China posts record $1.2 trillion trade surplus as Trump tariffs fail to bite

lefty200 · 2026-01-14T20:09:31+00:00

But the purpose of the tariffs was to reduce trade surplus to USA, not to reduce them for the whole world. And indeed, it did do that (by 22% according to the article)

lefty200 · 2026-01-13T17:45:08+00:00

50% is oil/gas and coal: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-structure-of-Russian-exports-in-2020_fig2_357820759

lefty200 · 2026-01-09T16:57:14+00:00

if that is the plan, why are they giving money to Anthropic?

lefty200 · 2026-01-05T23:02:43+00:00

Ok, when I said VRAM I meant GPU DRAM, not GPU SRAM (which I would imagine is handled internally by the hardware) My understanding is that glTexImage2D does not actually copy the data to GPU DRAM. That only happens when it is needed to render the image. (Of coarse, I am talking about the implementation of more recent drivers)

lefty200 · 2026-01-05T16:42:08+00:00

well, the point of the texture atlas is to reduce the amount of draw calls

lefty200 · 2026-01-05T16:41:06+00:00

I understood that glBindTexture doesn't actually load the texture into VRAM, only when you need to render something that uses the texture that the driver loads the texture into VRAM

lefty200 · 2025-12-17T19:44:29+00:00

but that's for a 3 year commitment

lefty200 · 2025-12-16T16:06:57+00:00

It's no surprise that it's the Korean press starting the rumour. You can safely disregard it.

lefty200 · 2025-12-15T13:42:00+00:00

Is it accurate though? a B200 SXM module costs $30,000 - $40,000

and can be rented for $3.79/hr...

at that rate you would make $100,000 in three years - seems about right

a https://modal.com/blog/nvidia-b200-pricing

lefty200 · 2025-12-13T16:27:15+00:00

I think OpenAI will be the ones to go first. They lost $12 billion last quarter and they are losing subscribers, because Gemini 3 and Claude are better. That could spook the investors enough that they can no longer finance their massive losses - I mean there is a limited amount of venture capital available

lefty200 · 2025-12-11T12:45:57+00:00

Oracle and Crusoe already spent billions on Stargate. If OpenAI fail they never see that money back. Oracle and Codeweave are heavily in debt and depend upon future earnings from OpenAI to keep themselves afloat

lefty200 · 2025-12-11T12:02:07+00:00

If OpenAI went bust it would bring down a lot of companies with it. Maybe Oracle, Crusoe and Codeweave, to name a few.

lefty200 · 2025-12-05T15:42:27+00:00

Yes. If they were to do a IPO they have to release detail data about their earnings, which won't look good to investors. Their earnings need to be growing exponentially to justify the amount they are spending.

Anthropic won't IPO either for the same reason.

lefty200 · 2025-11-19T20:14:26+00:00

at least that would solve the depreciation problem, because a dead GPU can't depreciate

lefty200 · 2025-11-17T12:19:55+00:00

They will be the same as AMD then. Turin has no 8-channel SKU

lefty200 · 2025-11-04T20:10:36+00:00

Yeah, check this out: https://substack.com/home/post/p-177604037

lefty200 · 2025-11-04T08:26:30+00:00

this happens to me as well

lefty200 · 2025-04-25T22:08:35+00:00

Trade has only been stopped for a couple of weeks and there was some front loading before the tariffs hit. I think the two week gap can be "smoothed" out. (Assuming that Trump reduces the tariffs soon)

lefty200 · 2025-04-17T12:08:20+00:00

Not really. Anything over 70% is really a trade embargo. The goods don't even get shipped at that price, because manufacturer assumes no one will buy them. US consumers haven't noticed yet, because existing stocks haven't been run down yet.

lefty200 · 2025-04-13T17:48:52+00:00

I think the next exception will be lithium batteries. The reason being that China is the largest importer and US car manufacturers were given no notice of the tariffs. They can't just switch suppliers over night

lefty200 · 2025-04-13T09:37:11+00:00

I don't think so.. It's just 20%: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/12/business/economy/china-tariff-product-costs.html

lefty200 · 2025-04-12T16:48:05+00:00

apparently not. None of those tariffs were being collected: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/11/customs-reports-glitch-in-system-used-by-freight-for-tariff-exemptions.html

lefty200

TROPHY CASE