aqouta
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aqouta
2d ago
He has a vision, though we can debate the merits of that vision, I agree he's a pretty vulgar individual and his execution is often appalling. But was “decades of American policy” sustainable? The permanent deficit only makes sense if you can serve the growing debt indefinitely. Why should we assume that this can hold?
I could go on at length about my problems with Trump but at the hope of not starting too many skirmishes with this forum I'll limit myself to saying that Trump's gift is identifying an aggrieved feeling in his base and validating/stoking it. If that means vanquishing woke, which I mostly agree with, he will try to do that. If that means striking at China who much of his base holds responsible for decaying rust belt towns then he'll do that. He is not setting out to balance our budget or deal with the infinite deficit, he has increased the deficit. Long term sustainability is not something he cares about, part of his appeal that got him elected was dumping the idea of sustainability by breaking the GOP on Medicare's obvious unsustainability. He's a slop populist that refuses to acknowledge trade offs, a national embarrassment. Perhaps the only thing worse than him being in charge is the Bernie wing of the democratic party that looks to Europe's fat decay into a retirement home with envious eyes and wants to squash our attempt at relevance through ai dominance with pure stupid ludditism.
As I've said multiple times, Trump is correct in his diagnosis even if ham-fisted with treatment.
If you've said Trump is right in his diagnosis of the American sickness multiple times then you've been wrong multiple times, Trump doesn't know about or even think about the American sickness. He has diagnosed the ugly populist urgings of his base and as people are often mad about real problems sometimes strikes out at those problems in total ignorance of their structure. Our problem has something to do with trade so he strikes out against trade, broadly, untargeted and with great zeal.
If America becomes materially productive, it will diminish European share of the pie, you can't sustain your consumption with just soy and LNG exports, something has to give.
well no, it's your model that we should be trying to sustain our consumption with just Soy and LNG exports, the raw commodities while every nation does their own production. 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 and maybe we could encourage some home grown competition but integrate with the partners without like, doing state sponsored spying on their designs to that end.
Qianlong still had some clue, thanks to Heshen, who was ultimately executed for vast corruption, leaving the Qing blind for decades. Then, it was too late and they grew too dysfunctional to modernize like Japan.
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. 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 as some pending competitive domestic chip manufacturing that you seem to think is likely. And it parallels nicely with your history lesson, which I do genuinely appreciate. I try to not let my bias for democracy show too prominently in my analysis, but it seems important to point out the downsides here and also that it's not clear how succession after Xi is done is supposed to work smoothly.
They mean precisely the opposite, that Chinese exports are too cheap and abundant, and call it unfair. What exactly do you want them to do? Enforce the internal demand for more expensive foreign goods, such as subsidizing private consumption of Macbooks? Get worse at manufacturing? Make their subsidies as ineffectual as European ones? Focus on welfare spending, until they get old, slow down their value-add climb, and fall behind far enough to balance trade?
What I'd like is kind of like an onion, we've got a few layers here.
At first are the demands I have for my own government that started our back and forth a while back. I want to not surrender our advantage for no real gain. 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. If it's not, and this is my position, then we should under no circumstances allow NVDIA to export our most powerful chips to China. And I don't want to hear any free trade paeans on this, China wipes its ass with free trade.
As for what I want China to do. Well I do have family there now, they're more privileged than most Chinese people so the reforms I'd like aren't exactly for maximizing their benefits, but I'd like China to shift its focus from out competing the world and territorial conquest to getting its internal household consumption up. I'd like further Hukou reforms so there are fewer second and third class Chinese citizens. 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. Step away from autarky. Perhaps geopolitically untenable but I'd also like to see them stop aiding Putin in his horrific war in Ukraine. Of course this is a bit of the awkwardness that I've just listed a bunch of things in the "what if we pretend AI is a mundane technology" world. 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, but he doesn't seem particularly AI pilled honestly.
Your security guarantees don't look very credible and monetizable now.
which ones don't? Yes, Trump is a bully to our allies in an embarrassing and disgusting way, but the line people are fighting over right now is how much we should be materially supporting people who aren't even our allies and just have implicit value to people that are our allies to prop up.
I don't oppose any of that, it's fair game so long as it works. By coercion I mean buffoonery like forcing allies to invest in American production
I'll continue to not want to defend Trump policies but will point out that this is similar in effect to Chinese Market access for IP and tech transfer policies where China gets a substantial amount of the return on foreign investment and then forces the foreign competitor out once it can replicate the production anyways. At least Japan would get some lasting equity in this deal formulation. China's high-speed rail program was built on technology transferred from Siemens, Kawasaki, Bombardier, and Alstom. Do those companies or their home countries enjoy any stake in CRRC's international expansion?
Pretty much, but that doesn't change the conclusion. The US is a vast economy. China is becoming comparably vast (or is already bigger depending on how you count), and specifically on goods production it's just no contest. Such economies gravitate towards autarky, both for security and macroeconomic reasons and because of basic logistics.
There's a big difference between aggressively pursuing autarky and just the natural internal trade that exists because you're a big country and most of the things you buy aren't hyper specialized products. I keep hammering this because it's important. America doesn't, or at least didn't, see it as a problem that its most advanced chip products are the result of cooperation between firms for dozens of countries. Yes, if you're buying groceries in the US then naturally they will be sourced relatively locally and generally the most common things a person consumes are commodity and service products that don't gain much by having a long supply chain. Every local area is probably going to need to answer the "where do we get milk from?" question in their own way. 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, but autarky is the madness that has Trumpists trying to figure out how they're going to produce coffee beans in the contiguous united states hundreds of miles from where they can grow effectively.
I repeat that Chinese household consumption is underrated due to in-kind transfers (such as all this public infrastructure)
well, kind of. The high speed rail buildout you may have a point. 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. At least the American excess spending is circulating among American Doctors and Pharma companies, which yes are actually making miraculous drugs.
American consumption is overrated due to Baumol disease.
Baumol's applies to all sectors, household, state and industrial at least equally, probably more to state, so this can't explain inflated household consumption as a percent of gdp. It's the same factor in all sectors, it cancels out.
Normally if a point isn't responded to I don't insist on bringing it back up but I need to make an exception here. It's really important that the whole Chinese industrial production system relies on exports and the CCP has been unable to change that fact despite ticking past two five year plans of it being a goal. It just is the case that Chinese people enjoy less of the fruit of their labor than Americans do.
Right. That's the big question, isn't it.
It certainly seems like a question central to the world of inward facing nations you're putting forward. How is China getting the 70+% of its oil imports in this future? The iron ore? The soy beans? Surely they have resources but this seems a hollow sort of autarky.
aqouta
2d ago
Depending on how you define “neoliberal”
This is of course always the rub.
“Keep the goods flowing; why should we say no to their foreign aid?”
I think this is best described as just the classical naive econ model. As far as models go this is at the very least middling, with most popular variations from it being the result of poorly thought out motivated reasoning for doing things that people want to do for other reasons. Still, one should not rely on game theory to keep the scorpion from jabbing you to death or however that fable goes.
aqouta
2d ago
Oh the high and mighty. The dude ran a company making hardware for gamers and crypto miners and got lucky that it ended up being civilizational important and that they bet on EUV big. He is by all measures obviously an excellent business man, impressively ahead of the game on this latest DRAM shortage. But none of that is evidence of some kind of long term view. Spare us the Ubermench talk, I thought we were supposed to be the nazis in decline.
aqouta
2d ago
A lot of your links seem to be broken and affixing themotte's url in front of them.
Your narrative is a bit out of date. How will Europeans pay for Chinese imports if China has no need of their exports (in «fine crafted goods», services or anything)? Maybe they just won't, if China can do all that fine crafting cheaper and better. But they will face the same issue with American imports, indeed already are facing:
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.
American Hegemony is not about building some happy global family with a division of labor. From software down to extractive industries, American Empire wants to be like Emperor Qianlong said: «our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders. There was therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce».
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.
The main difference is that China got there with industrial policy and human capital, and you're trying to get there with tariffs and coercion and a Wunderwaffe.
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.
A center of commerce in what sense? The US currently has a very low fraction of international trade in GDP – around the level of Pakistan. The US wasn't a global center of commerce during its ascent either. You pat yourselves on the back for importing some junk but it's not really spreading a lot of your wealth around, it's only large in absolute terms. China is simply already doing what you want to do once you get «AGI», and by 2038, if AGI plans pan out, your narrative will be laughably quaint.
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.
The US currently has a very low fraction of international trade in GDP
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.
Moreover, what's wrong with that? Both nations are large, decently situated and can, in theory, produce all goods in prolific abundance within their own borders more economically than imports would be; and China is entitled to a larger and more diverse internal market on account of population size. There are some hard natural endowments – Australia has more accessible mineral wealth, Atacama desert has excellent solar resource, I don't know – but commodities are cheap. Maybe they'll become less cheap? What remains scarce after labor and R&D are commodified? Land? Copper? Wombs? We need to think of how the world would operate when major nations are capable of industrial autarky, because modulo some Butlerian Jihad we will have to deal with it anyway.
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% to 38% of GDP. They know the problem. They haven't solved it because the mechanisms that suppress consumption are load-bearing for the political economy.
aqouta
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
4d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
9d 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
10d 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
11d 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
12d 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
13d 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
13d 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
13d 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
14d 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
15d 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
15d 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
16d 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
16d 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.
Trump is indeed importantly bad. It's important for me to lay out why I think Trump is bad because, as you know because you keep deploying "what about what trump is doing" as counters to my arguments, much of what makes him bad is that he's doing things China has been doing for a while now. And you also use his stance on chips as a major line of support for your triumphalism of Chinese chip production. Our models of him diverge on this subject in ways that are important to the discussion.
There's some nuance I could edge at here, China itself runs deficits both at the national level and massively at the local government levels so this is hardly just a problem for the US. But I don't fundamentally disagree that the debt spending is unsustainable and should be curbed. My point was that Trump is not doing this, his "vision" does not include doing this and he makes even less convincing noises about doing it than previous administrations that did not do it either even if he sometimes burbles up some incoherent thoughts about how the tariffs will pay down the debt right before promising to instead give that money out in checks.
Well no, there are other options. 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. There is an important difference in how the two nations behave when they rely on an outside actor in their supply chain, this is core to the question of autarky.
In the earlier post you quoted I gave you three levels of AI plateauing that seem extremely plausible to me, although the first and third seem like more likely states if I'm honest. 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. You've thought about that potential world more than I did and found some interesting features of it that I thank you for sharing. It really is a world worth thinking about. But I don't think it's the more likely world.
Yes, it is bad that we've been dominated by the boomers for so long and have elected so many elderly candidates in the past decade or so. 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? Can some other entity make the call to push him out without fear of retaliation if he declines but refuses to accept it? These are civilizationally important questions.
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.
And maybe another of his biases is this belief in the importance of autarky. As you go on to say he espoused autarkic rhetoric of the importance to have no "choke points" and that desire was processed by the state media apparatus into a report about where those "choke points" are and then the state apparatus set about alleviating them and succeeded in that goal, well it succeeded in it as far as that very same state apparatuses measurements are concerned. But this is all downstream of his view that it's very important to be entirely self sufficient and autarkic. That isn't a fact of the universe, it's a bias in Xi's head that the state apparatus confirmed and attempted to address. Other nations do not attempt to be free of any foreign dependencies and it's not a costless goal to pursue.
Maybe further economic independence is a good thing, maybe it's not, but either way China will pursue it because it's what Xi thinks is right and it would pursue it into ruin if that's where it leads. I doubt the autarky demand will lead China to doom, but there are policies and biases that could. Maybe Xi gets a militant edge and goes after Taiwan too early or too late or gets it too easily and then pushes too far for other islands. There's a lot running on one guy who may live another twenty years but for how much longer will he remain as sharp as he was in 2020? senility sure hit Biden pretty fast.
I am indeed very thankful that both of our out of touch leader's terrible decisions cancel out.
You're telling me refusing China State of the Art chips might get more of the most talented researchers to come to the US and this somehow forms itself into an argument to send them the chips because as a second order effect the talent remaining there will demand to use our chips? I think the first order effect swamps here and is an incredibly good argument for not sending them our chips. I think a job offer at our frontier labs should in fact come with a free golden Trump citizenship card stapled to an H200.
Turning off export controls to prolong export controls is a little too big brained for me. 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. But at the cost of our largest advantage in the race this is silly.
With the benefit of a new night's sleep and a reread through this thread I think we can cease the back and forth on this topic, Trump era American international trade policy is so bad that it has become as nakedly extractive as Chinese international trade practices have been for decades. Going back and forth on examples is not productive. It seems we agree that nations today will act in their economic self interest. My point is that America has an economic self interest in using its trade policy to remain ahead in AI and we discuss this elsewhere.
These are American brains. We claim those. It's one of our things. Homogenous nations get an easier time remaining high trust and unified, us mutt nations get to claim all the output done in our name, that's only fair.
Looking at Samsung printed on the back of my phone "Are you Chinese?". I dispute this dichotomy.
Well yeah, that's the very expensive part. We can argue, and I largely agree, that the FDA should have lower standards; but providing proof that a drug is safe and effective to a very high standard is not pure rent seeking. There's genuine economic value there that the rest of the world often freeloads on, even if rationally we might prefer a lower but less expensive standard.
Sure, we can quibble around on the accounting, but China's household consumption as a percent of GDP isn't just low compared to the US, it's low compared to basically all developed economies. The EU runs around 52% without the US healthcare peculiarities.
But more importantly you haven't addressed the demand problem. 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. The debt of the local governments turns acidic and the whole thing seizes. Economies are complex systems, it's not enough to be obsessed with minimizing the inputs, you need to ensure the outputs work too.
I know you're skeptical of the importance of demand. Maybe this will make more sense if we swap the sides. Why were American businesses so willing to risk such high demands to gain access to the Chinese internal market? More demand is good right? It's good for companies when they find lots of new customers? What happens to a company if it suddenly loses 90% of its customers? What happens to a country if all of its companies suddenly lose 90% of their customers? From a god's eye naive view you might look down at this country and say "what's the big deal? There are lots of people in that country that could use new cars or widgets, this seems like a win, we don't have to send the cars and widgets to foreigners, just give those people the products. But those products were produced with debt on the assumption of payment that the country's people can't provide. The production was all forward shifted before the payment and now the payment isn't coming.
Well wait, this is a bit of a dodge. Are these other nations not getting access to the labor erasers?
This bulverism is beneath you and something you seem to always return to. These beliefs are neither in my heart nor on my lips. So frequently you accuse interlocutors of believing in vile orcs or subhuman bugmen. Give me a break man.
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