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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   36286 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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How do we square this with real world happenings? Deepseek, DF-21, Chinese batteries, the fact that they're now selling basic everything at competitive prices etc?

I am aware there's shitty research and Chinese are unusually good at gaming systems, but they deliver.

Or, you know, they operate the world's biggest HSR system without incurring massive casualties.

What fraction of a billion 100+ IQ people need to deliver to generate a GDP per capita similar to Mexico driven by, largely, the same factor- heavy industry.

I doubt that PPP adjusted Mexican GDP is same ad Chinese..

Their high speed trains derail sometimes and some have been slowed down to make them less likely to derail. They also have high ticket costs and low ridership. The system is propped up by government spending and could not sustain itself on ticket costs. I know some people really like high speed rail, but I'm not too hot on it in general and Chinese HSR in particular.

I have worked in Chinese factories. I know they can make stuff. I also know Chinese factory workers need constant monitoring and correction. There's something off with their work culture. They are not lazy. But if they have to be careful rather than fast they can't do it without someone like me watching them. And when I leave they start doing the work really sloppy and fast.

I don't see any contradiction between Chinese research publications being trash and also they make batteries and electric cars and DJI drones. They just need good factory supervision and quality control.

I think you are extremely overindexing on your experience. A century or so ago they were stereotyped as lazy too. This is a matter of culture that can change very quickly.

I've never heard of a lazy Chinese stereotype. My American public schooling taught me about how they were worked very hard in abusive indentured servitude in the 1800s.

And 150 years ago they were stereotyped as undesirable immigrants because they were able/willing to work harder for less money and undercut white workers. "Coolie" had all the connotations of "illegal Mexican day labourer" in the current year.

I have seen exact opposite claim: that ridership is sufficient and there aren't really any new serious crashes. Wasn't the last one in '17?

And when I leave they start doing the work really sloppy and

Fining them for off tolerance parts didn't work?

This was not a supplier, it was our own factory. Scrapping or reworking parts is burning our own money.

In that sense we had more leverage over external suppliers in that they had to be in spec or we could reject their parts and it is their problem if that makes them lose money.

We had a major customer reject a large order of a part due to it being out of spec. It was a disaster. I was on a plane within a few days.

A bit of googling claims Chinese HSR is not financially sustainable and survives on taxpayer funding and hundreds of billions of dollars in debt. But that's true for other HSR projects and not a particularly Chinese issue. Planes are just too fast and cheap and HSR way too expensive for HSR to make financial sense.

The issue with Chinese HSR is that it became a sort of flagship national pride / soft power / foreign influence vector during the post-2008 stimulus period.

For various (mostly American-adjacent) geopolitical-meets-green reasons, high speed rail became an international symbol of being a 'modern' and 'advanced' country, particularly because the Americans weren't into it. (For pretty sound economic reasons, but that doesn't stop good propaganda.) Building more and more HSR was not only a quote-unquote 'easy' way to beat the US at a metric of global prestige, but it was a complimentary infrastructure investment with the construction boom and the early Belt-and-Road infrastructure project wave (and thus a Chinese jobs program / influence investment overseas). China was a Train Power who could spare trains and track for a reasonable price and no strings attached* (*terms and conditions apply), and all that.

The issue on the domestic front was that the construction boom was a bubble, and the dynamics of the Chinese system that led to ghost cities also led to high speed rail to those sort of ghost city projects, even though the fundamental issue- like in a lot of places- is the human geography dispersion. People need movement within cities, or from suburbs to cities, more than they need movement between cities.

I feel like this goes back to the communist roots of the PRC, and it was a similar problem with the USSR in the olden days: tick the boxes, meet the quotas, who gives a damn if the end product is no good? The political officers only care about making things look productive and good.

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