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There's a solid point that the U.S. being able to offer a higher standard of living than virtually anywhere else is its single greatest power to tempt defection and dissuade its own defectors. As you say, if you defect somewhere you don't have immediate cultural ties, you'll almost certainly end up living a far crappier lifestyle once the initial rewards for your valorous actions are spent.
Like how in the Hunt for Red October the defectors manage to persuade themselves that American life will be idyllic if they can pull it off.
What does the US have that China doesn't? Certainly not safer streets.
Shanghai: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ff29nDLBzaA
New York: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6y5CqAHxGX0
The Chinese govt is more authoritarian, you aren't allowed to go shoot guns. They are always watching you. But they can and will pay the big bucks if you have something to offer. They pinch Taiwanese semiconductor engineers by 4xing their salary. They bring in ex-SF or former air force pilots to train their people - on substantial pay packages. I bet we don't hear about the guy who handed over the F-35 radar schematics for 8 million because it makes people think. The US military is not exactly the highest paying organization in the world.
Furthermore, they might throw in a cute girlfriend. Hinkle was going out with Miss Russia.
Really, what stops people defecting is that they'd lose all their friends, family and have to live somewhere else they don't know, where most speak a foreign language. That's why most people stay in their home countries, even when wealth differences are quite stark.
In practice, I think there are a number of ways in which living as a moderately rich Westerner in China is still much worse than living as a PMC Westerner in the West. The reason those ex-fighter pilots and so on take the million dollars to train the Chinese etc is precisely that they expect to be able to take their gains and return home to the US or England.
Look at perhaps the most famous Western dissident of modern times, Ed Snowden, now defected to Russia and granted citizenship personally by Putin last year. Snowden is admittedly an edge case because he didn’t actually defect to Russia, he just betrayed his country and fled to Russia. He was a well-paid software guy living in Hawaii by the beach with his acrobat girlfriend. He doesn’t seem to be living large out there, he hasn’t been granted a tony Moscow apartment with servants, premier dacha and an annual five star vacation to the Maldives (the kind of lifestyle the Russian elite enjoy). He seems to live a pretty mediocre existence, living largely off (Zoom) speech income, the kind of income someone of his class in Russia might live, maybe worse even.
My guess is Hawaii was still better. Similarly, there are people who live well in China, but almost all are Chinese save for a (shrinking) few rich expats in finance and a handful of other industries in Beijing and Shanghai who work for Western companies.
So.. do you really ly believe Americans owe allegiance to thoroughly authoritarian, secretive institutions that have usurped power in their republic and acting in the spirit of the US constitution by fighting against unaccountable tyranny is a betrayal ?
Is that a reasonable summary of your position ?
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Snowden did what he did for ideological reasons, there's always a quantum of those people, but I would be willing to bet that most defectors/traitors are so because of money or threats (either from the inside or from the outside).
I think he's the exception, which is why he's both famous and even could do what he did. There's almost no reason to suspect a guy like that. But most people aren't willing to risk a very nice life on the altar of the 4th amendment. And I present as evidence the fact that basically nothing happened after he blew the whistle.
See also: Reality Winner, Private Manning.
The two biggest leaks in the last few decades were both ideologically motivated, as were many if not most during the Cold War.
Well that’s because he (and Manning) were emotionally unstable idiots who thought they had found some major malfeasance and then leaked massive amounts of data not actually showing that.
We'll have to disagree that constant universal violation of the 4th amendment and contempt of Congress to hide it doesn't constitute major malfeasance.
Not that it matters of course.
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What is the lifestyle of a non-Chinese expat living in China like?
How does it compare to the lifestyle of the average Chinese immigrant to the U.S.?
https://www.thepackablelife.com/travel/journal/living-in-china
Seems OK for English teachers. I hear that white men are considered attractive there too, though that's diminishing.
I don't understand, why do people think China is this super-poor country? There are parts of China that are poor but the major cities you're most likely to be in are quite rich, as shown in my videos. You don't even get accosted by crazy homeless people either. One of my female friends went to China and was raving about how safe she felt everywhere, even at night. If you sold state secrets to them, they'd presumably be positively inclined towards you and unlikely to turn the police state against you.
I don't want to move to China because it's not my homeland and because I don't want to learn Mandarin. But it's not like you're moving to Moscow in the 1960s, where you'll be condemned to a leaky apartment and cars that don't work. There's loads of gadgets and cool things in China.
I've heard that the major cities have awful smog problems and the rest of the country is, like, Central America level poor.
Yeah, the air quality is way less than what we’re accustomed to in the West. It’s also highly variable, in our city I think about ten percent of the time the air was visibly bad, though also only about ten percent of the time was it good enough to meet WHO standards. I kept air filters running at all times.
Though from historic data and images it seems not that different from what people used to put up with in cities like Los Angeles.
Villages are quite poor, usually without even flush toilets, and with coal stove heating, but they’re kind of a relic. Part of my family still lives in a village, but almost everyone lives in the city in apartments of varying quality. Some are very nice, some would be nice only by broke American college student standards.
Keep in mind that even tier three cities have the amenities a Westerner would be accustomed too. Nice shopping malls with top brands, app based ride share, food delivery, parks, gyms, libraries, etc.
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I actually suspect the opposite. "If he'll spy for you, he'll spy on you."
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Standards of living overseas are not that bad. A low per-capita GDP is negated to some extent by greater purchasing power in dollars, so your ill-gotten gains go very far. Those countries have electricity, internet access, plumbing, cars, public transport, airport, etc. It's not like Somalia or something.
Sure. Just sucks for your kids.
compared to being in jail for rest of your life? that is probably worse for your kids
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You think that will matter in 30 years? Computers and robots will literally have 100% of the jobs.
No they will not.
source: the same as yours
I'll leave this very informative (and accurate) chart here for you.
It was put out about 25 years ago and we are right on track so far.
https://i.imgur.com/48wuJkO.jpeg
By 2050/60 one AI will have more compute than all human brains on earth.
Why you expect this to be unbound exponential curve rather than logistic function?
Also, lol at jpeg without source for dataset.
This is a famous chart by a famous author. I thought it would be well known in these circles.
It does not waive requirements to provide sources for claimed data - or be laughed out of the room.
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Do you have a meaningful counterargument to Wolfram's computational irreducibility thesis, or have you not considered the issue at all?
Kurzweil style number-go-up arguments are fun Whig catnip, but they completely handwave away crucial details. There's a reason Malthus' predictions ended up being wrong despite being mathematically sound.
Considering that wolfram alpha is now 100% obsolete due to AI advancements maybe he isn't the best sword to bring to this gunfight.
Yes he has an idea about complex systems needing to be fully simulated and in that way becoming the very thing they simulate. But guess what! Computational reducibility is a thing too, and it works really really well! Human brains do it every day even!
Bringing Malthus into this is also an interesting choice, considering he was wrong precisely since he underestimated the pace of technological change.
I'll take that as a no, since you restrict yourself to discussing the context of the argument instead of its substance.
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The question is whether it is worth giving up ever returning to the country which objectively has the best economic conditions and relocating to a country where you might not even have the skills (i.e. language fluency) to be of any economic value.
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Uh, aren’t well-off people with government connections in Russia and China doing quite well, even by American standards?
Russia and China could treat their defectors like local elites. They don’t.
I think they are doing extremely well in terms of luxury, even being able to ensure the best possible education for their children but there is something that you cannot buy in Russia or China. Political stability, trust and justice cannot be bought in these countries for any price. There is always a chance (and rather high, I would say) that Kremlin or CCP will knock at your door asking you for a favor, or even worse, seeing enemy in you. That's why all the progeny of Russian upper class, including Putin himself lives in the West.
Having to choose: being extremely wealthy Russian oligarch or just average citizen of Switzerland, I take the latter without any doubt, but it depends on a character obviously.
I doubt it. You really think Russian elites would leave their children in the West so the West would be free to arrest them on various bullshit charges like e.g. in the case of the Huawei founder's daughter?
Might be true for the merely very rich, but Putin? Lmao.
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