"The Nevada Transportation Authority unanimously approved three permits Thursday that will allow Tesla, Uber, and Waymo to operate commercial robotaxi services in Clark County, home to Las Vegas. Together, these permits would deploy up to 8,000 robotaxis across the county over the next 12 months."

Add to this the four big Chinese robotaxi firms: Baidu's Apollo Go, Hello Robotaxi, Geely & Pony.AI. Their 2027 projections for China alone exceed 100,000 & they've been ahead of projections and predictions so far. Furthermore, we know China can build those millions of future robotaxis quickly.

Current Level 4 self-driving allows for most human-driven taxi routes to be roboticized. The commercial incentives are all behind this push to millions of robotaxis, too.

Understandably, labor unions are against this. They're in a bind. Their whole function is to protect human jobs, but the real trend here is the movement to post-scarcity. Most don't really believe in post-scarcity yet. However, right as predicted, all its precursor events and pre-conditions are falling into place & robotaxis reaching their millions is just one more of those signs.

Tesla, Uber, and Waymo all get the OK to operate thousands of robotaxis in Nevada

"128GB DDR5 kits are fully ten times more expensive than the lowest price we’ve ever seen. In fact, the situation is so severe that hyperscale buyers have reportedly already locked in almost all of the global DRAM production capacity for 2027, handing over advance deposits to guarantee their supply of precious DRAM, which is now among the highest-value commodities in the world by weight; mainstream DRAM chips are worth over half as much per kilogram as solid gold."

There's going to be a lot of discount RAM, and discount data centers going begging when the AI bubble bursts.

The data centers, the increased electricity prices, and now more increased prices for smartphones & laptops….

And this all to chase AGI via a route (ever bigger LLMs), that there is no proof will get there. Meanwhile, if the US companies don't get AGI, the trillions investors have given them is money up in smoke. All their investor-funded achievements to date are available for free via Chinese Open-Source.

"Clerc himself says there are three problems to be solved before the route gains traction. The first is geopolitical, with sanctions on Russia making it currently off-limits for most shipping groups. Then, there are environmental considerations around any potential accident in the Arctic."

“The third one is commercial: because it’s relatively unpredictable when the route opens and closes, there is no commercial demand to switch. Customers don’t want you to flip-flop because their entire lead times get thrown in the air, and it’s very difficult to plan with this,” adds Clerc."

The service is from Ningbo (a major Chinese port city) to Felixstowe in England, with onward connections to Rotterdam and other European ports.

I get that cutting shipping times in half cuts costs, but as shipping is becoming more automated, aren't they falling anyway? Plus, China has already got the China-Euro rail connection working with regular rail cargo connections to Europe. It's the same length of time as the Arctic Sea route, but seems much less problematic.

A reality check is needed on Arctic shipping: It will take a long time before new routes become more than a niche commercial activity

$250,000 degrees are long term investments. But what happens if the planned income to justify them isn't there in the 2030s and 2040s? If corporate America is happy to hire people with $10,000 degrees, is there any point in going for an equivalent degree at 25 times the price?

As the AI jobs apocalypse seems to have already started for college graduates, this question has now become urgent reality, not future hypothetical.

TED, ETS and Khan launch new $10k AI degree

"It is developing genetically modified seeds and crops, but it is also targeting the fast-growing industries of cellular agriculture, lab-grown proteins and food from precision fermentation……….What the Chinese lack in frontier biosciences – for now – they can more than compensate with vast industrial scale and state-directed credit. Systemiq thinks this could slash the cost of bioreactors and fermentation systems, achieving “price parity” with traditional food far sooner than widely supposed.

Once alt-protein is cheaper, market forces will make it almost unstoppable, in much the same way that 99pc of net electricity added across the world last year came from solar and wind."

The Western world's collective decision to embrace free-market neoliberalism in the late 20th century now looks like a mistake of truly historic proportions. But there's worse: we are still governed by the same failed ideology. It's why all Economists have groupthink, and politicians (supposedly) on the left differ little from the conservatives. We are ruled by neoliberal conservatism, and voting changes little.

Meanwhile, we can look across the world to China to see a vastly superior version of Capitalism, ironically delivered by so-called "Communists". Some used to think China needed to learn from the West; it is almost certainly going to end up being the other way around.

China’s plan to dominate global food supply chains: Beijing’s 15th five-year plan will marshal all levers of state power towards one end

"Joe Biden’s former commerce secretary Gina Raimondo has decided that UBI in response to AI is the thing to fear most. At the Reagan National Economic Forum, she said: "I personally think it's like the end of America."

She is now heading up a newly-launched, extremely well-funded organization to make sure the country reaches for anything but a basic income in response to AI.

On the one hand, while selling themselves to investors, Big Tech says it can eventually automate almost any job a human can do. What they don't want is any responsibility for their actions. I'd expect conservatives to be against UBI, but Gina Raimondo, the person heading this up, is a Democrat.

The upside? This conversation is getting harder to ignore, and Gina Raimondo is bringing more attention to it, even if it's with dud ideas. In years of paying attention to this topic (AI/robots capable of most work), I've yet to come across a solution that isn't some form of Socialism or UBI.

So give it all you've got, Conservatives & Centrists; I doubt you'll come up with any workable alternatives, despite your $500 million funding.

Gina Raimondo Says Basic Income Would End America. Her New Billion-Dollar Org Is How She Plans to Stop It.

Labor productivity losses, Rising energy costs, wage stagnation, investment decreases, infrastructure spending, & stagflation. These are the main ways climate change's extreme heat is reducing GDP. France, Germany, Japan, Spain and Italy are luckier than most, they're rich countries. This GDP will hit the world's poorest the hardest, reversing decades of gain where extreme poverty was decreasing.

Too hot to grow: The economic costs of extreme heat. Source: Allianz SE

The bad news about C02 emissions final plateauing is that there are still decades ahead of them becoming part of the atmosphere and continuing to raise temperatures. Humanity still has plans for vast amounts of carbon dioxide to add to the atmosphere in the 2030s/40s.

Still, if this truly is a plateau, and not a bump on the path to further increases, then it's worth celebrating. Is this all down to the Middle East War? Hard to tell, but 2026 decreases in global manufacturing and transport activity account for some of the C02 decreases.

Will they rebound when the oil supply does, or has the missing capacity become permanently electrified/renewables-powered? Time will tell, though I suspect the latter may be the case. That's what makes me wonder if C02 emissions finally plateauing means Peak Oil has arrived, too. Unsurprisingly, global 2026 oil use is down because of the Middle East war. That conflict looks far from over. When it's all finally done, will the ME region have found the world doesn't need it so much any more.

Climate TRACE reported that global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for the month of May 2026 totaled 5.0 billion tonnes CO₂e. This represents a decrease of 0.1% vs. May 2025.

IEA cuts forecast for global oil demand

"Base Power charges customers $695 to install a single battery, $19 per month, and 13.1 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity, which is about the going rate in the region. Base Power, which owns the battery, sells stored electricity back to the grid during periods of high demand."

As Base, and not the customers, own the batteries, it seems to me these customers are buying insurance against grid downtime as much as anything else.

Base Power has big ambitions, but isn't there a flaw in their plans? Solar Panels.

They're getting cheaper and cheaper & linking them to your own batteries means that you can drop the '13.1 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity' & '$19 per month' part of Base's deal.

Base Power raises another $1B to save the grid using backyard batteries

This approach uses tiny capsules containing living cells plus engineered microorganisms that act as biological “instructions”, releasing signals that tell stem cells what kind of tissue to become. The researchers have demonstrated bone, fat and muscle formation, with printing taking minutes to about an hour and tissue maturation taking roughly three weeks.

You often hear people complain about many exciting new sci-tech developments being in labs, and then never heard of again. But there's a whole host of problems to resolve before the lab-to--successful product journey is complete. In this case, the final product needs to be; reproducible, automated, inexpensive, scalable, regulation-compliant and sufficiently precise.

A technology solution that simultaneously solves the problems of cultivated meat & human tissue bio-printing would be so huge, it makes you wonder why people don't put more urgency into these commercialization efforts.

3D printing gets a living upgrade

It won't be long before that figure is 100%. At first, that won't be for the full year, but that will happen too. And as renewables adoption tends to race ahead of predictions, it will probably happen sooner than many people expect.

Pacific Gas & Electric, which owns Diablo Canyon, quotes its operating cost as $8.4 billion for the period 2024-30. Or $1.4 billion a year. An obvious question arises. Why pay $1.4 billion a year for something you don't need? There are 400+ other nuclear plants around the world. How long before the same economic reality comes for them?

The obvious solution for PG&E and other nuclear operators might be to start courting the data center sector. At least if nuclear-powered AI ever went Skynet, it would be easy to switch it off. I think humanity would have a much better chance of taking out 400 vulnerable targets, as opposed to countless millions of solar panels decentralized around the planet.

California Grid May/Apr 2026 Renewables Curtailment Figures, Source: California Grid Operator CAISO.

Diablo Canyon Operating Costs, Source: PG&E.

"The Federal Trade Commission last week issued a sweeping ban on foreign imports of advanced humanoid, quadruped, and wheeled robots, pulling a nascent industry into the same protectionist bracket as chips and AI models……..90% of recent US university robotics research papers relied on Unitree robots, per the Association for Advancing Automation."

It's fine to want to counter Chinese industrial dominance, but is this the cleverest way to do it?

• It will do nothing to slow or stop Chinese robotics. The US is only 14% of Chinese exports these days. The Chinese economy doesn't need America the way it used to.

• The same measures with AI sped up Chinese AI development, not hindered it.

• China's great advantage is a vast manufacturing/industrial hinterland that facilitates startups and development. That is what Europe & the US need to try to replicate.

• China has also joined-up thinking and long-term plans stretching over decades. Bans don't supply those benefits either.

FTC bans foreign humanoid robots, extending AI protectionism to robotics

"A record $242bn of European green-aligned bonds were issued in the first half of 2026, according to the Climate Bonds Initiative, a UK-based NGO. Total global issuance is on track to exceed the $673bn sold in 2024, the previous record year, when issuance in Europe totalled $385bn."

People often comment on the amount of money going into AI, but what Europe & China spend on investing in Green Tech dwarfs it. US/China 2026 AI spending will top 1 trillion in 2026. But Global Green Tech spend must be many multiples of that.

The AI Boom seems driven by investors hoping they'll make the lucky casino bet on AGI. Green Tech may not be as exciting, but as investments go, the results and returns are far more stable and long-lasting.

European green bonds rebound. Issuance in the region will drive global sales to a record high this year

BloombergNEF Finds Global Energy Transition Investment Reached Record $2.3 Trillion in 2025, Up 8% from 2024