aqouta
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aqouta
6hr ago
When you're trading with an actor with ulterior motives free trade assumptions break down, even neoliberals know that you ought not actually sell the rope that will be used to hang you.
aqouta
7hr ago
And I know the obvious critique. If America can't compete in semi-conductors on a level playing field or any other industry then they should lose and China should make these things cheap as the pie growing move. But this isn't a level playing field. No one does more industrial policy than China. The CCP has an autarkic goal and pursues it at the cost of many things.
They systemically suppress domestic consumption through keeping deposit rates so that households earn below inflation returns so that those savings can be pumped into industrial buildout. The Hukou system creates workforces with limited rights in their migratory cities suppressing their wages to reduce labor costs. They spend very little on social safety nets. the end result being that Chinese household consumption is something like 40% of gdp vs 65% in the states.
You can say that's just them running their economy lean and that decadent westerners should lean down their consumption to compete, but if they did then you really would run into an environment where demand is too scarce. I know you've mocked that idea in the past but it really would be a problem for industrial buildout if no one was buying the stuff China or everyone else was producing.
aqouta
8hr ago
I don't really understand where you think America, or any other nation, is going to fit into the picture at all if your predictions of Chinese dominance come to pass. What is China going to buy from the US in 2038 in your view? They have a long track record of having an industry come into their sphere and then replicating as much as their can of it and then push out the competitor before exporting their version to any market that will take it. What are other trade partners supposed to do with a nation that's long term goal is to not buy anything from their partners? In the mean time I understand the economist position that says this is an obvious surplus, china sends us goods for pieces of paper, why look this gift horse in the mouth? But What happens when this happens to every industry?
I don't follow Noah too closely but in this piece recently I think he's spot on.
The second problem is that Europe’s trade with China is increasingly unbalanced. Europe is not trading services for the flood of electric cars, solar panels, and so on that China is sending. Instead, Europe is writing IOUs. That’s what a trade deficit is — the writing of IOUs in exchange for imports. Robin Harding of the Financial Times recently warned about this unbalanced trade, in an eloquent article entitled “China is making trade impossible”:
There is nothing that China wants to import, nothing it does not believe it can make better and cheaper, nothing for which it wants to rely on foreigners a single day longer than it has to. For now, to be sure, China is still a customer for semiconductors, software, commercial aircraft and the most sophisticated kinds of production machinery. But it is a customer like a resident doctor is a student. China is developing all of these goods. Soon it will make them, and export them, itself…
[I]f China does not want to buy anything from us in trade, then how can we trade with China?…[W]ithout exports, we will eventually run out of ways to pay China for our imports.
With the American hegemony other nations have options. Americans are happy to let other nations lead in some industries and rely on them long term. We're happy to buy Korean appliances, Japanese cars, European fine crafted goods and Columbian cocaine. If you want to build out a niche the American empire is happy to let you have it and integrate into the global family. This is not how China acts. China doesn't tolerate this kind of interdependence. I don't really see how you think allowing them to take up the dominant position in every industry is long term sustainable. Even in your post you talk about how China is already doing industrial policy to try to make sure that nvdia's position is obsoleted as soon as possible through energy subsidies.
aqouta
1d ago
Small quibble. Freedom of speech is indeed the right to keep your job in spite of your speech. The first amendment just doesn't guarantee that right. Freedom of speech is an ideal that needs to be balanced with other ideals, in this case freedom of association. If freedom of speech was our only master we would indeed insist that no one be fired for what they say on the job. I only say this because people tend to conflate freedom of speech with the first amendment. 1A is about the government and free speech is a larger idea than just your relationship with the state. When a platform like reddit or twitter bans you they are actually meaningfully reducing your ability to speak freely in violation of freedom of speech without violating 1A at all.
Your employer firing you because of your speech may very well be unobjectionable and on the net good, but it does violate freedom of speech.
aqouta
3d ago
This is probably something that's just inaccessible to me, but would that really solve that many people's discomfort?
It being inaccessible is I guess the point, but yeah, I'd much rather become fully female than stuck in between, which is one of the things that horrifies me about the whole 'transition as medicine' because it really can't deliver. Being stuck between would mostly distress me because I'd have a broken body that can't really do either gender role, it would be like finding myself crippled. It's not even just strictly the whole form baby thing, although that alone would be huge, but it would make all sorts of relationships more strange.
The whole thing about being cis by default is that you can offload a lot of whatever it is trans people claim to feel about their social dissonance onto just following these really straightforward scripts. I'm a guy, I can wear the normal guy clothes, go to the gym and follow a bro split to get moderately good results, and a thousand other things that pretty much just work. If I'm stuck in between then I'm in the wilderness. Nothing is designed for you, even if you pass then there is a surprise penis you need to explain to perspective partners.
That may all seem pretty trivial to someone with a strong sense of gender, and it all really is logistics, but hopefully it serves to highlight that it isn't the girlness or boyness that bothers me, it is the logistics and a full transition just has intrinsically better logistics. I think this reflects the intent behind the original cis by default concept because it avoids the whole being crippled thing and tests only if you care a lot about the girlness or boyness.
aqouta
3d ago
This isn't really what the meaning of cis by default is. It's the trans attempt to square the circle that a lot of people, when asked how they'd feel if they had the body of the opposite sex to make them empathize with the trans discomfort, just shrug their shoulders because besides logistics it just wouldn't be that big of a deal
aqouta
3d ago
"how would you react if a mad-but-exceptionally-skilled plastic surgeon kidnapped you and gave you the exact outside appearance and vocal patterns of the opposite gender, without messing with your gonads, menses, yada yada; we'll call the population that had this done to them momen and sound like a bad scifi flick, they're tots not women-in-your-specific-sense"
Eh, this doesn't quite fit because I'd be going from it being easy to play my biological role to it being difficult to play my biological role. You really can't dispense with the fully functional for phenotypical sex shift, that's load bearing.
Redacted
kinda feels weird to dump the full name.
Madrid and Toledo were both extremely beautiful cities. Madrid has a historic core (from ~1600) that is surrounded by successive layers of development: the center feels like a medieval or Renaissance labyrinth, the zones a little bit to the north or south have wide boulevards and apartment buildings that reminded me a little of Paris or Washington DC, and even further out you have something that feels like an American suburb. I spent most of my time in the city center: all the museums, restaurants, and even supermarkets were within walking or metro distance.
As a fellow car free guy in Chicago, I do think if you're willing to put a ride share app on your phone and set aside a few hundred bucks a month you can get the best of both worlds. You can get to most places with the CTA pretty reasonably and if you need to go across lines in a hurry you just grab an uber.
aqouta
7d ago
Read into the policy before you do anything stupid but my understanding is that, after some lock out period, suicide doesn't actually invalidate life insurance policies.
aqouta
8d ago
So yeah, give me money Donnie. I’m happy to be your client, and in exchange for supporting you, I’ll take more money anytime you feel like handing it out. Your patronage is genuinely better for me, and the best patronage I’ll ever have, because I won’t be around in the military for King James the First. I find it very unlikely that this will happen, as in less than 0.001% chance, but if Donnie ordered the troops to move on Congress and the Supreme Court, I wouldn’t care. Those organizations have been against me since before I was born. They have proven that they have nothing to give me as a client, and in fact take from me and from my children. Better by far that a new patron/client relationship begins to develop, so that change can be made.
These are the thoughts of a mercenary. You can think your country is doing wrong and want to improve it but it stands for something. And yes, you should be mad and you should want things to change and we've all been failed in many ways but you really want to call off the whole 250 year American experiment because of these set backs? The fight is over, democracy has failed? a decade long mania that's on the pullback and we're giving up? That's pathetic.
disgusted by this insight into the mind of someone who gave the best years of his life to his country
Spare me the melodrama, Civilian roofers have a higher fatality rate than service members. I don't mean to strike out at the important status we afford our soldiers too much but I'll do no more damage to it than your whining does.
I don’t tell you how to be an accountant
We're talking about how to be an American and we all have a stake in this thing.
aqouta
9d ago
I don't find this an impossible to understand perspective, I do find it a rather odd perspective for someone hanging around this place to have. If you truly can't be bothered about systemic discrimination against your racial group then I'm tempted to say "don't worry about it kitten". Like what are you even doing here? Go have a slice and a brew and let the rest of us sort the big problems out.
aqouta
10d ago
There's a lot here, thank you for the reply. Your analysis of the various 'peoples' is interesting. I find a lot of it compelling but, as a true believer in my people's experiment - and how lost I'd be if I weren't, I suppose this is how a practicing and believing christian must feel when they are baffled by how atheists can function without god - I do find things to disagree on. I'll have to digest it before that pushback can come up in some future engagement.
aqouta
11d ago
White people like (presumably) you, people who buy into this «human capital» doctrine, are simply people. Chinese and Jewish people are a people, and in their own cultural frame even the People – a distinction which is a bit better articulated than in many other cultures, but in no way an abnormal way of thinking. They are ethnocentric. Goys and barbarians are not part of the people, and the people will coordinate to achieve collective gain in zero-sum games with barbarians and goys. That's table stakes for a self-aware successful culture.
Maybe it's downstream of deep Christian roots but this is not how we, the liberals, want things to be. There is no contradiction between liking chinese people and disliking one institution that they are currently forming(of course as you note the CCP isn't even the only largely Han Chinese ethnic government), any more than there would be with liking German people and opposing the Nazis. The Chinese people have had previous governments, and so have us westerns. Not only are there obviously previous American presidencies that I oppose, in many ways I oppose the current one. And yet I love my people, I love America and Americans. I love our optimism, the puritan work ethic, the celebration of success. Many of these same great qualities I recognize in the Chinese people I have met.
To the degree that Fuentes strikes a cord against Israeli/Jewish influence it's because it's deep in our marrow that ethnocentrism is evil. And that's why he will ultimately fail. He makes Americans feel uncomfortable dissonance about their gut deep opposition to ethnic centrism and the obvious ethnocentrism of israel, Israel itself being made up of the world's most famous victims of ethnocentrism, But that same energy he's using to drum up resentment of israeli influence is what he opposes. It's why he has to ride the line of praising the jews for serving their ethnic interests as he opposes them. In his preferred world view there is absolutely nothing wrong with scheming in your ethnic interest. I don't think he will be able to turn the Americans in this way, I don't think that's in our souls.
All of this is very mush-headed. There's no need to antagonize any ethnic group or reject cooperation, but there is a necessity to acknowledge that major nations represent essentially ethnic interests that are partially shared by their diasporas, and there is not a single non-Western nation that is straight up invested in propping up the West for «values» or whatever. Including Israel. All alliances will be alliances of convenience.
Your post is passive just descriptive. Do you endorse ethno nationalism or just observe it? In my favorite post of yours you once said
I wear my sympathies on my sleeve. I have little sympathy for the Chinese regime and understand its faults, but I side with it (to the extent that this matters) as part of a gamble unlikely to pay off, but the only one left to me and my people to check the tumorous growth of the monster you happy lot sustain with the sweat of your brow.
What is that monster we sustain? What is it that you hope to see vanquish it and take its place? Could it truly be this cynical ethno nationalist? And if not what?
aqouta
11d ago
I'm also no enemy of the jews but I don't think you're really engaging with fuentes.
I think the Fuentes position is more that he thinks a strong nationalist country is the ideal and that "World Jewery" has had preventing the rise of a strong nationalist country at the very top of their priority list since the holocaust. He sees members of this class to have a strong influence on national politics. That in pursuing the prevention of a strong nationalist country forming they supported immigration on the grounds that it would water down any singular racial element taking control could cause problems if certain immigrant groups had their own antisemitic problems is just the classic golem attacking its master trope. He, probably correctly, thinks that if he worked with the Jews to get rid of the muslims then the jews would return to undermining his project at every turn.
aqouta
11d ago
Being broke wouldn't be such a big setback tbh, I'd need to like develop some beyond the pale predilections and then have them exposed or something to get ostracized from my friends and family. In which case I think I'd move far away and start over, maybe the west coast.
aqouta
11d ago
It's just rare to be able to slay someone in their motte and Piers had exposed the soft underbelly of his motte.
aqouta
13d ago
It's very strange to try and portray one nation conquering and subsuming another as the pro-sovereignty position. Ukraine was the buffer zone, Russia is the one shrinking the size of the buffer here. Accusing the EU of wanting vassal states in opposition to russia which operates on the model of creating actual vassal states borders on absurd. BRICS does not exist, it's a joke, the two largest "members" of BRICS have a current live territorial dispute.
aqouta
13d ago
Is piers Morgan a nakedly progressive partisan? My understanding is that he's what passes for a respectable centrist type in bonger land.
aqouta
14d ago
In some parts he had clever prepared responses and seemed to navigate the conversation pretty well, but that's such a basic thing. It's like watching someone sink tons of three pointers but can't even dribble.
aqouta
14d ago
finally got around to watching the interview. On balance I think Fuentes out performed but made a lot of errors. On the school shooting thing I think he needed to explain the per capita thing, when the fact check came back from Morgan and he said they both do school shootings at about the same rate he should have said "so your example of whites misbehaving is the one area the behave as poorly as blacks" I was baffled by him not making the point.
aqouta
24d ago
This can't be earnest, right? Like, this is some sort of meta-trolling post-irony in-joke account. Pepe The Frog but for weirdo progressive women to chortle about while wearing Pussy hats, right?
Yes, it is obviously rage bait and not the first of it's type. It's a reliable way to earn thousands of dollars on X, the everything app.
aqouta
24d ago
Your claim was that these developments were a plot to turn red areas more blue. This is simply not true. They are primarily built in blue areas and in red areas even if allowed they are subject to all the restrictions and in fact more restrictions than market rate housing. The red areas resist both. They resist density whole sale. Which is the original topic, red areas are NIMBY, they refuse to allow housing that land owners, developers and perspective tenants all agree on building. That's it, that's the whole story. You defending blocking, you defend people in red areas nosing into other people's property rights and telling them what they can and cannot build on their own land.
aqouta
25d ago
In particular, the state government wants to build multi-family low-income housing in Republican-leaning areas of blue states in order to turn those areas Democratic-leaning. No need to gerrymander if you can move the population.
As someone in the business of financing the building of multi-family low income housing, when people try to build multi-family low income housing in places that happen to be red the goal is to make money, it is not to, in a 7 degree round about way, do gerrymandering. There are much much easier ways to go about gerrymandering than carefully leaning on the state HUD to favorably grant tax credits to developer proposals that might move a couple hundred residents into one district that may or may not vote blue. Keep in mind a lot of these low income housing units are earmarked preferentially for like veterans and LIHTC recipients are much less likely to vote than the average person. The hud doesn't really even control who gets housing directly even if it was behaving nakedly partisanly. Thinking these are vehicles for gerrymandering is like thinking stock traders spend a lot of their time and effort trading in such a way that left leaning companies fail irrespective of their earning's report.
In fact, far outpacing the gerrymandering interest is the Community Reinvestment Act requirements on banks, who are the largest funders of LIHTC. Banks are required to invest in the communities where they operate or face increased scrutiny. The Low income housing tax credit offers an attractive and stable way to satisfy this requirement. Plop down LIHTC projects in the red areas where you have branches and you've satisfied your obligations in a way that offers a generous and steady return.
aqouta
30d ago
And funnily enough I can imagine almost any of the antagonists in that story thinking they're the Peter Gibbons of the office story.
We recently had a guy come through that we had to terminate. It started off with him pushing back in a way that we actually mostly appreciated. We got flagged because one of our functional accounts that manages our ssrs data source used a non rotating password and we needed to vault it. Turns out there is no firm approved way to integrate ssrs directly with our password vaults. The solution that came down and he was asked to implement was to write a program that would run in the server, pilfer the key and cycle them manually. He rightly pointed out that this violated the whole purpose of a password vault, and we were on his side pushing for an exception. But when the powers that be declined to give us that exception he couldn't just shrug with us and do what needed to be done. He started getting into arguments with higher ups and in general bad mouthing our department. I don't know the exact thing that pushed it over the line but I heard actual threats might have been involved and eventually his credentials were apprupted deactivated.
He too probably identified with Peter Gibbons and thought those of us who just went along were hapless automatons because we were willing to degrade ourselves by implementing bad practices to get off a corporate naughty list.
In real life your office is full of real people living real lives. They're not one dimensional characters from a 90s movie about atomization. Some of them probably do suck to work with, some even in the ways lampooned in office space or the office. If you get too caught up in role playing Peter Gibbons you probably can succeed but it's not likely to make you any happier than he was in the movie.
A lot of your links seem to be broken and affixing themotte's url in front of them.
I guess I should have noted that I oppose Trump/American Autarky designs in the strongest terms. The man is without vision or sense and deviates wildly from decades of American policy.
It should probably be noted that this policy of autarky didn't exactly turn out well for China over the following two centuries ending in their century of humiliation. The period itself was also an aberation as China was center to a vast trade network before the Qing. Do you have some theory of the recent rise of China that does not require the liberalization of its markets? Explanations for its backwardness coinciding with their close? I suppose this time could be different, China woke for a few decades, learns all the world's secrets and then returns to slumber dead to the rest of the world. But I think the Chinese are smart people, they won't repeat that mistake.
And no, the American hegemony has not historically been about autarky, We've historically traded security guarantees for access to international markets.
Tariffs are industrial policy and of course China imposes tariffs and had before the trade war. This is simply a game of Russel conjugates. I again oppose Trump's buffoonish actions but to think the CCP doesn't employ coercive tactics in trade is pretty surprising. This is a place with a habit of outright banning outside competitors, not just tariffing them. market access for IP bargains, forced technology transfer, straight up state sponsored industrial espionage and Cyber theft(APT10, PLA Unit 61398, Equifax hack, ect). It's just not the case that China has risen in some saintly within the rules manner.
This conflates a few different worlds. My model for an ai future if ai drops marginal labor cost to the base electricity needed to complete the task(but doesn't go infinite intelligence like the yuddites expect) isn't every nation turning inwards, like civilizational wire headers. I find that a bleak image frankly but I suppose some may and China may be one that does if that comes to pass. I don't find that future particularly likely really. And if it goes all the way to AGI then all I know is I want someone with my interests to have been the one to do the alignment work.
This map just seems to be a measure of economy size relative to nearest neighbors, no? Mongolia isn't a huge player in the international trade Arena, it's just landlocked between two countries with economies that are much much larger than its.
this is an interesting point and framing, thanks. I hadn't been thinking of the precise scenario where labor costs drop to marginal much. It does seem far-fetched but we are in the time where far-fetched things happen. I still find things shaking out this way unlikely and if they do I think the world would be unstable. When labor is very cheap and raw materials, even if they can be harvested much more efficiently, are the scarce thing then what is the offense/defense equilibrium?
also replying to this comment
The CF40 piece is interesting but doesn't address my point. They're arguing PPP calculations understate Chinese purchasing power, that Chinese people get more stuff per yuan than World Bank stats suggest. I'll grant it all for the sake of argument because the PPP discussion is boring and one can look elsewhere for it. My claim was about income distribution, not purchasing power. Household consumption being 40% of GDP means households receive 40% of national income to spend. The rest goes to the state and corporate sectors, funding the investment-heavy model. Even if every yuan buys more calories than we thought, that doesn't change the share going to households versus the share going to industrial buildout.
This matters because the investment heavy model requires external demand. Household savings fund the investments through financial repression - artificially low interest rates transfer wealth from savers to state-favored borrowers. The resulting production has to go somewhere, and domestic consumers don't have the purchasing power to absorb it because their savings were the input. Rebalancing toward consumption has been official CCP policy since 2006. In that time, household consumption has moved from
35% to38% of GDP. They know the problem. They haven't solved it because the mechanisms that suppress consumption are load-bearing for the political economy.More options
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