Gilder’s Guideposts Newsletters
What Is an Electron?
What is an electron? As an investor in all things electronic, I want to know. “A carrier of negative electric charge,” say the dictionaries, hiding the enigma behind its own adjective. Then what is a positive electric charge? In electronics, it’s the absence of an electron, termed a “hole.” Round and round the atom we […]
Imagine 100% Renewable Energy
Imagine 100% Renewable Energy The IEEE Spectrum may be the nation’s, and thus the world’s, most authoritative technology publication. So, when it solemnly hails the possibility of “100% Renewable Energy,” even us “climate deniers” wince and waffle. Incandescent on the article’s opening page in its May issue is an indigo ocean of solar panels on […]
China Spurs a New Golden Age of Economics
China Spurs a New Golden Age of Economics Reading Weiying Zhang’s “Re-Understanding Entrepreneurship,” published in English just this year, it occurs to us we may be living in a new golden age of economic thought. More remarkable still, we may owe this goldenness mostly to the last 50 years of Chinese history. China’s […]
Where Does the Arrogance Start?
What strange source stokes the egos of these people? A few months ago, Applied Materials (AMAT), long a leader in making chip manufacturing equipment, though recently seeming to have lost a step, announced it would build a new, $4 billion research and development facility in Silicon Valley. The plan was prompted in large part […]
Spy Vs. Spy
Foreign direct investment into China is at a 30-year low. Dozens of Western firms left during Chairman Xi’s nightmarish Covid crackdown. Now Western execs say a big reason they are not returning is China’s new espionage law. The law could be interpreted as treating ordinary due diligence for a prospective investment as spying, with the […]
The World Needs the U.S. and China as Partners in Creativity
U.S. technology protectionism and trade restrictions are forcing China to create its own largely independent chip industry, while being pushed to innovate in graphene, wafer fab, and wafer scale electronics. These measures are sundering a global “innovation ecosystem” that promised to usher in an astonishing era of global prosperity and human well-being with China and […]
China, America, and a Global Surge of Innovation Part I
Amidst the global economic cacophony of off-key men and nations, and despite the global COVID-19 overreaction, China’s economic trumpet still resonates. Across its economy, from coal and nuclear innovation to venture capital and artificial intelligence chips, China defies the Western themes of monetary obesity, “climate change” energy sabotage, “diversity” merit suppression, stultified political schooling, nationalist […]
Why ChatGPT is the Last Gasp of the Machine Age
Gabriel René, the visionary founder and CEO of Verses AI (VRSSF), offers a provocative critique of the current state of generative AI technologies, including ChatGPT. Far from being the latest development of an information economy for an information age, he characterizes these systems as “machine intelligence from the machine age”—a retrogression in the evolution of […]
Playing Catch-Up with Stalin, Mao, and Chairman Xi
It has been a long time coming, but we’re finally there. Ninety-eight years after Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan and a mere 71 years after Mao’s first Five-Year Plan, the United States of America finally has its own Five-Year Plan. According to the White House’s just issued National Strategy on Microelectronic Research, “over the next five […]
Live by the Fed, Die by the Fed
Attracting much merited attention is a recent paper from former U.S. Treasury Secretary and President of Harvard Larry Summers and several colleagues arguing consumers are right to be unhappy with the economy, even though unemployment is low and official inflation is back down to circa 3%. Nope, say Summers and colleagues, consumers are right because […]