‘Dictator’ Xi and the Uyghurs need us
‘Dictator’ Xi Jinping needs us—for now
Fentanyl, the largely China-sourced synthetic opioid flooding the US, has killed over 200,000 Americans over the last three years. If the CCP’s regard for US citizens doesn’t shake us, their genocidal treatment of the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities in Northwest China should inform our China policy.
The CCP has arbitrarily rounded up over 1 million Uyghurs and put them in labor and ‘re-education’ camps, subjected them to forced abortions and sterilization. The CCP has also forcibly separated hundreds of thousands of children from their parents and sent them to boarding schools to be indoctrinated. Mr. Xi’s regime has outlawed their religion and damaged and destroyed an estimated 16 thousand temples.
But don’t worry about us; the White House is ‘weighing lifting some sanctions’ over ‘alleged’ abuses against the Uyghurs in exchange for more action to stem fentanyl exports. How weak is that?
It’s like we no longer value life. Our ‘world leaders’ are bumbling around, trading us like pawns in their power game. It’s not that complicated. We need to rally the world to stop the killing in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Northwest China, and this will not be achieved by the US sending laser-guided missiles and cluster bombs. Peace can no longer be achieved by staging ‘conventional wars’ if preserving life is the objective.
The human cost of conventional warfare—No longer a ‘just war’
2,996 innocent US Citizens died in the terrorist attack on NYC on 9/11/01.
7,000 US troops died fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan by the end of 2019.
177,000 national military and police from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria allies died.
432,093 civilians died violent deaths during post-9/11 wars.
3.6-3.8 million people died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.
— Brown University’s Watson Institute new research for Costs of War project.
And now Mr. Xi has a deal for us!
So there he was, the modern tyrant of tyrants walking down our cleaned-up San Francisco streets and in our glorious Fioli gardens, with our homeless temporarily pushed to the outskirts—a trick we learned for Kim Jong Un. We welcomed a ‘President for life’ whose reign has overseen an ethnic and religious cleansing that would make his mass-murdering predecessor Mao Zedong, beam with pride.
Only eight months ago, China’s economy was expected to roar back to life in the post-COVID era. Instead, the world’s second-largest economy is suffering from slow growth, deflation, high youth unemployment, and a property market in disarray.
Mr. Xi knows these meager economic conditions not only hurt the Chinese people but the rest of the world as well. Big exporters such as Australia, Brazil, and several countries in Africa are the hardest hit by this slow-down, as are US companies like Apple, Broadcom, and Qualcomm, which have substantial device sales coming out of China. American businesses love selling to the 1.4 billion Chinese market—and that was the trump card Mr. Xi was selling.
Xi’s propaganda sales pitch to US business
“Are we adversaries or partners?
For two large countries like China and the United States, turning their back on each other is not an option. It is unrealistic for one side to remodel the other, and conflict and confrontation have unbearable consequences for both sides.
The planet Earth is big enough for the two countries to succeed. And one country’s success is an opportunity for the other.
If one sees the other side as a primary competitor, the most consequential geopolitical challenge, and a pacing threat, it will only lead to misinformed policymaking, misguided actions and unwanted results.
China is pursuing high-quality development, and the United States is revitalizing its economy. There is plenty of room for our cooperation.’
—General Secretary Xi Jinping quotes from dinner with US execs.
Even the normally anti-US, propaganda-heavy Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily gave Mr. Xi’s visit a schmoozy set-up for their boss. ‘The Chinese people will never forget an old friend, and that’s an important message we want to send to the American people,’ beamed in their headlines.
To top it all off, an A-list of US Barons of modern industry paid $40,000-a-plate dinner in San Francisco to clink glasses with the CCP’s General Secretary. Guests had a choice between Cakebread Cellars Sauvignon Blanc or Frank Family Carneros Pinot Noir, and they raised these varietals high and gave Mr. Xi a spontaneous standing ovation.
Look who came to dinner
Xi Jinping's ‘fanciful’ dinner in San Francisco with top American business leaders, complete with a fawning ‘standing ovation’ for the Communist Ruler, included: Apple CEO Tim Cook, Larry Fink of BlackRock, Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla, Mastercard chair Merit Janow, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, Boeing’s Stan Deal, FedEx’s Raj Subramaniam, Citadel Securities CEO Peng Zhao, and Bridgewater’s billionaire founder, Ray Dalio. Also on the list were Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon and Broadcom’s Hock Tan, whose two semiconductor companies make mobile phone chips used in millions of devices across China.
The one moment of truth during the whole brouhaha was when President Biden suddenly got cranky after meeting with the Chinese leader for hours and blurted out—as declining old people often do—and called Mr. Xi a ‘dictator.’ This outburst, of course, was much to the chagrin of his Secretary of State, whose ‘wincing’ reaction went viral on social media. More weakness.
China and the global Silicon Valley
The technology world has a long list of issues with the CCP, with IP theft and cyber-terrorism at the top of the list. Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel warned in his New York Times editorial, ‘In 2017 Xi Jinping added the principle of ‘civil-military fusion’ to the CCP’s constitution,’ which mandates that all research and intellectual property in China be shared with the People’s Liberation Army. In other words, all roads lead back to the Pigs running the farm, which is both a national security and fair business concern.
All the recent AI hype has also led both the US and the CCP to start drawing more distinct boundaries on how each country trades its AI, quantum computing, and semiconductor developments. American VC investment in China has all but closed down due to political pressure from both sides.
Another big issue is the dance we are having with Taiwan to deprive China of the world’s most advanced chips and equipment to make them. While these cutting-edge technologies come from the US, UK, the Netherlands, South Korea, and Japan—with 90 percent designed by Nvidia, Apple, Qualcomm, and Broadcom—they are made at the sprawling TSMC factory campus on the island that China claims as its own.
The concern with all of this is rooted in the fact that Washington’s One China Policy differs from Beijing’s One China Principle. The CCP principle holds that Taiwan is its sovereign territory, while the US policy is to acknowledge China’s position but does not take a firm stance on the matter. Again, so weak of us.
Epilogue
The number one job of any US President is to keep an eye on China—or more accurately—Mr. Xi and his small circle of seven comrades who dictate all matters Chinese. Mr. Xi is a smart man, and the more we communicate with him, the better. It’s a big chess board out there, with lots of moving pieces. The bottom line is we must first do our best to avoid nuclear confrontations and stop sending 18-year-olds into battle. The US has a lot of power beyond our military to help keep peace. Let’s be strong and use it, and stop perpetuating combat and needless killing.
If the 1.4 billion Chinese hope to be free someday, this victory will come from within. It took decades to bring down the Soviet Union and the apartheid government in South Africa without major civil wars. Yes, international economic and bully pulpit pressure played a big role, but ultimately, the people had to take back their own countries.
Silicon Valley can be the yin to the CCP’s yang and show our 1.4 million Chinese friends what is possible. The Web3 ethos is to remake America into a culture with minimal central control, where anonymity and privacy are cherished, and citizens can transact peer-to-peer in a secure, trusted, and transparent way. The CCP’s ethos is the exact opposite. They want to centralize and score all personal data in order to manipulate and maintain their control.
Let’s keep our hearts fixed on the millions who are being persecuted and killed at the hands of the CCP. Let us also be grateful for the many amazing Chinese people who have found their way to Silicon Valley and our country and have become significant contributors to our businesses and communities. There is much at stake in our relationship with China. It’s time for solidarity with the Chinese people and more strength in contending with Mr. Xi and the CCP.
‘If you’re fighting for your country and you get shot or hurt, it’s a terrible tragedy, of course…of course it is.
But maybe…just maybe…If you pick up a gun and go to another country and you get shot, it’s not that weird. Maybe if you get shot by the dude you were just shooting at…it’s a tiny bit your fault.’
OpenAI RIP V2.0
Maybe…just maybe, the bizarre carousel that sent OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman to Microsoft and back to OpenAI the last four days was the best thing for the company. Maybe it even saved the company.
In our OpenAI RIP V1 embedded below, we wished the momentarily Interim CEO Mira Murati well, as the other option was Microsoft would invariably have to swallow the company into its bowels, never to be heard from again. But shortly after we sent that post flying, Slammin’ Sam was seemingly the one to be swallowed by Microsoft. Then, like Jonah, he was spit out of the whale and found himself back in the CEO seat at OpenAI. How crazy was all that?
Our guess is the savvy and successful Microsoft Satya Nadella knew that bringing on Sam and OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman at Microsoft, as was announced last Sunday, was not the ideal scenario. (Microsoft owns 49% of OpenAI). At the time, we were surprised that Sam and Greg would work for a big company where projects like OpenAI get over-managed and become the living dead at best (look what Microsoft did for LinkedIn). Our gut now says it was all a ploy by Satya to call bull shit on the three dissenters that ousted Sam, and Sam and Greg were in the game.
And it all played out presumably as planned. As Sam and Greg were believed to be packing their bags for Seattle and Microsft’s CTO announced, ‘We will hire every OpenAI employee who quits’, 95 percent of the company was ready to take up the offer and go North too. All of a sudden, one of the three board members that voted to boot Sam, OpenAI cofounder, and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, relented. After Mr. Sutskever saw how much he was outnumbered, and in an attempt to save face, he announced he bought his ticket to Seattle, too. How that Joker survived and made the new board (see below) is beyond us, but it could be a sign the dysfunction is not over.
Sam’s X post about coming back to OpenAI only confirms our suspicions. ‘With the new board and w satya’s support, i’m looking forward to returning to openai, and building on our strong partnership with msft,’ Sam Xed without a blink.
Satya could see that OpenAI’s structure and corporate governance were a mess and told CNBC so after the announcement that Sam was returning to OpenAI to report to a new board of directors. ‘We believe this is the first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance,” Satya said.
The new board could still add a representative from Microsoft. Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, and Tiger Global are among OpenAI’s investors that lack representation on the board but have been pushing to reinstate Mr. Altman.
Meet the new OpenAI board
Honestly, we would think that the ‘most influential AO brand on the planet’ would have picked a much stronger and more imaginative board and kicked off all the old board members, but here they are:
Bret Taylor, board chair. Bret is currently a board member at Shopify, former co-CEO of Salesforce, and Twitter’s board chair before Elon Musk acquired the social media platform.
Larry Summers. Mr. Summers served as Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration and was the president of Harvard University.
Adam D’Angelo: Mr. D’Angelo is the only member of OpenAI’s previous board who still holds a seat and reportedly played a major role in the negotiations that brought Altman back to the helm.
Helen Toner: Ms. Toner is a researcher and director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Toner was a former employee at Open Philanthropy, serving as an advisor on AI policy.
Tasha McCauley: Tasha McCauley joined OpenAI’s board in 2018. She is an adjunct senior management scientist at Rand Corporation and formerly served as the CEO of GeoSim Systems, which developed an automated city modeling system.
Ilya Sutskever: Mr. Sutskever cofounded OpenAI and serves as its chief scientist. He also aligned himself, for a time, with the board members who ousted Altman.
Back to the central thesis here, many Silicon Valley startups find themselves in make-or-break situations like the OpenAI drama. It is during these periods when all concerned need to look into the abyss and ask themselves, 'Is this meant to be?' If the collective answer is 'Yes!', then it is time to regroup, clean house, embrace the lesson in humility, and march forward. OpenAI has no choice because there are a dozen companies with billions in their pockets marching down the street to take the AI prize.
As Steve Jobs once famously said, 'These overnight successes sure take a f*cking long time.' OpenAI is still a bit of a way off from being a success, so it's time to get back to work.
Did you know?
(Overheard on the streets of the global Silicon Valley. Got any hot insider tips? Email us editor@cryptoniteventures.com)
Billionaire Boys Club
A greenfield development project called the Praxis Society, with ties to Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan, and Joe Lonsdale, hopes to build a free-market cryptocity-state along the Mediterranean. Praxis’s 27-year-old CEO, Dryden Brown, says the new autonomous city exudes a ‘hero futurism with a neo–Gilded Age kind of aesthetic.” Crash a Praxis party with Mother Jones here and see what you think.
The FDA has cleared Elon’s company Neuralink's desire to search for volunteers willing to have a chunk of their skull removed by a surgeon so a large robot can insert a series of electrodes into their brain—a computer the size of a quarter—to read and analyze their brain activity and send the data to a nearby laptop to be explored.
A new book, Controligarchs, says Bill Gates’ investments in patented fertilizers, synthetic dairy, lab-grown meats, and gigantic US farmland purchases in the name of preventing climate change aren’t saving the planet but rather enriching his bank account.
Social Networking
Zuck stumbles forward. Facebook has restructured its’ AI division, dissolving the Responsible AI (RAI) team to concentrate on the flavor of the month—generative AI.
VC Whispers
Menlo Ventures has raised $1.35 billion to invest in AI ventures—to be split between early-stage fund Menlo XVI and early growth fund Menlo Inflection II, says partner Matt Murphy. AI has become an important focus for Menlo, which owns a stake in Anthropic, an AI safety and research company.
Menlo’s big news comes right after a group of more than 40 venture capital (VC) firms, including General Catalyst, Felicis Ventures, Bain Capital, IVP, Insight Partners, and Lux Capita, signed voluntary commitments to regulate the AI industry.
Follow the crypto
Binance Founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) pleaded guilty to violating money laundering rules. CZ has agreed to pay $50M in personal fines as part of a $4.3B total company settlement (the largest penalty in US Treasury history) and step down as CEO of the company he founded.
“For us at Coinbase, this [Binance prosecution] is really a vindication of our long-term strategy to focus on compliance to make sure we are building a trusted company. Over the last ten years, we have seen competitors come on the scene and offer products we didn’t think were legal, and now the regulators are finally acting to level the playing field. Just like banking regulations, such as KYC and AML, we need to adhere to more regulatory standards. There are areas of law that are still not clear in crypto—are they commodities or securities? Comparing the Binance with our case is like comparing apples to oranges. Ours is a civil case over the technical issues of what a commodity is and what a security is. The Binance case is a criminal matter.”
—Brian Armstong, CEO of Coinbase
Going Green
Ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC), where surface water warmed by the sun can heat a fluid such as ammonia, which then spins a turbine as it evaporates, could supply limitless clean energy to tropical islands.
Space Shots
NASA’s renewed focus is on deep-space exploration, lunar flights, and journeys to Mars. That leaves low-Earth orbit, the layer 250 miles above the atmosphere, as the next frontier in commercial space enterprises. NASA is supporting private developers via grants that promise to set off a gold rush of scientific research—and tourism.
Elon Musk’s next-generation, uncrewed, SpaceX built, Starship exploded less than ten minutes into its second test flight after separating from its main booster rocket 91 miles above the Earth on the edge of the atmosphere. Just seven months ago, the spacecraft’s first flight ended in an explosive disaster.
Chaos & Complexity
Twenty-six percent of K–12 teachers surveyed by Study.com said they had caught a student cheating using ChatGPT. In a Harvard Crimson experiment, it took less than 5 minutes to write an essay that had taken Harvard students six hours to research and write.
Cheating on exams and the cat and mouse between cheater and professor has always been a part of college campus lore. But ChatGPT has upended the balance. We got over calculators and spell-checkers, and we will get over AI tools. It’s the old academic and teaching ways that need reinvention.
Free our children to learn. How much longer must we live with the absurdity that the current education racket is worth its exorbitant interest-accruing costs before we finally confess that getting a BA today is total BS? Only 34% of kids that graduate with a 4-year degree think it has helped them get a job.
Pura Vida (pure life or not)
Regular sleep patterns play a stronger role in overall health than longer sleep patterns and lower the risks of death before age 75. ‘Sleep regularity was a significant predictor of cardiometabolic, cancer, and cause mortality risks in competing-risks proportional sub-hazards models,’ concluded the report.
People who practice a simplified form of tai chi called Tai Ji Quan twice a week for six months add three extra years of staving off decline. Tai chi practitioners improved their 10-minute test Cognitive Assessment score by 1.5 points (normal range is 26-30), according to a new medical study.
“Inflammatory issues often arise due to the sheer amount of wheat we consume every day, high-speed baking technologies that don’t break down the proteins into more digestible size, industrial food processing, and the use of herbicides. This inflammation can show as digestive distress, headaches, achy joints, neurological issues, bloating, skin disorders, ovarian cysts, autoimmune problems, and more. By removing gluten-containing foods and improving microbiome health, we can usually clear up these chronic inflammatory symptoms. While it’s simple to steer clear of obvious sources of gluten, such as bread and pasta, it’s the hidden sources of gluten that can catch you off guard.”
—Dr. Frank Lipman, functional medicine pioneer and sleep expert, author: Better Sleep, Better You
Current Wisdom
Find the cost of freedom buried in the ground
Mother earth will swallow you, lay your body down
Find the cost of freedom buried in the ground
Mother earth will swallow you, lay your body down
Goodnight
—Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in 1970 as the Viet Nam War raged.
