This has got to be the most moronic story of the month. It's genuinely so stupid it frankly boggles the mind. It was broken by Norwegian daily "Dagens Næringsliv" (DN) under the title "Chinese-owned rental cars filmed secret exercise: Saved video of soldiers and codes" (dn.no/forsvar-og-sikkerhet/k…). BUT when you look into the story what actually happened is that, for an exercise, the Norwegian army was short on cars so it rented some from Hertz. Those rental cars had dashcams - as cars do - that the soldiers mistakenly kept on. At one point, some soldiers found out about that: they were clicking through the car menus out of boredom and stumbled on the footage, including clips of themselves typing gate codes in front of the camera. They deleted the footage. There is zero evidence the footage left the car. THAT'S IT, that's the whole story. China hysteria being what it is in Europe these days, this somehow got transformed into a "China spying" story because Hertz Norway is owned by Volvo, itself owned by Geely (a Chinese company), and 2 of the cars were from a Chinese brand, Deepal. The narrative apparently being that Geely, through Volvo, through Hertz, deliberately left standard dashcams on in rental cars in the hope that the Norwegian military would one day rent them and forget to turn the dashcams off 🤦 And now, as is always the case, it's being spread globally by accounts like Clash Report 👇, which even found a way to make the story dumber: their version has the cars as "Chinese-owned Volvos", when they weren’t Volvos at all. Such is the contemporary media ecosystem: one outlet invents the hysteria, the next one strips away the last remaining nuance and we all end up dumber for it.

1 year and a half ago 👇 vs today 👇

Make no mistake: there is a new space race going on, but a very different one in nature from that between the US and the Soviet Union. This time around it involves, on one side, a colossal state-backed monopoly built on government money, welded to its country's military-industrial complex and run by a politically connected and highly ideological oligarch. On the other side: dozens of hungry startups trying to out-innovate each other in a ruthless, Darwinian competition. The oligarch is Elon Musk. The Darwinian competition is China. There is something funny about it, not only because of the role reversal versus the Cold War era, but also because it sounds like a repeat of the Tesla story: it increasingly looks like the Gods cursed Musk into serving as chief trailblazer of China's industrial ecosystem. This time around though, a strong argument can be made that the space industry is even more strategic, and potentially far more consequential, than the car industry. Stripped of Musk’s PR spin about saving humanity, what the SpaceX project is concretely about is: - Building a new global communication infrastructure via Starlink - Enabling the US security establishment to see and hear everything on Earth, all the time (via Starshield, its military division) - Dominating access to space itself, from launch to orbital real estate Each of these is very, very real. Do the test one day and download the app “Stellarium” on your phone that allows you to identify stars, planets and… the satellites orbiting above you. I guarantee you that the sheer number of Starlink satellites right on top of your head at any given moment will genuinely shock you. There are currently over 10,000 of them up there - almost as many as there are planes in the sky at any given moment (travelandleisure.com/airline…). Starlink satellites constitute roughly two-thirds of all active satellites orbiting Earth, all belonging to a single private American company. So it’s not conspiracy theories: the SpaceX satellites are up there, right above your head, right now. Starlink already has over 12 million subscribers across 160 countries. Starshield - the military division of SpaceX - already has multi-billion dollar contracts with the US defense establishment to "enable the U.S. government to quickly capture continuous imagery of activities on the ground nearly anywhere on the globe" (reuters.com/technology/space…). And SpaceX already controls the majority of global launch capacity. In other words, every single one of my three points above is already well underway. And, more worryingly, the roadmap for these satellites doesn't stop at surveillance: the US Congressional Research Service has documented plans for space-based directed energy weapons within the same SDA program that SpaceX Starshield is part of (crsreports.congress.gov/prod…), with Congress having already granted the legal authority and budget to develop them. So we're talking about a single private company, one deeply embedded in the US military-defense establishment, building the infrastructure to control global communications, conduct continuous planetary surveillance, and potentially project military force from orbit. And that company already has more hardware up in space than every other country and company on Earth, combined. From the standpoint of China, or that of any country that cares about sovereignty, letting that go unchallenged would be an act of strategic suicide. The question, therefore, isn’t whether China should develop its own sovereign capacities to challenge SpaceX, but whether it can. That's the topic of my latest article: a systematic analysis of whether China can break SpaceX's grip on the sky. Spoiler: if you bought SpaceX shares at a $2 trillion-plus market cap, you may want to rethink that one. This is the link to my article titled "Musk built a monopoly on space. Can China break it?": open.substack.com/pub/arnaud…

I found this absolutely hilarious. So China has this nationwide policy called "Green Channel" (“绿通”): if you transport fresh produce like fruits or veggies, you don't need to pay highway tolls. It's real, I checked, here is a government website describing the policy: gov.cn/zhengce/202406/conten… This is meant to reduce food costs and reduce friction in food logistics. If you're a small farmer producing - say - watermelons in Xinjiang, thousands of kms from Eastern cities, highway tolls alone could cost more than the watermelons themselves are worth. There is, however, a loophole that's going viral on Chinese social media these days 👇 It applies to pickup trucks! So if you have a pickup truck, you just need to pack the back with cheap cabbage and - voilà - free highway for you 😂 So in China these days, if you go on the highway, you're increasingly seeing more and more pickup trucks packed with fruits and veggies in the back 😅 It actually doesn't go wasted and may even work in favor of the policy. When they arrive at destination, the drivers do sell the produce so, on top of waiving highway fees, they even make a profit - basically becoming the small-scale food distributors the policy was designed to support. The video describes a driver from Zhengzhou, Henan who reportedly bought 500 yuan of cabbage, drove toll-free to Xinjiang, sold it for 1,500, then loaded up watermelons for the return trip and sold those back in Henan. He saved 2,000 RMB in highway fees and probably got his gas paid by the food profit! I'm myself planning to drive the whole summer touring Western China with my family in an RV: I wonder if it applies, I might try it! If you're in China and see a French guy driving a RV packed with cabbage, don't get surprised 😂