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German Rearmament

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We seem to live in a world where Germany and Japan are rearming, and most people are cheering. I generally would consider this okay myself – these are large, rich, powerful democratic countries that should be able to defend themselves and we would hope, support their democratic neighbors. This Foreign Affairs article paints a darker picture of a Germany that rearms in the face of a (perceived?) Russian threat, and then is taken over by a right-wing government.

A militarily dominant Germany could prove particularly dangerous if its centrist domestic leadership starts to lose power—as it just well might. The country is not due to hold national elections for three more years, but the extremist AfD now polls in first place at the national level. It subscribes to a far-right, illiberal, and Euroskeptic ideology. It is Russia-friendly, opposed to supporting Ukraine, and wants to reverse Germany’s post-1945 economic and military integration into the EU and NATO, at least in their current form. It sees military power as a tool of national aggrandizement that should be used exclusively to benefit Berlin. It hopes to develop a German defense industry that’s entirely autonomous from those of Berlin’s traditional allies. If it wins federal power, the AfD will use the German military exactly as Thatcher feared: to project power against Germany’s neighbors. In the same way that Washington has made once inconceivable claims on Canada and Greenland, an AfD-led Germany might eventually make claims on French or Polish territory.

It still seems far-fetched to me, but I could easily go back five years and name a bunch of things I thought were far-fetched, which have come to pass.

I have been thinking that terms like “right wing” and “fascist” are not very precise or helpful. What we see all over the world are political movements focused on ethnic nationalism. Ethnic nationalism pairs well with cultural conservatism and is more or less independent of economic ideology. Advancing the ethnic nationalist project is helped by being anti-democratic, anti-immigrant, and focused on external threats. This is the trend we are seeing in the U.S. and Europe, fueled by immigration pressure brought on by climate change, which is only going to intensify.

Can the U.S. executive branch legally withdraw from a treaty ratified by Congress?

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The Trump administration has announced that the U.S. intends to withdraw from the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. I think this is awful, as I naively thought that a treaty being “ratified” by Congress and signed by the President meant that the legislative and executive branches had come to a consensus on adopting it, and therefore a consensus would be needed to break it. By contrast, recent agreements including the Paris agreement were signed only by the executive branch. Here is what a site called Just Security (which I know nothing about) has to say.

As a matter of domestic law, the mainstream legal view, as taken in the Restatement (Fourth) of Foreign Relations Law, is that the president may constitutionally withdraw the United States from a Senate-approved treaty where, as here, the withdrawal is lawful under international law and neither the Senate’s resolution of advice and consent nor a congressional law has put limits on withdrawal. The president’s power to do so has never been definitively resolved by the courts. In the 1979 case of Goldwater v. Carter (which involved President Jimmy Carter’s termination of a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan), a fractured Supreme Court declined to address this issue. In practice, however, presidents have exercised this unilateral withdrawal power, especially in the years since Goldwater.

Theoretically, it sounds like the Senate could try to insert language saying a President cannot unilaterally break a treaty. But there is really no protection. A treaty is a weaker agreement than I thought, and in recent decades Congress has not even been participating in the process of discussing and signing them. Other countries really cannot rely on the U.S. to honor any agreement from one four-year political administration to the next.

Here is what the Constitution actually says:

He [i.e. the President, whom the Founding Father-Gods assume in 1783 shall henceforth be male] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur

Too bad it doesn’t say “make, break or modify”, but it doesn’t. Perhaps we need some more practical mechanism for modernizing our outdated constitution. But those rules would have to be updated in…the Constitution.

mirror life

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The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has moved their Doomsday Clock closer to midnight. The clock itself, like a lot of aggregate indices (I’m talking to you ASCE infrastructure report card) is more or less a gimmick to get public and media attention, in the hopes that at least some influential people will dig into the underlying analysis and data. Their underlying analysis includes all the things you would expect: nuclear arms control lapses and reversals, direct and indirect military conflict between nuclear-armed powers, apathy and intentional reversal on addressing climate change, biological and AI weapons of mass destruction (including AI-developed biological weapons of mass destruction, which is a particularly chilling thought), and the rise of “nationalistic autocracy”, which makes all of these conflicts more likely and any cooperation to solve international problems less likely.

Completely new to me was the idea of “mirror life”. This sounds like a kind of biological gray goo, and I wonder how it could have snuck up on me unawares?

In December 2024, scientists from nine countries announced the recognition of a potentially existential threat to all life on Earth: the laboratory synthesis of so-called “mirror life.” Those scientists urged that mirror bacteria and other mirror cells—composed of chemically-synthesized molecules that are mirror-images of those found on Earth, much as a left hand mirrors a right hand—not be created, because a self-replicating mirror cell could plausibly evade normal controls on growth, spread throughout all ecosystems, and eventually cause the widespread death of humans, other animals, and plants, potentially disrupting all life on Earth. So far, however, the international community has not arrived at a plan to address this risk.

Here is Eric Drexler’s original concept of gray goo from Engines of Creation (easily on my must read list), via Wikipedia:

Early assembler-based replicators could beat the most advanced modern organisms. ‘Plants’ with ‘leaves’ no more efficient than today’s solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough, omnivorous ‘bacteria’ could out-compete real bacteria: they could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop — at least if we made no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.

Is China going through an economic slump or a second industrial revolution?

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The rate of GDP growth in China is slowing, and prices for consumer goods are dropping. This article from Warwick Powell argues that the situation is not an economic problem at all, but rather caused by a sudden acceleration of productivity analogous to a period of rapid industrial progress in the west from about 1870 to 1890.

The period from roughly 1870 to 1890 in the industrialising world is often called the Great Deflation because consumer and producer prices fell steadily for nearly two decades. Yet this was simultaneously a period of rapid industrial expansion: steelmaking, railways, shipbuilding, chemicals, and textiles all experienced extraordinary increases in output, fixed capital formation, and labour productivity. Real wages also rose, even as nominal prices and, in some cases, nominal wages remained flat or declined. Conventional monetary interpretations – where deflation is associated with falling demand, recession and financial stress – don’t explain this apparent contradiction.

The key is that this deflation was supply-led. Massive technological change (Bessemer steel, open-hearth furnaces, mechanised weaving and rail distribution networks), dramatic extensions of energy inputs (coal and steam), and economies of scale fundamentally changed production cost structures. Unit costs fell faster than aggregate demand could absorb the increased output. Prices therefore declined not because the economy was weak, but because the production system became structurally more efficient. This is what we could call “good deflation.” An excellent paper by Borio et al., (2015) explores this in more detail…

China’s current economic conditions – marked by soft consumer prices, prolonged factory-gate deflation and extraordinary expansion in clean-energy and advanced-manufacturing output – mirror the paradox of the Great Deflation of 1870–1890. Then, as now, falling prices were not signs of contraction, but the surface expression of deep productivity shifts and sectoral transformation. China today is experiencing a similar structural reconfiguration.

In our high school (U.S.) history classes, we tend to learn that the late 19th century was a time of rapid technological and industrial progress, but that was also coupled with rapidly growing inequality, labor unrest, and unregulated pollution. Maybe China’s system and leaders will be able to reap the benefits of progress while keeping these problems under control. My thinking is authoritarian political and economic systems can appear to work better than democratic capitalist systems when they have leadership in place that is rational and genuinely has the citizens’ best interests at heart. This might actually describe the majority of authoritarian places and points in time. But then they don’t have the safeguards in place to stop bad leadership from metastasizing if and when it does pop up, and that is how you get history’s worst and longest-lasting geopolitical disasters. I’m not guaranteeing the U.S. has the immune system to successfully fight off our currently spreading political and economic cancer, only time will tell.

“dark factories”

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The first time I heard “dark factories”, I pictured the orcs toiling underground at Isengard (that’s Lord of the Rings for any readers who are not the right type of nerd to know that). I also think of Philip K. Dick’s story Autofac, one of my all time favorites. But no, the idea is that factories are emerging in China that are so automated that the lights don’t need to be on most of the time, because no humans are present. Naked Capitalism has a ton of links describing this phenomenon in China. Apparently U.S. industrialists are touring these Chinese factories and are shocked at how advanced they are and how far behind they (i.e., western industry) are.

The fact that western industrialists are invited to tour these factories would suggest that the technology is not secret. So maybe we should not feel threatened but rather look for opportunities to partner and learn. No doubt, there are similar factories churning out military and security hardware that are secret.

Ray Kurzweil speaks

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In this Peter Diamandis podcast, Ray Kurzweil says he gets 5-10 interview requests every day, almost all of which he turns down. He took this one, and talked to a panel of tech bros for over an hour, which is pretty cool. I forget Ray sometimes – amid all the doom and gloom, he is a relentlessly and consistently positive voice over decades. And he has credibility as a sort of renaissance man and public purveyor of forecasts which have turned out to be pretty accurate. Here are a few things I remember him saying in the podcast (no transcript – come on, that is something AI can do easily right?)

  • robots that can do my dishes within two years!!! This may be the most exciting prediction ever.
  • He sticks to his prediction, made in 1999, that artificial general intelligence will be achieved in 2029. He acknowledges that there is a lot of debate about the definition of AGI and therefore there will be a lot of debate over whether it has arrived. But over time he has refined his own definition of it to be more precise and in fact, more stringent. First, he says his definition is that AGI will be able to match the abilities of the top human expert in every field. Second, he says that while a few people believe we have achieved AGI already (it’s January 2026 as I type), by 2029 there will be near consensus that it has arrived.
  • He predicts that 2032 will be the year humans achieve “longevity escape velocity”. In other words, life expectancy will increase by more than one year for each year we live. So in his view, we all just need to “hold on a few more years” and maybe death and aging will be become optional.
  • He predicts that sometime in the 2030s (not so precise on this one), we (most countries?) will have some form of universal basic income.
  • The arrival of AGI is not his definition of the singularity. He has refined his definition of the singularity to be that artificial intelligence is 1000 times smarter than (biological) human intelligence. He forecasts this for 2045. Again, he is relentlessly positive and sees humans tapping into this rather than being left behind.

I definitely think Kurzweil has credibility, and I have never felt that he has any political agenda. I read The Singularity is Near around 2012 or so, and I think it is a mind-blowing book absolutely everyone should read. (I haven’t read the sequel/update The Singularity is Nearer yet, so I don’t know if I would recommend that as a replacement or addition to the original.) Everyone should know this point of view is out there, backed by evidence and math, and give it some consideration. That said, if I were really 100% confident that Ray’s predictions are right, I would not go back to work on Monday morning. I would start drawing down my savings and enjoying life from now on, knowing that the age of scarcity will be over before my savings are gone. I could also abuse my body up to just short of the point of death, knowing that any damage I cause will be easily cured. I am way too risk averse to do any of these things, of course, nor do I recommend them to the reader. But maybe when the doom and gloom seems particularly thick around us these days, we can take some comfort in knowing that at least the possibility of a better future exists.

January 2026 in Review

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Well, I seemed to be in a political mood in January. I try to stay on the policy side of the line, but that is hard when bad politics makes good policy impossible. Inspired by a Nate Silver post, I took a look back at what I see as key moments in the last 25 years of U.S. history, and there were just so many that were on a knife edge and ended up going the wrong way, in my view. Maybe there are other universes where things went better, but remember my scientific theory that once they make a Spiderman movie about a scientific theory, it is almost certainly wrong. I find it depressing how we got here, but there is no sense crying over it. We need to learn from the past yes, but then face up to the present moment and start picking up the pieces from where we are.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Evidence is crystal clear that sabotaging R&D spending is a very effective way to sabotage economic growth and progress. Attaboy to the fools, assholes and traitors currently in nominal charge of the U.S. government. Meanwhile, if a more rational administration ever takes hold, research on learning curves might provide some clues on where to concentrate our efforts for the greatest gains.

Most hopeful story: New York City congestion pricing was a hard-won U.S. transportation policy win in 2025. This is just good, economically sound urban policy that would be apolitical in a more rational world.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I reviewed book reviews from 2025, one of which was Ezra Klein’s Abundance (not the 2012 book Abundance by Peter Diamandis, which while I am not a huge fan I continue to be puzzled how Ezra Klein could either not be aware of that book or intentionally choose to name his book the same thing.) I still find it hard to summarize that book in a sound bite, which would need to be done if it were ever going to serve as the basis for a political campaign. But here is an attempt: (1) Continuously review and streamline federal regulations, (2) increase public and private investments in critical technology and infrastructure, including recommitting to clean energy, and (3) address market failures in housing, health care, and education. #3 is a doozy of course, but the un-sexy answer just has to be understand and implement the latest evidence-backed policies. I would think ramp up housing supply, Medicare for All, and free (tax-funded) college or trade school for all. And um, if we want a chance for any domestic agenda to succeed, we also need serious plans to manage international risks including war, ecosystem collapse, famine, and massive refugee flows that may be coming. Now, I just want to acknowledge that there is a rosy future scenario where AI magically solves all these problems. The way that could work is that technological progress and economic growth suddenly pick up so drastically that we are awash in cash and resources to the point that even the wildly suboptimal operations of our dysfunctional political system are adequate to solve the problems. I don’t think it is safe to put all our eggs in that basket! We better assume that we will need to continue doing the hard work of allocating scarce resources to manage difficult problems for the foreseeable future.

climate refugees

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This Common Dreams article goes into the existing legal framework governing refugees and how it could be extended to define and benefit climate refugees. For example:

  • The Refugee Convention of 1954 was set up in the wake of WWII and addresses “those who must leave their home countries due to war, violence, conflict, or any other kind of maltreatment”. So it doesn’t address environmental displacement or internal displacement, but it could be adapted to address these things.
  • The “1998 Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement” are what they sound like – they have not been formally adopted and are not legally binding. They could be developed into a treaty and/or countries could just adopt the principles as part of their own internal legal frameworks, hopefully also offering aid to neighbors experiencing hardship.
  • A “Global Compact for Migration” was adopted by the UN in 2018. It “promotes safe, orderly pathways for migrants, including planned relocation, visa options, and humanitarian shelter”. “Adopted” means the general assembly adopted it as another voluntary, legally non-binding set of principles. This also could be developed into a treaty and/or countries could incorporate the principles into their own internal legal frameworks.
  • The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is an actual treaty ratified by many countries including the United States Congress. Trump has announced the US is withdrawing from the treaty – which I don’t understand. I naively thought that if Congress ratified a treaty (which is extremely rare nowadays when win-win agreements are viewed by our cynical politicians as a loss of sovereignty), the executive branch didn’t have the right to unilaterally withdraw.
  • “The Loss and Damage Fund was established in 2022 at COP27 to address the financial needs of communities severely impacted by climate change. The money would support rehabilitation, recovery, and human mobility.” It is underfunded of course.

I don’t want to be cynical, but the global political mood is just cynical at the moment. US politicians in particular are not in the mood to sign international agreements or even cooperate informally. So while I think it is good to pursue all of these ideas, I do not think it is a good idea to put all our eggs in this basket.

Climate crisis-fueled migration is already a driving force behind the rise of right-wing parties in the US and Europe, and this ugly feedback loop looks to just keep accelerating over time. As economic conditions in the destination countries deteriorate, the right-wingers are able to scapegoat migrants and that accelerates the feedback loop even more. The most rational way I can see to try to break the feedback loop is to address the environmental and economic conditions in the source countries. Aid and trade are the consensus center-left and center-right ways to do that. The right-wingers are probably aware of this, and so they sabotage both, which accelerates the feedback loop again. So they have no incentive to solve problems, because increasing problems fuel their agenda. Meanwhile more rational politicians can point to the rational solutions, but then when they can’t deliver them within a political cycle, real peoples’ real economic pain again accelerates the feedback loop. We could try to deliver the best economic performance possible as a strategy with some chance of success. Here, the current US administration is unpatriotically sabotaging the foundations of economic success such as R&D, education, and a strong central bank. Sorry for the doom and gloom as I am not seeing an easy way out of this political conundrum. Sit back and hope AI raises productivity in spite of our currently incompetent government and institutions?

Where are the Small Modular Reactors?

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Small modular nuclear reactors might be a key part of the solution to the climate crisis, or they might not. They seem to be near the end of the R&D stage (although doubtless they can and will continue to be improved) and at the very beginning of pilot testing/proof of concept. They are not yet economically competitive with other forms of power generation (including traditional large nuclear reactors), which you could say about pretty much any new technology. There is a chicken and egg problem where you have to implement it and scale it up for the unit price to come down, and it is hard to get the private sector (and public sector, if they are short-term financial return focused) to take the chance on implementation of something that might end up not working out. Of course, the idea is to invest in a portfolio of things that have some chance of working out, such that there is a high chance at least one of them will pay off. Anyway, some facts and figures in this Physicsworld article (isn’t that name slightly redundant?):

  • Nuclear power generated 17.5% of the world’s electricity in 1996, vs. only 9% today (2026 if you are a future historian reading this).
  • I somewhat naively thought US firms might be leaders in this technological knowledge (if not in implementation of anything at scale, where I would never be that naive). But it turns out that there are two of these reactors currently operating in the world, and they are in Russia. Two are being built in China.

Sure, there are mining, supply chain and waste problems, but in my view you have to balance them against the unfolding global ecological catastrophe caused by burning fossil fuels for two centuries and counting.

WEF Global Risks Outlook 2026

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I think of this thing as not so much a prediction but an indicator of what political and business leaders are thinking and talking to each other about. The results seem to be very sensitive to whether people are asked about a 1-, 2-, or 10-year horizon. So I don’t know that the rankings make a lot of difference. Rather, it makes sense to look at a “top 10” or so. Chillingly, more than half of poll respondents seem to think there is an “elevated” to “looming” risk of “GLOBAL CATASTROPHE” within the next 2-10 years. Within 2 years, they are most worried about “geoeconomic confrontation” while within 10 years they identify environmental disaster as the top 3 worries – “extreme weather events”, “biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse”, and “critical change to earth systems”. “State-based armed conflict” (would it be simpler to just call this WAR?) is also up there somewhere near the top. “Inequality” doesn’t rank as high, but the analysts identify it as the risk that is most “interconnected” with the others.

How pathetic for our species and civilization that our leaders believe environmental disaster is looming a decade out, and yet they are starting wars with one another on our behalf in the present, when they know damn well they need to be cooperating to head off the environmental disaster that is going to affect all of us, the winners and losers of today’s useless wars alike. People don’t want war, so how are we putting people in leadership positions over us who are failing us so utterly?

https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2026/infographics-global-risks-report-2026/
https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2026/infographics-global-risks-report-2026/