Splendid Isolation

I read SOTI that the number of South African Afrikaans farmers resettled in the U.S. has now exceeded 117,000 — I think that the number is the total (i.e. including family members) and not just the men — but whatever, it’s a lot.

Let’s just remind ourselves that what we’ve gained is a bunch of people who are pretty much experts in their field — dry weather farming — and arrive here not only with that, but with a proven work ethic and most importantly, a profound sense of gratitude that they and their families have left behind a truly sick society which openly calls for their murder just because of their race, and their success.  (It doesn’t matter how these calls are phrased or how the intentions are masked, the net outcome is murder.  It’s still “Kill the Boer!” any way you cut it.)

As to what’s going to happen to the farms they left behind… well, just look a few hundred miles over the Limpopo River into Zimbabwe to see what’s happened there;  and anyone who thinks the outcome will be any different is deluding themselves.

Call it an agricultural brain drain, if you will.

Now let’s look at a brain drain of different dimension:  quantum computing.  Here’s the story:

Caught between climate regulation and catastrophic energy-policy decisions, a growing number of high-tech companies in the EU are packing up and leaving. Through stock-market deals, two top quantum-computing companies, IQM and Pasqal, are gradually moving toward the United States. The bleeding of the European economy is now being accepted with remarkable resignation.

Not a week goes by without another disaster report from the economy. In the first half of the year, the German economy recorded a record number of insolvencies — the highest insolvency figures since 2013. Thousands of industrial jobs are being eliminated as a result, and the economy continues to bleed. A political course correction toward strengthening the economic foundation still appears impossible. And this is only the beginning: the stranglehold of expensive climate policy, the restriction of fossil-fuel energy supplies, and rising regulatory costs are acting like an accelerant on the businesses of the euro economy. Those who can leave, do.

What is happening in Germany is being repeated elsewhere: in Finland, for example, where the company IQM is taking the leap onto the U.S. stock market. IQM specializes in superconducting quantum computers and develops the quantum processors required for them. The systems are being developed for research, high-performance computing, and industrial applications. The company merged with Real Asset Acquisition Corp., a kind of American shell company, and in early July moved to the Nasdaq under the ticker IQMX with a valuation of around $1.8 billion. This is not a classic sale of the company to the Americans — the existing owners received no cash payment but remained invested in the company. However, this changes little about the outcome: capital, market power, and an increasing share of control over the company’s strategy will, in the future, be rooted in the United States — American patents, American knowledge of future technologies, made in Europe.

A look at France shows a similar development. This is where Pasqal is based, a spin-off of the Institut d’Optique, founded in 2019. While global players such as IBM and Google rely on superconducting circuits, Pasqal found a different approach: the highly specialized team traps individual rubidium atoms with focused laser beams — so-called optical tweezers — inside vacuum chambers and arranges them in precise 2D and 3D lattices. With this principle, the company’s researchers appear to have succeeded in avoiding the production errors that have plagued other qubit technologies so far. The discovered method makes it considerably easier to scale the technology to ever larger numbers of qubits. Knowledge is power, especially in high technology. Given its complexity, the company’s innovation is probably only fully understandable to a few specialists.

In the case of Pasqal, the acquisition of the company by the shell company Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II on August 28 paved the way for its know-how to cross the Atlantic. The company is currently valued at around $2 billion — but this is likely to be only a snapshot; its potential is enormous. With its patents, research results, and academic substance, Europe is losing its intellectual foundation — all the more serious because the continent is energy-poor, politically cornered, and steering aimlessly through uncertain waters. Europe is simply no longer attractive enough for cutting-edge research, top-tier capital, and top talent.

Now as to why quantum computing is such a critical industry, read the rest of the article.

But while the quantum computing companies’ managers and owners are not personally being threatened with death, the threat to their companies themselves by the European mindset, laws and regulations is no less dire.

Of course they’ll move to where it’s safer and technology is not treated as a dirty word — and that place is not Switzerland, Germany, Cuba, Russia, Singapore or China (to name but some).

So bienvenue (and however you say that in Finnish), folks.  Europe’s loss is our gain, and they have nobody to blame except themselves.  Ditto for those racist assholes in South Africa.