# The Demoralization is just Beginning

Mar 3, 2025

This is a map of primary trading partners, US vs China, and how it has evolved over the last 20 years. Think about it, and realize this probably reflects your experience.

I know there was a similar panic about Japan in the 80s, but Japan by population has always been 3x smaller than the US, whereas China is 3x larger. In addition, we had and have military bases in Japan. This is not the same situation.

The US, since I have been born, has been coasting. The main product made by the US is the dollar, and it used those manufactured dollars to outsource everything. Most jobs in the US are now basically fake. It’s an economy in which five people stick a pipe in the ground, but that pipe is the fed and the oil was the good will built up over 1870-1970.

In 2008, with the bailouts, it was made clear that the US has no interest in reform. The next decade, in perhaps a spitting in your face move, the fed made the interest rate 0.

Known as ZIRP, this had never been done before. This led to insane perversions. When I got into business, I didn’t understand that business in America was mostly a total scam. Sure, you might look at a single business, and be like, oh, that sounds reasonable, but then you zoom out and look at the entire system, and it doesn’t really make sense. It’s scams feeding other scams.

Wanna each start a business, pass dollars back and forth over and over again, and drive both our revenues super high? Sure, we don’t produce anything, but we have companies with high revenues and we can raise money based on those revenues. We’ll both be rich!

Let’s do it with a bunch of extra steps so people don’t catch on though. They’ll only see it reflected in the lack of movement of real macro metrics.

You see, the US is a “developed” country, which means real growth is over?

You do understand that guns and boats are made of steel, right? Oh, airplanes aren’t, they are made of aluminum. Oh…right, yea, it’s not just steel it is absolutely everything.

The future is chips you say? All the good chips are made in the Republic of China you say?

This 2021 article lays it out clearly, and it also explains why nothing I saw in Silicon Valley made any sense. I’m not going to go into the personal stories, but I just had an underlying assumption that the goal was growth and value production. It isn’t. It’s self licking ice cream cone scams, and any growth or value is incidental to that. It isn’t until you understand this that people’s behavior starts to make sense.

America really is at a fork in the road. In one world, they abandon all hopes of being an empire, becoming a regional power with highly protectionist economics. This happened before, and it’s called Europe. I know it’s hard to believe now, but Europe used to be the seat of power for the whole world. The sun never set on the British empire. Now they put you in jail for memes.

Protectionist America is a boring place and not somewhere I want to be. It kicks the can further down the road of poverty, basically embraces socialism, is stagnant, is stale, is a museum…etc, again there’s a contemporary example of this.

When I said on Lex they were gonna nationalize NVIDIA, look at the AI Diffusion Framework, and notice how Trump hasn’t repealed it. It allows export of GPUs to only 18 countries. Nationalization with American characteristics.

It tells the other 177 countries that they should plan on purchasing their AI infrastructure from China.

The other path, which is the exciting path, is the attempt to maintain an empire. An empire has to compete on its merits. There’s two simple steps to restore American greatness:

1) Brain drain the world. Work visas for every person who can produce more than they consume. I’m talking doubling the US population, bringing in all the factory workers, farmers, miners, engineers, literally anyone who produces value. Can we raise the average IQ of America to be higher than China?

2) Back the dollar by gold (not socially constructed crypto), and bring major crackdowns to finance to tie it to real world value. Trading is not a job. Passive income is not a thing. Instead, go produce something real and exchange it for gold.

The first will bring the value of “American” labor in line with its global market value. It is a particularly unique advantage of the US over China, the US has a potentially much larger pool of talent. Non ironically, diversity is our strength. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of resistance to American labor finding its market value.

The second will prevent a lot of the scams. The reason the banking industry is so big is that it is close to the source of the made up dollars. If currency is gold backed, you could imagine something similar happening to the mining industry instead. However, the mining industry is real! It uses steel and aluminum to build physical things. And imagine when we start to mine space. That’s a way better reward function than scamming politicians out of fake dollars.

Unfortunately, I doubt either will happen. They very much both can, but people haven’t been demoralized enough yet.