[ben_w]

Unpredictable in many ways.

On economic, I hear talk about looking for 2 trillion in cuts; that's likely to cause economic stagnation all by itself as previously observed in e.g. UK austerity measures since the financial crisis in the late 00s.

Even on a smaller scale, any given cut is hard to forecast as a good/bad idea for the organisation itself (in the case the government) even for the guy at the top: for example consider that Musk cut what he thought of as pointless waste in each of his businesses, which works great in Tesla and SpaceX, has been a disaster for Twitter.

Also, China is close to a peer, and deploying renewables and battery vehicles as fast as possible — and yes also coal last I heard.

Then there's the talk of Musk being brought in despite the obvious conflict of interest. Wonder how that's going to play out, but given a substantial part of his wealth comes from electric vehicles, it's worth noting.

On the other hand he wants thousands of Starship launches and has yet to demonstrate the Sabatier machines that would be necessary for (1) Mars and (2) making this carbon neutral on Earth.

[philjohn]

Looking at the figures on China it feels like Coal is cheap and easy to deploy as a short term measure, but they're also investing heavily in renewables as you said (2X the rest of the world combined last year) and Nuclear.

For just how much is made there, and on a per capita basis, China isn't doing too badly - neither is the UK, the US on the other hand has had super cheap energy for a long time, and a whole lot is predicated on it, so it's going to be tougher (even tougher now).

[ashoeafoot]

China is fakeing most of it and our press only reports it as existing and true to coax our politicians into doing something ..anything.

My tip: If you read fantastic news, google the location and look on it from space. Any game changer should be visible and viable from orbit. And it is but often enough..no powerlines or tramsformers. Planned economies, they reach their goals, to promote bureaucrats , reality be damed.

[TheOtherHobbes]

The goal seems to be to be as irrational and self-harming as possible, because rationality itself is considered some kind of narcissistic injury. So I don't expect this to end well.

Neither Musk nor Thiel understand the structural differences between being a CEO and running a successful country.

China does understand them. It is in many ways a terrible place, but China has made insanely successful investments in education, engineering, and infrastructure, and is far better at planning for and building the future.

The US has gone in the opposite direction. Make high quality education increasingly unavailable and/or unaffordable, cultivate a popular culture of superstition, narcissism, and irrationality, and impoverish the population so talented individuals are either trapped in cultish, increasingly directionless corporate bureaucracies, or on the verge of homelessness.

And tech in the US only exists because of immigrants. If it becomes hostile to immigrants the smart people will go elsewhere - and that will be that.

[ashoeafoot]

China is better at one thing: projecting and tellingthat story. Their planning is so shortsighted, they only recently reverted the one child policy, even though a "running" out of young workers could be expected since the 90s.

Why does a totalitarian propagandaposter, that publicly does not get is shit together on demographics until its to late be trustworthy when it comes to green energy ?

[ben_w]

The OCP was never perfectly enforced, and until the 90s China had a total fertility rate above replacement levels — 2.73 in 1990.

As for trust, trust simply isn't how anything is done on the international stage, so nobody in the US needs to trust China any more than anyone in China needs to trust the US (or indeed any other pair of nations): we know China has surpassed the USA as the biggest combined source of greenhouse gases, and monitoring stations showed Chinese factories were to blame for surprise increased in banned ozone depleting gasses; what makes the rest of us believe the statements about their renewables is audits and satellite imagery, which also tell us the limits of those roll-outs.

[ben_w]

> The goal seems to be to be as irrational and self-harming as possible, because rationality itself is considered some kind of narcissistic injury. So I don't expect this to end well.

While both Trump and Musk clearly demonstrate (the popular conception of) narcissistic injury when being told they're wrong, Musk also demonstrates that there are conditions where he doesn't respond so poorly — rockets.

I have no idea if that's going to make a difference.

> Neither Musk nor Thiel understand the structural differences between being a CEO and running a successful country.

I have no option about Thiel in this regard, despite him generally giving Bond Villain vibes. Musk I agree; if I was cryogenically frozen tomorrow and woken in 50 years to the news that Musk built his Mars colony but it failed catastrophically, I'd guess Musk's lack of understanding about governance was why.