30 July 2026 – What I read and able to note down today in the news that I scan:
Jobs we think will disappear will disappear
Not necessary because we were right, partly because it self fulfils. When society believes that a certain job will eventually extinct, mechanism will also be in place to hasten it demise if the rationale hold true. The younger would be work force would have or made to shun themselves from the career and hence requiring the affected industry to quicken workforce replacement in non-human form.
US bans Chinese humanoids and power inverters
Seen as a protectionist approach, the FCC under Donald Trump administration imposed the ban citing, again like a broken record, on security concerns.
Read elsewhere, protectionism do shield the industry it meant to protect but will not build competitiveness. I might add it actually make it worse as evident from Malaysia’s failed attempt to shied Proton. Instead of becoming more competitive, it became complacent and eventually crumbled only to be ‘rescued’ by been acquired by a Chinese automotive player that’s younger than Proton. (Geely was founded in 1986 but as a refrigerator manufacturer. It ventured into automotive in 1997. Proton was founded in 1983 as an automotive player)
Better AI is not needed to win AI war
An article reflected what Jensen Huang had mentioned when he first opposed US AI diffusion laws. He claimed that the way to win the tech war is to flood the market with the tech and not by suppressing them to protect it from been copied away. He alluded that having such tech in the wild would ensure competitiveness so that may the best prevails. Instead, suppressing diffusion of a particular tech will only ensure the defeat of the said tech. The case here is that the tech that wins need not be the best or the better one, it just need to be the one that’s used by the most. Case in point is the war between VHS and Beta Max. The latter was believed to the more competent one, but VHS won because it achieved mass adoption.
Ferrari Luce, its first EV met its one year target in 2 months despite strong critics.
The company faced harsh criticism when the car was launched. 2 months thereafter, it had reported that it has met the whole year target. Just goes to show sometimes, customers don’t know what they really want. Like what Steve Jobs famously claimed, a great company is one that solve customers problem that they didn’t know they have. Something called as ‘latent needs’.
Chip sell off continues – despite strong fundamentals
Perhaps a strange observation. SK Hynix reported a staggering improvement of close to 600% of earnings year on year but its shares plummeted up to 20% before parring its losses. This triggered continuation of sell off in chip stock in US.
Reading reports, the executive of these companies are saying they see demands up to beyond 2030. So much so that SK Hynix has committed an unprecedented capital expenditure to expand capacity to address demands.
Perhaps, it’s a market inertia and believe that semiconductor is a cyclical industry and that this will end quickly. While I personally do believe it may be so, I am seeing this as a super cycle meaning while there will eventually be a down cycle, this will come at a later time. Then again, such antics, investors getting jittery may just be self fulfilled.
I wonder now if there’s ever been an industry that transformed from cyclical to become a staple industry. Time to check with AI, the exact tech that’s causing all this. Perhaps, it’s indeed transformative.
Back from a quick conversation with Claude. It appears that memory will continue to be cyclical. There aren’t enough evidence that it’s not cyclical.
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