DirtyWaterHotDog
No bio...
User ID: 625
DirtyWaterHotDog
7hr ago
to facilitate the transfer of US military resources from Europe to the Pacific
Why do it in a roundabout manner ? The cold-war with China is in full swing. It's 10 years too late for appearances.
the adults actually have everything under control at all times
Has that ever been true? Vietnam, Afghanistan & Iraq were net negatives for the US. The country has a storied tradition of wasting money in ways that 'adults' would deem unwise.
this was a genuinely impulsive decision on Trump's part, and that he's not following any particular ideological roadmap.
Same here. Trump (and those who he listens to) is a tactical genius and strategic buffoon. He's good at bullying as a means of getting small wins. But, he lacks the patience for grand games. His evaluation of the world is simple and myopic.
<semi_rant_begins>
China's rise and its inevitable challenge to America's supremacy had kicked off by 1978. Their current momentum has been half-a-century in the making. It took the half-century before that for America to build Pax-Americana into what it is (was?) today. Even at full-throttle it will take America ~2 decades to craft a new public image of itself. Trump wants to draw new cards. But, the old cards were good, and it may take a few draws before America finds itself with good cards again. In the short term., change will likely be for the worst And if the cards don't work out, the long term might be doomed as well.
Think about it, 2015 America was in a great place. The first world wanted nothing to do with China. There was balance.
Western Europe, Japan, SK & America were aligned in keeping China at arms lengths from their markets. BRICS nations were seen as long-term possible contenders to the first world. South Africa is aligned with the west. India didn't get along with China. Brazil's location makes it naturally align with America. Russia allied with China, but had delusions of grandeur that kept it from ever being subservient.
In this world, even if China had won, who would be in its umbrella ? Iran, Pakistan, Russia, SEA, Africa & some South American countries ? That's the grand alliance ? What did America have to fear ? Between South Asia, Poland, Turkey & HispanAmerica.... the 1st world had enough mid-industrialization partners for outsourcing low-margin industries. If robotics automation stayed on track, the 1st world's requirement for offshore labor would've ended right as these aforementioned nations became too expensive for outsourcing. Biden ran a cluster-fuck of a govt. But, the pre-2016 neolib consensus seemed to be doing just fine.
In 2025, I'm not so sure.
Will Europe, Canada & HispanAmerican nations seek opportunistic short-term deals elsewhere, instead of operating within America's umbrella ? China has a lot of money to throw around. Canada could solve its housing problem if it formally allowed Chinese nationals to park money here. Europe could make their money go further if they opened up to Chinese shopping portals like Temu and embraced Chinese electronics (Huawei, Xiaomi). Chinese belt-and-road style loans might start looking tempting to feudal countries if their elites weren't America educated (and therefore America aligned). Small nations would get on their knees and suck Xi off if China offered to divert the fire-hose of Chinese tourists to their nations. India could adopt a China-style make-everything-in-house strategy going forward. It wouldn't take it to first-world-dom, but it could operate within its means. India is poor, but 1.5 billion is a lot of consumers.
America dominates many sectors, but it is especially powerful in Tech and Entertainment. Guess what, both sectors are trivial to disrupt. Semi conductors, Pharmaceuticals and Heavy engineering take decades to build excellence in. But tech and entertainment can be disrupted overnight.
It would take less than 2 years for China to offer full replacements for O365, AWS and Windows. They already have competent alternatives for Facebook, Google, Tesla & Apple ready to go. Where would that leave the magnificent 7? With NeZha 2 & BlackMyth, they're already showing technical excellence in entertainment. Yes, America tells better stories, but that's only because American stories resonate. If Trump continues being a bully, will anyone want to see the next Rocky 4 or Captain America ?
I still don't get what was so broken about America that Elon & Trump needed to turn everything on its head.
<\semi_rant_ends>
horror stories from Canadians
I've posted about this extensively on TheMotte. But here it goes again.
Since the 70s, Canada has imported India's lowest-skilled. While Indians were considered model immigrants everywhere else, Canadian-Indians were busy committing 9/11-level terrorist acts. Canadian-Indian bad actors are part of a large web of criminal gangs, human trafficking rings, and drug distribution cartels. Trudeau turbocharged this problem by opening the floodgates. In India, the flight of uneducated and unskilled migrants to Canada was rampant enough to become a meme. Many among us (governments included) warned Canada that these channels were being exploited to facilitate crime. Trudeau did not heed our advice. The outcomes are a result of Canada's stubbornness.
Indian immigrants in other nations do not have the same demographics. They're well-integrated, peaceful, and high-earning versus conservative, uneducated, and of flexible morality. Of course, #NOTMOSTCANADIANS, but you get my point. Projecting Canada's problems with ethnic Indians onto other nations makes no sense, and the statistical differences prove my point (crime, earnings, education).
50% of the extant population in my county was supplemented with Indians like Canada has seen.
Ethnic Indians are 5% of Canada's population.
If the stories of off-the-boat Indians shitting in bodies of water like it's just what you do are true, it's fucked.
You're scared of the bogeyman. These people don't exist.
I have never met an Indian who shits in bodies of water. I've never seen it among people I know in India, let alone outside the country. The kind of Indian who does it can't speak one sentence in English, let alone get a passport or a visa to ever exit the nation. I don't want to laugh at their misfortune. Street-shitters are a desperate and downtrodden class of people. They're barely tolerated in AC restaurants in India, let alone a foreign nation.
"You can't make me go back! Anything but that!" attitude of second-generation Indian-Americans is profound.
Ah, I'll leave this for another day. The ABC vs. Chinese or ABCD vs. Indians conversation is strongly colored by insecurity, ungroundedness, and colonial mindsets. For now, I'll say that it has little to do with their dislike of India. India (and developing nations in general) run on survivalist mentalities based around class systems. Second-generation Indians are insecure about their place at the top of the survivalist-Indian hierarchy. Their actions should always be viewed with that fact in mind.
And then there is the shameless nepotism and scamming. It's more or less known that if you make the mistake of putting an Indian in charge of hiring, suddenly your company is hiring only Indians. That most resumes from Indians and credentials from institutions that service mostly Indians are completely fake and can't be trusted. I've seen repeated stories out of Canada that local education institutions, which have leaned into servicing Indians, have become so overrun with fraud that employers have begun just chucking applications from those institutions in the garbage. Been burned too many times.
You have causality backward. White people are unwilling to work for wages that desperate Indians agree to. This makes it so that the only people who meet the hiring bar and are willing to accept the wages are Indian immigrants. Similarly, Tier 3 Canadian institutions start cash-cow programs with little educational, career, or prestige value. The only kind of person who sees value in such a program is someone with ulterior motives. The program gets fraud-friendly candidates because it’s structured to only draw fraud-friendly candidates.
Detached from the outcome attitude.
While we're exchanging anecdotes, my experience has been the opposite. Doctors back in India are caring, invested, and treat you like a human. I've found American doctors to be cold and impatient.
I've never had an experience where an Indian went one millimeter outside of the minimum of their job description to service a customer.
My experience couldn't be more different. My Indian (and first-gen Chinese) coworkers clearly work harder and produce higher-quality outcomes than the natives. But the natives keep getting rewarded because the company can't afford to lose citizens.
The Viveks of the world speak in broad terms that these Indian workers are just better than me.
Yeah, Vivek felt resentful and hurt in his comments. I don't agree with his comments, but I can see how your average white person would feel attacked by it. Fair enough.
My way of life is disappearing, my culture is being squeezed out, my history is being erased, my co-ethnics aren't reproducing.
Yeah, it has to do with your co-ethnics. Indians (among other first-gen immigrants) are more spiritual, family-oriented, and 90s-American-like than native 2025 Americans. Your complaints are rooted in Gen Z Americans rejecting classically American values. Don’t point to us immigrants. This is all you. If it is any solace, this seems to be a global problem. Everywhere, urban kids of the next generation are rejecting ideas that their 'elders' held close to their hearts. Time is ruthless.
I've seen very little self-awareness from Indians about what they are really fleeing from or what makes them different.
I see your point. For every Indian who seeks integration, there are smart and educated Indians who ghettoize. It's how immigration works. Jews, Italians, Cubans, etc.—they all ghettoized in their first generation. In time, they integrate.
I don’t agree with your Japan analogy, though. America exported every part of its culture for a whole century. It forcefully molded workers at other English-speaking corporations into pseudo-Americans. America is a 'global' phenomenon. Irrespective of the truth, that’s the image it portrays and sells. If immigrants drink the Kool-Aid, then that’s on America for shoving it down our throats. You might argue that this was the doing of the filthy globalists, and it isn’t the will of 'true' Americans. But to me, that just sounds like you saying that you're a powerless normie who is angry about being powerless in their country. If you didn’t want to be flag bearers of globalism for 50 years, then you should've found your way to power and reversed the trend. Even in 2025, Trump may cosplay as a nativist, but he's as global coastal elite as they come.
DirtyWaterHotDog
5d ago
I've heard of deals around $50k in New Jersey. It's not that bad. You need to give your wife a good life for 3-4 years, and then you can divorce on amicable terms.
I dislike it for the same reason I dislike drastic changes in general.
It's supposed to replace the existing EB-5. Stable regulatory environments are central to being considered business-friendly. People plan their business around the stability of the EB-5. Drastic changes to the regulatory environment does permanent damage to a nation's perception as being business worthy. Now, the US has a big dick, oodles of goodwill and a strong precedent of stability. So these changes may not cause visible damage in the short term. But, it accelerates the long-term cultural shift away from the US and towards the Indo-Pacific. These changes take decades, but their impact can be felt immediately in the aftermath of trigger events. Covid was one such example.
Secondly, I'm not sure it will have takers. Around the world, there are around 400k (UHNWI) Ultra-high-net worth-individuals. (People with more than $30 million). Americans, Chinese and Europeans constitute a majority of them. Americans and Europeans don't want a new passport & are at war with China. That leaves about 50k people in the rest of the world, who would want the Gold Card. Most Gold-card/EB-5 equivalents are investment visas. Looking at the announcement, the $5 million seems to be a direct spend instead of an investment. That's a lot of money down the drain, and rich people don't throw money down the drain. Why wouldn't someone get a citizenship for EU nation or Canada instead ?
Overall, it's a great option if the EB-5 coexists alongside it. Terrible if it replaces the EB-5.
DirtyWaterHotDog
7d ago
My accusations weren't this strong, but I've made similar points.
Altman having a child changes things. I welcome Altman to the 'pseudo-visceral stake in the future club'. Congrats to him and his husband.
I'm in support of gay men adopting children and adopting rituals of traditional marriage. Yes, they're only nominally monogamous, but that's good enough for me. I prefer an effort to maintain optics of normalcy, instead of forcing the culture to accept a public lifestyle that's way outside the overton window. Don't care about what happens behind closed doors. I've seen a few twitter dog-whistles accusing him (and gay men in general) of being pedo groomers. Real unsavory stuff.
It doesn't change that Altman comes across as a uncanny-valley predator (in a lizard person sort of way), but that's par for the course for billionaire tech CEOs. Can't exactly fault him for that.
DirtyWaterHotDog
7d ago
Speculation: The UK was in the midst of massive decolonization. I'd make sense to conservatively ration food if you're in the midst of a divorce from your agricultural suppliers.
DirtyWaterHotDog
10d ago
Is it a stereotype if it's true ?
DirtyWaterHotDog
10d ago
India imposes direct presidential rule (rather than local elected government) in rebellious state
Following up. The headline is misleading.
The state of Manipur is in the midst of a tribal civil war. It isn't a separatist war. It's between the state's 2 main tribal groups. Certain events sparked the civil war in 2023, but the social tensions were already like dry tinder, ready to pop off. In that sense, the inciting event is less relevant. The incompetent governance that let the issue spiral into a wildfire is pertinent.
For 2 years now, tribal militant groups have killed and raped on opposing sides. Having being called ethno-nationalists before, the center wants to avoid being seen as taking sides on a sub-ethnic conflict. This is a border state (think Puerto Rice), and mainland Indian voters haven't shown concern towards the conflict. So the BJP has let the conflict rage on. Direct interference would only hurt their electoral outcomes.
The center and the state are ruled by the same coalition (BJP-NDA). Once things went haywire, the BJP employed a dual strategy. They let the chief minister (state governor) be a lightning rod for blame, nominally keeping him in power. behind the scenes, they've been running the state through bureaucrats who're attempting to limit damages. Last week's change simply reduces indirection. The only shame is that the BJP didn't do this sooner.
Yunus of deploying terrorists
She's right. But it changes nothing.
Former Bangladeshi PM Hasina accusses Yunus of deploying terrorists, pledges to return and avenge police officers. This seems unlikely, as she doesn't control the state apparatus. However, if she does return, it would lead to wider turmoil in the region.
To be fair, this isn't her first post-coup exile. At least this time her entire family wasn't genocided.
DirtyWaterHotDog
10d ago
We need to have a discussion some day about what was the actual bad thing about the Nazis.
It is their preference for out-group-misery over in-group flourishing.
For all their faults, previous govts have never taken this much joy in hurting their outgroup. Bannon doesn't care about the flourishing of white people. He cares that America doesn't facilitate the flourishing of non-whites (non-natives?). Elon clearly cares about empowering his lackeys and winning, more than facilitating a good life for Americans at large.
I agree that Bannon isn't a Nazi. But, I have yet to hear him recommend policies that would facilitate positive change.
- Silicon valley has too many immigrants ? How does he recommend replacing a million of top percentile people America has stolen from the rest of the world ? China managed to keep a few hundred of its geniuses around, and within a few years, they had DeepSeek. If anything, the more productive a team, the more Indian, Russian and Chinese it becomes.
- You're a nativist ? How do you recommend bringing cost-competitive manufacturing back to the US ? Tariffs are clearly making it worse rather than better.
- You're an isolationist ? Why would our allies go along with unilateral sanctions placed by the US on its enemies (China, Iran).
- America is full ? How do you continue growing domestic consumerist demand if fertility rate is below replacement ?
He can point out problems all day. No solutions. No appeal to positive change. No optimism. Just finger pointing and loud gestures.
That's Nazi mentality. Germany can't flourish until the jews are genocided. What fiscal policy will enable a pure-Aryan Germany to flourish ? Who cares. We need to get the jews out first. We'll figure out the big solutions later. Ofc, this mentality horse-shoes quite hard. Bernie, AOC, Stalin & Mao have similar traits, with different outgroups. (with varying degrees of severity)
Centrists look incompetent because nothing happens. But, gridlock can be feature too. Decision by committee means that no one group gets a raw-deal. In a functioning nation like the US (richest country), the govts job is to preserve processes, not uproot them. Drastic actions make more sense in completely broken systems like Ecuador, Argentina or places with no systems like newly independent Singapore.
Now America isn't perfect. Many of its systems are broken and deserve to be disrupted. Healthcare billing is broken. Border enforcement is broken. Accountability for military spending is missing entirely. The zoning and urban planning setups are broken. I have yet to see Elon do anything towards disrupting [1] any of these truly broken American systems. Leads to me suspect that disruptions are chosen with the goal of hurting enemies rather than fixing systems.
[1] I have heard whispers of LVT. That would be a welcome change. I have yet to see anything substantial on it. Until then, my point stands.
genius workaholics
I know a few people like this. The 2 put together is scary effective in the short term.
In my experience, it doesn't last. A large portion of them burn out at they approach their 30s and turn semi-resentful. They make money, but their management/leadersip makes more. They haven't experienced much of life. Their heath takes the biggest hit as you lose your immortality in the 30s. And then ofc, The lack of bitches comes to haunt all men.
They tend to have zero human experience, so they end up in permanent "senior" IC roles, while their savvier & stupider friends are now ascending into VP-dom. It's like working in the military. It definitely shapes you in a specific way. But, it can be hard to adjust to civilian life afterwards. The classic example is HFT. Work through your 20s, retire permanently at 30. However, in HFT, you make 10s of millions instead of just a few millions like these kids are making. Not rich enough to Fat-fire.
Now, I personally love working with these people. They are machines and other than a few turbo-autists, most of them are good people.
I knew a few models in which life works out for these people.
Option 1 - Pump and dump yourself. (bail out at the right time)
- Startup path: quit in mid 20s -> build startup -> succeed big time -> retire in your 30s. (closer to the HFT outcome, like Brad Pitt in BigShort)
- Principal Engineer: For those with people skills. Quit for principal IC role in big tech -> get promoted to your level of incompetence -> live happy but under-stimulated life.
Option 2 - Become a 70s dad
- Arranged marriage: Indians & jews figured this out. At 30, millionaire Ramesh gets married off to the hottest trad-wife woman you've seen. Both of them love the arrangement. He buys a house in San Jose, so parents can visit all the time. Ramesh still works his ass off, but loses out on nothing.
- Arranged marriage white edition: the ugliest white dude gets headhunted by a controlling Asian woman who keeps him on a leash. He is overjoyed to find his fetish match. Happy ending.
So yeah, couple of good options, but it is really easy to sleepwalk into your 30s with upper-middle class wealth and zero outside of it.
Exception to the exception - the best of them are monsters beyond understanding. Genuine ubermensch. Handsome, fit, smart, articulate and human calculators. Universally, they are either the most humble people I've met or sociopaths. No middle ground. They all love running marathons for some reason. In my experience, this group knows the perfect tipping point to start their VC funded startup or find a multi-million/yr VP role to camp at big-tech.
DirtyWaterHotDog
10d ago
Everyday I choose not be a resentful person.
My list of contrarian non-emotional twitter anons have scissored. Elon and AGI being the core drivers ofc. Now, they're split between despairing, spewing vitriol or expressing wierdo-optimism towards an AGI world. For the first time since 2016, my social media diet is reinforcing negative emotions rather than becoming a source of information & relaxation. Over Jan & Feb, I've turned resentful, yoyoing between anger and despair.
Thankfully, I have caught myself early. But damn, it takes so much effort to be a positive & well-adjusted individual when your entire echo-chamber is in the midst of mania. I must keep myself off twitter. Hopefully in a year or so, it'll be normal again. Until that point, I must abandon twitter like I abandoned reddit during 2016's Trump hysteria. Thankfully, I have enough going on in life to keep me busy.
This can be a manifesto of sorts. No dead kids or apocalyptic proclamations. Just a promise that, everyday, I'll wake up and choose optimism.
P.S: This is a butterfly effect from tiktok being banned. My instagram reels algorithm was tuned to perfection. Only the funniest low-iq brain-rot. Perfect relaxation. Once a tiktok ban was threatened, reels received all the tiktok kids. Pair that with christmas & mariah carey generally ruining all insta reels, and my reels never recovered. I started using more of Twitter as a result, and it's all south from there.
DirtyWaterHotDog
11d ago
Can you confirm this to be true ? It seems insane that funding money crosses department boundaries.
DirtyWaterHotDog
11d ago
hiring staff to deal with real regulatory and compliance requirements
Comes back to 'Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats'. The overhead is a result of the regulations. The removal of overhead doesn't remove regulations.
What funding do woke movements need ? They're staffed by privileged upper class volunteers who're signed up in unemployable non-STEM programs. Wokeism works precisely because it needs no funding.
DirtyWaterHotDog
11d ago
I see them as the Chinese equivalent to Mistral. They came out of no where, but they definitely weren't upstarts. Post that, they had sufficient resources that it couldn't be called a 'rag tag group of nobodies'. For a while, the media portrayed mistral as a bunch of nobodies fighting against the giants. That characterization was just as incorrect.
Same for Deepseek. None of this takes away from their achievement. They are all cracked, no doubt.
DirtyWaterHotDog
12d ago
The 1:1 replacement would be a 2025 Toyota Prius. The new Prius (prime) is a good looking car and will run for ages.
I recommend buying a used EV. The prices are stupid low. I don't know why the market is so negative towards them. But, a used Model 3 is the best deal on the market right now.
Personally, I'm biased towards the Mazda 3 Turbo hatch. Perfect balance of power, handling, premium, longevity and price.
DirtyWaterHotDog
13d ago
Ayy no worries. I'm so used to people on TheMotte being skeptical, that the bar for aggressiveness is usually high.
The rate at which they're producing papers has me convinced that DeepSeek is operating at a much much larger scale than than the west realizes. (not taking anything away from them ofc. Deepmind is much larger, and seems to barely be keeping up with Deepseek)
Just today they released a sparse attention paper that makes some pretty bonkers claims - https://x.com/deepseek_ai/status/1891745487071609327
What gives them away is the especially mature way in which they write papers. There is maturity that only comes from writing a lot of them. These are the best ML PhDs China has. Not some trading geniuses who picked up LLMs on the side.
DirtyWaterHotDog
13d ago
This is such a thoughtful comment. Leaving a reminder to myself to come back and reply to it when I get the time. Thanks ! I should've waited for your top-post. So much more nuance.
At the highest level, your reaction to it reminds me of how I felt watching RRR. The cultural reaction is so visceral, that it can be hard to articulate. But, you know it when you see it.
You've convinced me to watch it, at the very least.
DirtyWaterHotDog
14d ago
Deep Seek had its mainstream moment last month. But, it has been on the radar since early 2024 and the release of Deep Seek coder. While China has been competitive in the LLM space, their major players are massive organizations like Alibaba, Huawei or BAAI. Deep Seek was special because it reflects a cultural appetite for ambitious risk taking paired with technical excellence, all within a small upstart. It's a combination that has been missing from non-US startups, and for a long time was credited for China's inability to execute moonshots.
That aside, you're right. It is more that people are suddenly noticing what were well-funded efforts that were a long time coming. The outcomes themselves weren't sudden at all.
DirtyWaterHotDog
14d ago
Are Xianxia and Wuxia the same ? Peerless Dad is a wuxia novel and the manwha adaptation is great. It's Korean.
DirtyWaterHotDog
14d ago
It implies - a discipline that the west was thought to dominate, but PRC China created a premier alternative out of nowhere.
Black Myth Wukong & Xiaomi SU7 are other examples.
The 'deepseek' moment is twitter sheeps trying to find a contrived analogy. But it gets the point across.
DirtyWaterHotDog
14d ago
Is NeZha 2 any good ?
NeZha2 is China's first big blockbuster. It's being heralded as a 'Deepseek moment' for Chinese cinema and I'm confused.
I saw NeZha 1 with my Chinese roommates and I didn't like it. The animation was expensive, but had a stock footage-ness to all of it. The jokes were Minions-esque slapstick and the core story was straight out a children's book. The movie felt miles behind nuanced works like InsideOut or Up. Ghibli is on a whole another planet. Minions is probably the analogy I would go for. Note - I saw it in Mandarin with subtitles, with a PRC Chinese person explaining any nuance I might've lost.
Now, the Minions movies made a ton of money and the west's block busters have been especially bad post-covid. I get it, it's kettle calling the pot black. Normies have terrible taste, so I'm going to avoid equating commercial success with quality. My comment is from the perspective of taste.
And I am a China optimist. My best friends are PRC Chinese and they're smart. I don't doubt that Chinese companies can compete in global entertainment or automobile markets. But why is everything that comes out of PRC China so tasteless ? There is clear absence of nuance, craft and love in every industrialized piece of crap that comes out of there. Deepseek is special because it feels inspired. DJI & Nothing also have a spark within them. But elsewhere it feels competently executed but empty. Nezha is no different. Great execution, no soul.
Is this hype organic ? Am I just a hater ?
DirtyWaterHotDog
14d ago
The right to know if maintenance is being deferred on the building?
Yes, they have monthly society meetings for communicating these things. It is similar to an HOA, but with significantly less power. I grew up in an apartment, and we never faced sudden costs. All one-time spend was delayed until the collective 'savings account' had enough in it. The monthly maintenance bills stayed constant. (adjusted annually) Also, because the housing society consists of your peers, they're generally receptive to late payments in a way that banks simply are not.
The right to remain in the building if the building has e.g. been condemned due to deferred maintenance outside your control?
If a family stops paying maintenance (electricity, water, building upkeep, heating are often pooled through common systems), then the building will cut off electricity and water to the apartment. But, that's about it. You can continue living in Squalor if you so wish.
The right to replace appliances / flooring / roof / etc ?
Yep. Your house is your house. The building's rooftop and the outsides are upgraded with collective investment and decision making. But once you're indoors, it's all you.
The right to decide on which ISP will service your unit?
Yep. The ISP have already put in the cables. But, we always had a choice among 2-3 different providers. I was quite surprised to find out that people in the US often do not have choice of ISPs.
The right to have accurate forecasts of the cost of rent in the future?
Doesn't apply to ownership. Maximum rent increase/yr is generally capped by the city govt. So, buildings don't play much role here.
The right to have a friend stay the night at my place? The right to store my bike inside my place?
Yes, it's your house. Why would the building need to know or care ? Similar things were very common back home.
landlords
Hope we're talking about the same thing. There are no landlords here. There is usually a housing collective or housing society. It's like being a joint shareholder. All decisions are made by committee.
On the contrary: random one-off bills are common, at least in the US.
Sounds like a USA problem. Not sure what would cause this. It's very rare for large apartments to need sudden spending. Any scheduled upgrades/revamps are planned 3-ish years in advance. Monthly maintenance rates are accordingly increased, but the pain is distributed over years. So when the time comes, the money is already there.
Condo association decides that the parkade really needs redoing now instead of next year on schedule, majority of condo owners agree
Yes, this happens. But, I've never heard of it being a sudden bill. Always distributed over many years. Also, major expenses in our colony requires a super majority (66%+).
DirtyWaterHotDog
14d ago
Here is the kind of apartments I would like in cities. https://youtube.com/shorts/Lqqtb1hE8L0
DirtyWaterHotDog
14d ago
You're correct. The kind of place you describe is a hellish sardine can. Building vertical with no considerations is a recipe for disaster. Unfortunately, post 1970s white flight, many American cities have become hostile to things families care about.
I mentioned in another post that I frequent French and Swiss cities. Even in Paris proper there is an abundance of parks, rentable gardens, playgrounds and just generally - open space. Go away from the touristy parts, and Paris gets fairly quiet, car free and residential. The Swiss cities have all of this but 1 level better.
Car death numbers are so high in sprawling America, that at some point suburbs are creating the problems they claim to solve. Parisians dont have to worry about cars, because it's impossible for maniacs to drive 50 mph in residential zones. Similarly, violence and child safety is organically taken care of when there are a dozen observers around at any given moment.
I would let my kid qander by themselves in an American inner city with 4 lane arterials in every direction. But, thats the outcome of the destruction of American cities....not a property of city by itself.
To me, America has less than 10 cities. Everywhere else is a downtown mall and business area surrounded with endless suburbs.
China has technical excellence and no taste. (at least in the way that the west can appreciate)
Black Myth Wukong & NeZha 2 were major points of contention because people couldn't decide if they were sufficient indicators of taste. The arguments scissored on if you believe taste is universal or cultural. IE. Should Chinese expression of taste be understandable from a western lens ?
Which was the crux of my original post. An America that believes in so called 'American values' is irresistible. Trump's America is not that. Trump's America is not an attractive place. (specifically this 2nd iteration).
The possibilities for what voting Americans can stomach has expanded toa point of discomfort with Trump's return to power. Perceptions matter. China's boogeyman status is based on perceptions / propaganda (whataboutism around Tiananmen) and so is America's 'prosperity for all' free world order. I agree with your impression of China. But, nations can be oddly shortsighted when China comes knocking with a wad of cash in tow.
More options
Context Copy link