Richard Hanania says that human capital, not “industrial policy,” explains East Asian success: “The human capital theory is simple and direct. East Asians have high cognitive ability and make better inventors, workers, and entrepreneurs. As long as they aren’t subject to something as extreme as the rule of Mao or the Kim family, they will eventually achieve first-world standards of living. Policy matters in the same way it does for other countries, where free market reforms are good and central planning is bad.”
WSJ: “China now has the biggest power grid the world has ever seen. Between 2010 and 2024, its power production increased by more than the rest of the world combined. Last year, China generated more than twice as much electricity as the U.S. Some Chinese data centers are now paying less than half what American ones pay for electricity. “In China, electricity is our competitive advantage,” Liu Liehong, head of China’s National Data Administration, said in March…That is just the beginning. Morgan Stanley forecasts that China will spend some $560 billion on grid projects in the five years through 2030, up 45% from the previous five years. Goldman Sachs predicts that by 2030, China will have about 400 gigawatts of spare capacity, about three times the world’s expected data-center power demand at that time.”
The Verge: “Over the past 18 months, the largest AI companies in the world have quietly settled on an approach to building the next generation of apps and services — an approach that would allow AI agents from any company to easily access information and tools across the internet in a standardized way. It’s a key step toward building a usable ecosystem of AI agents that might actually pay off some of the enormous investments these companies have made, and it all starts with three letters: MCP…MCP essentially tells AI models which external tools, data sources, and workflows they’re able to access, then allows them to connect and perform tasks. When someone uses Claude to perform tasks in Slack, for example, MCP is what authorizes and establishes the connection between services. It’s what lets Claude redirect you to Slack and get notified once you’ve logged in. And it lets Slack tell Claude which tools, resources, and features it can access — “essentially a ‘show me what you’ve got,’” Conor Kelly, a product marketing manager for MCP at Anthropic, says.”
Ben Thompson: “The one big advantage professionally-produced content has, however, is that it tends to be more evergreen and have higher re-watchability. That’s where we come back to the library: implicit in Netflix making library content more valuable is that library content has longevity in a way that YouTube content does not. That, by extension, may speak to why Netflix has decided to initiate the Hollywood end game now: the real threat to Hollywood isn’t (just) that the Internet made distribution free, favoring the Aggregators; it’s that technology has made it possible for anyone to create content, and the threat isn’t theoretical: it’s winning in the market. Netflix may be feared by the town, but everyone in Hollywood should fear the fact that anyone can be a creator much more.”
