Man, I swear this is the craziest thing I've heard all year! I was chilling at the terrace with Fane, sipping a beer and bitching about our electricity bills, when I scroll online and see what China's been up to. Don't believe me? They've launched a floating island – yeah, an artificial island that floats on water and runs on nuclear power! No joke, bro, it's like something out of a sci-fi flick. Jiangnan Shipyard, one of their companies, showed off the project at a trade fair abroad, at Posidonia. It's a platform with container terminals, energy production, transshipment – all zero emissions, they say. And they use molten salt reactors, not water, so it doesn't overheat. On my word, I've never seen anything like it. The builder says it "will become a new ecosystem for zero-emission maritime container logistics." Let's be real, they're getting stuff done while we're still arguing over the A7 highway.

But wait, that's not all! While they're building nuclear islands, their economic model is wiping us all out. I read an analysis in The Atlantic – it says the effects are "catastrophic." Xi Jinping runs China like a factory: subsidies, tax breaks, low wages, intentionally weak currency. That's how they make exports artificially cheap. Last year, their trade surplus hit $1.2 trillion – a record! Do you know how much $1.2 trillion is? I can barely pay my BMW installment, and these guys are raking in that kind of cash. Foreign companies can't keep up. Germany is losing 10,000 manufacturing jobs a month. Indonesia, which makes clothes, risks hundreds of thousands of jobs. MIT economist David Autor says Beijing is causing "forced deindustrialization" of wealthy economies and that "it's going to be pretty catastrophic." Personally, I'm not buying the story that we're buddying up with them.

Now, Trump, even though he said he's "friends" with Xi and set up a "trade council," still feels threatened. And rightly so. In the European Union, they've started imposing rules to reduce dependence on China, encouraging local green energy production. Jens Eskelund, head of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, said "trade with China destroys the value of products" and rhetorically asked, "Why are we still trading?" Yeah, like we have a choice...

And here's something else: artificial intelligence is starting to guzzle energy like a factory. At a summit in Helsinki, the Eurelectric Power Summit, they said data centers could gobble up 28% of the growth in electricity demand in Europe by 2030. And here's the irony: our electricity is three times more expensive than in China and double that of the US. How the hell are we supposed to attract investments like that? Participants said "targeting price must be more important than carbon." Well, that's what I've been saying all along!

Not to mention Bhutan, a tiny kingdom at the foot of the Himalayas. They have the opposite problem to ours: their population is shrinking. So the government in Thimphu decided to give 10,000 ngultrum per month (about $105) for every third child, up to age three. The measure is from June 4, 2026. In 2015 they had 11,000 births a year, now only 8,153. Young people are fleeing to Australia, poor things. The royal cabinet secretary, Kesang Deki, said the money is given for any child after the second. Eh, at home, Mioara would kill me if I had another kid just for $100.

And Nepal, their neighbor, has a unique time zone, 15 minutes ahead of India, and its own calendar, Bikram Sambat, which shows the year 2083. Their flag is the only non-rectangular one in the world. The calendar is adjusted by astrologers. Oh my, it's like our own family drama with mother-in-law Veta's "opinions."

Anyway, I'm off to call Fane and have a beer in honor of the Chinese building nuclear islands while I can barely afford a kebab. But don't worry, Romanians are smart and we'll manage – it's just that sometimes the wave gets us.