Trump Playing Chess, China Playing Go

“Long term companies are not obsessed with quantifying performance. They are in it for a brand.” - Rory Sutherland

Trump is Playing Chess, China is Playing Go:This is how Donald Trump thinks about Iran. Find the king. Apply overwhelming force. Make it submit. He has said as much in his demand for Iran’s capitulation, his dismissal of its leaders as ‘losers’, his framing of the conflict as a simple matter of American will against Iranian weakness. It is the language of chess: hierarchical, confrontational, centred on a single decisive objective and premised on the belief that sufficient force applied to the right target ends the game. The Chinese are playing a different game altogether. The Chinese strategy game is ‘igo’, known in the West as go. It is played on a board of 19 by 19 lines, creating 361 intersections compared to chess’s 64 squares. The pieces, called stones, are identical. No stone is more powerful than another. There is no king. There is no queen. There is no hierarchy at all. While Trump has been focused on the chess board, Iran as the opponent’s king and military force as the decisive piece, China has been quietly placing stones across the entire global board for two decades. Each stone, individually, appears unremarkable. Together, they form a pattern of encirclement that is now far advanced.

https://thewire.in/world/trump-is-playing-chess-china-is-playing-go

Wake Up Tricks Before Alarm Clocks: Candle clocks, with markings for incremental measurements of the passing of time, go all the way back to Ancient China. These were sometimes cleverly devised so that a nail would fall out into a little metal tray approximately every hour. A 19th Century account by an American ethnologist even noted people in China placing incense sticks between their toes to wake themselves up. Water clocks, known as a clepsydra in Ancient Greece, were widespread for centuries, and the philosopher Plato is credited with first adapting one into an alarm in the 5th Century BC. He trapped air inside a vessel which water was flowing into; as the water increased so did the pressure, eventually resulting in a loud kettle-like whistle.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260306-the-wake-up-tricks-people-used-before-alarm-clocks

The Underclass from 2029: The date is April 3rd, 2029. A few months ago, I moved back to San Francisco, as the effective tax rate in New York City has now reached 85%, with a billionaire tax becoming a centi-millionaire tax becoming a tax on anyone earning above $200,000... The only jobs left in the world are “datacenter technician,” “Waymo security guard,” “hot guy,” “funny guy (who desperately wants to be hot guy),” OpenAI serf, Anthropic serf, and the four freaks who pledged allegiance to Grok (though they seem to be having the most fun). Podcasters used to exist, too, until the AI labs bought all of them. Now, they’re just being milked for training data for GPT 0.o00-formerly-mini-now-normal-sized, or whatever the current model is called.