Ask Paul: September 25 ⭐

Happy Friday! It's officially autumn here in the U.S. after a too-hot summer and a lot of chaos and unrest. Here's to a calmer end of 2026, though this week's questions speak to our ongoing concerns.
"Epic Games faces 100 million euro claim over Fortnite tactics"

Wait, is tea-bagging illegal?
❓ All hail our new Chinese overlords
wright_is asks:

Xiaomi just released their 18 Pro and Pro Max and the 18 Fold, all of which are pretty much identical to Apple’s offerings (naturally, the software falls a bit behind), but with some nice additions as well. The 18 Pro and Pro Max also use the new Qualcomm Snapdragon that was announced in Hawaii this week, so they are the first phones on the market with the new chip. Their cars are now also starting to appear outside of China, you can get them here now, the SU7 Ultra has over 1,500HP, for example, and can achieve 350km/h top speed. Like their phones, it doesn’t offer the refinement of, say, a Porsche Taycan Turbo S or a BMW, but they are also markedly cheaper.

We saw ads for Xiaomi all over Berlin during IFA earlier this month and I was interested to see that they made cars. That's one brand I've not seen in Mexico, for cars, that is, but we do see BYD and other Chinese car brands there. And Chinese phone brands, of course, including Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, and others. And all kinds of other electronics too. And this is something I've thought about a lot, mostly because we do spend so much time outside the U.S.: Americans are largely ignorant of how advanced Chinese technology is across the board and I think it will be shocking to most when they finally find out. You can read Apple in China to get some inkling of how badly the biggest U.S. companies have betrayed our country to China, not just Apple, but Tesla, Uber, and others. But it's like having a child. You can do all the research you want, but you don't realize the gravity of the situation until you experience it. The Chinese are killing it, in part because we handed them the keys to the kingdom, and they're not playing catch-up anymore. We are.

Apologies for yet another comparison. But this reminds me of the rise of the Japanese auto industry. In the U.S. in the 1970s, most people considered Japanese cars to be cheap tiny pieces of junk, but Honda, Toyota, Nissan/Datsun, and others were already destroying the U.S. car makers on quality by the end of that decade and they pulled ahead for good in the 1980s. I recall my father telling me that no one would ever buy a Lexus, when that brand was announced, because Mercedes existed. But then their first car, the LS400, arrived here and it was as good as a Mercedes for half the price. That's what's happening in EVs now, but with China, and we just don't see it in the U.S. It's going to be a face slap when it finally happens. Or an ass kicking, really.

Do you get to test such devices, do you think that the cheaper prices will cause people in the west to defect to these sorts of...