The Liberty Pear Highlights (Nov '24 - Jan '25)


I’ve been writing and posting for a little over 2 months now. I’d like to revisit a few of my favorites from this time!

I will make highlight posts like this every once in a while, maybe monthly to reduce the length of them.

Nationalize AI Series

This is the series I spent the most time on - and a lot of it is extremely important especially with the recent news about how China is catching up in AI.

I wish this series did as well as my tariffs series, as it is much, much, much more important! Each part can be read independently, but it is best when you read all of it. It’s not terribly long!

The Tariff Series

I wrote two parts regarding tariffs. I believe these are both critical to understanding what might happen if there are broad tariffs implemented.

I do think I will make a part 3 and potentially more parts to this soon-ish.

The Future: Made In China

A massive fusion breakthrough shows again that they are in the lead in this critical innovation. What does the USA need to do? What other energy projects are China ahead on?

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Quotes from one of the most consequential men in American history.

The Extinction of the Nightingale

There’s a theme, so far, on this blog - focusing about lesser known and/or under appreciated aspects of history. One example of this is my other highlighted post about Building 7.

Another such, vastly under-appreciated, story - is this story.

2025 Economic Thoughts & Predictions

Economic outlook & predictions based on two major policy proposals by the current administration. An economic article more so than a political one. Critical information if you’d like to understand how policy could affect everyone’s lives.

Lump Of Labor Fallacy

Does adding new workers to an economy reduce jobs for others? Nope! This is known as the Lump of Labor Fallacy - see the explanation here to understand.

Understanding this can help you understand what certain policies will do to the economy overall.

What Are Externalities?

This post is meant to give you a basic understanding of what externalities are, some examples of them, and an introduction on why they matter and need correction. Here we are particularly focused on negative externalities - since these are both more common and from a policy perspective, far more important.

Building 7

An lesser known story during 9/11.

Paradox of Thrift, Fallacy of Composition, Austerity, and Second-Order Thinking

Explore second-order thinking through the lens of various economic counter intuitions.

Then, Jesus Said…

What would Jesus think of some of these things?





AOC Joins Jon Stewart On His Weekly Podcast

As I have mentioned before, I don’t expect everyone to love or even like Stewart or AOC (or anyone, frankly). I find these types of chats informative even if I don’t fully agree with it all. I took a lot from this one.

Fortune a Day - Recap - Week 4

Here’s my week 4 recap of my Fortune A Day project!

To stay on top of these daily, follow Fortune a Day on Bluesky!



The Future: Made In China


Another large fusion breakthrough rose in the EAST on Monday, January 20th - maintaining a steady-state high-confinement plasma operation for a world record breaking 1,066 seconds. Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) - which is also known as China’s “artificial sun” - achieved this feat; and by the way - the world record they beat was their own from 2023 of 403 seconds.

While we are quite a ways away from the promise of fusion energy - unlimited, clean energy - it is aggressively clear that China is ahead.

Energy and Growth

Graph showing the relationship between many countries’ GDP per person and their energy use per person, with some countries highlighted. While it’s not a direct causal relationship, it demonstrates that energy is a key necessity for economic growth.

Making the cost of energy effectively zero, and having it be clean, enables economic growth we can not even conceive of. Even as the innovations we are working on become more real - like superintelligent AI - they are likely going to always be constrained by energy.

Dominating Energy All Around

Like I mentioned before, usable fusion is still far away. But this isn’t stopping China from another massive energy innovation project which seems to be a large solar power plant in space. This is another massive project beyond the scale of anything the USA has done since the moon landing. This project is still in developmental phase - and execution matters more than talk — but America isn’t talkin’ or executin’.

As a third small point - China is currently building 27 nuclear power plants vs 0 (!!!!!!!!!!) in construction in the USA - and will generate more nuclear power than the USA by 2030 (5 years from now!!). (Source)


I won’t go into the other advantages China has in terms of energy innovation - I will leave that as an exercise for the reader to research.

The Fusion Fix?

I made a lot of the same points, that I will make here about fusion power, about AI in Nationalize AI - Part 5 - Superiority - but it seems like it makes little sense to have so many American firms competing to make fusion work by themselves.

Nationalization, and making the project a moonshot (think The Manhattan Project, the moon landing, etc) seems like the most appropriate move. Not only would this ensure that we could equitably distribute the benefit of fusion, but importantly the combined labor and resources. America has a proven ability to achieve groundbreaking results when it commits unified resources and effort.

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