DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
I think you are, first of all, insufferably smug. @Amadan is this report-worthy? I don't know. I think it's bad manners to say something like this without providing a citation. I am not an economist and it's timesome [auspicious typo] to deal with not even Eulering but an appeal to its possibility.
Anyway, I was talking of actual household savings. You said:
Look up the savings rate for China vs the US to see where wage suppression comes into play. The government forces large amounts of money into capital investments instead of wages which shows up in the data as a high savings rate.
IMF 2018:
https://www.imf.org/en/-/media/files/publications/wp/2018/wp18277.pdf
Household savings in China have been trending up since the early 1990s and peaked at 25 percent in 2010 and moderated slightly in recent years. Globally, household savings have been falling (from 14 percent of GDP in 1980 to about 7 percent today). The diverging trend has led to an increasing gap between China and the rest of the world. At 23 percent of GDP, today China’s household savings are 15 percentage points higher than the global average and constitute the main drivers of higher national savings in China.
In the 1990s. China’s corporate savings were relatively low and comparable to the global average. They surged in the 2000s, resulting in an increasingly large gap compared to those of other countries. After the GFC, this gap narrowed significantly, reflecting both the decline in China’s corporate savings and the rise elsewhere. Currently, China’s corporate savings are in line with the global average.
Government: Fiscal savings have been volatile over time, and, on average, constitute only a small portion of national savings. In the past, the fiscal savings level was similar to those of other countries, but in recent years, China’s fiscal savings3 have been higher than the global average, reflecting high capital spending
Quantitatively, demographic shifts alone account for half of the rise in household savings, suggesting that it has been the most important driver
Chinese households save more at every income decile, but the gap is largest at the bottom. Compared to other countries, the household savings rate is higher at every income decile, but the gap is particularly large for the poor.12 In many countries, the savings rates for the bottom 10–20 percentiles are often negative, indicating that substantial social transfers are used to support the basic consumption. In China, however, the savings rate for the poor is still positive and quite high at 20 percent. This points to inadequate social transfers, a lack of progressivity in taxation, and a limited social safety net
etc. So yes there is a state capital spending component, but the main story of the divergence with global trends, as of 2018, was literally private household savings. Maybe you have some newer data.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4d ago
This is economically illiterate. Citizens can's save nor invest what they don't earn. You're confusing two separate lines of China Criticism. Wages and thus real income, as I've shown, are growing just fine and proportionately to GDP. Savings rates are genuinely high on the level of private citizens, precisely because they do not trust or cannot access investment channels (other than housing, which is collapsing).
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4d ago
Is your argument that all Turing-complete software systems are possible to meaningfully "hack" with finite knowledge within finite computational time? Can you prove this mathematically?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4d ago
You're overrating the irreducible combinatorial complexity (especially given that we can improve modularity when software is this cheep) and underrating the computational efficiency. We're in the regime where 1M of near-frontier tokens goes for $0.3, caching-enhanced prefill is almost free. $300 for billion, $300K for trillion, $300M for quadrillion, $30B for 100 quadrillions. Will likely fall 10x within a year while performance creeps towards peak human programming skill, again. Bytedance is currently processing 50 trillion a day for Doubao, they have a near-Gemini 3 multimodal model (Doubao Seed 1.8).
How much is the entire specification of, say, a Huawei server's full hardware-software stack, all relevant documentation, everything? Maybe a few terabytes if we're obsessive. Blow that up 1000x for experiments and proof generation. A few quadrillions, plus the costs of software execution.
How much is invulnerability to ASI hacking worth? It's worth pretty much everything, given that the US is en route to have ASI and is psychotically attached to its finance-powered hegemony.
What is the alternative? Pretty much just preemptive nuclear strike.
They will be forced to do this.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4d ago
The first is a 2012 article, and I don't see its relevance. Likewise for the second, it's some mush about export-led growth in principle.
I wonder if you've ever tried to check your claims with simple arithmetic and googling.
Chinese annual wages in manufacturing, far as I can tell, have increased 2.3x between 2013 and 2024. Similarly for all wages (2,38x). Chinese GDP in RMB grew by 2.37x, for a discrepancy of <<1% for all wages and 3% in manufacturing. Chinese labor productivity increased in lockstep with wage increases, resulting in flat pseudo-unit labor costs. Inflation was low and decreasing over most of this period, resulting in 2024 108K wage being worth ≈90K of 2013 RMBs, an increase in purchasing power of 93%.
The nominal hourly wage of an American worker, over the same period, grew 47%, and real purchasing power, owing to inflation, only ≈11%, while GDP grew 72%. Admittedly employment increased and so did total number of Americans, but that's of no consolation to individual worker.
Labor share or GDP:
USA = [58.8, 58.9, 59.2, 58.4, 58.2, 58.5, 59.1, 60.3, 58.6, 57.4, 57.1, 56.8]
PRC = [[47.5, 48.2, 49.0, 49.8, 50.3, 50.7, 51.1, 51.5, 51.8, 52.0, 52.2, 52.4]
What exactly is the theory for claiming that this is evidence of wage suppression in China? Why should they have already caught up if not for Xi's evil wage suppression to nefariously boost export competitiveness?
This doesn't also cover the huge subsidies for industries that act as an indirect tax on local consumers.
This presumes that subsidies are inefficient, rather than efficiently suppressing costs of living, which in China are indeed absurdly low.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4d ago
No, it matters enormously whether "powers" are actually meritocratic public institutions with legible functions, or just semi-criminal patronage networks that compete over spoils. Kooperativ Ozero and Benoi Teip are not "powers" in the Western sense, they're clans or mafias. You're kind of trivializing one of the biggest things the West has going for it, here.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4d ago
Another important difference is that Britain could kick Argentinian ass very easily, whereas Russia has navigated itself into an existential war. I think on the balance Falklands war made more sense for the respective Empire.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4d ago
To proof a complex system against hacking, you'd need ASI.
Thankfully, verifying proofs is easier than generating them, so we're about to find out if this is true.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4d ago
Xi broke the chain of succession and limited separations of powers the CCP had built for itself post Mao
Why are we seriously entertaining this superficial think tanker nonsense? There was no separation of powers, there was a detente between oligarchic groups, Shanghai clique and Communist Youth League. China had never developed instintutionalized separation of powers, it was a system of informal customs of succession and balanced Politburo composition. The primary result of this was the viability of endless corruption under the veneer of "growth" from inflating the property bubble.
that is deeply related to the problems China is facing at the moment
It's related in the sense that they had perverted Deng's "getting rich is glorious" edict into a permission for a Ponzi scheme that's now collapsing.
But the country with a 13k GDP per capita running a genocide in its far reaches with a straight line of succession back to the most disastrous dictator in human history? I mean...I'm trying to be nice here...but it's hard...
I maintain that the main issue is lack of humility. It's okay, you'll learn by degrees.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4d ago
Modern Chinese are becoming less materialist, less pro-democracy and more nationalist, even as life satisfaction falls, so I really don't think they're attributing their woes to the CCP.
it's not a secret that the Chinese youth are being screwed over by the CCP intentionally depressing wages and an additional issue of huge unemployment
Isn't this pretty much an obvious conspiracy theory? They simply don't have enough high-paying white collar jobs for an enormous surge in overqualified university graduates. Why the hell wouldn't wages be stagnant if supply outstrips demand.
Hell, if you want me to give you a list of my complaints about America I will gladly list them here, but they just won't be that America is poor with a government funneling people's money into a tech race that it's not fit to compete in
I think that's proving his point. Like, this kind of framing strikes me as deserving of very harsh criticism, it's basically barbaric gibberish. But it's part of your culture, your "civilization", such as there is.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4d ago
Do you think it made strategic sense to have a border with an American protectorate?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5d ago
Yes, that's fair. I mean that «punish» is a lousy theory of victory. What goals did China actually hope to achieve versus what it achieved? In Korea, it's pretty simple, they wanted to prevent the collapse of DPRK and maintain a defensive buffer at a minimum, eliminate South Korea as a stretch goal, and they succeeded in their minimal goals. Americans also succeeded in their minimal goals, then MacArthur developed more maximalist ambitions, suffered a defeat, and the American strategy got scaled back, so nominally it's a «stalemate» for the entire war.
I think that Chinese regional strategy has the minimum goal of «have no actively hostile nation on its border», and it's been broadly successful. There's still India and they are militarizing the border, but luckily it's a border that neither side can exploit for a meaningful invasion.
Americans have this funny, somewhat childish manner of scoring wars on style points. Basically it's a generalization of how tough guys in a bar in Alabama or whatever might boast. I lasted 10 years! I could go on, just got bored! One against ten! Machismo. Very impressive for scoring mates. The question is, have the objectives been ultimately achieved? What was the war even about? We don't really have a good understanding of what the Sino-Vietnamese war was about.
As for the objectives, here's the perspective from the other side:
Vietnam is different from the rest of Asia because it does not depend on the U.S. for security and China for trade. In fact, it is the opposite. Vietnam depends on the U.S. for trade and China for security. … Vietnam heavily depends on China for its security. This is not to be confused with an alliance relationship, in which Vietnam needs China’s assistance against a particular threat. Security dependence in this context means that China can militarily hurt Vietnam on both the continental and the maritime domains while Vietnam cannot hurt China in return because of Vietnam’s limited resources and weapons inferiority vis-à-vis China/.
Whether Vietnam can economically develop in a peaceful environment is up to China. Vietnam was on the brink of economic bankruptcy when it tried to arms race against China between 1978 and 1991. Only after China ended its “bleeding Vietnam strategy,” normalized ties with Vietnam, and settled the land border and Gulf of Tonkin disputes in the 1990s and 2000, could Vietnam decrease its military spending in service of domestic economic development. It is not a coincidence that Vietnam always affirms its pledge not to host foreign military bases on its soil and not to join any alliances against China in high-level exchanges with China to assure China of Vietnam’s peaceful intentions. Avoiding a second Chinese invasion has been at the center of Vietnam’s defense policy since 1991. Even in the absence of such an invasion, Vietnam cannot and should not seek to arms race with China as a deterrent. Also, maintaining amicable Vietnam-China ties matters to Vietnam’s own relations with its neighbors Laos and Cambodia, as Vietnam must convince China that it has no intention of turning Laos and Cambodia against China.
China’s importance in Vietnam’s security thinking thus dwarfs that of the United States. The U.S. cannot protect Vietnam from a second Chinese invasion because Washington’s ability to project power onto continental Asia is limited. During the Cold War, the U.S. military could not defeat an inferior Chinese army in Korea and Indochina.
It's similar to how Russians «lost» the Winter War. While it was a catastrophically bad, shameful operation and @Stefferi's people eliminated a much greater absolute and vastly greater relative share of the adversary's forces than Vietnam ever did, very impressively so, the question is: who got what he wanted? Who lost? Soviets achieved their minimal goals. Finns lost land.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5d ago
It is also conceivable, and indeed quite certain, that civilizations can rise and decline, and this is only partially about essential qualities of the people, because genetics doesn't in fact explain 100% of the outcomes. That culture itself can rot. The West, I think, is genuinely an exceptional civilization, with very strong fundamentals. So was China, at one point of time. But China declined through unforced errors. So can the West. It's important to internalize just how advanced they were, and how far they have fallen.
From The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers:
Of all the civilizations of premodern times, none appeared more advanced, none felt more superior, than that of China. Its considerable population, 100-130 million compared with Europe's 50-55 million in the fifteenth century; its remarkable culture; its exceedingly fertile and irrigated plains, linked by a splendid canal system since the eleventh century; and its unified, hierarchic administration run by a well-educated Confucian bureaucracy had given a coherence and sophistication to Chinese society which was the envy of foreign visitors. True, that civilization had been subjected to severe disruption from the Mongol hordes, and to domination after the invasions of Kublai Khan. But China had a habit of changing its conquerors much more than it was changed by them, and when the Ming dynasty emerged in 1368 to reunite the empire and finally defeat the Mongols, much of the old order and learning remained.
To readers brought up to respect "western" science, the most striking feature of Chinese civilization must be its technological precocity. Huge libraries existed from early on. Printing by movable type had already appeared in eleventh-century China, and soon large numbers of books were in existence. Trade and industry, stimulated by the canal-building and population pressures, were equally sophisticated. Chinese cities were much larger than their equivalents in medieval Europe, and Chinese trade routes as extensive. Paper money had earlier expedited the flow of commerce and the growth of markets. By the later decades of the eleventh century there existed an enormous iron industry in north China, producing around 125,000 tons per annum, chiefly for military and governmental use—the army of over a million men was, for example, an enormous market for iron goods. It is worth remarking that this production figure was far larger than the British iron output in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, seven centuries later! The Chinese were also probably the first to invent true gunpowder; and cannons were used by the Ming to overthrow their Mongol rulers in the late fourteenth century.
[…]
But the Chinese expedition of 1433 was the last of the line, and three years later an imperial edict banned the construction of seagoing ships; later still, a specific order forbade the existence of ships with more than two masts. Naval personnel would henceforth be employed on smaller vessels on the Grand Canal. Cheng Ho's great warships were laid up and rotted away. Despite all the opportunities which beckoned overseas, China had decided to turn its back on the world.
[…] Apart from the costs and other disincentives involved, therefore, a key element in China's retreat was the sheer conservatism of the Confucian bureaucracy—a conservatism heightened in the Ming period by resentment at the changes earlier forced upon them by the Mongols. In this "Restoration" atmosphere, the all-important officialdom was concerned to preserve and recapture the past, not to create a brighter future based upon overseas expansion and commerce. According to the Confucian code, warfare itself was a deplorable activity and armed forces were made necessary only by the fear of barbarian attacks or internal revolts. The mandarins' dislike of the army (and the navy) was accompanied by a suspicion of the trader. The accumulation of private capital, the practice of buying cheap and selling dear, the ostentation of the nouveau riche merchant, all offended the elite, scholarly bureaucrats—almost as much as they aroused the resentments of the toiling masses. While not wishing to bring the entire market economy to a halt, the mandarins often intervened against individual merchants by confiscating their property or banning their business. Foreign trade by Chinese subjects must have seemed even more dubious to mandarin eyes, simply because it was less under their control.
…
This dislike of commerce and private capital does not conflict with the enormous technological achievements mentioned above. The Ming rebuilding of the Great Wall of China and the development of the canal system, the ironworks, and the imperial navy were for state purposes, because the bureaucracy had advised the emperor that they were necessary. But just as these enterprises could be started, so also could they be neglected. The canals were permitted to decay, the army was periodically starved of new equipment, the astronomical clocks (built c. 1090) were disregarded, the ironworks gradually fell into desuetude.
These were not the only disincentives to economic growth. Printing was restricted to scholarly works and not employed for the widespread dissemination of practical knowledge, much less for social criticism. The use of paper currency was discontinued. Chinese cities were never allowed the autonomy of those in the West; there were no Chinese burghers, with all that that term implied; when the location of the emperor's court was altered, the capital city had to move as well. Yet without official encouragement, merchants and other entrepreneurs could not thrive; and even those who did acquire wealth tended to spend it on land and education, rather than investing in protoindustrial development. Similarly, the banning of overseas trade and fishing took away another potential stimulus to sustained economic expansion; such foreign trade as did occur with the Portuguese and Dutch in the following centuries was in luxury goods and (although there were doubtless many evasions) controlled by officials.
In consequence, Ming China was a much less vigorous and enterprising land than it had been under the Sung dynasty four centuries earlier. There were improved agricultural techniques in the Ming period, to be sure, but after a while even this more intensive farming and the use of marginal lands found it harder to keep pace with the burgeoning population; and the latter was only to be checked by those Malthusian instruments of plague, floods, and war, all of which were very difficult to handle. Even the replacement of the Mings by the more vigorous Manchus after 1644 could not halt the steady relative decline.
One final detail can summarize this tale. In 1736—just as Abraham Darby's ironworks at Coalbrookdale were beginning to boom—the blast furnaces and coke ovens of Honan and Hopei were abandoned entirely. They had been great before the Conqueror had landed at Hastings. Now they would not resume production until the twentieth century.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5d ago
China itself runs deficits both at the national level and massively at the local government levels
There is, of course, a difference between sovereign debt, which China has (though the ratio to GDP is exaggerated, because GDP is underrated), and external debt, which in China's case is minuscule. But okay.
If we behaved like China then we would deploy state espionage to steal their trade secrets, establish national champions to feed those trade secrets to and subsidize those champions while pushing our other industries to favorably use them
You are indeed pondering the use of fairly underhanded means, except you don't need to steal «secrets» because most of that is your own IP, the main problem is skills. I think the gap is near entirely due to stronger US position in established technology (real and, even more so, arrogantly perceived), not any moral preference.
The fact that the middle level erased much of China's biggest advantage in number of engineers was more of a side point than the whole thrust of my argument but you seem really fixated on that possibility
I'm really not, I'm talking about third parties, mainly the EU, but extremely high levels of automation on some timeline <20 years seem to be the modal scenario for me.
Fortunately we'll have an opportunity to correct this in a few years, when will China's next chance to relatively smoothly change its leader be?
When Xi grows tired and steps down, like Deng did (Deng, importantly, kept manipulating his successors). Personally I think he'll nominate Ding Xuexiang on merit of overseeing the EUV project, assuming that it succeeds. Ding doesn't have the required track record of governance, but Xi broke rules himself, and this is more important than boosting KPIs in some province.
I suppose it depends on how you define good news whether zero covid being possible was the good news or was it bad news that stoked his paranoia that he favored. The point is isolation from alternative viewpoints that he himself doesn't actively seek out.
I think the good news was about the technical possibility of zero Covid, or at least drastic slowdown of the spread with full lockdown and tracking measures. The bad «news» was overestimation of potential costs of Covid, and once we reached Omicron, it took too long for Xi to notice both failure and good news of Omicron's relative mildness.
I think you're failing to model him. This boilerplate grasping autocrat theory is about as lazy as your theory of Huang, too. More generally I guess you're biased against and uncharitable towards «rulers», both CEOs and personalist dictators, they must be irrational, petty, and shooting themselves in the foot. Because otherwise it's not clear if «uh, but we'll stop electing boomers one day» suffices as a defense of a structurally compromised, easily corruptible universal suffrage 2-party democracy. I seriously believe that your succession system is straight up inferior to the CPC's one, both morally and technically. You impose no filter besides "graduated from a good school", you ask for no virtues except popularity and political instinct, your checks and balances and «institutions» are revealed to be hot air, you reward clientelism, and so on it goes. It's a very good system for ensuring non-violent successions and popular buy-in, but that's all it has going for it – insurance for elites who want to play the game of power without skin in the game. It's a complete profanation of the idea of democracy, which was designed for a different people, of different class, in a different context. Chinese system was at least designed for modern-ish China.
Other nations do not attempt to be free of any foreign dependencies and it's not a costless goal to pursue
Other nations can't, at least not yet. Only China and the US have a serious shot. It's a very valuable goal when you have a powerful enemy that wants you to be technologically behind and vulnerable to trade disruptions because it considers your self-directed development morally wrong, or inherently a threat.
I tire of this debate about autarky. It's a somewhat recent discovery for the Western public that China is doing that, overwhelmingly the complaints were about gross trade imbalance, IP theft, «military applications» and sectoral competition, you're one of the few who's talking about autarky as a problematic philosophical position. Though notably, Neal Stephenson predicted this dynamics in Diamond Age, see Seed vs Feed (no relation to Sneed).
You're telling me refusing China State of the Art chips might get more of the most talented researchers to come to the US … I think a job offer at our frontier labs should in fact come with a free golden Trump citizenship card stapled to an H200.
No, that's not the argument. I'm just listing their options. On the margins, yes, total compute denial might drain some more brains. I think that your bias is preventing you from noticing that they're not desperate like Indians, they're already pretty nationalist, and such blatantly hostile effort may backfire. I know that some OpenAI folks proposed stalling Chinese AGI project by granting O1s to top DeepSeek researchers, who privately said they are not interested in this garbage (several of them are returnees, and I guarantee you that they can easily 5x their income anytime by switching sides again).
Your society is just increasingly losing attractiveness. There are costs to vice, to dysfunction, to casual racism, to smug forgiveness of your every demerit, and to antagonism. There are also costs to having low sexual market value, frankly. How much is it worth in $$$ or H200s for a 20 year old nerd with 3400 CodeForces ranking to justify living in a place where you get Chinese women, rather than in Hangzhou? I think this detail is often underrated in analyzing people's choices.
Anyway, the argument was more about the difference between freely working on the best hardware they can get, and working in a shitty Soviet-style sharashka with a commissar. If the latter is implemented, the US does win on freedoms, values etc. Xi does not want to fold frontier private companies into a SOE and destroy them, in AI and otherwise. So he's navigating a fine line here in permitting Nvidia with caveats.
This may seem naive and romantic to you, but that's my view. They are invested in their research projects, their companies, their mission, their nation, these companies are currently culturally healthier than American ones. You can't change that with some bans, but Xi can, and he has to weigh the costs.
I could grant some small, measured in weeks to months, "lock in" effect for releasing export controls if that's what you want to call Chinese chip makers getting slightly less feedback from the frontier labs
my 95% interval is 1 to 5 years. You really overrate how plug and play it is. It's comparable to the problem of chips as such. They were designing chips on par with Nvidia back in 2019, they still don't have an equivalent to CUDA. In 2026 they'll tape out chips on par with Nvidia from 2022, and still won't have an equivalent to CUDA. I'll change my mind if I see any non-garbage model trained on Ascends, there's definitely more than enough raw compute for that already. Last time Huawei tried, it was an obfuscated DeepSeek V3 with a switched tokenizer.
These are American brains. We claim those. It's one of our things.
Well, that's the spirit. But there's a difference between being a heroic man at home and a brainy bugman in a foreign land. You've got to offer better deals if you want to keep them, because some top performers are going back. This guy, for example. New top performers are often skipping the US stage altogether. I see 5 IOI Gold winners on DeepSeek team. Graduated PKU and went straight for <$200K compensations at home. I think Zuck would be eager to pay multiples of that.
Chinese industrial capacity is built to and relies on exporting to function. It's not an accounting artifact. It's clear in the trade surplus and it's been a priority to fix for over a decade now with little to no progress. If trading partners want to behave like China and cut their imports then this whole system falls apart. The companies reliant on exports fail systematically. The savings of the Chinese citizen dry up.
That's a fair concern, and yes of course the Party shares it. I don't think it's an existential concern, because thermodynamics is more important than financial flows. If you really can produce everything cheaply in terms of energy and labor, you can lose 90% of your trade surplus and pivot to subsidizing demand, it'll be a politically costly but technologically straightforward adjustment, and yes you can survive an implosion of your companies. If you cannot produce much of anything cheaply, you can try to subsidize supply but you'll probably be flailing for years. And speaking of debt, you can do the arithmetic here. Even their most involuted industries are not in such a gutter.
China cannot fully implement Dual Circulation. That's largely a failure. That's also largely a product of tradeoffs that make sense under their assumptions about long term competitiveness and security, which I believe are not paranoid and in fact more rational than American assumptions were and are. Too many of their exported goods cannot be replaced in the short term, so they can currently afford this model. Notice, for instance, how they've shrugged off the decline of exports to the US market, fully offsetting it with Asia. The developing world has much need of cheap high quality goods, particularly capital goods, and will have for a while yet.
Going forward, we'll see.
Are these other nations not getting access to the labor erasers?
Are they? My impression is that the US intends to monopolize the top-tier product for national security purposes. They'll get open source Chinese versions or some nerfed American stuff.
But that's my idea of how your AGI race narrative would actually develop. Personally I think that everyone gets their sovereign AGI, sooner or later, so we'll indeed see a large reduction in non-commodities trade, shoring up of critical industries, and have to live with that.
Give me a break man.
I believe in individual responsibility for shared delusions, and I do think that your analysis is strongly influenced by an implicit belief in racial hierarchy, which is why you are not curious to learn more than tropes and some macroecon about this system your nation is in competition with. But fine, I won't insist.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
6d ago
If I have a problem, it's with exasperated, condescending and low-effort dismissals of good faith arguments, with eyerolls, smirks, chuckles and other juvenile garbage.
Good grief x2.
What the fuck is the appropriate response to this?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
6d ago
Sputnik was a big story, Soviet technical competence was not. It will be a big story when we see deliveries of machines, first wafers, first chips. I allow that I may be wrong and trust the wrong sources. 2028 for first risk production seems plausible right now. Hopefully it will be resolved one way or another.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
6d ago
That is what I said. You're too cognitively rigid to abandon your annoying attempts to reveal some inconsistency. I am simply right on multiple accounts. It's more than 40%, 40% would also not be an indictment by itself, and this whole line of argument about suppressed consumption spending is propaganda. Blocked.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
6d ago
I'm saying that the handwringing about low Chinese household consumption is propaganda. It's presented as an unfair source of their competitiveness and an immoral exploitation of their population. In reality, even 40% is fairly normal in nations we recognize as successful upstanding members of the international community, and Chinese figure is underestimated and may be more like 50%.
You also annoy me with this constant appeal to paywall. The last link wasn't paywalled and it went on to explain why 46% is a lowball too.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
6d ago
Maybe it can't hack the servers directly if they're airgapped (though I wouldn't underestimate the power of some social-engineered fool bringing in a compromised USB) but it could hack everything around the servers, the power production, logistics, financing, communications, transport, construction
You misunderstood my point. I am saying that hacking as such will become ineffectual in a matter of years. Automated SWEs make defense drastically advantaged over offense due to information asymmetry in favor of the defender and rapid divergence in codebases. This “superhacker AGI” thing is just lazy thinking. How long do you think it takes, between open source AIs that win IOI&IMO Gold for pennies, and formally verified kernels for everything, in a security-obsessed nation that has dominated image recognition research just because it wanted better surveillance?
I believe that the physical domain is trumped by the virtual.
A very American belief, to be sure.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
6d ago
I don’t believe in their ability to produce strong thinkers and leaders that come from out of nowhere
It doesn't come out of nowhere, it's called education, competition and meritocracy, and they clearly have strong leaders and thinkers already. You're just in a bubble.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
6d ago
EVs are a good example - how many Chinese people buy American EVs? I'd assume the number is approximately zero since American EVs are about 5x the price for a comparable product
Well, this reveals the problem with first principles thinking popular among rationalists. Tesla model Y is consistently one of the hottest EVs in China. They totally love Teslas. It genuinely has advantages over domestic cars, they constantly make videos where its FSD dunks on Xiaomi and other competition. Upper class Chinese buy Teslas.
(Of course, it's Tesla made in Shanghai. It so happens that Shanghai Gigafactory is about 2.3x more productive per worker.)
Similar logic can apply to Nvidia.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
6d ago
trump bad
OK, but how does this make the previous system sustainable? You consume more than you produce, and you cover the delta with IOUs. It's a time bomb, people just got accustomed to the explosion being repeatedly postponed, developed a mindset that American “reserve currency” grift is so strong that this is no biggie. I think they're wrong.
it's your model that we should be trying to sustain our consumption with just Soy and LNG exports
Unfair. As you can see I'm arguing in favor of selling high-end GPUs, where you actually dominate. Soy and LNG obsession was Trump (before recent course adjustment).
I think we should continue to try and dominate in aerospace, tech, entertainment and other industries. We should happily let ASML dominate in fab design, TSMC dominate in fab execution(although China hungrily eyeing their island for conquest does justify some industrial policy to move that particular industry into safer territory), Samsung dominate in RAM
You currently can't “not let” them dominate there, they are simply dominant, like you are in aerospace, so it's not exactly a choice. And in your own logic, all of that “let” becomes effectively charity soon after you have AGI (unfortunately, a necessary evil to fight Red Chyna!). It's just a question of maximizing comparative advantage by tolerating division of labor, while you complete the Total Labor Eraser Machine 9000; in fact a continuation of the earlier mustache-twirling “let the broke ass yellow bugmen assemble our gadgets for pennies, while we deepen our design and basic research dominance” strategy, justified by the Smiling Curve logic. Sorry, one doesn't have to be Xi to see how it works.
And of course, your personal distaste for Trump won't change the reality of him forcing allies to rebuild their core industries in the US. This is American policy for the foreseeable future and I don't think it'll be rejected by the next admin, like Biden didn't reject and only reinforced core pillars of Trump's China policy.
I have to point out that China is led by an aging dictator who has progressively isolated himself from the type of people who would bring him bad news.
Xi was born in 1953. He's 72. Trump was born in 1946, like George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. I get the “leaders are like underpants” logic but humans are not really underpants, which quickly get dirty but do not appreciably age in storage; and I wonder if a well-functioning autocrat really is worse than a structural inability to elect people born after 1946 AD (Biden dates back to 1942, of course). Xi's father lived to 89, after 16 years of persecution. A very interesting man. Xi's mother is apparently still alive at 99 years of age. I think Xi is pretty damn lucid and will remain so for another decade, and the “progressively isolated from bearers of bad news” bit sounds like a lazy trope. Maybe Zero COVID applies but that was more about excessive paranoia than desire for good news. He's quite obsessed with calamity consciousness and “preparing for danger in times of peace”. Xi's China has systematically derisked its position, to the extent that when Trump ranted “the U.S. has Monopoly positions also, much stronger and more far reaching than China's. I have just not chosen to use them, there was never a reason for me to do so — UNTIL NOW! … For every Element that they have been able to monopolize, we have two.” – it was hot air.
Apparently you think that the reason China could only take export controls on the chin 6-2 years ago, and can clap back and force US concessions now, is just that Trump is a venal corrupt moron and in fact he did have those two elements. The fact of the matter is that he used to have them but does not anymore, because Xi is not like Trump, nor like Putin. In 2018, when Trump cut ZTE off from US kit, Chinese state newspaper “Science and Technology Daily” published a series of 35 articles “What Are Our Chokepoints? Core Technologies We Urgently Await Breakthroughs In”, obviously building on Xi's rhetoric. I recommend reading it in detail. Xi kept scolding everyone for not doing enough – in 2020, in 2024. As of now, at least 30 out of 35 items are deemed solved. We know very much about their efforts to break all such chokepoints, they are in fact increasingly well organized, the graft of Big Fund I was eliminated. This is not the behavior of a delusional autocrat in an echo chamber. Your whole society looks more like an echo chamber, given how shell-shocked DC China Watchers were after Oct 9, how they kept saying that Xi miscalculated, overplayed his hand or whatever. He clearly did not.
But I don't expect to convince you. “Arrogant power-hungry strongman kills goons who report bad news” is a staple of your scholarship, a justification of your system, and a powerful trope of your media culture. After all, Free American Men do not need to stoop so low as to seriously scrutinize the policies or behavioral profile of some bugman chief (who wasn't even born in 1946 AD). It's not like there can be any consequences of being wrong.
The whole autarkic emperor blinded to their weaknesses and his subjects being afraid to tell him he's wrong seems to me at least as good of an explanation for denial of NVDIA imports
I think they're much more afraid of lying than of any demotion for underperformance, because being implicated in some graft gets you expelled from the party, jailed or executed, and the CPC is designed with good incentives for mutual surveillance. Of course there's the American trope/cope that corruption investigations are just selectively applied for “purging rivals”, everyone is corrupt and corruption adds no risk. We'll see. For now, you can be thankful to Xi for doing USG's proper job of not letting advanced chips into China.
You seem to oscillate between claiming NVDIA is going to establish some kind of vendor lock in while also celebrating an impending Chinese internal semiconductor champion that will make refusing to export toothless anyways. Either lock in is real or it isn't. If it's real then surely China's efforts won't mean much if they can't even get their national champion to use their home grown chips.
I don't oscillate, those processes are just in tension. Liang Wenfeng said: “NVIDIA’s dominance isn’t just its effort—it’s the result of Western tech ecosystems collaborating on roadmaps for next-gen tech. China needs similar ecosystems. Many domestic chips fail because they lack supportive tech communities and rely on secondhand insights. Someone must step onto the frontier.” And yet even DeepSeek has not yet trained anything on Ascends. You need usable chips and frontier AI talent, working together. Frontier talent has options – go to the US, work with domestic chips under duress, work with Nvidia chips in the PRC (but those were becoming scarce), work with domestic chips because they literally are the only thing they can get, and so on. Nvidia can create a vendor lock, not unbreakable in principle, but sufficient to slow down their ecosystem and prolong the vulnerability to export controls. Domestic chips will have both low utility and slower hardware progress if domestic software has no adoption at the frontier. China ultimately wants good AI and less talent flight (that is a thing, you realize) and so won't meddle egregiously in frontier roadmaps.
Their plan seems to be letting Tier A labs do what they want with their own money, subsidizing power for domestic compute, forcing Tier B to match procurement of Nvidia/AMD with domestic compute, and building public datacenters with domestic compute. In time, this will result in an okay-ish domestic ecosystem and wider adoption of those chips, after which they may require, incentivize or naturally get some frontier training runs. But the end goal is to downgrade Nvidia from a chokepoint to basically another commodity, not ban it. They can ban commodities in retaliation, as with soy, but it's not about a commitment to never buy American produce. So long as they have security and optionality and it makes basic economic sense, they don't mind importing soy, or LNG, or chips, or airplanes, or anything.
I want to see more of the returns from China's growth go to improving the quality of life of Chinese people rather than Xi's vanity in needing to dominate every market that exists What I want China to do if AI is a pivotal technology is to lose to America in a race to develop it, I would understand if Xi declined
indeed. Except, “every market that exists” is the same issue as a singular pivotal technology. The simple fact is that either you move up the value chain relentlessly, or you get some sort of “lost decades” or “middle income trap” and then you're American chewing toy. When you actually have the potential to be a great power and not just some cute intermediate supplier with no security like the Netherlands, Americans will chew on you until you have no potential. China is not special, it's just the only remaining contender after Europe and Japan were done with. Clearly an American can have Chinese family and remain committed to the hegemonic project. All you can offer to the weak is to be in your orbit, sell cocaine or cheeses or whatnot; all you can offer to the strong is defeat. That's normal realpolitik. I just want you to acknowledge that the noise about “quality of life of Chinese people” is disingenous.
China's high-speed rail program was built on technology transferred from Siemens, Kawasaki, Bombardier, and Alstom.
Bought and paid for, minor (yes, minor) extralegal fraction aside. Unlike Japan, these nations were not forced to transfer technology under duress, as China does not control their security.
There's a big difference between aggressively pursuing autarky and just the natural internal trade
There's also a big difference between being on the giving or receiving side of export controls and Wassenaar Arrangement. This isn't about Xi bad, Americans have been working to keep China non-competitive in the semiconductor segment for at least over three decades: “We found that the executive branch practice was aimed at keeping China two generations behind the U.S. semiconductor manufacturing industry. On March 1, 2001, the under secretary for export administration (a policy-level official), described this practice and reconfirmed it in a follow-up January 2002 meeting with GAO after he left office”. That's “Jiang Zemin good” era, growth, engagement, all that soapy bullshit. Meanwhile, your semiconductor industry is heavily dependent on Chinese brains. I won't moralize on the hypocrisy and laughable entitlement, obviously you feel entitled to allocating progress conditional on how much you like a given regime. After all, “if we weren't worthy, they wouldn't have come”. The point is that even modulo their autarkic preferences, proactive derisking – for every industry with a chokehold – makes perfect sense.
Not every local area should try to answer "how do we design cell phones?" for themselves. If they have a competitive advantage in cell phone design, or some step of the process, then sure go ahead
Speaking of local cell phones. I loved Nokia. Very cute story of plucky little Finland doing well in tech, connecting people, all those 3310 memes. The era before total Chimerica dominance. Was pretty sad when it got killed. I recall @Stefferi even speculated that it led to the decline in birth rates. I suspect Elop did that intentionally, though he just wanted to deliver fresh game to Microsoft and fumbled the company altogether. Now it's either iPhone or Chinese phones, and you tried to kill Huawei too.
But the excess industrial buildout? That's going into exports. It's the Americans and Europeans enjoying discounted goods that is enjoying the surplus here.
This is partially fair. There are two components to this. One is subsidizing the base undifferentiated layer of economy - energy and raw materials, agriculture, infrastructure, “wasteful SOEs”. This makes it possible to not just produce anything effectively but discover new physical products faster, without the pathologies of American financialization. Another is provincial competition with duplicate companies and “involution”, spurred on by national plans like MIC 2025. Not even Xi likes involution, but they seem to be unwilling to tackle it, because it also produces very fit companies. Overall, I think that in the long run this strategy works fine as it makes goods cheaper very quickly at the cost of slower growth in nominal consumption.
At least the American excess spending is circulating among American Doctors and Pharma companies, which yes are actually making miraculous drugs.
Well, it's fueling Chinese pharma companies too, and now they're licensing miraculous drugs to you, and you buy the end product at 30-fold markups. “In China, a single-dose vial costs US$280 but in the US it will have a wholesale price of US$8,892”. Though the US distributor, Coherus, classified as a manufacturer, captures 80% of this markup, on merit of its role in dealing with the FDA. Who knows where we'd be if the Chinese could rip you off directly. Maybe all cancer would've been solved already, and your healthcare would've been cheaper too.
Baumol's applies to all sectors, household, state and industrial at least equally, probably more to state
Maybe but that's a quantitative question, I think rent+health+education are uniquely Baumoled in the US relative to China (which subsidizes them), constitute non-optional spending, and cover a large fraction of the gap. The accounting of US consumption is pretty different from Chinese approach too, as @FrankishKnight explains here. Anyway, as I've said, low Chinese household consumption is not more anomalous than high American one. Nations have all kinds of ratios, and the US ratio is not characteristic of a prosperous state.
How is China getting the 70+% of its oil imports in this future? The iron ore? The soy beans?
Those are worth peanuts in comparison to their current trade volume and surplus. They'll be fine, at least it won't be their biggest problem. If the world stops buying their ships, they also won't need quite so much iron.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
6d ago
Yes, there is a big gap. But why does the gap to the US matter at all? You both have abnormal societies.. China is an outlier in its GDP bracket, you are an outlier in yours. Chinese household consumption is similar to its East Asian neighbors. We can quibble about specific datasets, but South Korea is under 50% pretty much no matter how one looks at it. Why is Indian or American ratio inherently better than Chinese or Swiss ratio? This is all a pretty facile discussion, different nations have different systems, your main problem with their system is that it's too internationally competitive, not that Chinese people are poor (and they aren't even that poor).
State actors have trash talent, for reasons discussed earlier. A few outliers, but at this point Google has like 100x NSA's capability. This needs Google's capability at 100x the scale of labor. Where we differ is that I think this doesn't require 100x Google's capability.
Because the American AI only has access to internet-connected surfaces, is rate-limited and needs to avoid detection before breach, whereas Chinese AI has root access to the entire stack plus documentation and source code and can examine those subtle vulnerabilities in a massively parallel manner and at its leisure.
The point you keep missing is that at every point, information and time asymmetry exists in favor of the defender, which I think makes up for the observed qualitative and quantitative advantage of the attacker.
I maintain that this is a lazy hope for having an unfair advantage and scarcely different from "we could bomb three gorges dam, we just choose not to".
More options
Context Copy link