December 18 2024

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1. Chinese AI Firms Rival U.S. Despite Restrictions
2. 2024 Marks Record Going Back To 2013 For Gunfire on School Grounds
3. Skyrocketing Insurance Nonrenewals Threaten U.S. Housing
4. Half of U.S. Faces Power Shortages In Next Decade
5. China’s Manufacturing Dominance Reflects Britain Before Industrial Revolution, US Post-WW2
December 18, 1620: Mayflower arrives at Plymouth Harbor

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1. Chinese AI Firms Rival U.S. Despite Restrictions

Slowing China’s progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has been a top priority for Washington for the last three years. To achieve that goal, the Biden administration has escalated controls on the sale of advanced chips and chipmaking equipment to China, including a fresh salvo of restrictions earlier this week.  Policymakers may be flummoxed to learn, then, that Chinese companies aren’t just keeping up in the AI race: some believe they could overtake American industry leaders as soon as next year. The latest breakthroughs came late last month, when two Chinese AI companies released new models that perform as well, if not better than their American peers. Developed by tech giant Alibaba and High Flyer Capital Management, a Chinese quantitative hedge fund, the technologies compete directly with OpenAI’s latest o1 model, which can “reason” through problems — a process some researchers have described as a new paradigm.

Article Source: The Wire China

2. 2024 Marks Record Going Back To 2013 For Gunfire on School Grounds

This year is the most active for gunfire on school grounds since 2013, when Everytown for Gun Safety started tracking data. As of Dec. 16, at least 205 incidents of gunfire on school grounds have occurred nationally this year, resulting in 58 deaths and 156 injuries, according to Everytown for Gun Safety's database. That surpasses the 199 gunfire incidents on school grounds recorded in the database's previous record high in 2021. The deadliest school shooting came just weeks into the 2024-2025 school year when a 14-year-old student killed four people with an AR-platform-style weapon at Apalachee High School in Georgia. On Monday, a shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, left three dead, according to law enforcement.

Article Source: Axios

3. Skyrocketing Insurance Nonrenewals Threaten U.S. Housing

Since 2018, more than 1.9 million home insurance contracts nationwide have been dropped — “nonrenewed,” in the parlance of the industry. In more than 200 counties, the nonrenewal rate has tripled or more, according to the findings of a congressional investigation released Wednesday. The consequences could be profound. Without insurance, you can’t get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home. Communities that are deemed too dangerous to insure face the risk of falling property values, which means less tax revenue for schools, police and other basic services. As insurers pull back, they can destabilize the communities left behind, making their decisions a predictor of the disruption to come.  

Article Source: NYT

4. Half of U.S. Faces Power Shortages In Next Decade

About half of the United States is at increased risk of power supply shortfalls in the next decade that could lead to outages and electricity conservation measures, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation said on Tuesday. As U.S. power consumption rises from AI data centers and the electrification of buildings and transportation, efforts to add electricity generation have fallen short, creating an intensifying supply-demand imbalance, NERC said in its annual Long-Term Reliability Assessment. "We are seeing demand growth like we haven't seen in decades," said John Moura, director of NERC's Reliability Assessment and Performance Analysis. "Our infrastructure is not being built fast enough to keep up with the rising demand."

Article Source: Reuters

5. China’s Manufacturing Dominance Reflects Britain Before Industrial Revolution, US Post-WW2

A. In the year 2000, the United States and its allies in Asia, Europe, and Latin America accounted for the overwhelming majority of global industrial production, with China at just 6% even after two decades of rapid growth. Just thirty year later, UNIDO projects that China will account for 45% of all global manufacturing, singlehandedly matching or outmatching the U.S. and all of its allies. This is a level of manufacturing dominance by a single country seen only twice before in world history — by the UK at the start of the Industrial Revolution, and by the U.S. just after World War 2. It means that in an extended war of production, there is no guarantee that the entire world united could defeat China alone. That is a very dangerous and unstable situation. If it comes to pass, it will mean that China is basically free to start any conventional conflict it wants, without worrying that it will be ganged up on — because there will be no possible gang big enough to beat it. The only thing they’ll have to fear is nuclear weapons. And of course other nations will know this in advance, so in any conflict that’s not absolutely existential, most of them will probably make the rational choice to give China whatever it wants without fighting….China’s leaders know this very well, of course, which is why they are unleashing a massive and unprecedented amount of industrial policy spending — in the form of cheap bank loans, tax credits, and direct subsidies — to raise production in militarily useful manufacturing industries like autos, batteries, electronics, chemicals, ships, aircraft, drones, and foundational semiconductors. This doesn’t just raise Chinese production — it also creates a flood of overcapacity that spills out into global markets and forces American, European, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese companies out of the market. By creating overcapacity, China is forcibly deindustrializing every single one of its geopolitical rivals. Yes, this reduces profit for Chinese companies, but profit is not the goal of war.  

B. The obstacles the U.S. has faced in trying to supply Ukraine during the past two years have revealed a systemic, gaping national-security weakness. It is a weakness that afflicts the U.S. military at all levels, and about which the public is largely unaware. The vaunted American war machine is in disarray and disrepair. “Shocking is not overstating the condition of some of our facilities,” said Representative Donald Norcross, chairing a House Armed Services subcommittee hearing on munitions manufacture a month after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Ted Anderson, a retired Army officer who is now a principal partner of Forward Global, a defense consultancy, told me, “You would stay awake all night if you had any idea how short we are of artillery ammo.” In 2023, the U.S. Army Science Board expressed concern that the nation’s industrial base “may be incapable of meeting the munitions demand created by a potential future fight against a peer adversary.” Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense analyst at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and one of the authors of the Science Board’s report, immersed herself in this world of procurement and manufacturing for nearly a year. “When I was done,” she told me, “the only thing I could think was It’s a miracle the U.S. military has anything that blows up, ever.”

Article Source: Noah Smith, The Atlantic

December 18, 1620: Mayflower arrives at Plymouth Harbor

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2. https://www.thewirechina.com/2024/12/08/chinese-ai-companies-are-catching-up-despite-u-s-restrictions-chinas-ai-models/

3. https://www.axios.com/2024/12/17/gen-z-teachers-active-shooter-drills

4. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/12/18/climate/insurance-non-renewal-climate-crisis.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

5. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/half-us-high-risk-power-shortfall-next-decade-regulator-says-2024-12-17/

6. A https://open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now?r=d9vo5&utm_medium=ios
B https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/12/weapons-production-munitions-shortfall-ukraine-democracy/680867/