Just from reading the threads here it seems readily apparent that he then went to start this company that did these bad things. Does not seem confusing at all?
Your original comment implied that stealing American IP and creating shell companies is “CCP-inspired behavior”. This suggests there is some high minded Rule of Law based justification.
Now you are saying that stealing IP was never the problem, and actually the issue is anything that stands in the way of the US gaining wealth and power.
I assume you're not confused about the fact that DeepSeek winning would be against US self-interest, and the thriving of OpenAI + Anthropic domestically and globally is very much in the national interest of the US.
Even if both groups did exactly the same thing, it would be irrational for the US to not bias itself in favor of its own businesses.
Free Market vs. planned economy was always mostly talking points, not a consistent ideology imo.
Even during the Cold War, American farms were heavily subsidized. The abundant supermarkets were not a product of free markets, they were a propaganda piece.
Today the US is pretty far from being a free market. Tax deductions are subsidies. Industry subsidies fund things on the front end, and bailouts are essentially subsidies after the fact.
And on top of that there are plenty of (good and bad) regulations which distort the market. For example it is illegal to import foreign insulin even if it would be cheaper. In most parts of US metro areas it is illegal to build multifamily housing.
Most of the things you list don't make a market non-free. A free market can still have government regulation and distortion. In fact it requires it otherwise it will be captured by large players in short order and become non-free as a result.
The insulin example I agree is non-free. More generally the entire medical sector is only somewhat free. However I'm not sure that's a bad thing given the stakes and the history of the free market as it applies to healthcare. The medical establishment itself is an only barely disguised guild system after all.
> an economic system in which prices and wages are determined by unrestricted competition between businesses, without government regulation or fear of monopolies.
By definition, free markets do not have government regulation. If you have an alternative definition of “free market” please feel free to share it.
I think you're misinterpreting the intent of what you quoted. I also think the phrasing of that definition is quite sloppy, being prone to exactly the sort of misunderstanding we see here.
For a market to be stable, fair, and free of monopolies government intervention is required. I don't think that fact is at all controversial. So already the definition you've quoted there has, if read literally, set up a scenario that is impossible to realize.
A free market is one where regulations are broad and are applied to the players evenly. A subsidy that applies to a sector as a whole (ex solar panels) is an example of such.
Many of the agricultural subsidies are much more targeted than that. However the regulator needs to maintain the stability of the entire system as a whole, and to that end food is not some luxury good that can be subject to shortages without major consequences. A tradeoff has to be made, either for more market regulation or significantly less market stability. Market participants in danger of starvation not known for exhibiting reasonable, well thought out behavior.
Similar to free speech, the free market is better seen as a vague guiding ideal rather than an absolute and objective description of a system. It's illegal in the US to make credible threats of violence towards someone. Can that fact be taken on its own to mean that we don't enjoy freedom of speech?
I am not misrepresenting the intent. The definition says “without government regulation”. If their intent was that some regulation was allowed, they would have said that. It’s the job of a dictionary author to be precise.
If I define a “two legged stool” you can’t add a third leg just because two legs is unstable and doesn’t lead to good outcomes. Whether a market with no government regulation is stable or leads to good outcomes does not change the definition.
You are referring to a “mixed economy” which has some markets and some regulations. A mixed economy is more stable because it is able to reduce market failures like monopolies and externalities that free markets cannot escape.
You're arguing semantics and have rendered the term meaningless in the process. The purpose of a dictionary is to communicate meaning. The meaning of a word or phrase is the idea that it is employed to communicate in practice.
When people talk about a free market they aren't referring to some logically contradictory thought experiment. It is something that they actually wish to strive for in practice. Thus it is clear that some amount of regulation must necessarily be involved.
This is quite similar to freedom of speech, as I previously mentioned. The concept itself is an abstract ideal and the context of the law matters.
What you are referring to is a laissez-faire market which as history has repeatedly shown doesn't remain a free one for long. An adjacent comment pointed to property rights as an example. You can have a free real estate market without having a laissez-faire approach to property rights, yet the government involvement in that case is extremely heavy handed. The free speech analogy might be a city controlled by the mob where the government won't intervene but saying certain things will still get you killed.
I agree with you that in practice the US is a mixed economy, but then I already acknowledged that (among other things) our farm subsidies are highly targeted and the medical sector is regulated in a very invasive manner. However I do not agree with your suggestion that eliminating monopolies makes a market mixed. A monopolized market is not a free one because there is no competition.
> For a market to be stable, fair, and free of monopolies government intervention is required. I don't think that fact is at all controversial.
It is. Government intervention is what creates monopolies, because economic value stops being the ultimate metric that decides which enterprise is profitable over another; because it favours one entity over another, large corporations are not valued on their financials alone, but on the strength of their political connections - which in turn enables lobbying as an effective tool.
The entire premise of free markets is that the market is the ultimate judge of value. If you add the government and its heavy hand on the scale to the mix, it is no longer a free market. It’s pretty simple.
> A free market can still have government regulation and distortion
The question is "how much" rather than a binary consideration. With the size of the government in most countries, we are way past what would be considered a marginal influence.
As an explicit example, major revenue streams that Tesla (used to) take advantage of are
1. the EV tax credit, and
2. carbon credits
so the richest man in the world/the US had significant tailwinds for a central business venture of his via either directly taking money from the government, or taking money from other companies due to the government requiring they give him money.
> The abundant supermarkets were not a product of free markets, they were a propaganda piece.
The US has abundant supermarkets to this day. It was overwhelmingly a product of the market economy and remains so. The US has between 45,000 and 75,000 supermarkets (75,000 if you include supercenter stores that also sell groceries). That's not counting smaller specialty food stores.
It's a product of consumer spending capacity (net disposable income), of which the US has an enormous amount and has for over a century relative to other nations.
The export restrictions only apply to certain GPU models, which are the more recent powerful ones used for training tasks. So the H100, B100 etc. are banned along with 4090, 5090.
Nvidia has downgraded chips that aren’t banned. H100 is banned, H800 is allowed. A100 is banned, A800 is allowed. But the sale has a tariff attached.
That’s all how it’s supposed to work. In practice companies probably circumvent the restrictions.
> That’s all how it’s supposed to work. In practice companies probably circumvent the restrictions.
Ex-colleague of mine told me he used to work for this company in UAE (he told me this story 15+ years ago, so he worked there even before that). He said it took him months of working there before he discovered that their entire business was evading US sanctions against Iran-they’d order servers/etc from the US, tell the US vendor they were for use locally in UAE, then ship them straight across the Gulf. The UAE government presumably knew this was happening but chose to turn a blind eye; the US government likely did too, but struggled to tell which orders/purchasers were legitimate and which were sanctions-evaders, plus likely was worried about enforcement action causing issues in the US-UAE diplomatic relationship.
I’m sure there are similar businesses out there who specialise in evading US sanctions on China.
Can I tell you I can go downstairs now and buy a 5090 (not d or d2 version, the real 5090) in China for 4000usd (33000rmb)? They have it stock right now, they have since release. It’s a Japan version.
I didn’t ask about h100 or others but can’t see why they wouldn’t have.
> Apparently using Vercel to host a personal blog might not be the best idea. I'm nearly reaching the limit of Edge Requests in just 2 hours after the post.
I had always thought that fixing outages was one of the least appealing parts of software engineering, but so many SWE blogs seem to have built blogs in ways where downtime is inevitable.
Unless there is an extremely good reason not to use one, a static site generator works perfectly well. Next, there are many 3p services which will display that site for free. GitHub pages, AWS free tier, I’m sure there are plenty of other ones.
Importantly, and relevant to this article, the files live on your computer. You can mirror them in any number of repos if you want, but it is not possible for any 3p service to hold them hostage.
I am thoroughly convinced that this is the right way that I’d even go so far as to say it is a best practice for roll-your-own blogs, and any sort of issue like the article describes is a direct result of not following that best practice.
Maybe a slight problem is liver toxicity at the doses in this study? The drug was tested at lower doses for other diseases, but above 72 mg caused problems. Quick conversion math is telling me this study would want 170+ mg.
Maybe there’s some way to get around this particular issue.
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