Joseph Belbruno Blog

  La Maison Blanche confirme l’entrée en vigueur, le 1er février, de droits de douane voulus par Donald Trump contre le Canada, le Mexique et la Chine Le président des Etats-Unis, Donald Trump, à Washington le 30 janvier 2025. ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP La porte-parole de la Maison Blanche, Karoline Leavitt, a annoncé, vendredi 31 janvier, que les droits de douane voulus par Donald Trump et prévus à compter du 1 er  février contre les produits provenant du Canada, du Mexique et de la Chine, entreront bien en vigueur ce week-end.  « Le président va imposer  [samedi]  25 % de droits de douane sur le Mexique, 25 % de droits de douane sur le Canada et 10 % de droits de douane sur la Chine pour le fentanyl illégal qu’ils produisent et dont ils permettent la distribution dans notre pays » , a dit M me  Leavitt. Plus d’informations à venir. Le Monde avec AFP

Robert D. Kaplan from Waste Land "In truth, order must come before freedom, because without order there is no freedom for anyone. The Weimar Republic, because it lacked the requisite order, ultimately became a threat to freedom, despite the explosion of the arts that it fostered. Human nature being what it is, order must remain the paramount political virtue. Without it there is no one, as Hobbes says, to adjudicate right from wrong, to separate the guilty from the innocent, so not only is there no freedom but no justice. These are the central realizations of classical conservatives (who prefer stability to illusions of progress) from which all other realizations emanate. Obviously, individual freedom involves a certain amount of messy disorder, especially in a mass democracy like that of the United States. But that is not what I am talking about. I am talking about a secure, stable, and orderly political system where the rules are adhered to."

  Ratland China says its economy grew 5 percent last year. It probably didn’t. A man picks vegetables at a supermarket in Nanjing, China, on Jan. 17. (AFP/Getty Images) Now, the government’s final figures for 2024 are in. Lo and behold, the economy grew at  exactly 5 percent , not a decimal more or less. The figure’s precision revives an old question about China: Should its official numbers be believed?  The answer is no . Recall the country’s implausibly low  official death toll  from the covid-19 pandemic. Most official pronouncements call for a dose of skepticism. The lack of reliable economic data from the world’s second largest economy and most powerful driver of global trade is a problem for the United States and the world. Continuous growth in China, with its huge appetite for commodities and resources, is essential to the global economy. The reverse is also true: A slowdown in China would impose a severe drag on other countries. What’s worrisome is that ...

  TikTok must be shut down TikTok logo on a smartphone. (Jeff Chiu/AP) The rule of law is the foundation of civil society and the fuel on which democracy runs. It is also essential to a healthy economy because it is what gives people and companies the confidence to invest in the future, knowing that their investment will be protected, regulated and taxed according to clear, known rules. Unfortunately, maintaining the rule of law sometimes means enforcing laws the country might be better off without. Case in point: the TikTok ban. Concerns about Chinese ownership of an app with 170 million American users are legitimate. Nevertheless, it is rash to force ByteDance to divest or shut it down. Unless a sale can be arranged, those millions of users will lose access to a platform where they are engaging in constitutionally protected speech. What’s more, it’s not clear that the risk of data theft or of algorithmically enhanced Chinese propaganda outweighs the danger of infringing on broade...

European and US populism don’t mix Janan Ganesh janan.ganesh@ft.com · 30 Jan 2025 Two conflicting thoughts about DeepSeek seem plausible right now. Forced to be resourceful, China is starting to expose the artificial intelligence sector of the US as flabby and coddled. Alternatively, don’t panic, America: the brute scale of US capital will tell in the end, as will the nation’s openness to foreign talent. Either way, notice the absence of a third horse from all the discussion this week. You wouldn’t know that Europe accounts for a comparable share of world economic output to China and the US. Whatever the feats of such companies as Mistral, the continent’s role in AI — in fact, its place in the world — is increasingly that of an infant watching both parents squabbling overhead. How has it come to this? Over-regulation of business, say some. Or a far from complete single market, which means that close to half a billion people (who are well-off by world standards) count for less than they...

  Why ‘Distillation’ Has Become the Scariest Word for AI Companies Listen (6 min) DeepSeek’s success with distillation is raising new doubts about the business models of tech giants and startups spending billions to develop the most advanced AI.   Photo:  Lam Yik/Bloomberg News Tech giants have spent billions of dollars on the premise that bigger is better in artificial intelligence.  DeepSeek’s breakthrough  shows smaller can be just as good. The  Chinese company’s leap  into the top ranks of AI makers has sparked heated discussions in Silicon Valley around a process DeepSeek used known as distillation, in which a new system learns from an existing one by asking it hundreds of thousands of questions and analyzing the answers. ”It’s sort of like if you got a couple of hours to interview Einstein and you walk out being almost as knowledgeable as him in physics,” said Ali Ghodsi, chief executive officer of data management company Databricks.  T...

  D.E.I. Will Not Be Missed Jan. 28, 2025 Credit... Mark Abramson for The New York Times Opinion Columnist In December 2015  the Obama administration decided  to allow women to serve in all combat roles. “There will be no exceptions,” Ashton Carter, then the secretary of defense, announced. Women would be accepted as “Army Rangers and Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Marine Corps infantry,” among other demanding roles previously open only to men. As for physical standards, those would not change: “There must be no quotas or perception thereof,” Carter said. In some ways, the policy has produced inspiring results. More than 140 women have completed the Army’s elite Ranger School, and a few have passed the Marines’ Infantry Officer Course (though none, as yet, have become SEALs). Women serve with distinction in other combat roles, including as fighter pilots and tank commanders. In other ways, however, the policy has realized the worst fears of its early critics. Though it has ele...

  Nvidia’s Fall Shows an Uncertain A.I. Future By  Mihir A. Desai Dr. Desai is a professor at Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School. During Monday’s stock market swoon, Nvidia, the artificial intelligence giant, lost nearly $600 billion in value,  the biggest single-day loss  for a public company on record. How could the fortunes of one of our leading companies fall so far so suddenly? While some will seek answers in  the promising A.I. start-up  coming out of China or the vicissitudes of trade policy, these movements speak to deeper changes in our financial markets that can best be explained, oddly enough, by revisiting ancient mythology. The image of the ouroboros, a serpent eating its own tail, is a remarkably  durable and pervasive motif . Ancient Chinese, Egyptian, European and Latin American civilizations seemed captivated by the image or ones like it, variously symbolizing the cyclic nature of life, the totality of the universe or ferti...

  DeepSeek Shows Silicon Valley’s Huge Blindspot on AI OpenAI and others have coasted along believing money was their moat. It’s not. 27 January 2025 at 14:59 CET Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg Save Translate 4:29 Last year, the chief executive officer of a leading AI firm was asked at a private Silicon Valley dinner about how his company differentiated from others building “foundation models,” the systems underpinning chatbots like ChatGPT. Did he have a moat? Yes, he answered, according to another CEO who was there. No one else had raised the billions of dollars that he had. That was his moat. This shortsighted approach to doing business, that huge sums of money alone can keep competition at bay, is why giants like Meta Platforms Inc. are  in panic mode  about DeepSeek, a Chinese company that’s built a formidable AI model for roughly the salary of a single AI executive in the US. Its  breakthroughs  now pose a shift in the balance of power and a reckoning f...