China/US Economies

On this day:
1258
Baghdad falls to the Mongols, and the Abbasid Caliphate is destroyed.
1306
In front of the high altar of Greyfriars Church in Dumfries, Robert the Bruce murders John Comyn, his leading political rival, sparking revolution in the Scottish Wars of Independence
1567
An explosion destroys the Kirk o' Field house in Edinburgh, Scotland. The second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, Lord Darnley is found strangled, in what many believe to be an assassination.
1933
In round 13 of a boxing match at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, Primo Carnera knocks out Ernie Schaaf, killing him.
1996
The IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov for the first time.
2009
The communication satellites Iridium 33 and Kosmos-2251 collide in orbit, destroying both.

***

Common sense tells us that restraints on business are generally bad, that red tape strangles enterprise, that taxes on goods in transit will reduce the volume of transactions, that wage earners will suffer if the things they buy are made artificially dear, that legislation to increase the cost of living and production must be especially disastrous to a populous manufacturing and commercial country like ours.--Hirst

***

A newly released federal memo reveals Ohio’s richest man accused sex offender Jeffrey Epstein stole or misappropriated several hundred million dollars from him over their decades-long financial relationship.

***

The U.S. attack on Iran was shocking and unprecedented. Why is there so little talk about it?

***

China/US Economies

Analysis of commercial and political patterns suggests China’s broader AI ecosystem operates according to a different logic than the “US-China AI race” framing implies.

First, development and deployment remain private-led, with state participation filling infrastructure and application gaps rather than competing directly for frontier capabilities.

Second, frontier developers are pursuing diverse technical and commercial strategies rather than converging on LLMs as the path to AGI. The data shows specialization in modalities, vertical domains, and applications. This reflects a market where companies are optimizing for deployability and commercial viability, not just pushing frontier capabilities.

Third, China’s AI ecosystem is actively shaped by local policy competition and fiscal incentives, rather than solely by market forces or central planning. This creates geographic inequality but also reveals how innovation actually gets governed in practice through decentralized competition for activity and talent. It also raises concerns of potential resource waste, especially given that many local governments are currently short of money.

This assessment (from somewhere) emphasizes local, private incentives and less central control (although they influence incentives), more free markets and less command economies. The strength of the West has always been its freedom to evolve, so China may be woodenly adapting here, allowing some risk. Compare this to Trump's recent demand that defense contractors freeze dividends and buybacks until their inventories rise.

We are back to the old arguments. A government, in the words of Zohran Mamdani, that can “replace the rigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism”; a government, in the words of Adrian Vermeule, that will “enjoy a capacious scope of public discretion to promote the common good.”

But there is no "warmth" in government, no "discretion."

The Constitution creates political structures and then limits them within those structures because self-restraint in politics does not exist.