Nemesis Has a Long Memory: China’s Copycat Past Is Finally Collecting Interest

 

China built an empire by copying others. Now its own ideas are being stolen, its courts are clogged, and the monster it fed is turning inward—with lawsuits, raids, and global backlash.

I have watched China’s rise for years like a long street fight caught on slow-motion replay. First came the punches it threw at everyone else’s ideas. Then came the trophies built from borrowed blueprints. Now comes the twist nobody in Beijing can dodge. China wants protection. Hard protection. Courtroom protection. And the irony hits harder than any sanction ever did. Nemesis doesn’t knock; it kicks the door in.

The image says it all. A six-inch plush toy named Labubu, born inside China’s own creative economy, now has an evil twin called Lafufu. Factories crank them out like counterfeit conscience. Police raid warehouses. Shanghai cops seize fake toys worth 12m yuan in one swoop. I almost laughed when I read it. Not because it’s funny, but because history has a brutal sense of humor. The country that once told foreign firms to stop whining about stolen designs is now crying foul over stolen dolls.

Let’s not rewrite history with soft lighting. China was the world’s factory for imitation long before it became the world’s courtroom for intellectual property. Walk through markets in the 1990s and early 2000s and you’d find fake Nike shoes stacked next to fake Nestlé seasoning, all sold with a straight face. Western companies knew the risks but came anyway. The market was too big. The labor was too cheap. The rules were too flexible. And flexibility often meant your trade secrets walking out the back door.

General Motors learned that lesson the hard way in 2003 when a Chinese partner rolled out a car that looked suspiciously like GM’s own model. Kawasaki and Siemens watched China’s high-speed rail miracle unfold and wondered how their proprietary technology suddenly felt so familiar in someone else’s hands. At the time, complaints were brushed aside. Growth mattered more than ownership. Speed mattered more than permission. Borrow first, apologize never.

But here’s the pivot nobody wants to say out loud. China grew up. And grown-ups hate thieves even more than children do. Today’s Chinese economy isn’t just an assembly line. It’s a laboratory, a design studio, a patent office on fire. Chinese firms now dominate smartphones, electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, and telecom equipment. They file more patents than any other country on earth. According to global IP data, China has led the world in patent filings for several consecutive years, with millions of active patents on the books. Suddenly, loose rules aren’t a growth strategy anymore. They’re a liability.

That’s why Chinese courts are drowning. More than 550,000 IP cases flood the system every year, turning judges into factory workers of justice, processing roughly one case per day. Shanghai has become the preferred battleground because its judges actually know IP law. Even then, companies wait 3 months just to get a case on the docket. Justice may be blind, but here it’s also backed up like rush-hour traffic.

The root of the problem isn’t mystery. It’s excess. Too many factories. Too much capacity. Not enough original demand. Idle plants don’t like sitting still. They copy because copying keeps the lights on. I read about lawyers like Li Hongjiang who describe the same nightmare on loop. Win against one counterfeiter today, face another tomorrow. It’s industrial whack-a-mole. Cut one head off, two grow back. And this mess doesn’t stay inside China’s borders. It leaks. It floods. It shows up on Amazon listings with suspiciously low prices and suspiciously familiar designs. In the United States, patent-related cases involving Chinese businesses jumped by 56% in 2023 alone. Many of them involved Chinese sellers clashing with Western rights holders over copied products in electronics, communications gear, and consumer goods. This isn’t ideological warfare. It’s commercial chaos.

Part of the blame sits squarely with inexperience. Many Chinese firms expanded abroad without running proper freedom-to-operate checks. They built first and asked questions later. That approach works at home when enforcement is uneven. It fails fast in courts where injunctions hit like a hammer. Now these companies are scrambling, hiring senior in-house IP lawyers and paying top dollar to clean up mistakes that never should have crossed borders. Cheap shortcuts become expensive detours.

Then comes the final irony, the one that makes this story sting. Chinese companies are no longer just defendants. They’re plaintiffs. They’re accusing foreigners of stealing Chinese ideas. Luckin Coffee sued a Thai business for copying its name and logo and won. Trina Solar sued Canadian Solar in American courts, arguing that its technology had been infringed. Read that again slowly. Chinese firms are now asking Western judges to defend Chinese innovation.

This is where nemesis steps fully into frame. China built a system where imitation was tolerated, even encouraged, because it accelerated development. That same system now threatens to eat its own children. You can’t train an entire economy to cut corners and then expect it to suddenly respect boundaries. Habits don’t vanish because policy changes. They linger. They resist. They bite back.

I don’t see this as moral awakening. I see it as economic self-interest wearing a judge’s robe. China didn’t discover the value of intellectual property because it found religion. It discovered it because it finally has something worth stealing. The courts are full because the mirror is finally clear. The thief now owns the jewelry. And ownership changes everything.

The coming years will be uglier. More lawsuits. More raids. More global clashes. Chinese firms will demand protection abroad while struggling to enforce discipline at home. Western companies will keep pressing back. And somewhere in the middle, a plush toy named Labubu will sit on a shelf, a soft reminder that when you spend decades copying the world, the world eventually copies you back.

Nemesis always collects. With interest.

 

 On a different but equally important note, readers who enjoy thoughtful analysis may also find the titles in my “Brief Book Series”  worth exploring. Read it here on Google Play: Brief Book Series.

 

 

Talking While Iran Reloads: Why Negotiation With Tehran Is a Sick Joke

 

Talking to Tehran buys time for bombs and bodies. Ali Khamenei stalls, reloads, and kills. Every handshake funds terror. Delay equals disaster. President Trump must act now or inherit the blast.

The name is Ali Khamenei, and the system he runs isn’t misunderstood, mischaracterized, or unfairly judged. It’s violent, cynical, and soaked in blood. If that sounds harsh, good. Reality is harsh. Calling a hangman a tailor doesn’t make the rope disappear. From my TV, these so-called ongoing U.S.-Iran negotiations look like a bad joke told at a funeral. The anchors nod. The analysts hedge. The diplomats smile like dentists before drilling. Iran is “eager” to make a deal, they say. Of course it is. When the butcher asks for a timeout, it’s because the knives are dull and the customers are angry. Desperation isn’t virtue. It’s a symptom.

Khamenei’s regime has mastered one art form: delay. Delay inspections. Delay consequences. Delay collapse. Talks are their oxygen tank. They don’t negotiate to resolve; they negotiate to survive. Nuclear only, they insist. No missiles. No terror proxies. No money trail. No questions about the bodies cooling in the streets of Tehran, Mashhad, or Isfahan. That’s not diplomacy. That’s a shell game with a mushroom cloud waiting in the wings. I keep hearing that negotiations are “good,” even if they “might fail.” That line makes my teeth itch. Iran’s track record isn’t mixed; it’s consistent. Stall, cheat, deny, repeat. Centrifuges spin while diplomats spin words. When a liar tells you he’s lying slower this time, he’s still lying.

Let’s stop tiptoeing around the ugly part. Under Khamenei and his entourage of clerics, generals, and executioners, Iran is one of the world’s top executioners per capita. Protesters don’t get due process; they get bullets. Journalists don’t get rebuttals; they get cells. Athletes don’t get medals; they get silenced. After recent protest waves, hundreds were killed, thousands arrested, many tortured. Families bury children while state TV calls it order. That’s not stability. That’s terror with paperwork.

And while this bloodbath plays out, we’re told to stay calm because talks continue. I’m watching the nuclear clock tick like a cheap thriller prop. Inspectors warn. Analysts warn. Breakout timelines shrink to months. Months. That’s not enough time to argue about commas. Every meeting that pretends missiles and terror don’t matter is a coupon for catastrophe. Missiles deliver nukes. Proxies deliver leverage. Cash delivers all of it. Ignoring the delivery system doesn’t disarm the package.

We’ve been here before. When money flowed after past deals, violence followed. Oil revenue went up, rockets followed the curve. Hezbollah stocked up. Hamas tunneled. The Houthis fired. Iran didn’t reform; it reinvested. That’s not a theory. It’s a balance sheet. You don’t launder blood money by calling it humanitarian.

The defenders of endless talk sell fear of escalation like it’s wisdom. From my couch, it looks like cowardice wearing a lab coat. Escalation is already the business model. Iran chants “Death to America!” slogans, funds terror, plots abroad, and then asks for relief like a frequent flyer. Khamenei calls America the Great Satan and Israel the Little Satan, then demands respect at the table. The satire writes itself. You can’t shake hands with a fist that never opens.

Pressure, on the other hand, works. It always has. When sanctions bite, Tehran squeals. When force looks credible, Tehran recalculates. When force looks fake, Tehran advances. This isn’t ideology; it’s behavior. The regime understands power, not pleading. It respects consequences, not communiqués. Peace through strength isn’t poetry; it’s punctuation.

I’m told decisive action sounds reckless. What sounds reckless to me is funding the very machine that kills its own people and arms their killers abroad. Decisive doesn’t mean dumb. It means relentless pressure, credible force, and zero illusions. It means choking the cash, crippling the missile program, and making nuclear progress painfully expensive. It means backing the Iranian people with actions that weaken their jailers, not speeches that flatter them.

And don’t insult my intelligence with “nuclear-only” fantasies. That’s like treating lung cancer while handing out cigarettes. Missiles, proxies, nukes, repression—they’re one ecosystem. Cut one leaf and the vine grows back. Pull the root or stop pretending you’re gardening.

The TV keeps flashing warnings like hazard lights we refuse to read. Americans told to leave. Assets repositioned. Strategic ambiguity floated like cologne. Tehran hears it. The question is whether Washington believes its own posture or just likes the photo op. If you brandish a stick, don’t replace it with a feather mid-swing.

So here’s my unfiltered opinion, written from a living room, not a war room. Negotiating with Ali Khamenei’s regime as if it were a normal government is political self-harm. It sanitizes murder, subsidizes terror, and wastes time we don’t have. The talks, as framed, are pointless. They stall the clock and feed the beast. The smarter path is decisive pressure against a blood-thirsty regime that has earned zero trust in 47 years.

I’m not afraid of names. I’m afraid of consequences we keep inviting. Time is Tehran’s ally. Death is its currency. And every extra minute we pretend this circus is working is another body we’ll pretend not to count.

 

 

This article stands on its own, but some readers may also enjoy the titles from my  “Brief Book Series”. Read it here on Google Play: Brief BookSeries.

 

The Revenge of the ‘Humanities’: AI Ate STEM Alive

 

AI flipped the hierarchy. STEM got automated. Humanities got relevant. The workforce isn’t evolving—it’s panicking. Those who can’t explain, judge, or persuade may soon be unemployable.

I’m not here to polish my words or dress them up in polite academic perfume. I’ll say it the blunt way it happened. For decades, the system shoved one message down our throats like a bad pill: if you want money, power, and respect, you chase STEM. Science. Technology. Engineering. Mathematics. Everything else was treated like a hobby. A side quest. A polite way to say you were unserious about survival. Humanities and social sciences were the academic equivalent of showing up to a Wall Street interview in sandals. Everyone smiled, then looked past you.

I watched it happen in real time. Guidance counselors repeated it like scripture. Politicians waved charts and promised innovation. Employers nodded along. Parents warned their kids not to “waste” tuition money on philosophy, history, sociology, literature, or political science. STEM was sold as the Holy Grail. Learn to code, they said. Learn calculus, they said. The future belongs to engineers, they said. Meanwhile, humanities majors were treated like the ugly girls at the dance, standing by the wall, pretending they didn’t want to be chosen.

Then AI showed up and said, “Hold my server.”

Here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud. AI is built to eat STEM for lunch. Math? That’s dessert. Code? That’s an appetizer. Engineering problems? Just fancy puzzles with rules. AI thrives on structure, repetition, logic, and patterns. You give it equations, it smiles. You give it code, it hums. You give it technical manuals, it devours them like fast food. The very skills we crowned as untouchable turned out to be the easiest to automate.

And suddenly, the golden children of the job market started getting pink slips.

Between 2022 and 2024, tech layoffs came in waves. Not rumors. Not whispers. Mass layoffs. Software engineers, data analysts, QA testers, junior developers, and even mid-level engineers were shown the door. Jobs that were marketed as “future-proof” cracked under pressure. AI didn’t replace everyone, but it replaced enough people to expose a brutal truth: if your value is speed, AI will eventually outrun you. When you train a machine to think like you, don’t be shocked when it applies for your job.

Here’s where the plot twists.

AI can calculate. AI can generate. AI can imitate. But AI struggles when the task involves meaning, judgment, ethics, culture, persuasion, or contradiction. It can write sentences, but it doesn’t understand why words hurt. It can summarize history, but it doesn’t feel the weight of it. It can analyze behavior, but it doesn’t live inside fear, shame, love, power, or belief. It doesn’t know when silence is better than speech. It doesn’t know when a technically correct answer is morally bankrupt.

That’s the lane humanities and social sciences never left.

For years, we mocked these fields as soft. Now they’re the hardest thing to automate. Communication. Interpretation. Ethical reasoning. Social awareness. Narrative judgment. Cultural literacy. Political analysis. Behavioral insight. These aren’t bugs in the system. They’re the firewall between civilization and chaos. And AI keeps slamming into that firewall.

Companies learned this the hard way. They deployed AI tools and triggered backlash. Biased outputs. Legal trouble. Public outrage. Regulatory heat. Suddenly, they needed people who could explain decisions, understand communities, anticipate reactions, and clean up messes machines didn’t know they made. You don’t fix that with more code. You fix it with human judgment. A calculator never apologizes.

Look at where demand is quietly growing. Roles tied to policy, ethics, compliance, communication, education, UX research, behavioral science, content strategy, public affairs, and social analysis aren’t shrinking the way pure technical roles are. These jobs exist because machines don’t understand humans well enough to manage humans. And until they do, someone has to translate reality into rules and rules back into reality.

This is the part that makes people uncomfortable. Humanities didn’t suddenly become useful. They were always useful. We just ignored them because they didn’t promise instant money. We built a system obsessed with efficiency and speed, then acted shocked when it couldn’t explain itself. We optimized everything except wisdom. You can run fast in the wrong direction and still end up lost.

So yes, I’m asking the question straight, no makeup, no manners. Is this the revenge of the humanities?

Not revenge like a movie montage. No marching band. No victory speech. It’s a slow, quiet reckoning. The kind where the market realizes it bet too heavily on logic and forgot about meaning. Where policymakers suddenly panic about misinformation, polarization, ethics, and social collapse. Where companies realize they can automate labor but not legitimacy. Where AI can do the work but cannot take the blame.

The same degrees we mocked are now doing cleanup duty. Not because they’re trendy, but because someone has to understand people when systems fail. You can’t regulate truth with algorithms alone. You can’t govern trust with spreadsheets. You can’t explain justice to a machine if the humans in charge don’t understand it either.

Let me be clear so nobody twists this. STEM still matters. Medicine still needs scientists. Infrastructure still needs engineers. AI itself needs technical minds. But the lie was that STEM alone was enough. AI exposed that lie like a bad credit score. The future doesn’t belong to those who can only compute. It belongs to those who can judge when computation goes too far. So here we are. The engineers built the machine. The machine learned fast. And now the poets, historians, sociologists, and philosophers are back in the room, not to gloat, but to explain what the machine cannot understand. When the hammer becomes powerful, you start asking who decides where it swings.

Call it irony. Call it karma. Call it poetic justice if you like your satire sharp. But don’t miss the lesson. The ugly girls at the dance didn’t change. The music did.

 

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When AI Moves Faster Than Your Business Model: Adapt or Perish

 

Anthropic proved software can be built in days, not years. Markets panicked. SaaS cracked. AI won’t kill everyone—but it will expose who’s bluffing, overpriced, and already late to their own funeral.

I watched the screens flicker red and felt the familiar chill run through the market. This time it wasn’t a rate hike, a war headline, or a rogue inflation print. It was code. Not a decade-long rewrite. Not a moonshot product roadmap. Just a few weeks of work, a legal AI tool from Anthropic, and suddenly software stocks were tumbling like dominoes on wet pavement. The sell-off wasn’t polite. It was sharp, fast, and emotional. SaaS and financial services took hits because investors saw something they hadn’t priced in yet: speed that breaks old assumptions.

What shook people wasn’t just that Anthropic launched a legal tool. Legal tech has been around for years. It was the realization that something usable, enterprise-adjacent, and frighteningly capable could be stitched together in roughly 10–14 days. That detail landed like a brick through a window. I could almost hear traders muttering the same question at once: if this can be built that fast, what exactly am I paying for?

That’s when fear takes the wheel. SaaS valuations rest on the idea that software is hard to build, expensive to maintain, and sticky once adopted. Now imagine a world where a lean team with access to a frontier model spins up a product that undercuts years of development. The market didn’t wait to debate nuance. It sold first and asked questions later. I’ve seen this movie before. In the late 1990s, when the internet made distribution cheap, investors declared that brick-and-mortar retail was finished. In the 2000s, when digital ads exploded, print journalism was pronounced dead. Each time, the panic was real, but the extinction story was sloppy.

The legal angle added gasoline. Lawyers are expensive, process-heavy, and allergic to hallucinations. Yet here we are, watching AI draft briefs, summarize discovery, and surface case law in seconds. The irony is brutal. The same profession that bills by the hour is now staring at a machine that doesn’t sleep, doesn’t bill, and doesn’t complain. No wonder markets flinched. But fear has a habit of overshooting reality.

I don’t buy the collapse narrative. I never have. History doesn’t support it. When spreadsheets arrived in the late 1970s, accountants weren’t wiped out. Visicalc and later Excel didn’t destroy the profession; they multiplied its output. By the mid-1990s, Excel was used by over 90% of large firms’ finance teams, and accounting employment kept growing. The same thing happened with databases, cloud computing, and even smartphones. Each wave killed certain tasks, not entire industries. AI is no different. It’s a blade, not a bomb.

What investors are missing is that AI, deployed well, is additive. Chris Kelly hinted at this when he talked about hallucinations and safeguards during his interview at CNBC, a TV channel focusing on business news. Early systems mess up. We’ve already seen hundreds of documented cases where AI generated fake legal citations, invented quotes, and hallucinated precedent. That’s real risk. Lawyers have been sanctioned for filing AI-generated nonsense. But that’s not the end of the story. It’s the beginning of the tuning phase. Every major technology goes through this ugly adolescence. Airplanes crashed before they became safe. Early cars killed pedestrians before traffic laws existed. Nobody concluded that transportation itself was doomed.

The smarter SaaS companies will do what they always do. They will wrap AI in guardrails, checks, audits, and workflows. They will make hallucinations harder, traceability easier, and liability clearer. They will bundle these features, not discount them. People love to argue that cheaper production means cheaper prices. History laughs at that idea. Software pricing has rarely fallen in real terms. What happens instead is feature inflation. You pay the same subscription, but you get more power, more automation, more dependency. The price stays put. The value proposition mutates.

Look at cloud computing. Amazon Web Services launched in 2006 promising cheaper infrastructure. What followed wasn’t a collapse in enterprise IT spending. Global cloud spending crossed $500 billion annually by 2023. Companies didn’t save money. They scaled faster. They spent differently. AI will follow that pattern. Costs may drop at the margin, but demand will explode. When productivity rises, ambition rises with it. A rising tide lifts ships that know how to float.

The market reaction also ignored the partnership dynamic. SaaS firms don’t have to fight AI vendors. They can ally with them. Kelly was right to point out that leaders will partner with companies like Anthropic or OpenAI, embedding models into trusted platforms customers already use. That trust matters. Enterprises don’t want raw models. They want accountability, compliance, privacy controls, and contracts that don’t evaporate when something breaks. That’s where incumbents still have leverage.

Privacy is the quiet killer in this story. AI feeds on data the way fire feeds on oxygen. Upload the wrong document, and you may have just trained a system you don’t control. Governments already know this. There have been documented incidents of sensitive data being used improperly in AI systems, prompting internal bans and policy memos across federal agencies. Enterprises will follow suit. Protocols will harden. Data walls will rise. Companies that can’t manage this will bleed trust, and trust is harder to rebuild than code.

This is where laggards get punished. Not because AI exists, but because they freeze. They deny. They delay. Markets are ruthless with denial. Stocks don’t collapse because technology changes. They collapse because management refuses to adapt. I’ve watched this happen to retailers who ignored e-commerce and media firms who mocked digital ads. The pattern is always the same. First disbelief. Then panic. Then irrelevance.

Anthropic’s legal tool didn’t kill SaaS. It exposed complacency. It forced investors to ask who is actually building, who is bundling, who is securing data, and who is just collecting subscription checks while hoping the storm passes. The sell-off feels overwrought because markets priced apocalypse when the reality is selection. Some firms will get stronger. Others will fade. Capitalism doesn’t do mercy. It does sorting.

I keep coming back to one simple truth. AI doesn’t end work. It raises the bar. It doesn’t erase industries. It strips excuses. The companies that survive this moment will look back and say the same thing winners always say after disruption. We moved fast. We partnered smart. We controlled risk. Everyone else will call it unfair. When the tide goes out, you see who was swimming naked.

 

 

This article stands on its own, but some readers may also enjoy the titles in my  Brief Book Series. You can also read them  here on Google Play: Brief Book Series.

 

 

Plugged In and Hacked: The Dirty Secret Behind EV Charging

 

Your EV charger may be a loaded gun: hackers can shut down your car, steal your payment data, or slip malware into your vehicle—while you stand there smiling at a charging screen.

I keep hearing the same sales pitch every time I pass a glowing EV charger in a mall parking lot or highway rest stop. Clean future. Smart mobility. Plug in and relax. The problem is that relax is exactly what attackers count on. While drivers watch their battery percentage climb, some EV charging stations have been quietly exposed as soft targets—machines that can be poked, prodded, and in some cases turned against the very cars they are supposed to serve. When the gate is left open, thieves do not knock.

The uncomfortable truth is that some EV chargers were found vulnerable to attacks that could disable a vehicle, steal payment details, or infect a car’s software. This is not sci-fi paranoia. It is the predictable outcome of rushing hardware into public space faster than security thinking can keep up. We built a rolling computer ecosystem, bolted it to the power grid, connected it to payment systems, and then acted surprised when hackers showed up like uninvited guests at an open bar.

I remember watching early demonstrations from security researchers and thinking the tone was almost apologetic. Nobody wanted to be the bad guy who spoiled the electric party. But the data did not care about feelings. In 2022, researchers at Pen Test Partners publicly demonstrated how weaknesses in certain consumer and public EV chargers could be abused. They showed that with relatively modest access, an attacker could interrupt charging sessions, manipulate charger behavior, and potentially pivot deeper into connected systems. That year mattered because it shattered the myth that chargers were just “dumb plugs.” They are networked computers with ports, protocols, and privileges.

The bigger picture became clearer in 2023 and 2024 when industry-wide assessments landed with a dull thud instead of a bang. NCC Group released findings showing that a significant percentage of tested EV charging ecosystems contained high-risk vulnerabilities. In several environments, insecure communication protocols and weak authentication controls made it possible to interfere with charging operations or access sensitive backend systems. Some chargers accepted commands they should have rejected. Others trusted devices they should have questioned. Trust, when given freely, is often stolen.

Disabling a vehicle sounds dramatic, but it is not magic. Modern EVs constantly talk to chargers. They negotiate power levels, authenticate sessions, and exchange status data. If that conversation is hijacked or corrupted, charging can be stopped cold. In edge cases, misconfigured systems could trigger fault states that prevent a vehicle from charging properly until it is reset or serviced. Imagine being stranded not because your battery died, but because a stranger told your car to stop listening to you. That is not just inconvenience; that is leverage.

Then there is the money trail. Public EV chargers process millions of transactions every day. In 2023 alone, global public charging sessions exceeded 1,000,000,000, according to widely cited industry estimates. Each tap, swipe, or app-based payment is a data event. Where there is payment data, there is temptation. Security analysts have repeatedly warned that poorly secured chargers could expose card details or account credentials, especially when operators fail to properly segment payment systems or encrypt data in transit. Traditional gas pumps taught us this lesson years ago. Credit card skimmers thrived there because nobody expected a fuel nozzle to be a crime scene. EV chargers risk repeating that history with newer, shinier hardware. The costume changes, but the con stays the same.

The most unsettling scenario is software infection. EVs are computers on wheels, running millions of lines of code. They receive updates over the air, rely on third-party libraries, and interface with external systems like chargers using standardized protocols such as OCPP. If a charger is compromised, it can become a delivery mechanism. Security researchers have shown that malicious payloads can be positioned where vehicles or backend systems might ingest them, especially in ecosystems where update validation is weak or logging is poor. No credible researcher claims hackers can instantly “take over” every EV on the road, but that is a straw man. Real attackers play the long game. They plant, observe, escalate. Water does not break stone in a day.

History backs this up. In 2015, long before EVs dominated headlines, security researchers demonstrated remote exploitation of connected vehicles through entertainment systems. That moment forced automakers to confront the reality that connectivity equals attack surface. EV chargers are now part of that surface. In 2021, security analysts warned that critical infrastructure attacks were shifting toward edge devices—small, widely deployed systems that are hard to monitor at scale. EV chargers fit that profile perfectly. They sit in public, often unattended, running firmware that may not be patched for years.

Statistics sharpen the edge of this argument. A 2024 industry survey found that more than 60% of charging operators struggled to maintain consistent security updates across their networks. Another assessment reported that over 40% of tested charging systems exposed at least one critical vulnerability related to authentication or data handling. These are not fringe numbers. They describe an ecosystem still learning how to defend itself while already under load.

I can already hear the counterargument whispered in glossy boardrooms. No confirmed mass attacks. No viral meltdown. No reason to panic. Fair enough. Panic is useless. But denial is worse. Cybersecurity history is littered with warnings that were ignored because the damage had not yet scaled. Retail breaches, hospital ransomware, pipeline shutdowns—all of them followed the same script. Early warnings. Limited incidents. Then a single coordinated strike that turned complacency into headlines.

What makes this story alarming is not that EV chargers have vulnerabilities. Everything does. What stings is the mismatch between the green utopia narrative and the gritty reality of rushed infrastructure. We told drivers to trust the plug without telling them about the locks. We celebrated innovation while quietly accepting shortcuts. A fast road still leads to the same cliff.

Yes - you heard me right.  I am not an outsider throwing stones. I use technology. I believe in progress. But belief without scrutiny is how systems rot from the inside. EV charging networks are critical infrastructure now. They deserve the same paranoia we apply to power grids and financial networks. Harden the protocols. Enforce authentication. Patch relentlessly. Audit constantly. Because the next attack will not announce itself with flashing lights. It will look like a glitch, a declined payment, a car that just will not charge.

When that happens, we will pretend to be shocked. We should not be. The warning signs are already plugged in, humming quietly at the curb, waiting for someone curious enough—and careless enough—to listen.

 

 This article stands on its own, but some readers may also enjoy my Brief Book Series titles. Read it here on Google Play: Brief Book Series.

 

AI Is Hungry—and Journalism Is Dinner: Washington Post Announces Mass Layoffs

 

When AI enters the newsroom, nothing is sacred. Sports, books, foreign wars, local lives—all disposable. What survives is power-friendly content and a public kept blind by design.

I read the news about The Washington Post the way you read an obituary for someone who is still breathing. One-third of the workforce gone. Sports and books tossed aside like yesterday’s paper. Foreign desks hollowed out. Metro gutted. The official language was calm, corporate, antiseptic. Focus. Stability. Reinvention. But behind that language I heard a familiar sound. The low, wet chewing of a machine that never gets full.

This is not just about layoffs. This is about appetite. Artificial intelligence is a digital glutton, and it does not nibble. It inhales. Jobs, industries, traditions, craft, context, memory. It eats the margins first, then the center, then the soul. The sports desk and the book section are not random casualties. They are the organs that take time, judgment, and lived experience. AI hates time. It hates patience. It hates anything that cannot be scraped, summarized, and monetized at scale. When the forest is gone, the termites still ask for more wood.

The publisher says the paper must focus on national news and politics. That sounds noble until you hear what is missing. Sports connects cities. Books shape minds. Foreign reporting explains the world beyond our borders. Metro tells you who you are and where you live. Strip those away and you do not get sharper journalism. You get a thinner product optimized for clicks, rage, and algorithmic churn. You get a paper that sounds important but knows less and less about the world it claims to explain.

Executive editor Matt Murray said the traffic has plummeted in the last 3 years amid the AI boom. That sentence matters. It admits the quiet truth. Readers are not leaving because journalism suddenly forgot how to report. Readers are leaving because AI floods the internet with cheap summaries, auto-written explainers, and synthetic certainty. When everything looks like news, nothing feels necessary. The machine does not care if it replaces truth with plausibility. It only cares if you scroll.

I think about the foreign correspondents who begged to keep their jobs. The Cairo bureau chief laid off alongside the entire Middle East roster. A correspondent in Ukraine losing her job while still inside a war zone. That is not trimming fat. That is cutting muscle and bone. AI cannot smell a street after an explosion. It cannot read fear in a mother’s eyes. It cannot tell you when silence means more than a quote. Those things do not scale. So they get cut.

Former editor Marty Baron called this one of the darkest days in the paper’s history. He knows what darkness looks like. He led the newsroom through investigations that mattered, through political pressure, through an era when facts were under siege. He remembers when journalism was expensive because democracy was expensive. Now we are told democracy must be cost-efficient. A cheap lock invites a thief.

Ownership always matters. Jeff Bezos bought the paper for $250m in 2013 and once spoke eloquently about the need for a free press. He built a retail empire by perfecting logistics, automation, and ruthless efficiency. That same DNA now shadows the newsroom. Warehouses without workers. Delivery without drivers. Content without journalists. It is not personal. It is structural. AI is the ultimate warehouse manager. It does not sleep. It does not unionize. It does not complain when you erase entire sections of a 150-year-old institution.

The irony cuts deep when you compare this collapse with The New York Times, which added about 450,000 digital-only subscribers in the last quarter of 2025. That is not an accident. The Times invested heavily in depth, games, cooking, audio, and global reporting. It treated journalism as a product worth paying for, not a cost to be minimized. One paper fed its readers. The other tried to out-starve the algorithm and lost.

AI defenders say this is progress. They say machines free humans for higher work. I have heard that song before. In the 1980s, factory automation promised better jobs. Instead, entire towns hollowed out. In the 2000s, digital advertising promised sustainable journalism. Instead, Craigslist gutted classified revenue, and Facebook siphoned attention. In 2010, algorithmic feeds promised personalization. Instead, they delivered polarization. The pattern is clear. Technology promises abundance, then concentrates power, then calls the wreckage efficiency. When the horse throws you, the saddle still wants credit.

Sports and books being scrapped tells you everything. Sports writing is not just scores. It is history, rivalry, failure, redemption. Books are not just reviews. They are arguments with the dead and conversations with the unborn. AI can summarize a novel in 200 words, but it cannot tell you why a sentence ruins your sleep. It can list stats, but it cannot explain why a loss still hurts 20 years later. Those sections are being sacrificed because their value is human, not algorithmic.

The Washington Post Guild warned that cutting workers would weaken the paper and drive readers away. That warning will age well. You cannot shrink your way into relevance. You cannot automate trust. You cannot replace reporters with prompts and expect loyalty. Readers know when a paper is written by people who live in the world versus systems trained on the leftovers of yesterday’s reporting.

I write this because this is personal. I am a professor and a writer. I am a reader too. When a major newspaper decides the world is too expensive to cover, the cost does not disappear. It gets paid later, in ignorance, in confusion, in policy built on half-knowledge. AI does not care about that bill. It will be long gone, chasing the next dataset, the next disruption, the next mouthful.

This moment is not unique. It is a signal. AI is not just coming for factory floors or customer service lines. It is coming for culture. For memory. For institutions that take time to build and seconds to dismantle. The sports desk and the book section are early casualties because they remind us that life is more than politics and breaking alerts. A machine that wants everything must first erase what slows it down.

The Washington Post says these steps will strengthen its footing. Maybe in the short term. Maybe the balance sheet breathes easier. But journalism is not just a business. It is a public good that survives on credibility. Once that is gone, no algorithm can synthesize it back. You cannot replant a forest with sawdust.

AI will keep eating. That is what gluttons do. The question is not whether it will stop. The question is what we are willing to lose before we admit that something essential is being swallowed whole.

 

 

If you’re looking for something different to read, my  Brief Book Series titles are available on Google Play Books. You can also read them here on Google Play: Brief Book Series.

 

China’s Rare-Earth Weapon Freaks Out the West, but Brazil Is Quietly Cashing In

 

China’s mineral chokehold terrifies the West, supply chains are one crisis away from collapse, and Brazil is emerging as the quiet winner of the next resource war.

I did not step inside a warehouse in Brazil’s northeast, and I am not pretending to have dust on my shoes or a helmet under my arm. I am a college professor and a writer watching this unfold from the outside, reading balance sheets, policy papers, trade data, and history. Still, the story is loud even from a distance. In the state of Bahia, at a facility known as APINK Warehouse, Brazilian Rare Earths is building one of Latin America’s first rare-earth separation plants. You do not need to be there to understand what it means. The math alone tells the tale.

Rare earths are a cluster of 17 elements that sit quietly at the heart of modern power. They do not glitter like gold or pump like oil, but they decide who builds missiles, electric vehicles, wind turbines, smartphones, and radar systems. China understood this early. Today it controls about 70% of global rare-earth mining and roughly 90% of processing. That is not market leadership. That is leverage. When Beijing tightens its grip, factories thousands of miles away start to choke. When one hand holds the tap, everyone else learns the price of thirst.

The West learned that lesson the hard way. Last year, China imposed export restrictions on key metals, machine parts, and even engineers. The effect rippled fast. American and European manufacturers cut output. Carmakers struggled with shortages of super-magnets. Green-tech firms delayed projects. Defense contractors whispered about supply risk instead of boasting about capacity. By November, a one-year truce was declared. Few believed it would last. Truces built on political mood swings rarely do.

Donald Trump saw the vulnerability clearly. The United States had built advanced industries on a supply chain controlled by a strategic rival. That is not just bad economics; it is a national-security gamble. Trump’s response was blunt. He pushed for alternative suppliers and challenged China’s pricing tactics directly. Corporations did not wait for speeches. They started hunting for new sources immediately. That hunt leads straight to Brazil.

Brazil holds nearly 25% of the world’s known rare-earth deposits, second only to China. That single statistic shifts the global balance. Brazil also brings cheap electricity, decades of mining experience, and engineers who know how to operate at scale. This is not a greenhorn entering the game. Brazil has history here. In the 1950s, a Brazilian company called Orquima was the world’s largest rare-earth producer, extracting metals from monazite sands. Then came fear of radioactivity, heavy regulation, and nationalization. China stepped into the vacuum and never let go. History is ruthless with countries that abandon the field too early.

Now Brazil wants back in. In November, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed a decree making rare earths a national-security issue. In January, his government began drafting a national strategy. The language sounds bureaucratic, but the impact is real: special financing, public-procurement options, and streamlined procedures. Brazil is signaling that rare earths are no longer just rocks in the ground. They are tools of statecraft.

The money alone is not the main attraction. The global rare-earth market is worth only a few billion dollars a year, small compared with Brazil’s iron exports. The real value lies downstream. Rare earths feed high-tech manufacturing. They anchor magnet production, battery systems, and defense components. Control the input, and you gain influence over entire industries. That is why this story is not about mining profits. It is about leverage.

Diplomacy is woven into every ton of ore. The United States faces shortages of critical minerals across the board, from copper and nickel to obscure elements like scandium and yttrium. Washington is eager. In July, Trump imposed 50% tariffs on most Brazilian imports, partly to influence the trial of former president Jair Bolsonaro over an alleged coup plot. That same month, the American ambassador quietly met Brazilian mining firms to express interest in buying their future output. That is not contradiction. That is realism. Power talks in private even when it postures in public.

Lula initially said Brazil’s minerals were not for sale. Then he floated the idea of a rare-earth deal in exchange for tariff relief. If the United States hesitates, others will not. The European Union, Japan, and South Korea all face the same mineral squeeze. Buyers are lining up. When scarcity rules, ideology takes a back seat.

Still, Brazil’s path is not smooth. Today, the country has only one operating rare-earth mine. Serra Verde opened in 2024 and plans to double non-Chinese supply of heavy rare earths, the most valuable category. It has struggled with production. Ionic clay deposits are tricky. A nearly $500m loan from an American aid agency is expected to help stabilize operations. Dozens of other projects remain stuck in licensing. None are likely to produce before 2028. Processing is another hurdle. Many miners want to extract in Brazil but refine elsewhere due to expertise gaps and capital constraints.

Protectionism complicates matters. Lula has warned against foreign countries digging holes and taking Brazil’s minerals. The sentiment plays well politically, but the economics are harsh. Rare-earth mining is capital-intensive. Many operators are foreign-owned because Brazilian markets cannot easily absorb the risk. Brazil already imports Chinese steel made from Brazilian iron, a reminder that moving up the value chain is easier said than done. Rare earths offer strategic leverage, not guaranteed industrial transformation. You cannot bully chemistry into obeying slogans.

What changes the equation is pricing. For years, China used predatory pricing to crush competition, recouping losses through magnet and electric-vehicle sales. That model cracked when Trump signed an agreement with MP Materials in California. The deal guarantees a floor price of $110 per kilogram for neodymium-praseodymium oxide, roughly double China’s rate. That sends a clear signal to the market. Higher prices invite new players. Australian, Brazilian, and American firms are stepping in. Many will fail. Consolidation will be brutal. But the country sitting on a quarter of known deposits usually survives the storm.

From where I sit, the picture is stark. The West is nervous because it built its future on a fragile supply chain. China is confident but no longer untouchable. Brazil, quietly and without fanfare, holds the strongest cards it has had in decades. The APINK Warehouse is not just a facility. It is a symbol of a shift that cannot be unseen. When giants fight over the road, the one who owns the land sets the toll.

 

 

This article is part of a larger idea I explore in “Mines, Magnets, and Mayhem: How China’s Rare Earth Monopoly Could Cripple the West”, one of my short books on Google Play. Read it here on Google Play: Mines, Magnets,and Mayhem.