Not by coincidence, Japan is also the G7 member most distantly located from the other G7 members.

Would take its relative lack of diversity over per capita gains any day of the week. Though, sadly it may just be another function of geography, with lag factors.

So Bitcoin may be a Ponzi scheme with a market cap of $750bn, but so is Tesla. And Bitcoin has done less for the money transfer industry than Tesla has done for the motor industry (almost nothing).

Fred Reed is right – the attraction of a digital currency is as a stable store of value. Not as a wild speculative bet with downside.

The comparison with Japan is interesting. Maybe there are even more factors than just IQ and creativitiy,when it comes to science, maybe a third factor? Maybe just different ways of thinking? On the other hand, Chinese are extremely over-represented in American AI Labs. Maybe it’s really just a cultural thing.

they’re taking the worst cues from the rightoid side

sacrificing dominant power status over internet coins is stupid, so stupid that the universe itself will punish them, and i think it will be an extreme, civilization-ending punishment

I say to Putler: make plans to grab the rest of manchuria

On the other hand, India is going in the opposite, pushing both gene editing and crypto. China won’t be able to pull a “haha we best everyone shit” that led to their demise in the first place when there’s a literal transhumanist and maybe even fashpilled country on their doorstep – no better incentive to reverse dumb decisions

Is buying Urbit still the move?

Apparently you do not know much about China. Huawei is moving right now from hardware to software, start reading something new. China is prioritising cloud computing, big data, IOT, AI, smart cities, etc.
https://asiatimes.com/2020/10/us-war-on-huawei-misses-the-control-point/

There is a weird feeling of cognitive dissonance from the digital currency acolytes here in the U.S. They are almost always Leftoid believers in Climate Cooling / Warming / Change. Yet, digital currency mining is bad for the environment:

��� • Toxic substances are used to build the electronics.
��� • Miners use electricity from hydrocarbons, including coal.
��� • At end-of-life, the equipment creates a waste stream.
___

The PRC is building all sorts of power plants, coal & nuclear, to get ahead of demand. They are dropping “Bit Mining” for this practical reason. I predict that at some point down the line, the CCP will repackage the shutdown as “Green Strategy”, which will drive the Leftoid SJW’s here in the U.S. completely bonkers.

PEACE 😇

Seems to me Xi Jinping has decided to preserve the regime ( and his rule) over all else. He may believe, like the old USSR, he can acquire, copy or steal what technology as is needed to maintain military parity with the US led bloc but that depends on not having to go to war with the US, say in 1945, and being able to postpone the conflict until China has caught up. Very dangerous.

China also runs the great risk now of growing old before it can grow rich. Japan and South Korea can probably manage their slow population decline without an social or economic collapse but China still has no social safety net so any economic upheaval will more likely require the regime to turn its guns on its own people to stay in power.

Oh, btw, you are one G-20 meeting away from uncontrolled crypto currencies ban the moment crypto really threatens the money printers.

What about the impact of climate change in Chinese economy by mid-century? I’m sure it will be less benign than in Russia or Canada…

The comparison with Japan is interesting. Maybe there are even more factors than just IQ and creativitiy,when it comes to science, maybe a third factor?

All Japanese scientists who are capable of doing Nobel level work have to self-exile for life to be able to do it while they’re still in their young most productive stages of life. Related, patio11 on Hacker News has detailed how young computer programmers working for the big companies don’t get to contribute until they’ve been there for years. As the US audit of Toyota’s code for running a car or cars that were claimed to have problems like getting stuck throttles revealed, this does not result in high quality code. Entirely the opposite, and if you have experience with old code bases you’ll recognize the issues described were very real and credible.

I’d personally like to know how Japan essentially dropped out of the manufacturing of cutting edge semiconductors. Over the years I heard details about how for example engineers would take weekend trips to Korea to set them up, pretty much all DRAM is now made there by SK Hynix and Samsung there except for a small amount made by Micron in the US. I mean, they still make lots of chips, and maybe a lot of flash (Toshibi/WD), but I’m not sure they’re a leader in anything but optical sensors for cameras and specialty chemicals.

The reason the DY would be worth something is that China and other countries will give you physical goods for it, just like much of the current value of the dollar is because oil is priced in dollars.

Minor problem: every digital yuan essentially has a serial number which the PRC/CCP can use to cancel it if they see fit. The PRC historically just hasn’t been willing to do the things that would allow the yuan to become a reserve currency; how much can the DY do if it’s not something others are willing to hold for very long?

Huawei is moving right now from hardware to software, start reading something new.

With extremely rare exceptions that prove the rule like Nvidia, hardware companies really suck at doing software, and the reverse is usually true as well. Huawei becoming a software powerhouse is particularly unlikely after what was revealed in the U.K. audit of their base station software, like literally tens of copies of different versions of a critical open source cryptography library. They just don’t get it at all, but this does make those systems so vulnerable before you buy it you don’t particularly have to worry about them spying on you, everyone will be able to.

This is not to say people and companies in the PRC can’t do software, it’s just part of a general world wide pattern of what companies can do well or not.

Very bad take regarding the crypto ban. I am surprised some as intelligent as Karlin fell for the notion that crypto’s uses extend beyond buying illegal goods on the dark web.

The value of bitcoin is very volatile and nobody regards it as a currency in its own right, its value is always tied to fiat currency. Furthermore it is as susceptible to manipulation as any other central bank issued currency.

Overall, its popularity is a symptom of Western decadence and speculation culture, hence China is right to ban it just as it has banned celebrity fandoms and limited ShitTok usage to 40 minutes a day for minors.

I don’t know about crypto. I need to buy wood for roof. There is huge demand. Yet, nobody is taking crypto. Not even drug dealers. They laughed at me😭 I see it like pyramid scheme. There is no point if Bitcoin if you can’t exchange for money easily. I see it like stocks. Buy dip, sell high. Buy dip, sell high. Store real value in money, maybe stock or house

All the top AI talent is in the US

This is the weakest claim in your argument https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2020/01/14/china-artificial-intelligence-superpower/?sh=3f6b8282f053

The strongest evidence that China is superior to the Unites States is culture and vigor and energy(cultural not physical).
During the outbreak the Chinese built a hospital in a month.
Something interesting to not is that Chinese hydrogen bombs are of a different superior design to other hydrogen bombs. https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/china/yu-min.htm
The Chinese are capable of translating original brilliant ideas into reality. That is a capability the U.S has lost.

https://mobile.twitter.com/khalsuprmacy/status/1427990274173661191?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zorawar_Singh_Kahluria

Bunch of clueless boomer comments by those who don’t understand blockchain tech||

This isn’t like banning fiat vs gold, more like banning industrial tech over subsidence agriculture||

ਵਾਹਿਗ�ਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗ�ਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ

Subsistence agriculture*

camaraderie aside, what reason is there for Russia to allow domestic commercial transactions in a foreign digital currency that is centrally controlled from the People’s Bank of China

To respect the Mandate of Heaven, and worship of the God-Emperor.

The Middle Kingdom gonna find itself stuck in Middle Income the way it going, LOL.

ਵਾਹਿਗ�ਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗ�ਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ

“… All the top AI talent is in the US, as are the three leading AI research outfits (DeepMind, OpenAI, Google AI). Tesla and SpaceX are American. Its Woke drama and government dysfunction are spectacles that conceal ineluctable American strength …”

The twelve 2019 USA Math Olympiad winners:

Among the G7 Italy & France have inflated per capita incomes due to the Euro whose value is held up mostly because of Germany’s large export surplus outside the Eurozone.

But yes its been a dramatic fall for Japan in industry after industry Consumer Electronics,Networking Hardware,Smartphones,Semi Conductors,Display Technologies etc.

Have a look at the names on the vast majority of those papers…. You’ll be lucky to see 5% Anglo heritage, vast majority are Asian

I don’t think it’s implausible that the Western Faustian love/pursuit of technical and progressive change for the sake of change and the more conservative and cautious Chinese tendency will result in a future where the US or some part of the West is the most advanced or powerful while China is relatively backwards and primitive.

But the implication here is that the West will have pursued the most radical changes imaginable – genetic engineering, cyborgism, brain implants and other implants of all kinds, transhumanism, etc. These future changes would result in people and societies totally alien to early 21st century people and societies. While China would be relatively backwards and primitive but closer to us here in the early 21st century.

It seems to me that people who feel positive about this potential scenario either have a quasi-religious belief in technical change providing some sort of salvation, or have very strong tribalistic, in-group feelings such that nominal Western domination or the West being the most powerful relative to out-groups is their chief concern and interest.

Incidentally, Xi Jinping is said to be a big fan of Goethe’s Faust:

Xi Jinping has read Faust and knows it by heart: Edward Luttwak HT @tylercowen https://t.co/oY4tU4hKm7 pic.twitter.com/mHK1u4WGvh

— John Rentoul (@JohnRentoul) May 29, 2021

The point that I was trying to make is that within the Chinese population there is a huge pool of talent in the hard sciences and engineering disciplines. In the post-Mao era, these talented individuals were finally able to receive an education commensurate with their intellectual potential as overseas students. Over the past 35 years these mainland Chinese students and scholars (and now, their children) have been a tremendous source of talent for the Anglosphere and Europe.

In China that STEM talent pool will only get stronger now that China has the facilities and environment for them to flourish domestically. In contrast, America is pursuing social and economic policies that can only be described as national self-mutilation.

There is a good chance that crypto and Web 3.0 will transform global finance, governance, and the Internet over the next generation in fundamental ways.

I know next to nothing about crypto currency. (I still don’t know how, if every transaction is recorded, how someone was able to steal wallets a few years ago.)

But I do pay attention to some MSM and time and again, without any reference to finance or economics, the case against crypto is made that it is dangerous because it is outside the control of the institutions that have been set up to exercise control.

Mine baby, mine!

Accelerate! Accelerate!

And don’t look back!

Xi would rather rule a middle income country, than be in prison in a high income country. Xi values stability.

The next big CPC election/conference is in 2022.

Does anyone have any thoughts?

https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/after-xi

So, is South Korea taking over tech leadership in Asia from Japan?

University of Second-Hand Anecdotes.

There is a good chance that crypto and Web 3.0 will transform global finance, governance, and the Internet over the next generation in fundamental ways. Many of these transformations will be in ways that challenge or at least question the traditional prerogatives of the state as regards censorship, monetary emissions, and even legal sovereignty.

And this is of course an unacceptable prospect to China’s government. I can’t imagine anyone is surprised that they were going to ban crypto in the end.

How do you reconcile your bullishness on China and your professed respect for the CPC with your seeming belief that decentralization will define the coming decades? If that’s the case, China was never going to make it.

However, they are aggressively rolling out blockchain technology, with the DY being the best but not only example. Cryptocurrencies have been to date, in my humble opinion, one of the less promising implementations of blockchain. In regards to those implementations that are most critical to your O-ring concept, such as in the supply chain, China is presently ahead of the US. So I think it’s a little premature to count them out.

My feeling is that China is going its own way. It has acquired enough power to have the confidence (or perhaps arrogance) under Xi Jinping to chart its own path, which is neither the liberalization that liberals hoped for or the based-civilization that rightoids imagined.

I think the liberals have been soundly BTFO over the past couple decades, but I now think we’re seeing the alt-right including possibly our dear author (who I highly respect), be disabused of their notions of China as well.

China is China. It’s probably thinking of the West magnitudes less than most people in the West think it does. I don’t think they’re looking at the West and furiously copying what works and discarding what doesn’t. They’re not trying to be a pale imitation of the West. They’re moving in accordance with their 5000 year (or whatever it is) history and how they see themselves as the successors of that history. They were forced to adopt western methods and values when they got wrecked during the “Century of Humiliation�, but I think they’re very happy to go back to their own ways now that they can afford to.

I think we’re going to see China do some incredibly smart things like maintaining order. And also some incredibly stupid things, like not switching to a democratic government that can smoothly change leaders. But that’s because they’re beating to their own drum, which is different than ours. This is the kind of diversity in cultures and systems which I actually think is nice to have in the world.

Clearly there is something in the oriental culture which makes JP and SK (and likely in the future China) underperform in GDP, with perhaps other benefits that can’t be captured by GDP. I don’t think China is going to rule the world the way America has. Oriental culture seems much more insular and less missionary. I see the West making further inroads in dominating the rest of the world: Middle East, Africa, South America. The West will stretch all over the world right up to the borders of East Asia. East Asia will maintain its sovereignty but will remain hermit kingdoms, as we see Japan today. Nice places to live harmoniously for their inhabitants, but not necessarily superior to the West.

For those of us who are not rich enough for it, then Kleros and Rubic?

AK: We are now in last stage of an epic bull or in early bear. I am 80% confident that this is the former. Only thing that can stop Bitcoin going to $100k EOY or early the next is if stonks nuke IMO. I can’t exclude that, though. Buffett Indicator at 200% probably not sustainable, even with all the printing.

I do think the ban on human gene editing is dumb to the extreme, but I don’t see banning crypto as stupid at all. What does China have to gain from DeFi?

These Chinese decisions remind me strongly of the famous “sea bans� (haijin) pursued under the Ming and the early Qing involving bans on maritime trade and ship construction. Intermittently issued, ineffectively enforced, trivially circumvented by the pirates and smugglers it was putatively aimed against – who were often aided by local officials in return for part of the spoils. The treasure fleets rotted away in their harbors and a few centuries later Europeans overspread the world. History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.

From the long run perspective, it’s not clear that the Chinese decision to limit overseas trade and exploration just as Europe wholly embraced it was the wrong one.

One of the chief consequences of these two different paths was that European societies increasingly became imperial, multiracial, multicultural in scope, to the extent that now even the homelands within Europe itself are increasingly diverse. The “facts on the ground” of diverse, mixed societies, even if they were originally founded on white supremacist lines, have gradually made it difficult to justify any assertion of European homogeneity or dominance. And with increasing black African presence and influence in the West, coupled with the population increase in Africa, it may be difficult to prevent a large wave of black African immigration into historically European societies in the near future.

Whereas China may have dodged the issue entirely by clamping down 500 odd years ago.

Yes. Pooh insists in screwing the pooch and copying the dumbest things USSR of old did, step by step.

USSR:
Build world’s largest army that will be never used
Censor and jam all Western media
Fight against pop music, blue jeans and other capitalist degeneracy
Ban foreign currency
…
Success!

China:
Build world’s largest navy that will be never used
Censor and block Western internet
Fight against computer games, K-pop music, catboys and other capitalist degeneracy
Ban digital currency
…
Even bigger success!

It is all pity and shame – in the forthcoming Cold War II, China had much better prospects than old Soviet Union.
With only little work, China can present itself as shining city on the hill, where people under the wise rule of the best and brightest of Communist party are free and safe to make money and have fun, while US is shithole of poverty, homelessness, gangs, drugs, prisons, endless fake elections, corruption, scams, rioting, looting and shooting.

No way. Pooh wants country of tough masculine men who work in factory 996 and rest of their lives spend goose stepping and flag waving in cool uniforms and studying advanced Xi Jinping thought.
All this crap that looks hot and sexy, but fails in real life every single time.

>Taken together China, Russia, and Iran

LOL

There is more evidence of UFO than of “superior Russian military technology” and Iran is complete basket case, tottering at the edge of bankruptcy, with regular riots and uprisings with 1000+ death toll, so infiltrated by from top to bottom it could not protect even their most critical military installations and personnel from constant sabotage and assassination.

So the Cold War II is going to be axis of China+Russia+Iran (+ Venezuela and few more Latin American and African shitholes) against … US+EU+Japan+East Asia+India+rest of the world.

Looks even more lopsided than round one.

This is quite amusing to read. In this article, Anatoly Karlin sounds like a very intelligent version of the low-IQ White supremacists. It is interesting to compare several copings about China’s rise:

Japanese (e.g. Fukuyama): We won, it is the end of history.
Jews (e.g. AaronB): No more science to discover, Chinese should research Taoism 2.0.
American (too many to name): Chinese only steal and copy.
Russian (e.g. Anatoly): Chinese ban my favorite research.

OK, I consume my right to jab, so should at least contribute a serious point or two before I leave. Does Anatoly fully understand the policy rationale versus the scientific-limiting implications of the ban in those areas? Does he believe these represent all / most of the possible “world-transforming” research areas? If not, does he claim the ban necessarily implies Chinese inevitable / likely bad future decisions in others? What about quantum information science (an area I have done original research, and a likely transforming area) where China is currently leading? What about the innovative J-22 wind tunnel (to be launched 2022) which would provide both quantitative (bigger numbers) and qualitative (better numbers) leaps ahead of Russia/America for aerospace design (an area I know little about)? To name just a few.

As long as we can have a good life, who cares?

As for changing the world, if it is not one’s self doing it, what, then, is the difference from watching TV? It is stupid. What is the difference between cheering for Musk and cheering for a sci-fi plot?

Exactly. Bitcoin allows one-to-one international transactions without the involvement of an intermediary currency, and that really helps small economies to control their balance of payments problems. Ultimately the west must destroy Bitcoin to protect the dollar.

As for the timing, I’m guessing that the Eurasia countries, led by China and Russia, and with the balance being small economies, are about to roll-out their own equivalent to bitcoin for use in their trading block.

Interesting – this does align with much Xi-observer commentary on the ideology of the world’s most powerful man. He’s no futurist.

You would assume CCP has looked at the experiences of Japan/Sth Korea for developmental lessons. If you’re inclined, you could cobble together a plausible story about the recent history of the tiger economies that puts a failure to adequately account for human nature at the core of their current issues. So makes sense for China to be concerned.

If you take low TFR as a crude measure of evolutionary stress (how far the environment has diverged from the ancestral conditions we are adapted for) Japan/Sth Korea have in fact ‘progressed’ further and embraced societal upheaval more than anywhere else. So much so that many of their citizens are unable to thrive.

Yea, so tell us right now what the “policy rationale” behind banning gene editing is?

So that Chinese can not hyper-compete among one another in a stressful 996-like way to be superior, but at the cost of being the most impoverished shithole on Earth assuming other nations start using it?

How fucking awesome.

Measuring progress means attributing progress. Bietcoins are a meme, as much as “real money”, that one but an unruly yardstick of differences in power-wealth. Not a precise tool for measuring progress.

Indeed the Chinese bring nothing new to the table, …from there to affirmating that the original(Western “Free” Enterprise) of the copy is legit is bad science.

It is not about Dutch machines(they also “grow” synthetic meat), but about the vision behind it(greed in the short term). Societies that measure themselves by who accumulates power and wealth, influence, become loops into no derivatives, not progress.

Please delete this message(again).

As if the focus on “dematerialization” and transhumanism won’t violent reverse itself to its antithesis in the West, replaced by their nemeses thru civil wars and revolutions.

Dunno, might ask your friends over at Samsung and Sony…

What do you want for a “free” China “liberated” by the US and Japan?

Our biases, based on our experience and economic theory(s), are that overbearing top down control is at least less efficient at production of novel goods if not outright destructive of the mentalities and small individual capital formation/accumulation needed for radical innovation. Even in a rich highly controlled environment, purges and pass overs of some kind tend to disrupt accumulated gains, like in some of our old behemouth companies, the smart tech radicals that are driven out and their accumulated “toys” and inventions side lined or liquidated.

USSR for all its resource advantages in 1918 (people and land), in the end had few really new things to brag about by its collapse despite huge % capital investments. I’m sure AK can enlighten us on stuff beyond the fusion quadrapole components and RD170 engine line but, overall, Russia looked really primitive in the 1990s. Industrial stuff that my grandfather (61 years older) was more familiar with.

On the other hand, there now also seems to be a lot of positive interest in crypto from Big Finance, which as we know wags the dog over here.

“a dramatic fall for Japan in industry after industry Consumer Electronics,Networking Hardware,Smartphones,Semi Conductors,Display Technologies etc”

My understanding (gained admittedly from a single source, Eamonn Fingleton, who was FT Japan editor for 20+ years) is that Japan understands that to be at the top of the tech tree, “Producer Goods” is the thing. So the machines (like precise stepper motors used in semiconductor manufacture, or manufacturing robots) that create the products are what’s at the top of the tree. At the materials end, Japan dominates in hi-tech materials like carbon fibre (Toray) and ultra-pure silicon. Oh, and batteries. They seem to be quite important. And miniaturised motors.

“Machines and mechanical appliances having individual functions are used in the production of other goods. “

https://oec.world/en/profile/country/jpn

“In 2019, Japan was the world’s biggest exporter of Machinery Having Individual Functions ($20B), Photo Lab Equipment ($11.9B), Large Construction Vehicles ($10.8B), Hot-Rolled Iron ($7.49B), and Electrical Capacitors ($6.58B)”

It has almost no indigenous energy sources (it spends $126bn annually on oil, gas and coal imports) yet has a 2019 trade balance of $42bn, although that’s well down on the $1500bn pre-earthquake in 2009. It’s #1 on the OECD economic complexity index.

https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/exports

“Exports from Japan grew by 26.2% yoy to JPY 6,606 billion in August 2021, compared with market estimates of 34% and after a 37.0% surge in July. This was the sixth straight month of double-digit growth in overseas sales, amid strong signs that the global trade continued to recover and low base effects from last year. Shipments of machinery jumped 31.8%, boosted by semicon machinery (34.3%), and power-generating machines (25.5%); while those of electrical machinery rose 17.1%, led by semiconductors, etc (14.9%). In addition, there were rises in sales of transport equipment (11.5%), driven by motor vehicles (4%), and parts of motor vehicles (28.7%); others (14.2%), due to scientific instruments (21.6%); chemicals (28.5%), driven by plastic materials (27.6%); and manufactured goods (43.6%), led by iron and steel products (83.6%). Sales rose to China (12.6%), Taiwan (42.6%), Hong Kong (23.4%), South Korea (31.4%), Thailand (54.2%), the US (22.8%), Germany (28.3%), and Australia (15.5%).”

“Japan is now the poorest G7 country after Italy.”

AK, your stats must be missing something. There’s no way the UK is in any way, shape or form ahead of Japan save in the quality of its real ale and maybe the beauty of what landscape hasn’t yet been built over.

It is very smart of China to focus on chip building. AKarlin is rambling as usual. There are many reasons why China focuses on chips, that’s because they are counting on coming:

– IOT, smart cities will make the need grow exponentially,
– Quantum computing is still in its infancy,
– Smart cars,
– AI will definitely be part of warfare (as in, soldier robots), ever-increasing the need for chips,

The list can be extended. They already have the world’s largest market for all this. Just look at the case of Turkey and it is not difficult to see why it is very important to achieve independence in critical components of critical technologies. Ever since the Turkish drone industry started becoming world-class, Western ‘allies’ of Turkey have been implementing sanctions after sanctions to cripple its manufacturing (it is this behavior that made Turkey focus on the defense industry ever since the liberation of North Cyprus and the following Western sanctions). This is how they treat an ‘ally,’ that carries the refugee burden of their useless and unsuccessful wars. Just imagine what could they do to China if China was dependent on critical components. The US also understands that, so it encourages TSMC to move to the US and already blocked some deals involving Chinese overtake in the computer hardware industry.

You are talking of software but the software is not that hard. Chinese already have alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, Uber, and so on. Not to forget that, if Chinese alternatives actually grew outside China and started taking over, the other side would (and did) ban their software as well. Also, just because ‘software ate the world’ doesn’t mean hardware focus is a bad idea; the software that ate the world still needs hardware and it is also mostly consumer tech that defines the phrase.

Finally, in Japan’s case, there is something else going on, but I don’t know enough to figure what it is. Let’s not forget that Japan is actually a vassal of the US. Having more than one of the best-selling car brands, machine parts, hi-tech, some of the best electronics, and so on, it just doesn’t add up that if Japan isn’t better off than France or the UK. After all, which one of those G7 countries has a significant footprint in the software industry other than the US?

In any case, China is run by very smart and deep-thinking people. That is my observation, and it is not just based on their tech focus but also their other policies. They don’t buy any BS and that is what really worries the West. If things go at this rate, it will be China that will isolate the West from the rest of the world, not the other way around. To think that they’d go after an industry so aggressively just because is foolish. China understands that the West wants hegemony, not equality or alternative systems and civilizations. Focus on acquiring advanced chip manufacturing capability is just an extension of this understanding.

That seems like a very absurd idea to me, e.g. from Russia’s perspective – camaraderie aside, what reason is there for Russia to allow domestic commercial transactions in a foreign digital currency that is centrally controlled from the People’s Bank of China, which is not provably secure (I doubt it will be open source), and which will give China extreme surveillance capabilities over the entire Russian economy?

Why would Russia use the DY for its internal transactions? Russia may save some DY as a store of value, use DY for some run-of-the-mill international transactions, or exchange it for Digital Rubles or paper Rubles for internal transactions. At the point of exchange, the PBC will lose all tracking capabilities.

For any country, adopting the DY instead of the US dollar as reserve currency and/or the currency for international transactions does not mean giving the PBC surveillance capabilities over the entire economy of the country, unless the country does not have a national currency (like Ecuador, whose economy runs on US dollars).

2015, but still relevant, especially regarding business objectives. I write as the British asset stripping company Melrose is closing UK engineering factories at GKN, which it took over in 2018.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2015/03/08/why-this-super-advanced-tech-giant-dares-not-speak-its-name

“Besides silicon, another key industry where Shin-Etsu is leading is rare-earth magnets. Although these are hardly a household word, they boast a unique combination of super-strong magnetism and light weight. This makes them vital components in several of the most exciting industries of the future, ranging from hybrid cars to mag-lev trains. Shin-Etsu’s rare-earth magnets are also a key technology in high-performance hard-disks. Meanwhile the company is also a leader in such other vital and fast-expanding tech businesses as photo-resists, ArFs resists, trilayer materials, LED packaging, and gallium-arsenide semiconductors – all seriously high-tech stuff.

All in all Shin-Etsu provides excellent jobs for nearly twice as many workers as Facebook and more than twice as many as LinkedIn. Perhaps more impressively, it employs nearly five times as many people as Twitter. So why is Shin-Etsu not better known? Why indeed. In part the answer is that Japanese capitalism diverges sharply from the American version in its objectives and modus operandi, with the result that it is chronically underestimated in the Anglophone world. Whereas American companies have long been run strictly to maximize “shareholder value,” serious Japanese companies have no interest in boosting their share price but rather are run principally to provide well paid, secure jobs to their workers (unacclimatized Americans generally find this implausible but it is true — various hidden factors skew the incentive system for Japanese executives). One consequence is that whereas American investor relations executives routinely go to the ends of the earth to drum up interest in their corporations’ shares, Japanese companies feel no similar compulsion. On the contrary, they are inclined to regard foreign shareholders as unwelcome and uninformed meddlers. This applies in spades to American and British investors. Like the German system, the Japanese system is bank-based, and shareholders are treated as little more than an afterthought. If a Japanese corporation needs money, its knowledgeable and patient keiretsu bank will pony up the money. Although many Japanese corporations (not least Shin-Etsu) go through the motions of providing financial information in English, this reflects more a concern for general public relations than any focused investor relations strategy.

Another reason why Shin-Etsu doesn’t advertise its strengths is more controversial: it fears a backlash from the U.S. defense establishment. Traditionally the U.S. Defense Department has worked to ensure that the United States maintains self-sufficiency in all key materials, components, and machinery needed for its defense. If a hollowed-out America these days boasts any serious remaining capability in making monocrystalline silicon, I, for one, am not aware of it.

Let’s sum up on the contrast between the Japanese job-based enterprise system (which has been copied by Korea and, to a lesser extent, Taiwan and now increasingly China) and the American one. Surely the American one is better overall? Not necessarily. The fortunes the American system creates for a few — and most of them are more lucky than particularly inspired — often prove ephemeral. Think back to how many once-vaunted U.S. digital-revolution companies went on to bite the dust. Inktomi, Netscape, Worldcom, Pets.com, AoL — where are they now? The American system may be good at creating vast fortunes but at regular intervals such fortunes are swept away like so many sandcastles on the beach. Companies like Shin-Etsu don’t get swept away. Founded in the mid-1920 to make fertilizers, it has consistently built its business over the years and has probably never been stronger than it is today.”

Not solid info but it seems most of the bitcoin has been mined in China, with huge electricity costs and burning of coal. China has now banned mining for cripto and will, they say, energetically seek all miners: “”All the illegal financial activities are strictly banned and will be eliminated in line with laws,” said the PBC, noting that those who committed crimes by engaging in relevant illegal financial activities shall be prosecuted for liabilities.” How will cripto enthusiasts cope with the banning of mining cripto in the place where most mining seem to happen?

Long-term, the world economy has been defined by accelerating dematerialization.

Lol! Yeah most of the world economy will be guys sitting in front of keyboards and screens.

Essentially, China is eliminating financial risks (i.e. speculation) and supporting the Digital Yuan, pretty much straightforward logical policies.

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202109/1235018.shtml

My biggest prediction is for Laying Flat to be an almost unstoppable trend of anti-institutional, anti-rational-organizational action, analogous to parallel economies (agorism) in the parts of the West where the whole consumption-surveillance system is being set-up.

What various elites think to be the wave of the future (hyper-modern automated production, transhumanism and woke ideology) just won’t be, and it’s just the excessive complexity cliodynamics have predicted after any complex society has crossed the turning point of decline. The reversion to a less complex, more human, and definitely more organic societal form* cannot be avoided, and this is enough to disabuse everyone experiencing this of the notions of “infinite linear progress”, something the elite CCP cadres are still clinging to thru their interpretation of Marxism.

*It can end up be a Jin-dynasty like Taoist attitude in China, 19th century with better tech in the US, and neo-medievalism in Europe.

I’m pleased to see that Karlin is moderating his sino triumphalism, but he is doing it for the wrong reason. “Crypto” is fraud, that will end up ruining lots of little people.

There are better reasons to be sceptical of China, strating with atrocious demographics.

Why would the US want to ban Huawei’s bid data and cloud computing then? Try to stop Europe on cooperation with Huawei in this field as well? Because it is a joke? They don’t do that for some other Huawei businesses. You forget that people learn, and look at where China was 10 years ago. Software is now Huawei’s fastest growing business. They are moving away from hardware.

Huawei pivots to software with Google-like ambitions

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/26/huawei-focuses-on-software-as-us-sanctions-hurt-hardware-business.html

China is making it a priority to manufacture semiconductors at the density achieved by TSMC (which are built using Dutch machines). No doubt a very important undertaking. The technological equivalent of grinding in video games.

Nope, China is making a priority of many things in tech, this is only one of them.

And they did not do that because they are “nerds who only know grinding on chips”, but because their hand was forced by US chip embargo. Have you been living under a rock? They did not want it to be that way, to discover America again, until the US chip embargo forced them to rely on their own chips.

China’s demographic slowdown is not nearly as bad as Japan’s, S.Korea’s, Taiwan’s, Singapore’s, etc. Most of Europe is also much worse off. Germany has been well below replacement for more than 50 years, and has spent decades at 1.4 and 1.3! Somehow it has managed to survive and even thrive.

In fact, I believe that the Chinese TFR is higher — yes, higher — than the white American TFR. And it’s also more likely to increase, whereas white American TFR is doubtless going to keep hitting new lows.

China has demographic problems, to be sure, but to understand those problems as somehow uniquely bad is a mistake. China is better off than many, if not most, other countries, even in this respect.

China’s TFR has been below 1,5 since 2000. And there is good chance entire country will slip below 1 in a decade or two, as China continues to rapidly urbanize.

In absolute terms they recorded 12 million births in 2020, and this year will see a big decline to 10 million. By 2030 China will be producing 5-7 million babies, which compares to 3-4 million annual number of births in the US!

Anyone who keeps saying cryptos are frauds, have you read the comment by Raches? The real value of cryptos lies in its dissociation from state institutions and the freedom of action they provides.

And from an Austrian economics perspective, fiat currencies controlled by central banks & treasuries, along with fractional reserve banking, are larger and more pervasive frauds. Crypto is one of the exits from these monetary regimes.

You can get too fond of the banhammer.

That is what AaronB has been saying, and he sees what many people will do after getting tired of them.

It’s banned in the US too

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17858

Why is it banned?

Because we haven’t proved that it is safe and we have barely done any research on stuff like crispr, we are still experimenting crispr on animals using it on a human now is completely unacceptable

And the baby that Karlin is talking about is embryo selection which is completely different than gene editing and it is completely legal in china

Japan is now the poorest G7 country after Italy.

What numbers say that?

If you’re using GDP per capita, then exactly the same reasoning makes Liechtenstein and Monaco richer by far than any of the G7.

Software and tech gimmicks may make a few companies and opportunists a lot of money, but in a very real world made of very real things I’d put my money on China and whoever else makes enough stuff.

Exactly what made the US the indisputable world power a long time ago.

You don’t seem to grasp the depth and cunning of Xi’s mind. Making life in China less fun will drive the less conformist Chinese to emigrate. That will select the population of China for conformity. It will also infest other countries with nonconformist new citizens who will wreak havoc nonstop in their new homes. It’s a winning strategy!

Exactly European countries have weak economies they are wealthy because they can slap a Gucci label on a $5 purse and sell it for $1000 to East Asians, same thing with cars

They export some tech stuff, but these are protective markets, captive sales

But on a whole their tech is not competitive

Pretty sure Japan and China could build cars faster, more high tech and more luxurious than Bugatti but consumers will still chose Bugatti for the name

I can recall around the turn of the 21st century that it was fashionable to deprecate manufacturing as a dirty, old-technology industry and that the future was in services. It is self-evidently absurd to deprecate manufacturing as low-technology, and global trade then and now was dominated by manufactured goods (along with energy, itself an industrial and capital equipment intensive process).

Still, while this view was clearly a cope intended to rationalize poor Western policy decisions, I wonder if it wasn’t wrong so much as it was early. As Karlin notes in his OP, the global economy is asymptotically dematerializing. The future of industry appears to be like the past of agriculture. Vitally important, highly traded, technologically intensive and innovative–but an inexorably shrinking share of the world economy. As its share shrinks, more countries will choose to protect the sector for strategic or political reasons because the benefits of trade openness are less important than they once were.

It turns out the turn of the century view was not new. John Maynard Keynes observed as far back as the 1930s the growth of the domestic service economy slowly but inexorably displacing industry as the largest source of commerce, and even before the First World War it was observed that Britain’s trade balance only remained positive owing to its exports of “invisibles” (e.g. shipping). The trade in services twenty years ago appeared to be a triviality, but today with the US tech megacaps dominating global cloud computing it looks ever more important.

Incidentally Bill Gates chose to go into software because as far back in the 1970s he concluded that hardware was an ever depreciating commodity. He reasoned that it would be unwise to compete in a business with diminishing returns, and in 2004 he (in)famously claimed that hardware was going to be close to free. Fast forward half a generation and you can run an effective home theater system using a $30 Raspberry Pi.

As for Japan, while it’s true that it bet on hardware as opposed to software, this misses the bigger picture. First, some of its signature high profile hardware bets failed in the most dramatic fashion. The Fifth Generation Computer initiative was a miserable failure blown out of the water by Moore’s Law. Smaller US bets on disrupting x86 CPUs in the same era also failed (Intel Itanium and IBM POWER for instance). Second, and more importantly, Japan’s relative ranking is not new. For the past generation Japan has remained at the bottom of the G7 in critical measures of productivity such as GDP per employed person and GDP per hour worked. Because this was as true at the peak of the Japanese bubble as it is today, Japanese failure in software is not an explanation.

Germany is today a considerably richer country than Japan and has even overtaken the United States in GDP per hour worked, and in addition to being weak in software (SAP and not much else) it barely even competes in ICT hardware (Infineon). So it’s certainly possible to be highly prosperous based on hardware (just as some countries are highly prosperous based on commodities), though no doubt there are scale limits since the global appetite for capital goods and luxury consumer products has limits.

Japan does have many underappreciated economic strengths as has been highlighted by some commenters in this thread, but the Eamonn Fingleton view that it’s a secret economic colossus is plainly wrong. Japan remains the dominant producer of highly refined intermediate industrial inputs, continues to be the leading exporter of capital goods, and the Japanese car industry remains the best in the world. But several other Japanese industries have effectively collapsed in the face of competition, and the Japanese economy overall remains mired by low productivity which appears to stem from inefficient factor allocation such as labor-intensive agriculture along with a greatly overstaffed low productivity service sector.

The remaining fortresses of the Japanese economy are also under siege. Japan’s motor industry is unsuccessful in the luxury car segment, and now it faces disruption from EVs which Japan’s car executives have long dismissed (on admittedly reasonable grounds). Japan’s position in capital goods faces intensifying competition from South Korea and China. The country requires a fundamental shakeup, but none appears in the offering. All Shinzo Abe really offered was stimulus, depreciation, and the mobilization of women into the workforce. Now they claim they’re going to try immigration–good luck with that.

I don’t always comment, but when I do it’s to call you out 🙂

– You are viewing this from a too narrow viewpoint, crypto. China will make it in every meaningful way.

– Also you are saying that the one sphere where China takes the lead and will be in a dominant position, the Digiyuan, is irrelevant.

I guess this logic would imply that the US is on the cusp of a new boom, because people there use Bitcoin more than anywhere.

At the end of the day, all crypto is just a currency, not a good one at it. It’s more of a stock to be bought and sold than used as currency, and will continue to be that. Meanwhile Digiyuan will be real currency.

This article is the same as being hyped of a FIRE economy. Even FIRE has more substance than crypto, because RE is real and crypto is a volatile stock.

So crypto passes China. Big deal, less speculators in the market. The places where crypto booms will still be buying their things from China, and probably paying in yuan or Digiyuan (DY).

Crypto is not the next big thing, it’s not steam, electricity, the internet or anything comparable of actual value. Crypto is simply the next big stock, which will hang around.

I’m willing to wager a bet that the DY will have orders of magnitude higher use as currency than all the crypto combined. When, well 5 years after first being 50% China wide. So probably in 6/7 years.

In all of these years crypto has simply remained an investment tool more than a currency and I don’t see that changing much.

So your argument in favor of crypto is to say two things that are wrong.

Bravo.

The real value in crypto lies in disintermediation, and central banks are fine actually.

Freedom is only cared for by a minority of the global population, and most people with a preference for freedom lack the discipline to achieve it. Are you curling this site over the Tor network from a public hotspot on an old Thinkpad with LibreBoot and an open source operating system? I doubt it.

“Austrian” opposition to fiat currency and central banking is mere religious fanaticism totally divorced from reality. Its baleful influence over right-wing dissidents is a curse.

They can also pump out propaganda and incentives to make more children

And yes this works when the country has full control of the media, see the nuclear family during the cold war with Russia

2020 and 2021 may well be outliers, for obvious reasons. I don’t think that you can extrapolate to 2030 from 2021. Besides, China has a deep population reservoir, they have quite a lot of asabiyyah, and, as @Hbd investor notes, they have tools at their disposal that other nations will not use. Their position is hardly uniquely terrible.

Speaking of annual births in the US: By 2030, how many will be white? (“Whites are disappearing, and here’s why that’s a good thing:” https://theconversation.com/children-of-color-already-make-up-the-majority-of-kids-in-many-us-states-128499 ) Already, American children under 10 years of age are majority nonwhite.

The American experience will ultimately show that immigration is, at best, a short-term fix that ultimately degrades human capital. That it is, in other words, bad medicine.

China may blaze a different path, and in the long run I think that they will benefit from it.

2020 and 2021 may well be outliers, for obvious reasons. I don’t think that you can extrapolate to 2030 from 2021.

Actually, we can extrapolate with high degree of accuracy, because the number of fertile-age women for 2030 is already known. The only uncertainty revolves around TFR, which is highly unlikely to up anyway.

The only uncertainty revolves around TFR, which is highly unlikely to up anyway.

But this highly uncertain. China’s 2030 TFR — relative to 2019 — can rise, can remain more or less the same, or can fall. All three outcomes are within the realm of possibility. China is in fact almost unique in that it has a very good shot at boosting native TFR.

Suppose there was an exciting new technology which promised to network all of the world’s computers. Previously this technology had been limited to academic and military applications, but now this technology was newly commercialized. The technology is at yet poorly understood, expensive, and with few useful applications. But people grasp that this is the future.

Talented young people pile into the sector, and money backs them. Before long an investment mania ensues, and astonishingly in just five years the value of the sector climbs 400%. People with little understanding and even less interest in technology pile in because they fear missing out. But skeptics keep pointing out that few applications are widely in use, and fewer still are actually making money. One of the world’s most famous economists dimly forecasts that less than a decade in the future that this exciting new technology will be apparent to be only as important as the fax machine had been. The smart money bails for the exits, dubious firms collapse, and in under two years the value of the entire sector collapses by four-fifths.

With public interest gone, what do you suppose the future for this technology might be?

India may well be able to get the better of China without having to resort to waiting for genetically enhanced superhumans in some kind of weird sci fi timeline. We may be able to accomplish it by cynically riding Uncle Sam’s coattails.

Here is one scenario I envision could play out based on current geopolitical trends. What is going to happen in the medium term is economic divestment from China as a manufacturing base by American and American controlled proxies’ multinationals and their reshoring or relocation to other low cost nations. Since the USA controlled or allied sphere includes just about every relevant nation state aside from Russia and China itself, this will have huge repercussions for Chinese economic and thus political stability.

Political alliances will also be strengthened to hamper China’s ability to bust out of its immediate littoral and secure shipping lanes and resources globally. China is actually in an unenviable geographical position, as it is surrounded on all sides by nations that will naturally align with the American block in the coming geopolitical standoff, with the notable exception of Russia. It is also completely unable to safeguard the sea-lanes on which it depends for vital resources.

The way I ultimately see the situation playing it is all of the above weakening the Chinese economy and creating social unrest, unrest which will of course be fueled whenever possible by Western intelligence agencies, corporations, and the general American dominated cultural zeitgeist. Once the Chinese regime is weak, I could imagine the West manufacturing some crisis to justify an aggressive attempt at all out regime change in China.

That would likely happen by imposing airtight sanctions against China and completely closing off the sea-lanes to starve the country into submission. I actually could see China being able to survive such a blockade, but only if it is has access to Russian resources. However, I think it’s pretty clear that taking back control of Russia or at least forcing it into neutrality is part, parcel and prerequisite for America’s overall plan to vanquish China and something the West would be intent on accomplishing for its own sake. Without overland access to Russian resources I don’t believe China would have any option but to capitulate in the face of a naval blockade and complete worldwide political isolation. Even if the CCP tried to resist to the last starving Chinese a la the WWII Japanese regime I don’t believe the coddled, consumerist 1 child Chinese populace would let it. China would have to surrender, whether through external pressure or internal chaos.

What would happen to a subjugated China? It has the potential to be way too powerful if even nominally independent, so I doubt a puppet government of the type installed in Iraq and Afghanistan would be allowed to rule the country lest the puppet regime goes rogue. Instead I envision a return to the paradigm China has enjoyed for the better part of the last 1000 years: foreign rule and an imported managerial class and occupation force to keep the populace in check. That’s how it worked for centuries under the Mongols and that’s mostly how it worked for centuries under the Manchus until as recently as 1912. China is a kind of Mr Jekyll/Mr Hyde in that it has the potential to be overwhelmingly powerful and dangerous for world stability but at the same time the Chinese are a rather placid people on an individual level and acquiesce to foreign rule readily, much more similar to the Japanese in this way than to rowdy Afghans and Arabs.

India is of course likely to play a pivotal role both in reigning China in prior to regime change and helping manage the country afterwards. The USA would have neither the logistics or human capital to form the bulk of the managerial and occupation forces that would be required to govern a country China’s size whereas India shares a common border and has a youthful and rapidly growing population.

In fact, India will have a massive excess of young men in the coming decades due to selective abortions, so the above scenario would be an incredible geopolitical and societal boon. Not only would China’s capitulation remove the single largest geopolitical thorn from India’s side, but it could also solve a large chunk of the demographic problem. Many of these excess young men could be sent over to China to form the bulk of the administration and occupation personnel, acquiring Chinese partners in the process. The Indian man/Chinese woman pairing is extremely compatible and already one of the most common and rapidly growing inter-ethnic patterns in the world, from HK and Singapore to elite universities and corporations in the United States.

In fact, such a development would just be history repeating itself, as much the same kind of dynamic existed under the Mongols although at that time Arabs and Central Asian muslims played the part that I foresee Indians playing in the near future. Just look up the “Semu” under the Yuan dynasty.

Good for you to see what the American Imperial system is planning for China. But the critical obstacle to this is the reality that time is running out for the US, especially on the domestic front. So your “Aryan domination over Chinese” daydream is still far from certain.

Banning GMO people and banning Bitcoin are GOOD decisions, not bad decisions. China makes a lot of bad decisions, but these aren’t among them.

What happened to Internet (what Thorfinnsson has brought up as the counterexample) is the hype being gradually replaced by substantial interest, need and uses. Cryptos will undergo the same especially as a medium of transaction and a form of savings being “hidden” from the state’s surveillance and micromanagement, unlike mandatory CBDCs. But this won’t be seen before currency resets of FDR’s gold ownership ban kind happen.

The benefit is similar to the internet itself–disintermediation.

By decentralizing financial ledgers, crypto can do away with the intermediary role played by financial institutions. Banks and payment processors will become irrelevant for processing payments.

Eventually, it will diminish demand for currency itself. As more and more assets are placed on the blockchain, it will be possible to seamlessly and instantly trade from one blockchain into an another. You can already see this in action on emerging decentralized crypto exchanges in which one can trade from one blockchain directly into another (for instance, Bitcoin directly into Ethereum) without the intermediary step of selling one asset for currency (say, the US Dollar) and then using that currency to purchase the other blockchain. Here is one of many such examples: https://rubic.finance

Presently of course the only utility of this is to trade from one cryptocurrency into another. But eventually the blockchain will grow to encompass other assets. Securities can for instance be placed on the blockchain, and thus in the future it would be possible to do something like directly swapping S&P 500 futures for 10 Year US Treasuries with no requirement to use the Dollar for intermediation.

One day you may very well be able to instantly generate on demand a debit against your home equity in order to purchase lumber at the Home Depot. You can do that today of course with a home equity line of credit, but in this future you will not need to approach a bank to gain a HELOC and the merchant in question will take possession of a credit against your home equity directly rather than Dollars.

On a long timescale you can therefore expect crypto to eat the world, and the benefits will be lower cost and more accessible. National currencies of course are unlikely to disappear, and within economies they may function as a reserve asset the way the Dollar (or, previously, gold) functions as an international reserve asset.

Presently of course the technology has few applications beyond speculation, (allegedly) anonymous payments, and evading capital controls. As the technology matures, and to be fair much maturation is needed, that will change.

Just as with the internet, this is also unlikely to lead to the flourishing freedom that libertarians predict. If crypto is the real deal, then powerful forces will likely gain control over it.

Switzerland is really impressive.

Btw if you count Europe as one (including Switzerland, Uk) it isn’t doing that. Although still far worse than America

I just need to let you know that I am not a full-on libertarian. Placing liberty above all else, free-for-ll markets and NAP are poor organizational principles if those are done for any singificant length of time. But my point is the simple realization that, if your elite enemies have a Randian mindset, you can only counter them with Randian strategies (massive individualization and decentralization). Cryptos are useful as currencies of dissidence and struggle, in addition to the way you explained here.

Now, this is beyond ridiculous. Let’s look at individual arguments.
China bans gene-edited babies. In fact, beyond correcting a few known deleterious mutations in a handful of genes (out of 25-30,000 humans have), we don’t know what to edit to get desired results. What’s more, it is pretty clear that anything useful (e.g., intelligence or creativity) is determined by a combination of hundreds of genes. In reality, we don’t know which exactly, and what alleles are beneficial in those combinations. Current marketing of gene-edited babies is nothing but an attempt by a few unscrupulous operators to relieve some rich, ignorant, and gullible customers of their money. In brief, thieves stealing from other thieves. In essence, China bans something that exists only in fevered minds of some cool-aid drinkers. This ban, apart from curbing a particular pseudo-scientific fraud, would do as much harm as the ban of flying spaghetti monster.

China bans crypto-currency. The whole crypto craze is a big Ponzi scheme: a self-appointed currency backed by nothing is fraud, pure and simple. China banned this particular kind of fraud. There are many others, so fraudsters would find alternative ways to fool the fools and fleece them. There was never a shortage of fraudulent schemes throughout human history.

China does not embrace AI bubble. Thing is, much trumpeted “successes� of AI are a few dozen minuscule steps forward in select areas, that happened at the same time as thousands of similar or much greater steps forward by human intelligence. We are at least 20-30 years from making anything comparable in power to human in the realm of intelligence.

Looking at maps too much can be a mistake.

The US has incredibly providential geography, but that has just led to its wealth, which has made it an attractive target for migrants. Since its demographic base has been undermined, it now lacks the stability which its geography has given it historically.

Very easy for a hegemonic foreign power to undermine it, should it ever chose to. When Japan tried funding black power movements, it was way too early.

I think the elite in America want to stay in power and not risk all in order to turn the country into India’s golem. I mean, suppose they lost, would they want to live in India?

what I got from the thread is that crypto is libtard money-technology

+5-10 IQ points seems pretty doable.

The first question seems to be, is it worth the fitness costs of sperm not having to run its natural gauntlet?

Second question would be, how can you be sure that they are not selecting your embryos for their own favored traits and not for yours?

John Mearsheimer: I think, from China’s point of view, it’s best not to confront the US in any serious way right now. China will be in a much better position to confront the US in 20 years

An indication of the relative technological sophistication of China by then may be available from this piece of news from a few months ago https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/physics/china-demonstrates-most-powerful-quantum-computer/

[I]n 1994, the mathematician Peter Shor published a quantum algorithm that can break the security assumption of the most common algorithms of asymmetric cryptography. This means that anyone with a sufficiently large quantum computer could use this algorithm to derive a private key from its corresponding public key, and thus, falsify any digital signature.

I’ve had this dicussion about China with my financial advisor. Both my wife (who is Japanese) and him have brought this issue to my attention. It is our consensus that China is entering a Japan-like stagnation that will last indefinitely. But China will not crash, just like Japan will not crash. However, China as a growth story for investment opportunities is OVER.

I do believe China will forge ahead technologically to match the West. They are developing their own turbofan jet engines as well as their own semiconductor OEM’s (deposition, etching, and litho equipment) to compete with the likes of AMAT, LamNovellus, and possibly ASML. The latter will be very difficult as EUV process is extremely complex and ASML is the only company to have perfected it, only after 20 years of development work. Nikon and others gave up.

Just because a country stagnates economically does not mean it cannot keep the pace technologically. Japanese made industrial robots are still the best in the world. It was a Japanese maker, I forget which one, that bought Boston Dynamics from Google when the latter was not able to make anything of it (probably because they are too “converged” these days to innovate much).

The “designer” baby thing is not much of a thing right now. To engineer traits such as cognitive ability and executive function (the only traits that matter on a substantial level), requires denovo whole chromosome fabrication because of the number of genes that have to be fabricated/changed. We’re 15-29 years away from this capability. This is plenty of time for the Chinese to change their mind on this stuff.

In the meantime, I do hear rumors through the cryonics/life extension grapevine about a new cryonics organization in China. I know guys who have sold cryogenic dewers to them.

The entire goal of the CBDC push is to gain control.

That control will include small countries that can’t produce their own CBDC or even if they can, the major CBDC’s will swamp them. The intent is to get rid of nuisance currencies and eventually to get rid of smaller countries as they get taken over by one world gov’t tactics.

After the dust settles, the major players will have the only CBDC’s world wide, with smaller country’s central banks destroyed and their currency ruined. The intent is to have a world full of serf under feudalism 2.0 and the smaller countries will be collateral damage.

The Fifth Generation Computer initiative was a miserable failure blown out of the water by Moore’s Law.

It didn’t exactly get that far, rather it demonstrates a particularly bad way to do top down industrial policy. It’s one thing to arrange for cars, a long existing concept to be granted the resources they needed in post-WWII Japan (although Honda wasn’t one of the anointed companies), or allow the founder of Sony to finagle enough foreign exchange to license transistor technology which was a straightforward replacement for vacuum tubes, quite another to decide exactly which technology would be the future of computing.

The Fifth Generation project made an all in bet on logic programming (think Prolog), and that turned out to mostly be a dead end, part of a general “symbolic” approach to AI that was not able to fulfill its promises, at least for now. That its specialized chips got beaten by general purpose ones thanks in part to Moore’s Law but more likely Dennard scaling on top of that (what ended in the ’00s and stopped CPUs from continuing to get a lot faster) didn’t matter since they were not designed to do something that turned out to be really useful at the time, or maybe ever.

Compare to the way DARPA does things (once upon a time I was told in early days of AI research”bet on men and shovel money to them”, although that sort of thing changes frequently) and the Rodney Brooks style of robotics which saved the MIT AI Lab while the Standford one died on the vine (it’s been reconstituted last time I checked, but with no institutional continuity), or today’s hottest thing, Machine Learning (ML).

Which basically means you need a new smallholder (in American terms, yeoman) economics if you want to exit neo-manorialism, and that means cryptos.

Crypto’s are just another fiat Ponzi scheme pushed by those that can make a killing on it by raking in dollars, euro, etc from people that are driven by greed. The speculators spend what is considered by many to be money on something ethereal with no tangible reality backing it up. They are relying on the greater fool to purchase their token for more than they paid for it.

Does it cost near $50,000 to “mine” a Bitcoin? If the answer is no, then the hype over bitcoin is just another tulip bubble. The use of the mining analogy is, in itself, a major indicator that the whole thing is a con.

Ron Unz is correct – take away the speculative aspect and the whole thing dies down to where the blockchain behind it that does make sense becomes something to invest in, but the value of the tokens crashed into the dirt.

Your comments are correct. But governments want digital monetary transactions so they can easily trace the movement of money…there are current efforts afoot to do just that…eliminate paper currency. It’s all fiat anyway.

The CBDC’s are all for control. They want to turn off people’s ability to protest gov’t policy by turning off their ability to survive by limiting or completely restricting people’s access to their own funds. No longer a need for a duplicitous MSM. There’s also no longer a need for the existing banks, and I suspect all banks will get nationalized to use their existing buildings and computer networks to implement the CBDC’s. The recent closer relationship between the Fed and the Treasury signaled that the gov’t is willing to throw the banks under the bus at the opportune moment.

The joke, however, will be on them, as the CBDC’s will keep being inflated as the common currencies are now, resulting in run away inflation shortly after their introduction. The control only lasts for however long they can pay their mercenary scum in the police and military to use force or the threat of force against their neighbors. It is the inflation to hyperinflation eventually that dooms all ‘currencies’ regardless of the medium because currencies aren’t ‘money’.

At some future point, money will once again replace currencies and my hope is that at that point, gov’t will have nothing to do with true money. Of course, my hope won’t be realized as the bulk of the population is too stupid to demand it.

+5-10 IQ points seems pretty doable.

Not really. This is doable only by selecting a smarter woman w/o any genetic engineering. Not to mention that IQ is one thing, intelligence is another, not to mention creativity, which is distinct from both.

Second question would be, how can you be sure that they are not selecting your embryos for their own favored traits and not for yours?

This will become a concern when trait selection becomes real. For now it’s sales pitch of snake oil paddlers. Then again, there is a sucker born every minute.

“as well as their own semiconductor OEM’s (deposition, etching, and litho equipment) to compete with the likes of AMAT, LamNovellus, and possibly ASML. The latter will be very difficult as EUV process is extremely complex and ASML is the only company to have perfected it”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-asml-china-spying-idUSKCN1RN0DK

The FD story was based in part on ASML sources and in part on documents from the Santa Clara, California Superior Court that showed six former ASML employees, all with Chinese names, breached their employment contract by sharing information on ASML software processes with a company called XTAL Inc.

The FD reported that XTAL, which makes electrical design automation for semiconductor systems, is a subsidiary of a China-based company called Dongfang Jingyuan, which it said in turn has ties to the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.

In its reaction, ASML said XTAL’s funding came from “South Korea and China�. It said the aim of the theft was to create a competing product and sell it to an existing ASML customer in South Korea.

The company confirmed the FD’s report that the court had awarded ASML $223 million in damages.

“It is unclear to what extent these damages can be collected from the now bankrupt company XTAL,� ASML said.

They had memory sticks full of data and software.

“The suggestion that we were somehow victim of a national conspiracy is wrong,� CEO Peter Wennink said in a statement.

“We resent any suggestion that this event should have any implication for ASML conducting business in China. Some of the individuals (involved) happened to be Chinese nationals,� he added.

LOL

If a global Weimar scenario come to pass (possible), the only alternatives will be barter, commodity money, and (yes) cryptos.

So no cryptos in your sound money world?

Another commenter getting on the global libertarianism bandwagon. I really need to recuperate from my bout of neurotic anti-collective-at-all-costs ideology.

Yes, no crypto. Blockchain should be exploited for its benefits, but being money isn’t one of them.

I’m an anarchist. Libertarians are too soft for my taste.

Why don’t you explain how Bitcoin’s current value reflects its cost of production. If you can’t do that then Bitcoin is just another mania.

Using electricity to spin a motor to produce a product or to run a server has identifiable benefits. Using it to solve a puzzle question that has no reason for being asked in the first place is just a waste of resources.

The clear message China just sent to the crypto space should indicate what the rest of the world’s gov’t are going to do eventually. The supreme criminals in the society, the gov’t of the world, aren’t into entertaining competition.

@Anatoly. According to Wikipedia, Italy’s per capita income at about $35.000 is the lowest among the G 7.
On the the hand, Japan’s per capita income is about $43,000 roughly at the same level as Britain, France.

You should remember that according to the Big Mac Index by The Economist, both the U.S. dollar and European currencies such as the Euro, Swiss Franc are more than 30% OVERVALUED against such East Asian currencies as Chinese Yuan, Japanese Yen, South Korean Won, Taiwan dollar.

Also according to an article in Nikkei Asia on 10 Aug. 2021, China overtook America in AI research and China has been ahead of America in AI application for many years.

So as of now. I think China and America are neck and neck in AI

But I think China is ahead of America in quantum technology (both communications and computing) and 5G.

This is doable only by selecting a smarter woman

Clarification: even in this case you increase the probability, but there is no guarantee. Still better than genetically engineered “designer babies�: there, the blind lead the blind. The result was correctly predicted more than 2,000 years ago.

For thousands of years China has had a cluture of bureaucratic control/ That isn’t going to disappear in a few decades. Dengism has had its day. Reversion to the Confucian mean (study of the safer classics now including the works of Mao) is due and Xi is the man to do it.

I know very little about China. Tear me apart.

Does it cost near $50,000 to “mine� a Bitcoin? If the answer is no, then the hype over bitcoin is just another tulip bubble. The use of the mining analogy is, in itself, a major indicator that the whole thing is a con.

Is there some kind of secret farm that specializes in growing subnormal morons like you? This thread has brought out quite the bumper crop of buffoons, dullards, and just plain imbeciles.

Proof that the world urgently needs gene-edited babies.

UK firms do the publishing. The English as 2nd language countries thus should be bumped up a place or so.

When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the losers.
Socrates

You can’t accept my challenge because you have no reasonable answer. So, all you can do, as a mental midget, is to lash out to your betters.

Thank you for initiating name calling as it shows the readers here what kind of character you have and are.

Maybe one of the future developments in ongoing dematerialization will be people forgoing to have children. A couple can perform PGT-P to get the embryo’s genome and then run their birth and life through a sim. Why even bother doing the real thing when you can simulate their entire life at much lower cost?

China ngmi.

I’ve had this dicussion about China with my financial advisor. Both my wife (who is Japanese) and him have brought this issue to my attention. It is our consensus that China is entering a Japan-like stagnation that will last indefinitely. But China will not crash, just like Japan will not crash. However, China as a growth story for investment opportunities is OVER.

Who are his sources? I would fire him if that was me. I would not need him in the first place, anyway. Of the countless of estimates i have seen (many western estimates as well), almost all point to chinese growth being higher than the US up to 2050. There is lots of catch up effect untapped in China. Btw when talking about east asian stagnation, it should not be forgotten that both Taiwan and SK have pretty good rates with worse demographics and far bigger per capita GDP than China. There was no implosion of growth there unlike in Japan.

The average forecast for Chinese gdp growth is approximately:
2020 – 2030 5,1 %
2030 – 2040 3 %
2040 – 2050 2.2 %
2050 – 2060 1.4 %

So what is he smoking? China’s median age reaches Japan’s by 2050. It already has the best 5G coverage on the planet and it started developing 6G.

Personally speaking, he is massively wrong because only 60 % of China’s population is urbanised and have internet, which means that China has a room to grow up to 2035 at least, via urbanisation and plugging more people into the internet. No property or labour force crisis is possible under such conditions either, as China can (and will) move many more millions from rural areas into the cities.

However, China as a growth story for investment opportunities is OVER.

The majority of US and European companies in China do not think so. China has a huge room to grow because its markets and currency are severely underused compared to GDP. Plus China will never be Japan because it has an economy of scale, that is – everything produced there will be cheaper all other things equal, plus it will have the resources to make huge technological investments and undertakings almost no one else can. An example – when you have 1.4 billion people it helps big data, phone and IT industries immensely (and almost any industry actually), because so many people need to be serviced, which means that you need to create huge unparalleled IT infrastructure, clouds, supercomputers, data processing capabilities, AI, etc. That’s one of the reasons even US sanctions could not dent Huawei – it can always have a huge market.

You need in-depth analysis from real experts, not childish stuff like this. That would be expensive, or it will take some of your time to do it yourself.

I need to clarify that I was very influenced by libertarian writings but I’m not a committed libertarian now.

I still use Austrian economics as analytical tools that is closer to economic realities of a productive economy than Keynesianism, but ultimately both of them aren’t the sole economic truth, since there is always an element of faith in economics and much of economic “laws” are transient as people’s habits and mindsets change, not to mention the whole social arrangements. The remark about fiat & fractional reserve being frauds is meant to represent what the Austrian economists see these institutions – given sufficient distrust every institution is illegitimate, and every institution, no matter how noble or effective they are at first, will decay and fail over time. (Fractional reserve might be if you take the original promise of full deposit redemption in mind – Austrian credit creation require the lending of time deposits, and demand deposits is a service and not an financial instrument).

However, given the globalization of the anti-authority mindset, fanned by the implementation of the Great Reset agenda, you can see many aspects of libertarian economics (agorism, self-sufficiency, barter & commodity money) being embraced by increasingly enthusiastic masses and possibly as strategies of survival. And remember, all man-made disasters of the 20th century were due to the failure to implement a centralized “utopian” vision, and the Great Reset probably won’t be excluded from such a list. After that, given how centralization is discredited as an organizational principle, decentralization and the abnegation of public trust will be built into the new institutions.

The NAP goes against human nature as Communism does since it assumes a perfect state (elimination of aggression vs elimination of want) which is unbiological. We can strive to be pacific but aggression will always happen, including statism. It assumes a world of atomized actors bouncing onto boundaries of their lifestyles and interactions, like air particles. There is basically no place in the world, except many parts of 19th century America, where this is the default political structure. It was only possible as an American ethos of individualism, independence and anti-collectivism, some sort of HBD trait and not easily copied onto anywhere else with vastly different ethos. Such a society has no cohesion as everyone chart their own paths and guard their own farmsteads, and so would not exist organically outside of a landscape of yeoman farmers. This isn’t to belittle the value of leaving everyone to their own best paths of development – just not to transpose the personal to the civil and public. I am not an anarchist but one hoping for appropriate forms of “government” for every societal form, including anarchism for the libertarians. You shouldn’t impose one solution over everyone like liberalism did in 19th century and the WEF is doing with the Great Reset.

What I indeed believe is our position being on the cusp of civilization shifts as consequential as the Mongol Invasions/Black Death, the starting point of the Age of Discovery, and the starting point of capitalism. Particularly, capitalism is being made obsolete by the many factions of elites and populists, and we will have a chaotic transition from rational industrial growth to organic development, that will appear to be regressive and catastrophic to the proponents of progressivist history.

So, what does it mean for a China that is doubling on building their own Great Reset structures apart from main clique controlled from Davos?

Unlike the Sheeple here, I actually know that China is not real

They can also pump out propaganda and incentives to make more children

As of yet that has not resulted in more children being born, this after the 2015 move to a “two child policy.” As of the middle of this year a three child policy, and I note the implication the government is still fully involved in counting those children.

On the other hand 2020 being really bad for births has got to be a special case, and this might remain true until COVID is “solved” in one way or another for the PRC. Might give the CCP enough time to recover from serially trashing various components of the country’s economy, which might be wise in the long run, but making people more poor does not encourage them to have more children in modern economies. Although how many are still “on the farm?” (small family ones).

In the context of financial repression what’s happening in the housing market both from government policy and bubble(s) being burst looks very worrisome to me. No to a very limited government safety net and strictly limiting what the people can invest in, and then allowing that to first go out of control and then trying to bring sanity to it is a very hard thing, maybe search on “soft landings” for the historical record? And now how much wealth has been stranded, perhaps effectively destroyed if you can’t sell them, in cryptocurrencies?

Japan is now the poorest G7 country after

Japan, France and UK all have the effectively same income level as each other. (At this level, it is just small changes in the exchange rate).

Canada, Germany are slightly higher (but probably not in any significant way), and USA significantly higher.

Meanwhile Italy, lower.

Japan is just at the median income of the G7 countries. Even Germany’s and Canada’s difference is small enough that it can probably be more exchange rate or margin of error. It’s only USA’s income level which is very clearly performing above the other G7 countries.

The benefit is similar to the internet itself–disintermediation.

Yeah, but internet is dominated by a few large government integrated corporate conglomerates and people love this, and can’t get enough of.

Just as with the internet, this is also unlikely to lead to the flourishing freedom that libertarians predict. If crypto is the real deal, then powerful forces will likely gain control over it.

Like I mentioned elsewhere, is Walmart Dollar a possibility? Maybe. I agree with underlying tech and doing away with commercial banks, they outlived their usefulness, but crypto is going to get centralized, if not by the government directly (through Central Bank), then by government linked corporate conglomerate. So if not US Digital Dollar, then it will be Facebook Libra or Walmart Dollar or whatever. My bet is still on Central Bank regulated digital currency though.

Both Germany and Japan’s most important export market is China, but the former doesn’t have security concerns from China so is not in as much of a bind.

All else equal German autos are considered sexier than Japanese. If anyone who helps sell this its Hollywood–

View post on imgur.com

Hardy Krüger as Generalmajor der Waffen SS Karl Ludwig, A Bridge Too Far

But what’s going to be Germany’s answer for EV? As current, all the leading EV battery makers are East Asian.
https://www.carsguide.com.au/ev/advice/who-builds-batteries-for-electric-cars-ev-battery-manufacturers-explained-83190

fashionable to deprecate manufacturing as a dirty

For people who live in cities where industrial manufacturing is dominant, then it is indeed often dirty, unpleasant and very bad for your standard of living. Historically one of the reasons American people tried to escape cities to the suburbs.

Although of course better to be near some semiconductor factory using solar energy – than to be near something like copper smelting.

Deindustrialization has benefits for the average citizens. When polluting industry was moved out of a city (even out of country to the third world – China, Vietnam, India), then the cities often become flooded inflow of people, and almost a renaissance in former industrial areas as in examples like London, Bilbao, Milan, etc. (Of course positive examples of cities that could deindustrialize without falling in mass unemployments)

That would likely happen by imposing airtight sanctions against China and completely closing off the sea-lanes to starve the country into submission. I actually could see China being able to survive such a blockade, but only if it is has access to Russian resources.

Have you forgotten that the PRC has a serious nuclear weapons arsenal, and has decided to significantly beef it up? The above scenario with a CCP that doesn’t really care about the people, just their own power and here personal survival, would have them in an excellent position to threaten and then if necessary use nuclear weapons to break the will of the blockading countries.

They’ve long been explicitly threatening to use them, mostly recently after the AUKUS nuclear sub etc. deal, but in the most infamous post-Cold War example “During the Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1995 to 1996, Chinese Lieutenant General Xiong Guangkai told the US assistant secretary of defense that ‘Americans care more about Los Angeles than they do about Taiwan.’”

The only think we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history, but I recall the last time the world/US tried to starve a northeastern Asian nation into submission there was eventually a spot of trouble that was ended by nuclear hellfire.

Our propaganda organs have persuaded or at least coerced many Americans into accepting the most totally ridiculous beliefs on issues of race, gender, and various other Woke matters, and have similarly spread these ideological doctrines to many of our vassal-states, dominated by our electronic and social media. However, these beliefs are mostly crazy, and their widespread apparent dominance should make us very cautious in accepting other beliefs.

Take the AI issue, about which I know almost nothing. From what I’ve read, TikTok gained enormous ground against Facebook, Google’s Youtube, and other American social media giants because its AI was so vastly superior in serving up enticing videos. Doesn’t this indicate that Chinese AI and software is not necessarily as far behind as you suggest?

Here I think you’re making the same mistake about two things. What is the objective of Wokeness? I like Spandrel’s explanation of Bioleninism, there’s significant things to be gained by creating such cadres of broken people who’s only importance is what they can do for our ruling trash. And is YouTube etc. bad at serving up enticing materials because they’re just plain bad at it (you can make the case it’s “CEO” who has more power than Google’s CEO is generally incompetent, and YouTube can’t get Google’s best talent), but what it that sort of success when compared to the totalitarian tech Left’s (TTL) ability to control “the national conversation?”

To reify this, why have I never created a Twitter account, have stopped using Facebook except for local emergency stuff (a primary means my local units of government use to communicate), and 95% of the time only go to YouTube for specific videos someone has linked to? Why did you create Unz.com, and why do I spend so much time here instead of on TTL platforms?

Just how good is the TTL’s AI? I suspect we’ll find out for real after they start generating lists of future war criminals as the KGB did for Western Europe in case of a successful Warsaw Pact invasion of it.

Reversion to the Confucian mean (study of the safer classics now including the works of Mao) is due and Xi is the man to do it.

I know very little about China. Tear me apart.

There you go. Reversion to the mean means becoming the biggest economy on the planet for a long time. The mean of China for the last 2000 years was the biggest or second biggest (after India) economy on the planet, with Asia being the center of the global economy.

Here is how the reversion to the mean looks like. Not very nice to western countries.

There is a reason why desperate europeans were trying to reach Asia for such a long time. Now though, there are nukes, and globalisation favors non-western countries due to variety of reasons (technology/knowledge proliferation, labor arbitrage, etc).

study of the safer classics now including the works of Mao

It also includes opening up to the world, unlike what Mao taught. They know that isolation is not the answer, hence “opening up” is a constant party phrase. Thus the chinese bids for free trade agreements with almost everyone, the latest – with the US conceived (and later rejected by the US in favor of isolationism) TPP. It looks like the US is closing its economy to the world instead? : )

Globally brand and cachet is largely determined by white women. The top luxury names are almost entirely French, Italian and American. The only Japanese name that makes the top 20 is Shiseido.
https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/ar/Documents/Consumer_and_Industrial_Products/Global-Powers-of-Luxury-Goods-abril-2019.pdf

It’s well known in Western dating market that oriental guys* have the lowest sexual market value. Med and Latin guys the biggest slayers.

*Exceptions allowed like perhaps Daniel Chieh

Maybe it will stay this way, but who knows?

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Huang Xiaoming as IJA Intelligence Chief Takeda, The Messenger

Totally freaking agree, Tolya. A thought I had after the Crypto ban was: “wow, Deux Ex ended up getting China wrong”.

I spent time in China during the Hu years, and man, it was a free wheeling place. I didn’t see the shakedowns and whatever hassling by authorities Chinese presumably had to deal with, but the place had a chaotic and industrious feel to it, commercial activity everywhere. Reminded me of my imagination of the USA in the 1890s, a society juiced up by the infusion of technology, money and high energy people.

A lot of us had this idea that China would be a Moldbugian empire, a giant Hong Kong. Authoritarian, but also freemarket and corrupt in a functional way. There’s this exchange in Deus Ex where a guy in a bar is basically defending China as authoritarian, but also a place where you can make your fortune, it doesn’t look like that dream, which seemed likely in 2000, is going to happen.

You need crazy, risky taking geniuses to reach the heights of technology and have a dynamic economy. Given the Chinese personality, they need to go out of their way to encourage their young men to be a little wild, not to “work hard, study differential equation”. As you’ve noted before, despite their vast stock of high IQ engineers, they still can’t pull off a decent jet engine. I’d wager that tiny Sweden has a better shot, and better record, of producing world-changing technical innovations. Sad!

The Celestials also shoot themselves in the foot on geopolitics, they are bad at grand strategy. See Luttwak’s statements on this topic in recent years. Even if the USA continues rapidly losing capacity as a superpower, it’s easy to imagine a Russia-Europe-Japan balancing coalition arising, to check Chinese ambition. They’ve fallen into a very Chinese trap.

I think I know what you are saying (govts seizing on every opportunity to increase their ability to see and control everything), but I tend to think that if there are insidious motives behind CBDC, rather than big countries controlling the economy of small countries by the sheer power of their own CBDC over theirs, the main or at least proximate insidious goal of the govt would be to replace banks and third-party payment systems in their internal economy. China is already saying that the DY will be, among other things, a vehicle to give banking services to people outside the banking system (think of street vendors; China has the largest number of people without bank account). One bit of info connected to this is that payments in DY can be done without an internet connection (AliPay, WeChat require a connection). But, contrary to the suspicion that the PBC wants to make banks and third-payment systems obsolete, in the development of the DY, banks and third-party payment systems are on-board. The PBC have an R&D team formed by commercial banks, telecoms, and third-party payment companies. So perhaps they are in fact doing it for efficiency gains and to increase internal consumption, which they say is the proximate motivation. I imagine this is the proximate goal (efficiency gains and increased internal consumption) but many developments have clear proximate goals then along the way you realize other ultimate goals that eventually become more prominent, or maybe you plan ahead for the time when ultimate goals become achievable. I am focusing on the payment aspect of CBDC, which is the easiest to roll out, but there are financial aspects that are also very important and more complicated.

You laugh correctly at the ASML CEO’s make nice comment towards the PRC, but EUV technology as they’ve developed it is completely insane. It starts with emitting a droplet of molten tin, which is then zapped with a laser from a company in California ASML eventually bought. As the electrons drop back to their normal orbits they emit very short wavelength photons/light, just shy of what’s officially “soft X-rays.” This is bounced through around seven ultra precise mirrors each adsorbing some of the light before impacting a very special sort of mask to then illuminate the parts you want on one die on a wafer.

Did I mention a lot of this happens, has to happen in a vacuum? For the sake of intellectual curiosity I really want to know how they keep that tin from getting in to everything and wrecking the machine….

No, nobody in the world is going to be able to duplicate this any time soon, although there have been proposals to use other technology like synchrotrons to produce light of this sort. But it doesn’t matter that much for PRC national security uses, there’s a tremendous amount of stuff you can still do at what Intel calls 14 nm (their having, at least in part due to diversity, failed to move any further down except, maybe, one step very recently). So the PRC is not going to be fabricating CPU for Apple phones, but they’ll do OK for the foreseeable future.

If you want to learn a lot more about this, I generally recommend https://SemiWiki.com/

Anyone who complains about being insulted does not understand the purpose of the internet and isn’t fit to participate. Perhaps you would have a better time enjoying social media from your mobile phone rather than running with the big dogs on the Unz Review.

I attacked you because your comment demonstrated that you don’t have the foggiest idea of the economics of Bitcoin mining, yet chose to make this the lynchpin of your so-called argument. A few minutes of research would have informed you as to the cost, but I suppose that would’ve cut into your valuable time sharing photos of your recent road trip to Wall Drug in your treasured 1997 Plymouth Breeze.

For the record the cost of mining Bitcoins is the capital cost of acquiring mining hardware (generally modern ASIC-based miners such as Bitmain Antminers), the current difficulty, the cost of electricity, and the pool cost (for small miners).

Here’s a basic calculator: https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/calculator

Latest Antminer: https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=00020210920124332765Ffe211v80644

Current mining pools: https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-mining/pools/

Break-even at present difficulty with low-cost industrial electricity is about a year. Of course you can’t be sure since difficulty changes.

I suspect Socrates might have troubled himself to learn about crypto mining before opining on it.

They’ll never ban crypto in the West, far too many important people are publicly long. Dorsey is hyper-long, Musk is long, Mastercard is long. Bitcoin gives climate alarmists a new front for grandstanding: “green mining”. Who could be against green mining? Only a racist. There’s also the Western love of anything ‘technological’, it would be uncool to ban crypto. Don’t forget the insider trading angle. If governments keep Bitcoin alive, they can endlessly insider trade off threatening regulation, or adjusting laws. If you ban it, you halt that gravy train.

It’s no threat to the state anyway. National currencies will remain the unit of account, and that’s what really matters for monetary policy. Every internet connected device is backdoored, not like you can do truly anonymous transactions, even on Lightening. If crypto starts mediating transactions in a big way, the monetary base can simply be retracted in a proportionate way, with little or no effect on exchange rates among government currencies. Bitcoin is a global cowrie shell, a global store of value that has complementary properties vis-a-vis cash and conventional securities. Throwing Bitcoin into the mix is like adding another course to an otherwise slightly lacking banquet, it’s not replacing anything, just makes things better.

Call me up when uncontrolled cryptocurrency becomes 60 % of world’s currency reserves, as the US dollar. Hint: it is never going to happen.

Wanna bet?

And no, i’m not talking here about digital US dollar or CNY. I’m talking about uncontrolled crypto.

The combined value of bitcoin was equivalent to just 1.7% of the world’s money in 2021.

The minute it becomes a threat to Central Banks it will be banned. Maybe at 10 %

China’s goals and the US’s goals may be entirely different. In the US’s case and the west’s case in general, I suspect it is to enslave the population with a system of faux “money” that they can’t escape from. I’ve tried to envision some mechanism to avoid a US CBDC and still live within the US or its area of influence and came up with no way. The US’s system will provide the enforcement blueprint for Europe, all the English speaking countries and anyone that wants to trade with the US.

I’m not concerned with China since I don’t live there and don’t see any way of interacting with China or its people from where I am in the Caribbean. I do see, and am concerned about, the interactions with the US as the Caribbean is largely a US lake in terms of economic activity.

the main or at least proximate insidious goal of the govt would be to replace banks and third-party payment systems in their internal economy

Exactly! They want absolute control over the population by having them by the short hairs of their access to their own funds (I won’t call it money, since it’s currency which is just gov’t script backed by nothing but brute force).

It’s my contention that the US regime knows it can’t compete with China in the long run, so they intend to focus inward against the best interests of its population and anyone else in the periphery that is subject to US influence. The decades of currency spent on bullshit weapons systems is, I think, the reason that a war with China won’t happen. The US has junk that can’t perform so there’s no reason to even try to use it.

I think the thieves in the MIC have looted the country to such an extent that their weapons system aren’t up to the task and therefore any looting has to occur inside from now on. The exit from Afghanistan is just a realization that there’s nothing more the military has to gain from remaining there. The new focus is against the Constitution spouting, anti vax, white supremacists, etc that the bulk of the morons that vote will believe is necessary and proper. Totalitarianism is the US’s future and it’s already been instantiated in a milder version since 9/11. Now, the gloves come off with an in your face dictatorship that will beat and kill people that get in their way. See Australia for the model as to how to treat the citizenry and get no serious reaction. Australia is the test case for what will occur next in the US and then some.

I would also like to add the mindblowing optics system developed by Carl Zeiss for this ASML product..

Basically glass lenses wouldn’t work because the glass itself would absorb the EUV rays so they came up with the mirror based focusing mechanism to etch patterns on wafers..

Seriously borderline sci fi stuff..

Reversion to the Confucian mean (study of the safer classics now including the works of Mao) is due and Xi is the man to do it.

I know very little about China. Tear me apart.

Since you asked so politely: New, Improved Chairman Xi is having serious students of Chairman Mao disappeared. What’s now safe to read are Xi’s book(s) and I don’t know what else in that domain.

Although otherwise I might make a wild guess you’re thinking in the right direction, I too am woefully ignorant of so many things about China like Confucianism. But right now my impression is that Chairman Xi is trying to return the PRC to Marxism of a sort, and that never ends well, especially economically.

BTW, our host has got the attention of ZeroHedge with this latest posting. Worth looking at for just the scale models of a Ming Dynasty Great Treasure Fleet ship and Columbus’ Santa Maria, the latter is tiny by comparison. I mean, the former ship’s maximum width is almost more than the Santa Maria’s length.

Deindustrialization has benefits for the average citizens.

True, but that only works up until you realize that foreign countries shut down their production due to, say, a pandemic, and there is nothing you can do about it. Deindustrialization has benefits for the average citizens only as long as somebody else stays industrialized and makes products for them.

There are two parts to modern supply chains – one is globalization, and another is “just in time” inventory management where your product is made once ordered with minimal warehousing.

The inventory management is not going away as it has too many benefits, but supply chain we probably want regionalized, if we learned anything at all. Factories are heavily automated anyway, so cost of labor is not the driving factor anymore.

Even post pandemic, with trade tensions rising, you don’t want your critical components sourced from vulnerable Asia.

every internet connected device is backdoored, not like you can do truly anonymous transactions, even on Lightening.

The problem is more of it as a store of value, causing inflation in CB currencies. Just as gold, it will never be allowed to become anything major as % of world’s money. See what happened to gold in the US in certain circumstances. The big money must stay in $, Euro, CNY..so that the printers can go on.

I’m not a miner, and your first reference clearly states it’s developed by miners for miners, so that reference is useless to answer my simple question which you studiously avoid.

A reference I found a few months ago is : https://minerdaily.com/2021/how-much-does-it-cost-to-mine-a-bitcoin-update-may-2021/ . I only asked you to get your perspective on it, not knowing you were a foul mouth POS.

Therefore, the going price offers an exorbitant profit to miners. The same can’t be said for real miners that move dirt to get at gold, silver and other real commodities.

As far as you being among the big dogs, you’d be correct if it was big dog shit.

“Japan’s per capita income is about $43,000 roughly at the same level as Britain”

I would much rather be a Japanese person in Japan than a Native Brit in the UK.

There are no “bad areas” in Japan. No “grooming gangs”, no “County lines” drug gangs. Crime is relatively low. There are not homeless people and beggars in every town. Trains are fantastic, futuristic, medical care superb.

why do I spend so much time here instead of on TTL platforms?

Because you have no friends?

You need in-depth analysis from real experts, not childish stuff like this. That would be expensive, or it will take some of your time to do it yourself.

I think that’s bad advice. The value of financial “advisors�, “experts�, and their ilk is as close to zero as makes no difference. They don’t know the future, just like us. If they knew it, they wouldn’t need to work.

the biggest threat China has is demographics, with a tfr of 1.3 children per women and almost 14% of the population over 65 , China is on the verge of population decline

Tell that to any significant corporation. All have China specialists, this is how business works.

There are those who are good and those who are bad, just like with any place. Those who are better at estimating the future make money. Those who are not do not.

China Isn’t Going to Make It

How’s Chinese obesity epidemic going?

To catch up with US, Chinese will need to overinflate their healthcare, finance, and government sectors. I know their government and finance are pretty strong, but Chinese may be too healthy to catch up to the US.

But if they get obese fast, they too can spend $10-$20 trillion on healthcare expenditures which will bring their economy in line with US.

Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou was released by Canada, returned to China

China’s national power ensures Meng’s different outcome from Alstom executive: Global Times editorial

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202109/1235051.shtml

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202109/1235066.shtml

We believe many Chinese people have once again thought of the experience of France’s Alstom. Due to the company’s competition with its American counterparts, Alstom’s executive Frédéric Pierucci was sentenced in the US on foreign bribery charges for five years in prison. Alstom paid a huge fine and was forced to sell its core business to the US’ General Motors. In comparison, Meng and Huawei are much luckier.

The high-profile case of Meng, which has become a political dilemma significantly affecting the global geopolitical landscape, has been settled through both legal channels and political wrestling, experts said, noting that China, the US and Canada have seen the best scenario with much compromise made by the Biden administration in resolving the matter. It also helped pave the way for the positive interaction between the world’s largest economies in the near future amid strained China-US relations.

It was also one mistake of the US administration that has been corrected in line with the request of China, as China put forward two lists to the US during the bilateral talks in Tianjin in July, including the List of US Wrongdoings that Must Stop which urged the US to release Meng, showing that Beijing’s US policies began taking effect and remaining mistakes of the US have to be corrected.

Plus – aside from Germany – the average Japanese probably has an average standard of living higher than the others. It certainly has longer life expectancy.

The cessation of the Treasure voyage were partly to prevent the emergence of oligarchs that would challenge the power of meritocratic scholar-officials, who were traditionally contemptuous of merchants.

The other part was due to ethical considerations. The voyages would have surely encountered Arab and Turkish slave traders and declined to participate. The Ming had they wanted to behave like Europeans easily could have had firepower to overrun the African tribes (not even advanced enough to build Kingdoms) but opted to not to.

The treasure fleets rotted away in their harbors and a few centuries later Europeans overspread the world.

How’s that going for Europeans huh? Even the Norwegians who never participated in colonization are subjected to immivasion and Negro Worship.

Correct. 1/3 of the top AI talent in the US are Chinese.

After the Plaza Accords it seems Japan almost completely lost it’s innovative edge to South Korea…

But couldn’t it be a store of value against inflation-prone government currencies? Or as a store of value against the US dollar losing its reserve status?

I think the inflexion point was sometime in the late 2000s.

If we consider display technologies the Japanese dominated till the late 2000s.

In Plasma TVs Pioneer Elite TVs were the gold standard.

In LCD Sharp Aquous reigned Supreme.

And Sony released the world’s first consumer OLED TV.

Japanese phones pre iPhone were light years ahead of the rest of the world.

Now nothing.Sony smartphones have less than 1% market share.

All OLED TV panels are sourced from LG.

Most LCD TVs are sourced from Chinese firms like BOE..

I am still looking for a convincing explanation of what exactly happened.

“China specialists” don’t usually speculate about the market.

What they usually do is more simple, and more interesting.

See, back in the day, about 15 years ago, the Chinese economy was really opening up, but they were starting from a pretty clean slate. Regulations were effectively nil, there was no annoying civil legal system to bother with, there was a lot of small-scale competition on the ground, and sourcing websites like AliBaba were unmoderated. Anything the Chinese could make, you could quite easily find. It was trivial, back in those days, to arrange for tremendous bulk quantities of illegal steroids or black market pharmaceuticals on AliBaba.

Those days are long since past. The regulatory environment in China is much tighter, much more like America’s. (If still not nearly quite so bad.) Sourcing has become vastly more difficult, and sites like AliBaba are so closely monitored and moderated that they have effectively become gate-keepers. (Case in point: They no longer list pharmaceutical ingredients or APIs at all.) Industries have consolidated, so there’s less competition. Patent filing has become a Chinese national pastime.

In Xi’s China, things have become much more difficult.

“China specialists” — and I know, because I have had to employ a few at various times in the past — basically manage regulatory, IP, and logistical matters, which are all becoming increasingly complex. If you’re lucky and you have a good one, they’ll also be very plugged-in to the industry that you work in — on a first-name basis with a few dozen factory managers, etc.

If you’re working alongside a really good China specialist, and you squint real hard, you might be able to pretend that you’re back in 2010.

Even in the largest corporations, what China specialists don’t do is speculate about the market. Most of them are totally clueless about that stuff. At large firms, navigating IP and regulatory matters are usually the focus.

Could be partly a reflection of height differences. For ex: the longest lived Japanese are Okinawans (the shortest.) Forget which sex, but Okinawans take the world prize for only one sex. (That is most centenarians) The other sex is some island in the Med, but I forget which one.

The not so secret meaning of Karlin post.

Karlin to Putin (who reads his blog): My BitCoin investment is hurting. Do something with Xi. Stop him or something. What about some Po-oolong tea? And if you can’t do it at least appreciate my talent and readiness to write anything contrary to facts and logic just to advance my interest, that can be also yours – this talent and readiness can work for you, Mr. Putin.

And meantime in Beijing Xi beefed up his security detail once Karlin’s devastating attack against China was reported on ZeroHedge and there are rumors about the purge of pro-cryptocurrency revisionists in CCP.

Agree. But China hands at companies also constantly release forecasts about the market, including equities, oil consumption, gas consumption, retail, not to mention GDP, inflation, etc.

For example a popular theme these days is the big gap between the chinese share in world GDP and Chinese share in world market cap, which points to bullish case for Chinese equities.

A very typical example.

https://www.jhinvestments.com/viewpoints/international-equities/is-the-china-stock-sell-off-cause-for-concern

I am saying this based on personal experience. Myself and my wife have IRAs. Both used to be managed by the same “wealth managers�. Then I wanted to invest one in things they did not approve of, so I managed one (basically, bought some things and did not do anything else) and they kept managing the other. In a year my “managed� portfolio grew more than the one they managed. So much for their “expertise�.

Mind you, I am not saying they don’t have some useful technical knowledge. E.g., they gave me (unofficially, as they are not certified for that) some very astute tax advice, and I am grateful for that. But as far as predicting the future goes, their guess is no better than mine.

You got bad ones, there are good ones too. Just as in any place. Those who are better will get wealthy and move up the chain, will no longer be working with you, but will become company CIOs, etc. Those who are worse will remain working for clients down there.

Dunno, might ask your friends over at Samsung and Sony…

Samsung (Korean) has done a lot better than Sony (Japanese) over the last twenty years.

But what’s going to be Germany’s answer for EV?

VW is building its own battery factories.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/15/22325813/vw-volkswagen-power-day-battery-electric-car-announcement

One way Volkswagen plans to boost production of battery-powered vehicles is through a massive expansion of its manufacturing footprint. The automaker plans to have six battery cell production plants operating in Europe by 2030, which it will build alone or with partners.

It’s just cost saving typical of 21st century industry. It’s obviously more profitable for Sony, Philips, Panasonic and Samsung to buy LG panels, as they do not have a patent for this unlike e.g. Sony “Trinitron”.

Regardless of everyone buying the same panels, Sony makes often the best OLED television depending on year and category.

As for the company – it is ​doing its job, which is to generate profits for its owners (although chip shortage is a disaster for everyone this year).

​”Sony posts record Q1 profit on pandemic demand for devices: Operating profit for the quarter ended June 30th rose to 280.1 billion yen (€2.17 billion) from 221.7 billion yen a year earlier” https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/sony-posts-record-q1-profit-on-pandemic-demand-for-devices-1.4638712

What coins are in the arbitrum ecosystem?

Hayek made the same observations, but this is from Tocqueville-

“When Europeans landed in China three hundred years ago, they found there that almost all the arts had reached a certain degree of perfection and were surprised that they had not improved beyond that point. It was an industrial nation where most scientific processes had been preserved, while science itself was dead. That explained the unusually static quality of mind of this nation. The Chinese, in following the path of their ancestors, had mislaid the reasons for the direction the latter had chosen. They still used the formula without asking why; they kept the tool but they had lost the skills to adapt or replace it. The Chinese were, therefore, not able to change anything and had to abandon any notion of improvement. The well of human knowledge had dried up and although the flow still ran, it could neither increase its volume nor change its course.
We should not, therefore, complacently think that the barbarians are still far away for, if some nations allow the torch to be snatched from their hands, others stamp it out themselves.”

The difference here is that China has advanced this time on the intellectual capital of others, but you are predicting the same result.

Korean companies rise in consumer products is not based especially on innovation, but just providing the same products (as e.g. Japanese companies) at slightly lower prices.

Therefore Samsung or LG are almost always slightly cheaper (with also slightly less reliable building quality) for the same products as Sony or Panasonic.

Kia or Hyundai, will be almost always slightly cheaper than Toyota, Honda, Mazda, Subaru, Mitsubishi, Nissan.

And obviously a Samick or Young Chang piano, will be significantly cheaper than an equivalent model of Yamaha or Kawai piano.

It’s characteristic of the contemporary consumers to be very price-sensitive. So that if you can provide the same products slightly cheaper, you will have the greatest market-share in the consumer market.

Korea’s government has used a slightly undervalued currency to support this consumer sales strategy of pricing the products a little cheaper than Japanese equivalents (while Japan always had overvalued currency).

Sony, Philips, Panasonic and Samsung to buy LG panels, as they do not have a patent for this unlike e.g. Sony “Trinitron�

And this because Kodak had developed the WRGB OLED technology that was easy to scale up for consumer production. Kodak expended 40 years of R&D on this OLED research, and then Kodak collapsed with financial problems around a decade ago.

LG purchased the Kodak’s OLED division, that had the intellectual property and patents in 2009. So from this wise purchase, LG has Kodak’s WRGB patents.

“December 6th, 2009 – Kodak announced today that they have sold all their OLED related assets to a group of LG companies. This is a sad day for Kodak I think – they have invented OLEDs in 1970 and have been working on the technology for 40 years now (!). It’ll be interesting to see what LG will do with Kodak’s IP (which is mostly about Fluorescent OLEDs and manufacturing equipment). In any case, LG is showing that they are truly committed to OLEDs.”
https://www.oled-info.com/lg-buys-kodaks-oled-unit

“The so-called WRGB (or WOLED-CF) architecture uses four white OLED subpixels with color filters on top (hence W+RBG). The WRGB technology (developed by Kodak and now owned by LG Display) is much easier to produce and scale-up.”
https://www.oled-info.com/lg-oled

I pretty much can’t see any scenario where all the major nations don’t do something similar. It is not in the interests of sovereign governments to allow it to flourish. El Salvador is too small and weak to create it’s own digital currency. But that doesn’t mean everyone will adopt crypto.

Why don’t you be consistent and see what China is doing is also authoritarian. At least libertarians can critique China while you give up on that.

You are not a real anarchist. If you were, you will be able to conceive a way back out of mandatory CBDCs, which is agorism using barter or commodity money, and arming yourselves against state enforcers.

Do you know how rotten smaller towns in Japan are? That destitute zone in Osaka?

The white birth rate in the US is the level of China. The US only grows population now because Latinos.
And I notice you completely skipped the comparison made with Europe and the rest of East Asia. Almost all are below replacement. The lowest being Japan – South Korea – Singapore. Only Southeast Asia and Africa have high birth rates overall.

Alt-right tards haven’t got the faintest clue how ruinated, rotting, and vintage Japan is. In their incel fantasies of what Japan is like, everything is clean and new, everyone is happy, and there is any kind of financial opportunity to speak of. The real Japan is a moldy, damp, rotting cabin built on cinderblocks.

The real reason that weeaboo fuck would prefer to live in Japan is because he has a sexual preference for Asian women. If Japan were a white country literally no white guys would be talking about how ideal it is or how they wish they had been born there. No white guy is trying to move to Luxembourg or talking about how ideal it is, which is basically what Japan is but with nonwhites. Japan’s selling point among the alt-right is “Asian women and ño white women/minorities”. All other facts get ignored.

Well I just mean the changes that took place – began with the Plaza Accords. The other issue was the aging which began around then (the population is now officially declining). It took decades for both to have their full effect.

As I mentioned, I’m not concerned with China. As an anarchist I have no use for any gov’t.

Once they have a CBDC as well as the military, they can control everything until such time as the people wise up and stop cooperating, which, given their track record, will be never.

With a CBDC, and total control over everything of value, you won’t be able to barter in any significant way because you won’t own anything and you’ll be happy. Remember? Not even gold and silver will save you since they’ll make the conversion to CBDC illegal. They can force a value of $0 on anything they don’t like, including precious metals.

The CBDC is the key to their control, for as long as that lasts. At some point, their greed will kill the CBDC too, when it is inflated to not purchase anything and then their control collapses. That could take decades.

I’m way ahead of you. I left the US a long time ago.

The main point of using barter, commodity money and such in this scenario is to ignore the “value” assigned to them by CBDCs, and instead find a black market price for everything.

And when CBDCs are debauched to be valueless like those Weimar Papiermarks, people will revert to a barter/commodity money/local currency economy with mainly local production and trade, probably in an agorist setting.

Why do you still cling to the logic of what you intend to boycott? You are killing the messenger who talks mostly the same as you.

I agree that one of our biggest problems is all the stupid people.

But most of them took the jab and are therefore on the way out.

If it turns out that the only people left are globalists and hardcore resistors, I’m pretty sure money will come back into fashion.

That’s extraordinarily sad.

Agree. In addition, cryptocurrencies based on decentralized, permissionless blockchains requiring PoW (‘Proof of Work’) or PoS (‘Proof of Stake’) algorithms are simply too computationally-intensive to be technically scalable. They are also not economically viable as digital currencies because those blockchain algorithms require computing power which now exceeds the power consumption of entire nations! Digital currencies require the computing ability to massively scale the number of transactions which cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum can not handle.

China was right to crack down on cryptocurrencies which has attracted ‘get-rick-quick’ scammers of all kinds. Besides, China is in the process of launching its own ‘Digital Yuan’ based on centralized, permissioned blockchains which do not require computationally-intensive blockchain algorithms, thus making cryptocurrencies obsolete.

The COVID vaccines along with COVID itself might only reduce fertility but not making people firmly sterile. And whether that is true or significant, we need years to find out, and that effect can’t be isolated from more general ones similar to the fertility shock Russia underwent in the 90s.

“Rotten” you speak of is a result of the aging population and youth leaving for urban areas. There are other, more appropriate words for it, such as decayed or crumbling. The worst areas of Tokyo or Osaka are still safer than many downtowns of the US or suburbs of Paris or sketchy areas of London. Perception of safety is also relative, Asians tend to be extremely cautious and safety-oriented. I guarantee you the worst parts of China or Japan are still much safer than the bad parts of Western countries, and sometimes as safe as good parts. Chances you will be randomly attacked on the street in a major city’s most central location while you are minding your own business is basically zero in those Asian countries. You didn’t refute the anon dude. If you want to see real destitute check American hoods on Youtube.

You know, it is rather strange how so many people cannot put two and two together and accept the reality. If you said “Chinese do better in mathematics” they’d be fine, but if you say “they are ahead/getting ahead in AI” suddenly they get mad, and try to prove you wrong.

Then the other fact you mentioned. While I could consider giving them the benefit of the doubt, and say they are waging a propaganda war, the fact that they seem to swallow their own lies and act stupidly based on them makes me suspect that Western elites actually believe the stuff Western media repeats. Of course, then, ordinary people are misled even more. Even in this thread, we can see that, this idea that China will collapse because they are not making enough babies for example. It is often repeated among Western media/thought leaders. Meanwhile, just one look at the data and you see it is no different from (and sometimes better) than Western countries, including Japan or Korea. Then there is the fact that China already has more than enough people. Combine it with enough technology and a much lesser than current % of the working-age population is enough to keep China (or any other advanced country) going.

And if I am wrong and TFR really needs to be above 2.0, I promise everyone that CCP could make TFR go above 2.0 the day they want it (or 3.0 for that matter). It is interesting that people have no problem believing they had 1 child policy for decades but they are struggling to believe the opposite could also be achieved. The West has no understanding of China. It is as simple as that.

Your chances of being randomly attacked in America are very low. Negligible if you don’t live in a black neighborhood (vast majority of whites and Asians do not).

I’m just tickled by people who bring up this “hood” argument. Literally no white or Asian person ever woke up one day and decided they needed to move to the hood. The hood is a place you have to make effort to go to (physically as well as mentally). Predictably, 95% of white people never find themselves going there. You don’t live in the hood, and you’re never going to go there, so why does it matter?

I think the elite in America want to stay in power and not risk all in order to turn the country into India’s golem. I mean, suppose they lost, would they want to live in India?

You misunderstood the role Indians would play under the scenario I proposed, but first let’s tackle the idea that Jewish elites would not risk losing what they already have in order to potentially gain control over China. Frankly, I don’t think they have any choice. In their quest to utterly dominate and subdue the whites they have irreversibly weakened and ultimately doomed the West, thus sabotaging the very vehicle they use to exert their will on the world.

The only way they can maintain their current preeminent position in world affairs is to leverage their control over the Western nations to establish a dominant position over China before the West is too far along its path of terminal decline and China too far along its path of ascendancy. It’s certainly a huge gamble, but the upside is essentially The World and the downside is merely accelerating what would eventually come to pass anyway if they never took the gamble in the first place. Lording it over a crumbling, strife torn third world cesspit that will be the West by the 2050s while you watch East Asia prosper outside your grasp is not something I venture these ambitious tribesmen will accept without giving it the ole college try.

As to the notion that my scenario leads to China becoming India’s wholly owned property, that is not at all what I described. While India would certainly do its bit, it would be the West that would have to play the major part in forcing China to its knees, so certainly the Jews would play the preeminent role in ruling the country afterwards, especially a the very highest level. However, India’s cooperation would be indispensable so we would certainly have our seat at the table as well. More importantly, it would take millions of foreign personnel to effectively govern China after its defeat in order to completely bring it into the fold and ensure the desired agenda is implemented fully.

This is exactly where India comes in, and that is why I drew the parallel between Indians’ role in a subjugated China to that of the Semu under the Yuan Dynasty. The Mongols were the unquestioned rulers and formed the highest caste under the Yuan, but they were so few that they had no choice but to import a whole host of occupation personnel from Central Asia, the Middle East, and even India because they knew they had to keep the native Han populace subdued and could not trust the ethnic Han to staff important positions. These were the “Semu” and they basically formed the bulk of the occupation forces as well as what was essentially “middle management” in the administrative machinery of China. They were given a favored, lordly status over the Chinese population and served as governors, tax collectors, merchants, etc. They took Chinese women as wives and concubines and over the centuries were genetically absorbed into the Chinese population.

In my analogy the Mongols would obviously be Jewish elites and the Semu would be Indians, although Indians would undoubtedly participate in the highest levels of the occupation regime as well. As an Indian I believe such an arrangement would be completely fair and satisfactory, given that the West would be assuming by far the higher risk in the whole escapade so its elites would justly stake a claim to constitute the very highest caste in a conquered China.

You’ve spun an interesting fictional scenario, but one which has zero chance of coming about.

Simply put, (a) you hugely over-estimate India’s state capacity, (b) you seem to believe that today’s USA is populated by the same exact people who lived there in 1950, with the same traits and capabilities, and (c) you assume that China is stupid, blind, and naïve.

But India is a picture of dysfunction. Look no further than their military, which, though powerful on paper, is the laughingstock of the world. Their procurement and “indigenous development” programs are the stuff of legend — they’re actually worse than what you’d see in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa. They’re not even capable of developing a rifle.

The USA’s “leadership” — including its Jewish “elites” — aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. They are not their fathers, and they certainly are not their grandfathers. Instead they are psychologically warped, solipsistic, and intellectually stunted. A lot of ink has been spilled on this point, so I’ll leave it at that.

China’s leadership is more intelligent and more capable than you realize, and the same goes for its people. The capability gap between China and India cannot be overstated, and the USA is rapidly losing its technological edge just as it has lost every other edge. Besides, American military planners have talked about blockading China for decades. Do you think that the Chinese are unaware of this, or unprepared for it? That they’re building that missile-laden Navy for nothing?

So what you’re writing might make for decent fiction that might appeal to the types who read Tom Clancy supermarket novels, but as a serious forecast it is shit.

Correct but my point is why didn’t Japan invent a rival to LG’s W-OLED tech.

JOLED has been perennially starved for funds and is only now productionizing inkjet printed OLED technology starting with monitors this year.

In phone displays too which use the RGB OLED which Japan pioneered they are no where in the league of Samsung Display.

Why such slow development of next generation Micro LED technology.Again the first working micro LED(Legit Micro LED not Mini LED marketed as Micro LED)TV was developed by Sony but no road map to productionization has been unveiled.

Why this industry wide rout?

Straight outta Cupertino! Word!

Just as with the internet, this is also unlikely to lead to the flourishing freedom that libertarians predict. If crypto is the real deal, then powerful forces will likely gain control over it.

I have no idea what you are talking about in that last paragraph and how that scenario would develop, and mal’s reply has not enlightened me in any degree. Alas, maybe I just lack the technical expertise to fully understand this subject.

If Bitcoin mining offers such an exorbitant profit, then perhaps you should get a title loan on your beloved Plymouth Breeze in order to get a deposit on a secured credit card to purchase a miner. You won’t be able to buy an Antminer with your limited funds, but perhaps you can get a gently used 3dfx Voodoo to plug into your Pentium III Gateway running Windows ME.

The reason for the higher return on capital in crypto-mining relative to actual mining is that the risk is much higher. The volatility of Bitcoin greatly exceeds that of physical commodities, routinely crashing. When prices crash mining economics invert, and many miners have to bail for the exits. And then there is the legal uncertainty, as highlighted by this thread.

Your narrative is only partly correct in that while the Muslim ‘semus’ were indeed recruited as administrators of the Yuan Dynasty, the Uyghur and Tibetan Buddhists played a bigger role as Tibetan Buddhism became the official religion of the Yuan Dynasty, which marginalized the Muslim ‘semus’ from Central and West Asia. The idea that the ‘semus’ constituted some kind of a ‘ruling class’ is false as they were effectively treated as the ‘Other’ by the Mongol, Uyghur, Tibetan and Han Buddhists in the Yuan Dynasty.

Western historiography tends to depict the Yuan Dynasty as an alien regime which is only true for the first two decades of Kublai Khan’s rule after recruiting the Muslim ‘semus’ from Central and West Asia to form the administrative class of the Yuan Dynasty which became part of the Mongol Empire. But the Muslim ‘semus’ became alien leftovers after the disintegration of Mongol Empire into the Yuan Dynasty and three other Muslim Khanates following the death of Kublai Khan. The Kaidu-Kublai War (1268-1301) was a war of succession fought by Kublai Khan and his successor Temür Khan against the Muslim Khanates led by Kaidu over who should rule the whole of the Mongol Empire.

The role of the Muslim ‘semu’ as administrators of the Yuan Dynasty started under Kublai Khan in 1271 who reigned as the Khagan of the Mongol Empire from 1260 to 1294, after defeating the Song Dynasty in 1279. Note that the Muslim ‘semus’ came from Central and West Asia which had been under Mongol rule for decades prior to the conquest of the Song Dynasty. After Kublai Khan’s death in 1294, the Mongol Empire disintegrated into four different entities with the Tibetan Buddhist Yuan Dynasty only nominally affiliated to the other three Muslim Khanates. As the successors of Kublai Khan promoted Tibetan Buddhism in China, the role of the Muslim ‘semus’ declined while the role of the Uyghur and Tibetan Buddhists increased thereafter, as did the role of Han Confucianists when the Imperial State Examination system was revived. The practice of appointing the Dalai Lama by the Chinese Emperors started during this time in Beijing which became the newly established capital of the Yuan Dynasty.

It’s a political predication rather than a technological prediction per se. It’s just how things tend to work.

In 1999, probably not many people predicted that eventually most information on the internet would be served by a half dozen dominant “platforms” which would practice strong censorship or that the actual hosting of web content would be controlled by an even smaller number of colossal corporations.

As far as technology goes, Bitcoin itself (and most other cryptocurrencies) isn’t actually anonymous. The ledger is public and shows all transactions as well as wallet balances, so if someone’s wallet is itself not kept private the anonymity is nil. The NSA is already tracking cryptocurrency transactions: https://www.investopedia.com/news/nsa-worked-track-down-bitcoin-users-snowden-papers-reveal/

Privacy coins such as Monero have been invented to deal with this problem. Monero has an opaque ledger. But we should all be skeptical of the ability of technology to defeat state attacks. It’s not implausible that some privacy coins were themselves created by state actors as a honeypot.

For now access to crypto also largely runs through banking systems and centralized exchanges, which provide further mechanisms for state control. Coinbase for instance does not even offer Monero owing to concerns from regulators, and the (in)famous offshore exchange Binance is in the crosshairs of many national governments for providing means of evading KYC and AML regulations.

So while crypto is likely to change everything and upend the world, I am highly skeptical that it will bring people financial privacy.

Showmereal mentioned the Plaza Accords. He’s onto something, but misdates it. The Plaza Accords in fact increased Japanese innovation, as Japanese firms dealt with the higher exchange rate by increasing their productivity and innovation. South Korea was not ready for prime time a generation ago, as anyone who remembers Lucky Goldstar electronics and how terrible Korean cars were then knows.

But during the Global Financial Crisis, Japan became a safe heaven within Asia. This put sharp upwards pressure on the Yen, and many Japanese industries suddenly became uncompetitive relative to competitors in South Korea and Taiwan. The Japanese consumer electronics industry collapsed in a few years.

Willem Thorbecke published some pieces on this:

https://voxeu.org/article/investigating-effect-exchange-rate-changes-japan-china-east-asia-and-europe

https://voxeu.org/article/why-japan-lost-its-comparative-advantage-producing-electronic-parts-and-components

There is probably more to it than just this, though it’s significant. Back in the 1970s it was said that any debate between economists about Britain’s then ailing economy rapidly devolved into armchair sociology.

In the same vein one thing I always notice is how terrible Japanese firms all seem to be at internet marketing and distribution. With a few exceptions like Sony and Nintendo, Japanese companies invariably have terrible websites. It’s hard to get information on their products, and it’s also hard to figure out where to buy them. I wanted to purchase a particular Honda lawn mower, and in addition to Honda not selling this product directly I couldn’t find it at any regional retailer. Eventually I had to settle for purchasing a lesser Honda lawn mower. Meanwhile Samsung and LG make all of this easy and seamless.

One possible explanation for this was that in Japan the full development of the internet was delayed because of the persistence of fax machines and also strong development of the internet for feature phones in the 2000s, which proved not to be applicable outside Japan.

Fred Reed waxes eloquent about the “digital yuan�, but why would anyone want to use a centralized stablecoin pegged to the yuan that’s controlled from the PBC given the variety of more discrete and already existing alternatives?

– Smart contracts would be able to handle and certify cash flows in a completist way
– A new kind of collateral would be born
– Transparency could be shared with business partners in a credible way

It makes me very unpopular to say this, but when you mix fiat with digital currency you get all these new superpowers that aren’t available to privately developed currencies.

I write about it here: https://medium.com/@will_99737/digidollar-the-dawn-of-the-transparent-economy-de8148a08d09

The people that we have to deal with are not accustomed to dealing in gold or silver. Right now, most people want paper money in any transaction. To find an individual that is willing to swap gold or silver for whatever it is he is selling is a rare find.

As the currency heads to zero value, most people are going to continue wanting the inflated dollars because they don’t know what to do with the PM’s. PM’s are also denominated in ounces, for the most part and are not set up for small transactions. Trying to buy a loaf of bread with an ounce of gold isn’t going to work out that well, for example. Even trying it with an ounce of silver will be problematic. If people start cutting up PM’s, what measurement device is everyone going to have to cut off enough to pay for that loaf of bread, and how is the seller now going to get rid of some sliver of metal to make his purchase?

When the dollar hits near zero, there might be a change of mind among the bulk of the population, but that’s long into the destruction of the dollar. What do you do in the interim to survive? It could take months to years for the gradual slide to take place. During that time, it will be difficult to find a trading partner that will accept payment in PM’s.

That barter arrangements will sprout is guaranteed. People will trade their skills for commodities, trade PM’s, trade all manner of things, but that doesn’t make for a robust economic situation.

I would ask you to also calm down, as I’m on your side. I just happen to think that what you describe isn’t an easy thing to accomplish and there will be many casualties along the way. Those holding gold and silver will become targets for those that don’t. It’s going to be ugly.

I have no doubt that eventually reality will prevail, but in the interim, all manner of fiat will be attempted to keep the phony currency system going and most people will go along. The first country that makes gold and silver their primary money will signal that the fiat game is over.

The SDR will make an appearance. It won’t last if for no other reason than the criminals in every gov’t will try to gain an advantage using their currency. The CBDC’s will be tried and since they don’t fundamentally turn dollars into something with intrinsic value, that experiment will also fail eventually. Trouble is the time frames. It could take years for these attempts to continue cheating the population to fail. You and I need to eat during that time period.

I’m a professional software developer. I owned a computer center in the US for many years and hand built around 2000 machines for clients myself. My employees built many more thousands of boxes. I understand the hardware and software business from the inside.

I’m not into chasing the latest tulip mania. From my perspective, the entire crypto space is made up of those that want to take advantage of other people and the dolts that let them succeed. I want no part of such a disgusting business. I’d be in the porn business before I touched crypto.

You keep making things up about me that anyone reading your prose knows is just bullshit, but you persist. I realize you don’t want anyone to tell the dirty truth about crypto since you are apparently part of the scam. I just think someone should do it and given your rude and insulting tone, I must be over the target.

You may have the last word because you’re simply too disgusting an individual to deal with.

Which is why cryptos, which are very divisible and having a mix of hard issuance caps and fixed rate of inflation, would be useful if they are exchanged in an underground economy (which means hiding the transactions from enforcers from the Treasury). Many of the biggest ones have public ledgers, but fearing those with opaque ledgers being intruded, is like constantly fearing a bank robbery wiping out savings in your account.

What is also guaranteed is the scale of economic “destruction”, not because elites are out to break stuff while pushing thru their agenda, but because the fundamental ideology of economic liberalism has run its course, and the transition away from it will be painful because the “gains” will largely be gone. You won’t have capitalism, let alone AnCap, after the dust settles. might see some “libertarian” thoughts from me, only because many actors think in this way or its antithesis, and act accordingly, and not because those are cogent ways of organizing a stable society.

In 1999, probably not many people predicted that eventually most information on the internet would be served by a half dozen dominant “platforms� which would practice strong censorship or that the actual hosting of web content would be controlled by an even smaller number of colossal corporations.

Yesterday I looked at Gilmore’s homepage and it hasn’t been updated since 2013. He is 64 years old and most guys with that status do not check out that young (he was only 56 in 2013) unless they get sick. I hope he is OK.

(Here is his page if anybody is curious to look at something which increasingly looks like it is transplanted from a parallel universe: http://www.toad.com/gnu/)

Right, in the same article

Before the event, reports surfaced that VW would be pivoting away from its main battery supplier, South Korea’s LG Chem, and was turning to China’s CATL, according to Automotive News, citing South Korea’s Money Today online news site.

So far as this sector, the Allies have already landed in Normandy and there’s no turning back.

But Karlin is right in the sense you don’t win by grinding it out and making the best product. You win by Selling It.

Big Mac Index by The Economist

When I go on dates I impress women by showing off how many more big macs I can buy with the same amount of money

Switzerland alone has produced more Nobels than all of East Asia (also probably more ski resorts). It was never bombed during Wars so you can walk the old town in Zürich and see the residences of Lenin and Schrödinger. One of the few places in Continental Europe with a start up scene.

Aside from banking and watchmaking, its famous for the specialized service of uh, mercenaries?

Claudius: Where are my Switzers? Let them guard the door.

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

Congratulations on developing Bonzi Buddy and building 2,000 machines equipped with the legendary VIA Cyrix processor!

There is of course no doubt of shady behavior in the crypto space, just witness the recent run of animal shitcoins that flooded the market to capitalize on the Dogecoin pump. Outright crime is also common, mostly infamously the massive Mount Gox heist.

But all of this started with you opining on a crypto mining without bothering to do the barest research about it.

As for me, I’m long crypto but it is a minor share of my portfolio. It would be financial malpractice to advise anyone to put a significant fraction of his portfolio into crypto. I dabbled in ASIC mining a few years ago and now limit myself to small scale GPU mining.

Besides, American military planners have talked about blockading China for decades. Do you think that the Chinese are unaware of this, or unprepared for it? That they’re building that missile-laden Navy for nothing?

Unless and until they can find and kill nuclear attack subs, like the ones Australia has decided to procure twelve of, those missiles won’t have anything to do, except the previously mentioned nukes in attacks against the blockading countries, cities in countervalue or maybe they’re start with counterforce attacks on naval bases.

But that class of subs are high endurance and probably pretty self-sufficient, need food, some chemicals for processing the air, and more torpedoes and missiles, not sure we’d be smart enough to hide the latter sufficiently … all around it’s a terrible gamble. And if the Learned Elders of Wye are perceived as orchestrating this blockade of the PRC, wouldn’t the CCP make a point of nuking NYC and Israel? The latter doesn’t need more than 1-2 strikes to effectively destroy it.

This is the conundrum: How will gold transactions be made? It seems to me they will have to be made with a fiat substitute for gold.

Of course this could work. As long as Jews and their minions are excluded from the process.

I’m not following the details of your argument, but I think you should quote the whole relevant part of the article:

Initially, the ID 4’s battery pack, which is comprised of 288 pouch cells in 12 modules, will be produced by South Korea’s LG Chem. But once ID 4 production shifts to Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 2022, the batteries will be supplied by SK Innovation, another South Korean company that recently opened a $2 billion factory nearby VW’s plant there.

Before the [VW battery announcements] event, reports surfaced that VW would be pivoting away from its main battery supplier, South Korea’s LG Chem, and was turning to China’s CATL, according to Automotive News, citing South Korea’s Money Today online news site.

VW also has contracts with two other major battery producers, Samsung and CATL….

From both personal experience with a manufactured by LG cellphone and how GM is now suffering from incorrectly made by LG batteries, I can well imagine WV turning to practically anyone else who might be able to make batteries correctly. Which from first principles I wouldn’t expect from the PRC, but they obviously can do it well enough. Also note Samsung’s infamous cellphone battery fires.

(I don’t trust any of them, keep all my devices with them when at rest in metal or ceramic containers or dishes to limit the damage they’ll cause if they catch on fire. Someday we should be moving to safer chemistries like lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4), but for now stuffing the most watt-hours into the smallest space is the thing.)

I own PM’s. I don’t expect to use them directly to purchase routine goods. I might be able to barter for major purchases like property, trading title to the property for so and so much PM’s but that’s a long shot.

My reason for holding PM’s has been to sell them for some currency when PM’s gain to where I believe they belong and then trade the currency for property BEFORE the SHTF and the currency goes to no value. It’s a timing thing.

PM’s will rise as inflation increases and at some point, PM’s will be valued reasonably and I’ll sell some of the PM’s for some trash currency that a seller is expecting. Almost no one is expecting payment in PM’s. I’ll use the trash currency like a hot potato and hold it only long enough to complete the purchase of some major thing I want. I’ll sit on the remainder of the PM’s. There are several parts of the world where I might want to end up and that will determine which currency will be used temporarily to convert PM’s to high value goods.

I’m not trying to sell at the high since no one knows where that will be. I want to sell some when I think I can trade it for something else I value an equivalent amount.

LG bought Kodaks’ WRGB OLED patents – WRGB is the technology which is cheaper to produce and which has more lifespan, and it seems like it will be the viable option for mass adoption of the OLED.

Greater difficulty has been to make people initially switch to OLED, which is still not completely mature.

For example, Philips still has not released its burn-in solution. So probably only after 2022 that we might expect this in their products.
https://www.whathifi.com/news/in-development-philips-tech-solves-95-per-cent-of-oled-burn-in-issues

such slow development of next generation Micro LED technology.Again the first working micro LED

When introducing new technology, television industry is not only zero-sum competition for market share between the different brands. Rather all the brands need the consumers as the whole to adopt the new technology.

Consumers haven’t switched to OLED yet and it hasn’t even fully matured (solved burn-in issues) or become low cost yet.

I bought my OLED television in 2018 for crazy high price, and I felt like somekind risky pioneer. That’s just three years ago that the first mainstream people were buying their first OLED, and feeling risky (because of the burn-in concerns). OLED prices had still been unaffordable for most television buyers until around 2020.

OLED is still considered new and expensive by consumers (who usually only upgrade their television every 4-5 years) and it’s only a small market share of televisions at the moment.

It would not likely be good for the industry, if they already abandoned the latest technology because profiting from its adoption.

Consumers will start to adopt OLED televisions during the decade 2020s, and when they reached higher up the S-curve for adoption of OLED, then will be more sensible time to prepare the subsequent technology that the consumers will have to adopt again.

Conversely, the first gene-selected baby in the world was born a few weeks ago in the US (the father’s political views raised a minor journalistic furor).

Any “new technology” that they admit in the news, is 40 years old. That’s rule, always -40.

Yeah, but two can play that game. Australia won’t even get those submarines for ten years, best case, whereas China right now has the world’s largest submarine fleet — including at least a dozen nuclear subs, with many more in the works.
https://news.usni.org/2020/10/12/chinese-increasing-nuclear-submarine-shipyard-capacity

If the US subsurface fleet decides to start attacking Chinese merchant vessels, you can expect the Chinese navy to, at the very least, respond in kind.

And, in parallel, the Chinese are investing tremendous energies in developing overland trade routes which cannot be blockaded. These are fully operational and quite useful. Already, there’s an awful lot of overland trade between China and Europe — I’ve worked with a UK firm that regularly receives stuff from China via rail.

The US is arguably more vulnerable to retaliation than China is to a blockade.

Are you positing a cosmetic solution (gold certs that can be inflated like paper gold) for a structural problem (fiat controlled by the state/central bank) as RoatanBill sees it?

The reason China has received no Nobel Prizes in sciences except just one Nobel Prize in medicine a few years ago, is that in the past, China being a relatively poor and developing country, concentrated it’s meager financial resources in applied science to make reasonably adequate export goods to bring in money to develop the country as quickly as possible instead of spending precious little money it had on pure basic research that might give you bragging rights by winning Nobel prizes but it does little in advancing practical technologies that is a result of applied science research.

Now China got richer it has started spending a lot more money in basic research, so you will see China getting many Nobel Prizes in the next 10-20 years.

For your information. Japan did the exactly what China has been doing. In the 20th century, Japan didn’t get many Nobel Prizes in sciences because it concentrated in applied science rather than in basic research. . But starting in about the 1980s, Japan began spending heavily on basic research. That’s the reason why it gets more than it’s share of Nobel Prizes in the 21st century. I’m very happy for Japan

Anyway, Nobel Prizes are lagging indicator rewarding scientists for what they accomplished 20 or 30 years ago. According to Karlin, the better indicator for present and future scientific strength is the Nature Index to which the biggest contributing group seems to be ethnic Chinese.

Swiss mercenaries? Aren’t they the ones protecting the Pope at the Vatican with halberds? LOL !!
By the way I have no problem whatsoever getting dates with good looking white women. I personally prefer blonds and I’m a former paratrooper.

Swiss mercenaries? Aren’t they the ones protecting the Pope at the Vatican with halberds? LOL !!

Switzerland outlawed the practice quite some time ago with that one exception, before they were about the most feared in Europe. And they of course have modern weapons, see the later pictures here, their tricolor uniform could hide a FN P90 quite well although it says they went with the H&K MP7 rival. They of course have more practical uniforms, and SIG 55Xs they learned to use in Swiss basic training.

Japanese companies invariably have terrible website

This will be likely because they didn’t plan to sell to ordinary consumers in your market. So why invest in an expensive website, when you are not trying to sell to end users.

If you sell to professional customers in different countries, there can be different legal implications and probabilities if you will sell to ordinary consumers or end users.

For example, we notice that all Samsung and Sony/Murata, are currently trying to prevent the sale of their lithium battery cells (e.g. 18650s) to end-use consumers – which is very bad news for the hobbyist communities.

Ordinary DIY people and electrical engineering hobbyists have been always buying or recycling these battery cells for their DIY projects (making your own battery pack e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnE8DWQ_ik0.
Video Link), or for using in flashlights or vaping products.

But the positive on these batteries is only the button on top, while negative is the uninsulated cell body (the outer case). At the top the positive and negative therefore directly next to each other, and only insulated by a top cap.

An ordinary consumer can easily damage the top cap and short-circuit the battery. It can easily cause injuries and fires, for end-use consumers. So you can see why Samsung and Sony/Murata are trying to make it as difficult to buy their products (for end-users) as possible. They are only prepared to sell these cells to professional customers, who build them into protected battery packs.

Japanese companies invariably have terrible websites

Lol generally the worse the website of the company, the better quality the products they sell. There is the website for Takahashi telescopes – the world’s best quality consumer telescopes. https://www.takahashijapan.com/products.html

But those Japanese brands like “Luxman” or “Kawai” with upper class end-user international fanbases, usually have pretty nice websites with poetic writing styles.

http://www.luxman.com/product/detail.php?id=19

” The rich gradation sound quality has been achieved from deep bass sound to clear high tone with sufficient drive force acquired by connecting the 4-parallel push-pull structural output units in parallel.”

https://www.kawai.co.uk/products/grandpianos/shigerukawai/skex/

And nobody produces cooler catalogues and brochures than Japanese companies with all the diagrams.

Video Link

Bold of you to speak so definitively about the future of 3 incredibly complicated technologies and in disagreement with the people who know them best.

Maybe you’re different, but I notice that people who speak like you are always proven wrong.

The problem with authoritarian governments like the one Xi is trying to construct is that they’re terrible at recognising how little they know or are even able to work out or find out. They also tend to get high on their own supply when things go well.

Imagine the hubris in thinking that what your 1.4 billion intelligent and productive people really need is a centralised state, headed by you or your avatar, that bans them doing technological, social and cultural experimentation which it finds threatening.

Thanks for the information and three cheers for the Swiss Guards.

Samsung doesn’t seem to be following this plan to counter W-OLED it is about to commercialize QNED technology next year (instead of meekly buying OLED panels from LG and tweaking with the image processing algorithms like the Japanese)and Micro LED by 2025.

They also as a back up are investing in their own OLED tech for TVs the QD OLED which overcomes the problem of inadequate peak brightness that WOLED suffers from.

This is the sort of aggression the Japanese electronics industry was once famous for.

Yeah. All you have to do is keep the Jews out of it.

Crypto could be tied to gold and worldwide honest commerce would flourish. Organized crime (govt. and Jew Bankers) would be minimized.

Russia seems to be having much more successful in commercial aerospace

If you are talking about plane production (i.e. Sukhoi Superjet 100), this is loss-making in its total balance. That is the money from the budget for years, for manufacturing disguised as business, and that employs children of political appointments as the managers. So it’s really more like NASA or Roskosmos.

The problem is promoting it as if it was economically competitive profit industry, is confusing for the voters. That is, voters would support drawing ultimately billions of money from the budget for something prestigious like a space station, but not so much for a civilian aircraft (that latter is only justifiable as an actual overall profitable investment, which is not the situation).

Japanese public should never have accepted to waste money on developing a regional jet, but at least pausing it now there will be perhaps understanding the sunk cost fallacy.

In addition, cryptocurrencies based on decentralized, permissionless blockchains requiring PoW (‘Proof of Work’) or PoS (‘Proof of Stake’) algorithms are simply too computationally-intensive to be technically scalable. They are also not economically viable as digital currencies because those blockchain algorithms require computing power which now exceeds the power consumption of entire nations!

Last I heard, proof-of-stake was intended to address the power problems of proof-of-work. Since most if not all still use proof-of-work, it seems far too soon to tar proof-of-stake with the same brush.

Or they have some parsimony in business, than to use their resources for rapidly introducing the next stage of the technology, before the previous technology has been adopted by the consumers and started to generate profits.

Currently OLED is only a minority of new television sales even in the most advanced markets.

In terms of the total adoption (rather than new sales), it’s below 10% of the active market has so far bought an OLED television. So OLED will be still in the “early adopters” stage of the penetration in the traditional graphs.

So we could expect that MicroLED is something they will be preparing slowly for the ordinary consumers while the OLED is only just becoming a golden goose.

But Sony are rolling out their MicroLED for professional customers only.

” Sony is the second company at CES 2021 to announce new MicroLED screens – which it’s calling ‘Crystal LED’ – following Samsung announcing its own sets. The new Sony B-Series and C-Series Crystal LED Displays are currently exclusively for professional use in modular form”

It will go up to 1800 nits which is kind of scary to me (as someone whose eyes can hurt from the brightness on my OLED).

Video Link

Okay, let’s say white rust belt towns where meth and opioid addiction are rampant then. The point is supposedly dangerous parts of Japan or China are actually much safer than most of the US. Of course, if you never leave your middle-class suburbs you are relatively safer than most people in the US, but it says nothing about the country as a whole. The chances of you getting attacked on street are very low in the US (then what is very low? you could also say the same about pretty much any country), but relative to China or Japan? Even in the US, Asians have a significantly lower rate of crime. What are you arguing about here? You just proved my point, your “very low risk” perception is actually probably about the same level of Japanese people’s “very dangerous,” definition. So take it with a grain of salt when you hear about dangerous parts of Japan or China. The decay in rural Japan has to do with the aging population and youth leaving for big cities. It is not “rotten” in the sense of crime, degeneracy, and drug addiction. Rural China was always poor, but very safe regardless.

China will not receive a lot of Nobel Prizes unless it kneels before the West. I don’t get the obsession with Nobel Prize as if it is the standard for scientific or artistic success anyway. It is a Swedish-made prize, which, curiously awarded a very high number of Swedes despite their meager contributions. Add in the racism and/or Eurocentrism at least until the late 90s, and it is very difficult to take it seriously as an indicator of something other than Western confirmation bias. Tolstoy didn’t get a Nobel literature prize, but Churchill did enough said. I personally do not even follow who received the prize and I don’t even care, it is irrelevant and not worthy of paying attention to.

You are generally correct. Nobel prizes in sciences are ~50% politicized: a lot of real achievements are rewarded, but a lot of equally important ones are not. Nobel prizes in literature are ~90% politicized: most good writers never get them, whereas many people who are mediocre or downright crappy writers/poets do. Nobel peace prize (we can’t blame Nobel for that, he did not establish this category) is 100% political. Suffice it to say that Palestinian and Israel terrorists, as well as war criminal Obama received that.

“how rotten smaller towns in Japan are”

You mean ageing? Industries gone, young people likewise? Like Milwaukee, whose crumbling, empty factories in the 1980s reminded me of Sheffield/Rotherham after most of the steel went?

That, in Japan, is a paradise compared with UK and US counterparts. Rotherham is now famous, not for steel, but for the grooming and rape of 1400 young English girls. The former mining and industrial areas of the UK are heroin-ridden disaster zones, and most of the street level and mid level dealers are black or Asian (subcontinental not Chinese).

I invite you to compare the paper of the UK capital

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime

With one of the six papers of the Japanese capital. I can’t look at the “Crime” pages because they don’t have them.

https://www.asahi.com/ajw/national_report/

SJ-100 had a huge order from Aeroflot, just before the pandemic, and some other companies. The order is that big it secures SJ-100 as profitable for a long time.

Orders from the main Russian airliner companies are all it needs, not any of the major foreign countries or even ex USSR central Asian states – because our market is so big, and that particular size aircraft is perfect in flight range and passenger seats for domestic flights because of our unique population density and city locations.

For long flights in Europe /asia/US the SJ-100 is too small, and for shirt/medium too inefficient for their short flights.

Blatant protectionism with all the well-known problems in spare parts, maintenance and logistics? Of course – but protectionism they can do easily when companies like Aeroflot are performing very well to be able to order them – and at the same time giving UAC the space for solving all these operational problems.

As for nepotism – Mincelkhoz is one of the most successful government departments, headed by Patrushev’s son. I think there is plenty of non-elites in top positions at big Russian companies to at least counteract this – and if you accept it as normal though unfair for most russian elites to have educated their kids in US/UK/Ita/Swiss etc schools from the 90s until 2014 – then they can partially justify getting jobs at top Russian companies as their international education should be some advantage.

OLED adoption is hamstrung by the LG monopoly on WOLED panels. Its sales will always be equal to how many panels a single producer i.e. LG can churn out and LG as a monopoly will always charge a premium on its panels.

If multiple players could bring out their own WOLEDs driving innovation and lowering costs OLEDs would have replaced LCDs by now at least in Televisions.

Instead we will see within the next 2-5 emerging technologies mini led with 1000s of dimming zones,QNED,Dual cell LCD etc and consumer micro led towards the latter half of this decade.

I believe the trigger will be 8K televisions becoming standard in the next 3-5 years and there being no practical way to cost effectively produce 8K WOLED panels.

China will not receive a lot of Nobel Prizes unless it kneels before the West.

Wokeness and Globalism are much more important than geography. For example:

Paul Krugman obtained his medal in… Hhmmmmmm…. NY Times trade theory? No? How about… Faux Academic shilling for Globalist MegaCorporations?

Yasser Arafat and Barack Hussein Obama both received the Nobel War Prize for destabilizing the Middle East.

The Nobel & Oscar committees are now in a foot race (∆) to heap praise on AOC for her tearful House Floor performance. A defensive system that saves lives is anathema to the Elite, anti-Western panel that awards the Nobel War Prize. Her sobbing and whimpering display of weakness is exactly what the Nobel committee is looking for.

PEACE 😇
__________

(∆) I was going to say marathon rather than foot race but caught myself. Using Marathon respects Greek, and therefore Western, excellence.

I believe 99.99% of Western critics misunderstand globalism and multiculturalism. They are both tools to extend and continue Western hegemony. As the rest of the world inevitably catches up in education, economy, and understand Western notions, it would be impossible to continue hegemony without making the rest of the world enemy. The solution is the idea of globalism and multiculturalism. Globalism serves developed nations by opening up developing markets and preventing tariffs that’d allow local industries to compete with foreign entities. Multiculturalism weakens nationalist fervor around the world and allows Western cultural exports and ideals to flourish; both of which are crucial to continuing the hegemony. There is a downside to multiculturalism, I don’t need to explain it, but without some kinds of risks and backlash, there is no way to achieve continuation of the Western supremacy. Ordinary people in the right (and left) don’t understand these things, so they’ll blame Jews or elite conspiracy or the Leftists. I wonder how they suggest continuing the Western supremacy? Do they even realize that Europe cannot sustain high living standards without Asia or Africa? America is much luckier from the resource perspective, but even living in the US would have been much more modest compared to its current standards. So, it is a choice Western elites made to continue the material well-being of their countries, and it is a long game.

Maybe Nobel will be a global unbiased thing sometime in the future, but so far it has mostly been politically motivated, and there wasn’t even much of a concept of globalism or multiculturalism (contrary to Eurocentrism) for the most part of its existence anyway.

The article seems to say that, in the short to medium term, VW will buy batteries from a variety of suppliers; but in the long term, they’ll make their own, superior, batteries.

Well, unlike minerals (or any other real commodity), Bitcoin has zero intrinsic value, and unlike regular fiat currencies, none of them even have the security of a sovereign state to back them up.
Whatever merits the technology involved actually has, will eventually find adoption in state currencies, if they indeed have any real use outside of criminal transactions or pyramid schemes.

It’s profited for the journalists, as they can write every year about how money is lost for more than a decade and a half now.

There’s not profit making either in total (including investment costs – which is probably impossible to break even with), or even after the investments (they still lose money so many years later https://lenta.ru/news/2019/04/04/beda/ ).

Government investment for Sukhoi Superjet 100 development has been up to seven billions dollars. And the government still has to cover losses of people who bought it ( https://www.bbc.com/russian/news-5401610 ) and has to buy the ones sold to previous customers (https://lenta.ru/news/2021/01/25/ssj/) and use the Sovereign Wealth Fund to purchase them in the future ( https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4898386 )

Even if Iran will eventually buy some of the import substituted version, the relatively small profits from such a sale this will only cover a small portion of expenditure.

With this spending, the question is always to be understood in terms of opportunity cost. The same money can be used to invest in education, hospital, infrastructure, or to support future industries that could become profitmaking.

That is, opportunity cost includes less investment into industries which have a higher chance of generating returns for the economy and the employees.

If a perfectly managed project, building local version of regional civilian aircraft (which is mature 20th century technology) is never likely going to add much boost for an economy.

Even wildly successful Embraer in terms of market share for regional plane production, is loss making for the last years.
https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/erj/financials (Even aside from the fact Embraer are lossmaking, the size of the revenue is 15 times smaller than e.g. Dior). And this is Embraer, which produces thousands of E-Jet regional passenger planes for international customers.

protectionism with all the well-known problems in spare parts, maintenance and logistics? Of course – but protectionism they can do easily when companies like Aeroflot

But the original promotion of the project was rapidly produce a cheap, competitive plane, using international parts, etc, that all kinds of foreign companies would buy. It was presented as a efficient and rapid project that would generate somekind of overall profit.

Sound advice…I’m doing the same.

The question is: do you have to be the first ones?

If it proves to be good, China, say, can catch up, no?

I am increasingly skeptical about [China’s] ability to produce anything that is… really interesting/world-transformational. It continues making top-down decisions that, as in centuries past, may curtail the ultimate scope of its civilizational achievements.

China has already produced 98% home ownership and eliminated extreme poverty. Given that’s it’s still a per-capita lower income country, doesn’t it surprise you that there are more hungry children, drug addicts, suicides and executions, more homeless, poor, illiterate, and imprisoned citizens in America than in China?

China leads in most scientific disciplines and its quantum work is especially interesting.

As to ‘top down decisions,’ that’s an American, not a Chinese thing. China’s goal-setting is consensual:

And even its finances are decentralized:

It’s pretty funny how many of the early crypto developers were Austrian cultists, yet in the end, for crypto to accomplish its original goal of becoming a widespread means of payment cryptos are moving from PoW protocols to more centralised PoS. Even Buterin called Austrian economics a stupid cope for fringe autists.

Regarding HAIJIN policy of five or three hundred years ago, there were the Ottomans and the Tsars, they were also experiencing a traumatic 20th century.

And Japan as well, they openned up more efficiently and then they underwent Hiroshima.

My point is that the onslaught of modernity might not have been avoidable if the imperial China adopted different policies regarding sea exploration and trade.

China as it stands now is still solidly in a catching up position. To be too adventuous on the front of human explorations is probably not a good idea especially when there might not be too significant a firstcomer advantage.

It is clear to anyone who is not blind by choice that in “authoritarian� China and Russia government policies align a lot better with the wishes of the populace that in “democratic� West. That is trivial, although it cannot be agreed upon by those who refuse to see the reality.

More interesting (at least from my perspective) is the fact that while both Western Europe and the US are self-destructing due to idiotic actions of their elites, a lot greater fraction of the population in the UK and France sees that, as compared to the US. Are Europeans more astute, or is the US propaganda more pervasive?

The correct answer is acceleratation.

Thanks for pointing it out. I didn’t read the article thoroughly. My point is broader,

1. I fully acknowledge that many aspects of Made in China that deserves its reputation. In addition to QA questions, it’s at a lower end of production, so far lower margins. The net margin for an iPhone is $150+, for Huawei $15, Xiaomi $2

2. But compared to Germany, China (and US) is making more headways in emerging technologies. 30+ percent of cost basis of EV is battery. At least one can say CJK will be competitive in this high-margin EV sector.

For self-driving cars also because CJK is more wired than Germany. Yes, there are privacy concerns that I empathized with, but I’m speaking here first on economics.

3. When comparing Germany to Japan, Thorfinnsson and AK are completely correct in there being a gap in GDP per hours worked. I’ve alluded to the reason for it here

https://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-163/#comment-4889964

The problem is called Involution 内�, when a system becomes more complex without advancing efficiency.

This was initially described in a book Agricultural Involution about Dutch-colonized Indonesia. In East Asia there’s not a culture of work-life balance so people are striving in a zero-sum game of overtime inflation.

Again I argue the problem is the higher population density in CJK. Only 200 years ago China had about the same population as US and that led to an overpopulation Malthusian disaster called Taiping Rebellion. Thus I don’t buy into the argument that China has “low birth rate issue”

4. I’m not against financial innovation in general, but I’m not against CCP’s decision to curb it either. The West can accuse China of making Faustian bargains to get ahead, but the Globohomo Financial System almost completely blew up in flames in 2008 based on 2 financial “innovations”

a. Subprime MBS based on the assumption that US housing prices can only monotonically increase

And more importantly

b. Synthetic CDO contracts written by AIG, which assumed correlation of mortgage defaults, like in actuarial science, can be modeled using a Gaussian copula (joint distribution).

It might be in a few years – for now supply of the panels is above demand reportedly, and bottleneck for the OLED adaptation (or any new television) is a chip shortage.

will see within the next 2-5 emerging technologies mini led with 1000s of dimming zones,

When Sony introduce MicroLED to the consumer market, then this will undercut their OLED products which are already a kind of expensive “halo” product. It will likely be carefully timed introduction.

At the moment, it looks like they don’t want a rapid introduction MicroLED before the OLEDs have been adopted. This is evident from Sony’s behaviour where it only promotes this technology for professional customers already, even though they could sell it as an expensive consumer product

They release it this year only for professional customers, and hide it from the nonprofessional consumer market.

Video Link
It’s not uncommon they slowly stage introduction of the next technology. OLED itself was very slowly introduced, if you consider that Sony released the first OLED television in 2007, but it only by 2016 that OLED television became an option of below around $3000 for customers.

doesn’t it surprise you more homeless, poor, illiterate, and imprisoned citizens in America than in China

Not really surprising. USSR already had higher indicators than America in some of areas relating to public life, such as public transport infrastructure. America has unusually strong default settings for “public poverty, private wealth” and “high risk, high reward”. USA is a “New World” colony, and its low investment in the public space relative to its high income, is very non normal from the perspective of any “Old World” country – but its settings are more typical for other “New World” colonies on their continent like Brazil and Mexico. Most all countries in the American continent, have been very successful from the perspective of their colonial elites, but with a relatively lower sense of social obligation to the total mass of the population than in an “Old World” country.

Do you think that the Russian government continues to support the SJ-100, because it provides opportunities for graft? It appears that the Rosnano tablet was supported for this reason.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the F-35, put a lot of money in a lot of well-connected pockets, too.

Crypto could be tied to gold and worldwide honest commerce would flourish.

Do you ever wonder if perhaps you have little idea of how things work?

Well managers include children of officials and from Instagram there has been an impression of vast wealth.

globalism and multiculturalism. They are both tools to extend and continue Western hegemony. … Multiculturalism weakens nationalist fervor around the world and allows Western cultural exports and ideals to flourish; both of which are crucial to continuing the hegemony.

The West is a victim of Globalism, not the source of hegemon.

— Western culture is rooted in traditional Christian values
— SJW Globalist culture is inherently anti-Christian
— The West wants Nationalism not SJW Globalism

The last thing Globalism wants is to spread authentic Western culture. Christian Populism (a.k.a. Western values) are diametrically opposed to Globalist hegemony. Globalism spreads anti-Western SJW culture to expand hegemony.

PEACE 😇

I’m speaking here of only hard Nobels physics, chem, medicine. Of course it matters, along with Fields, Abel, and Wolf in math. And let’s acknowledge that there is a gap. The official CCP Youtube channel just released a program on (link under more)
中国孩å­�缺ä¹�钻研和创造精神，是哪里出了问题？Chinese youths lack research and creativity spirit. What’s wrong?

The points made are:
1. Expositions on popular science are exceptionally poor. There was a case when a Chinese mathematician (Chen Jingrun) made a partial breakthrough on the Goldbach Conjecture, which is a famous unsolved problem in number theory with a seductively simple statement understandable for the layman

Prove that every even whole number greater than 2 is the sum of two prime numbers.

But the science writer complete botched the story and failed to explain why its important and interesting.

Primes are a concept based on multiplication, every number is a product of primes. Thus in a sense primes are like atoms, numbers are like molecules. But the Goldbach Conjecture makes a statement about addition, which implies a deep relationship between the addition and multiplication operations.

And precisely because the statement is so simple that makes it difficult to prove.

2. One of the main contributors to classical mechanics in physics, Carl Gustav Jacob (((Jacobi))), wrote a letter to his uncle at a young age, that he’s so passionate about and will devote his life to research in classical mechanics, and ever forsaking getting married.

No Chinese will ever do that because they are just worried about passing exams. Partly because Chinese science teaching don’t inspire students to go beyond the textbooks.

3. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, was translated with care in German. History in German can be either Historie or Geschichte, the former refers more to the actual study of history or historiography, the latter can be an oral or written storytelling.

The German translation used the latter term which is more faithful to the content of Hawking’s book. The Chinese translation lazily used the former interpretation 时间简å�², 简å�²= Historie

A better translation would be 演义, as in 三国演义 Romance of Three Kingdoms, thus A Brief Romance of Time 时间演义.

But most Chinese STEM types are so narrow and totally ignorant of the humanities, so why would they even know that?

It is probably incorrect to assign a “Western” location for what is a liberal dynamic, but the “core-periphery” distinction. You will have globalism one way or another if you keep on having a liberal world, and multiculturalism that parasitize both Europe (or anywhere “advanced” enough) and the periphery will still brought about with the ethnically leveling rhetoric liberalism offers.

Accelerate and the Machine unravels.

Please tell me how things work!

So, considering recent trends, should we now expect politicians in the breakaway island to welcome “miners” and make moves towards legitimisation of decentralised cryptocoins?

You understand China and the Chinese very well, certainly much more than 99% of Westerners…

Great incisive observation on westerners believing their own lies…. Absolutely true based on my observations as well.

How is it a victim of globalism? Guess what happens if even just economic nationalism becomes the international standard rather than liberalism/globalism. Europe can no longer easily sell most of its products to most countries around the world. Globalism argues for a liberal order in which tariffs are eliminated (or low), this kind of system helps already developed countries. Idiocy globalism spreads isn’t a one side sword, it also harms developing countries, partly because of the other aspect of globalism: multiculturalism. Imported minorities do not only affect Western countries but also their home countries. They are, for the most part, end up becoming agents of the West without realizing it. Do you realize many Chinese (or other nationalities), who are supposed to be very nationalistic, end up becoming SJWs in the countries they emigrated to? In the end, the West benefits more than it loses from a material perspective, thanks to globalism. Not just that but also, multiculturalism allows it to export Western values at a faster speed to the parts of the world they’d have no access to otherwise.

You are talking of traditional Christian values. The last Christian died in the last century, what tradition are you speaking of? The West wants nationalism? Do you mean a minority who gets the crappy parts of multiculturalism and globalism, who don’t even realize that their countries are still nationalistic? As far as I know, open nationalism did not end well for the West, moreover, it caused rebellion after rebellion in their colonies as soon as the colonized started modernizing, and without a doubt, it would only cause Western hegemony to decline even faster. Otherwise, do you actually believe if India or Algeria didn’t revolt the Western countries would just stop taking advantage of them, and just let them go their own ways because they suddenly became SJW countries? So the facts are:

– West is still nationalistic, it is just not the way it used to be, it is less obnoxious and open about it because if they were the same way they were in the 19th century it’d end up with a disaster for them now that competitor countries are close/peers technologically,
– They understood obscene nationalism also causes infighting, as it did in WW1 and WW2,
– It is still imperialistic, it is called globalism and multiculturalism,
– Globalism spreads a lot of things, but anti-West sentiments are not one of those things,

Finally, there is a reason why both right and left elites support globalism and multiculturalism, more or less openly. There is also a reason why Russia is constantly provoking nationalist/racist sentiments in the West. West turning nationalist (openly, bordering racism, in the sense alt-right wants) would be a boon to challenging powers like Russia, China, and Iran. Honestly, it would also benefit developing countries. Therefore, I think those who call for old-style nationalism do not know what they are wishing for.

You said “I’m speaking here of only hard Nobels physics, chem, medicine. Of course it matters, along with Fields, Abel, and Wolf in math. And let’s acknowledge that there is a gap. The official CCP Youtube channel just released a program on (link under more)
中国孩�缺�钻研和创造精神，是哪里出了问题？Chinese youths lack research and creativity spirit. What’s wrong?

You go back to my post 209, then You will find I said exactly “The reason China has received no Nobel Prizes in SCIENCES except just one Nobel Prize in medicine a few years ago—”
I ONLY talked about Nobel Prizes in SCIENCES and nothing else.

According to post 221 by AnonfromTN who I think is a retired research scientist, Nobel Prizes in SCIENCES are about 50% POLITICIZED. Read post 221.

Anyway, Nobel Prizes are lagging indicator rewarding scientists for what they accomplished 20 or 30 years ago. According to Karlin, the better indicator for present and future scientific strength is the Nature Index to which the biggest contributing group seems to be ethnic Chinese.

In the past China concentrated in applied math to produce as many excellent engineers as possible instead of emphasizing theoretical math to get Fields Medals. Since China is a lot richer now, it started spending a lot more money in the area of theoretical math.

Not many things are wrong with Chinese students. Chinese teachers like the other East Asian ones have tendency to GREATLY exaggerate perceived academic shortcomings of their students to SPUR them ON.

It’s an old trick used by Chinese teachers and parents to goad their students and children even though they damn well know their kids are pretty damn good academically.

But I don’t mean that Chinese teachers and parents exaggerate their children’s scholastic short comings all the time because sometimes they are right.

So when you hear academically negative things about Chinese students, you should take it with MANY grains of salt.

you said “But most Chinese STEM types are so narrow and totally ignorant of the humanities, so why would they even know that?

You think that’s bad. How about American students avoiding STEM all together but major in such b.s humanities majors as black studies, philosophy, history etc? You think Chinese students are bad, then you should look at how bad American students are academically.

I’m going to quote a NY TIMES article written by professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa who studied American college students’ study habits for more than 4 years.

They found out, in a typical semester, for instance, 32 percent of the students did not take a single course with more than 40 pages of reading per week, and 50 percent did not take any course requiring more than 20 pages of writing over the semester. The average student spent only about 12 to 13 hours per week studying.

Not surprisingly, a large number of the students showed no significant progress on tests of CRITICAL thinking, COMPLEX reasoning and writing that were administered when they began college and then again at the ends of their sophomore and senior years.

If the test that they used, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, were scaled on a traditional 0-to-100 point range, 45 percent of the students would not have demonstrated gains of even one point over the first two years of college, and 36 percent would not have shown such gains over four years of college

Also there is another article in TIME titled “The Real Reason New College Grads Can’t Get Hired

the problem with the unemployability of these young American adults go way beyond a lack of STEM skills. As it turns out, they can’t even show up on time in a button-down shirt and organize a team project.

A survey by the Workforce Solutions Group at St. Louis Community College finds that more than 60% of employers say applicants lack “communication and interpersonal skills� — a jump of about 10 percentage points in just two years. A wide margin of managers also say today’s applicants can NOT think CRITICALLY and CREATIVELY, solve problems or write well.

According to an April 27, 2016 The Wall Street Journal quoting the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 37% of American 12th-graders were academically prepared for college math and reading in 2015, a slight dip from two years earlier.

So you can see there is absolutely no comparison between academically very diligent Chinese students and failure-bound sorry-butt American students.

You should remember that from the ancient times China has been one of the most CREATIVE and INNOVATIVE countries in the world.
There is a good chance China will become the biggest economy and technology superpower in the very near future as China was until the coming of the Industrial Revolutiom.

Imported minorities do not only affect Western countries but also their home countries. They are, for the most part, end up becoming agents of the West without realizing it. Do you realize many Chinese (or other nationalities), who are supposed to be very nationalistic, end up becoming SJWs in the countries they emigrated to? In the end, the West benefits more than it loses from a material perspective, thanks to globalism. Not just that but also, multiculturalism allows it to export Western values at a faster speed to the parts of the world they’d have no access to otherwise.

I’m starting to realize how migrant-exporting countries can also benefit when the West (like what A123 has been saying) immediately impose a near-zero immigration quota on them. But can Blade elaborate on this?

Lowy Institute is run by Hagannah ‘fighter’ Frank Lowy, and is relentlessly Sinophobic, as you would expect from a propaganda tank run by a Zionist fanatic. One of the lucky financial beneficiaries of 9/11 insurance.

is Tesla really one of the best examples you can cite of tremendous American success and future dominance? Just a few years ago, wouldn’t many people have exactly said the same thing about Theranos, which was widely hailed for revolutionizing medical testing?

Comparing Tesla to Theranos? Lol. Get real.

We may not disagree as much as it first appears. A great deal of the problem appears to stem from the term “Western”. I using it in the commonly accepted form, “The people living in West”. I suspect you are trying to use it in some other way as a reference to tiny numbers of powerful elites in anti-Western Hollywood and anti-Western Wall Street.

Guess what happens if even just economic nationalism becomes the international standard rather than liberalism/globalism. Europe can no longer easily sell most of its products to most countries around the world. Globalism argues for a liberal order in which tariffs are eliminated (or low),

That is the academic theory. However current reality is very different.

What Globalism actually means is that predatory trade countries (like China) use non-tariff barriers to block U.S. exports. American workers lose their jobs as production is moved overseas. SJW Globalists win while non-SJW Westerners lose.

Reinstating tariffs as a significant source of revenue would result in more domestic jobs. A win for Western workers and a loss for Globalist MegaCorporations.

Idiocy globalism spreads isn’t a one side sword, it also harms developing countries, partly because of the other aspect of globalism: multiculturalism. Imported minorities do not only affect Western countries but also their home countries. They are, for the most part, end up becoming agents of the West without realizing it.

I think we concur on this point. Migrants damaged by anti-Western SJW culture are a threat to both Western culture and their home culture.

As West and SJW are diametrically opposed concepts, you would be better served by calling them Globalist agents or SJW agents. A Western agent would be a missionary from Utah proselytizing Mormonism.

You are talking of traditional Christian values. The last Christian died in the last century, what tradition are you speaking of?

You have bought the Hollywood trope hook, line, & sinker. Christianity is very much alive out in Main Street America. What you see in the fictional Fake Stream Media “news” does not resemble reality.

Certain churches have serious problems. I do not understand why Catholics tolerate their current anti-Christian Pope. Open Borders leads to religious conflict and potentially Civil War.

West turning nationalist … would be a boon to challenging powers like Russia, China, and Iran. … Therefore, I think those who call for old-style nationalism do not know what they are wishing for.

Nationalism would make it much easier for Christian countries to avoid infiltration by Chinese and Iranian agents. The U.S. cannot retrieve stolen Intellectual Property, but it can stop further thefts. Driving anti-Western SJW indoctrination out of U.S. schools is essential.

Those who call for Christian Populism (e.g. MAGA) know exactly what they will obtain. Jobs and a return to traditional values. An end to other countries exploiting America. The fact that nationalism will work strikes abject fear into the hearts of SJW Globalists.

PEACE 😇

Mayve China IS worried about population.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/27/china-to-limit-abortions-for-non-medical-purposes

China will reduce the number of abortions performed for “non-medical purposes�, the country’s cabinet announced in new guidelines issued on Monday.

The state council said action would also be taken to avoid unwanted pregnancies and to encourage men to “share responsibility� in preventing them. Authorities aim to improve sex education and strengthen post-abortion and post-childbirth family planning services, the ruling body added.

“The basic national policy of gender equality and the principle of giving priority to children need to be implemented in depth,� said Huang Xiaowei, deputy director of the State Council’s National Working Committee on Women and Children.

Health authorities warned in 2018 that the use of abortion to end unwanted pregnancies was harmful to women’s bodies and risked causing infertility.

After years of trying to limit population growth, Beijing is pledging policies aimed at encouraging larger families. It said in June it would now allow all couples to have three children instead of two, while policies designed to reduce the financial burden of raising children are also being introduced.

As we usually heard in Sweden back in the day, why doesn’t Astrid Lindgren (immensely popular worldwide) get the Nobel? WHY!?

The worst award IMO was Bob Dylan (2016), perhaps suitably enough while the Academy was run by its first woman, Sara Danius. What on Earth were they thinking? A couple of years later, the Academy tore itself apart over sex scandals and leaking the winner to betting companies and a lot of women members departed in a huff because a woman was the leak yet it seemed unfair. (Perhaps for the best? one may ask) And a couple of years later we got based Peter Handke (2019).

From what I’ve heard, there are usually about 200 people on the long list for the Nobel in literature, and out of even those, most will obviously not get it. Even if you get on the short list (10 people or so), your chances are slim.

Personally, I think Borges is one of the big fish who should have gotten the Nobel, but his political views or associations seem to have been too problematic. A living author with some obvious political problems would be Salman Rushdie. If nothing else, they will have to console themselves with their fame, wealth and influence. It seems Angel Guimerà y Jorge was the most persistently nominated candidate who nevertheless didn’t win.

Finally, here are some works on how the Swedish Academy operates when awarding the prize.

https://www.svenskaakademien.se/nobelpriset/nedladdningsbara-bocker-om-nobelpriset-i-litteratur

https://www.svenskaakademien.se/nobelpriset/nomineringar-och-utlatanden-1901-1950

In Swedish of course, suck it up.

Flipping from one end to another!

Let me begin by stating that I am not a crypto evangelist and that crypto is a small share of my portfolio. I do not expect private sector cryptocurrencies to displace sovereign currencies, nor would this necessarily be generally desirable. Much of crypto-enthusiasm, aside from the interest in novel technology, simply stems from the same misunderstandings of the nature of money that animates hard money fanatics like the Roanoke Biff buffoon I sparred with earlier in the thread.

Having said that, I’d like to state why I do not think it’s accurate to state that cryptocurrency has zero intrinsic value. Whether or not Bitcoin specifically has intrinsic value is a narrower question of course. Bitcoin is technologically primitive, but as far as cryptocurrency goes it’s Lindy.

First, it’s worth considering the history of money. Today gold has a number of industrial applications, but historically it evolved into money before industrial applications for gold existed. Gold was valued for its beauty, scarcity, durability, and the ease with which it could be worked. The non-monetary use of gold was for jewelry and ornamentation, which again stemmed from its beauty. Whether or not cryptocurrency is beautiful may be a matter of perspective, but you have no doubt noted that many people are attracted to it. Properly designed cryptocurrencies also share the scarcity feature of gold. Thus cryptocurrencies thus have certain properties of moneyness.

Second, “paper” currencies, whether representative (i.e. commodity backed) or fiat, were also created by men. The earliest paper currencies were issued by merchants and banks in order to avoid the cost of transporting bullion. Many were failures and even frauds, but eventually people more or less got it right. Most commodity-backed currencies were issued in amounts greatly exceeding the underlying physical assets that backed them, and eventually successful fiat currencies emerged backed only by law and the habit of not destroying their value through excessive monetary emissions.

Cryptocurrencies have valuable technological features not present in existing monetary instruments and securities. The distributed ledger, secure cryptographic transmission of payments, and the ability to execute contracts and even full-fledged computer programs are the most notable examples.

I agree with your prediction that the valuable technological features of cryptocurrencies will eventually be incorporated into sovereign currencies. This, however, does not mean the end of private sector cryptocurrencies anymore than sovereign bonds eliminate the market for corporate securities.

As noted in a previous reply of mine to Ron Unz, the ultimate development of cryptocurrency technology is to diminish the demand for money itself. Money is after all not valuable for its own sake, but because of the fact that it can be used to purchase real wealth, goods, and services. As all assets ultimately migrate to the blockchain, people will increasingly directly transact without the use of money as an intermediary.

Sovereign currencies will retain a role in this system as a reserve asset, the payment of taxes, the payment of wages, settling accounts, and the like. Private sector cryptocurrencies (as opposed to non-currency blockchains) will have a role in paying miners, running the decentralized exchanges that most transactions will take place on, black market transactions (a real use even if pooh poohed), evading capital and credit controls, distributed grid computing, and other applications not yet envisioned.

One possible extremely crucial role for private sector cryptocurrency in the future is as an international reserve asset. I am not stating that this will happen, only that it is a possibility. The present international financial system in which the main reserve asset is controlled by a single sovereign issuer is clearly not sustainable, and there is no guarantee that this power will pass to another sovereign issuer which may in any case not be interested in the role given the Triffin Dilemma. Multilateral reserve currencies (e.g. the SDR) have coordination problems, and gold is expensive to transact and inelastic. Private cryptocurrency may therefore ultimately displace the Dollar as the international reserve asset of choice.

The first mover advantage may be overstated (ask the Chinese about gunpowder), but as AK has noted the PRC’s clampdown on crypto means that crypto economic clusters will now not emerge in China.

China’s achievements are remarkable, but as usual some of your chosen metrics are dubious.

98% home ownership is not an achievement. Germany famously has long had a low home ownership rate with no ill effects. A house is a place to live and the fetishization of home ownership is foolish.

I flatly do not believe that America has hungry children considering the extreme obesity rate. The SNAP program ensures access to food, and almost all communities have food banks. The data showing alleged hunger in America are based on “food insecurity”, which basically means someone found it hard to pay for food at a certain point in time. If anything we could use some hungry children.

Bringing up executions (one of the core functions of any self-respecting state) and prisoners, of course, is to ignore that America is hamstrung by a large black population. You appear to be some kind of Maoist race denialist, so of course you bring this up. At any rate according to this metric you should be praising all of the soft countries that stopped executing criminals.

Lastly, to attempt to rebut AK’s point by citing Chinese government budgetary decentralization is to miss the point entirely. What would be more economically centralized–a command economy federation or a market capitalist unitary state?

What’s to stop every country from following China’s move and banning cryptos? If the US and the EU made using cryptos illegal tomorrow, what would happen? Cryptos look like a Ponzi scheme to me, the early investors make a fortune, the later ones less and less, but maybe you’re seeing something I’m not.

Wuling’s MiniEV is easily ruling EV sales in China with sales over 40000 per month, mainly sold to the Millenials and Generation Z.

This EV costs only $4500 new, and can be as cheap as $2000 after Chinese government incentives, while minimizing the social and ecological costs of automobiles (with its small size and low pollution).

Maximum speed of 100 kilometres per hour and range of 170 kilometres. Enough space for 4 people. It would be sufficient to transport most workers to their offices.

If only every car was substituted for this size of mini car (instead we seem to be going in the opposite direction with this fashion for SUVs) – new city planning could be improved by reducing the size of roads and parking spaces.


Video Link

Somehow I suspect that countries unable to stop COVID, hard drug abuse, “refugee” crises, etc. are going to clamp down on crypto.

But of course, in principle, there’s nothing to stop any functional state from banning crypto. And given sufficient political will, the ban can be sufficiently enforced.

But is this likely? I don’t think so. Contrary to what some people think, crypto isn’t some massive threat to the Dollar (or the Euro, Yen, etc.). It does facilitate black market transactions, but provided taxes are still being paid not a major concern. And as some have noted, intelligence agencies themselves may be availing themselves of this feature. And now that cryptocurrencies constitute an asset class owned by major oligarchs and marketed by wealth management firms to clients, there’s a powerful institutional constituency for keeping them in circulation.

As for calling it a Ponzi scheme, that’s not strictly true in that a Ponzi scheme is simply robbing Peter to pay Paul. There are plenty of scam cryptocurrencies, but ultimately cryptocurrencies are assets rather than promises. That said, they have been termed “Nakamoto Schemes”: https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/

Here is another illustration of how Globalization places Americans at great risk.

Truck parts should be made in the U.S. using steel produced by American foundries. Semiconductors can be made in the U.S. National security requires domestic supply of raw materials for industrial consumption.

There is no other way.

PEACE 😇

Everyone's worried about computer chip shortage for graphics cards, personal vehicles, but they all forget… The supply line that runs it.

Big diesel trucks. The chips are so short handed now trucks are sitting for weeks. pic.twitter.com/LgTEm3cgtV

— Giant Stupid Dog (@K1NGRK9) September 25, 2021

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin suffer from their primary characteristic of being decentralized, permissionless blockchains which force them to perform computationally-intensive algorithms to prove their fiduciary authority. Fiat currencies, by contrast, are issued by centralized authorities and backed by the political will and sovereign credit of nation-states. The technical process of turning fiat currencies into CBDCs is relatively simple which would possess all the digital features of cryptocurrencies. The fundamental difference between autonomous cryptocurrencies and CBDCs is primarily ideological which leads to technical differences in their system architecture. For CBDCs, the quantity of currency in circulation is subject to the monetary policy of a centralized authority, namely, the Central Bank which issued the CBDC. But for autonomous cryptocurrencies, no such centralized authority exists except a distributed network of permissionless blockchains capable of performing computationally-intensive algorithms to prove their fiduciary authority which then determines the amount of cryptocurrencies in circulation. This decentralized process of ascertaining authority is extremely inefficient which limits the practical ability of its permissionless blockchains to scale massively in order to function properly as a medium of exchange. This intrinsic drawback of crytocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum explain why their practical use as a medium of exchange is practically non-existent in real-world transactions. Instead, they have become stores-of-value whereby financial speculators bet on their market value which is propped up by illicit funds. But that defeats its utility as a medium of exchange because its market value can fluctuate erratically due to financial speculation.

In short, cryptocurrencies are not really currencies but anonymous stores to hold ill-gotten wealth which has become their primary function today.

And as some have noted, intelligence agencies themselves may be availing themselves of this feature.

What are the odds Nakamoto was an NSA team? The last time I talked to folks at my college (admittedly this was several years ago) the math and programming guys almost all considered NSA a top gig and a couple years working there better than any but the best grad school.

98% home ownership is significant for two reasons, one of which you may be too young to recall. The US used its high ownership–which reached 69% at one point–to tout ‘democracy’ and, now that the figure has fallen to 66%, is silent about that metric. The numbers of people sleeping rough in every German city does not speak well for Germany’s policy.

to attempt to rebut AK’s point by citing Chinese government budgetary decentralization is to miss the point entirely. What would be more economically centralized–a command economy federation or a market capitalist unitary state?

China is not centrally planned but centrally goaled (an affront to our chaotic, Roman monarchical sensibilities) and the goals, which were set 2500 years ago, have been reaffirmed every year since 1951. The short-term goals come from the periphery via regular surveys, and are turned into actionable items which the provinces are then free to pursue as they see fit, since they control their budgets. Some background:

Mao refined the Confucian process by adding democratic oversight, surveys, and local experimentation on a scale so vast that today the process is an industry in itself. China’s Academy of Social Sciences, CASS, with fifty research centers covering two-hundred sixty social disciplines and four-thousand full-time researchers, now uses questionnaires and grassroots forums to initiate and evaluate all legislation.

Teams tour the country, appear on TV, hold meetings, listen to local opinions and formulate proposals. Congress commissions scholars to evaluate and economists to budget their recommendations. Says a CASS planner, “Computers have made huge improvements in collecting and analyzing the information. Still, thousands of statisticians, actuaries, database experts and technicians with degrees in urban, rural, agricultural, environmental and economic planning invest thousands of hours interpreting and analyzing this vast trove of data, statistics and information. Needless to say, for a continent-sized country with over a billion citizens, it takes hundreds of thousands of people to develop a Five-Year Plan”.

The country’s Brains Trust, the State Council, publishes draft Plans and solicits feedback from employees, farmers, business people, entrepreneurs, officials and specialists, and feasibility reports from the twenty-seven levels of bureaucracy responsible for implementation. The Finance and Economics Committee analyzes Plan budgets and, after the State Council signs off and Congress votes. Then discussion is suspended and experimentation and data collection begin. The process resembles Proctor & Gamble more than Pericles of Athens, with solutions to problems test-marketed everywhere, says venture capitalist Robin Daverman:

“China is a giant trial portfolio with millions of trials everywhere: innovations in everything from healthcare to poverty reduction, education, energy, trade, and transportation are being trialed in different communities. Every one of China’s 662 cities is experimenting: Shanghai with free trade zones, Guizhou with poverty reduction, twenty-three cities with education reforms, Northeastern provinces with SOE reform, pilot schools, pilot cities, pilot hospitals, pilot markets, pilot everything. Mayors and governors, the Primary Investigators, share their ‘lab results’ at the Central Party School and publish them in State-owned media, their ‘scientific journals.’

“Significant policies usually begin as ‘clinical trials’ in small towns, where they generate test data. If the stats look right, they’ll add test sites and do long-term followups. They test and tweak for 10-30 years, then ask the 3,000-member People’s Congress to review the data and authorize national trials in three provinces. If those trials are successful, the State Council [China’s Brains Trust] polishes the plan and takes it back to Congress for a final vote. It’s very transparent, and if your data is better than mine, your bill gets passed, and mine doesn’t. Congressional votes are nearly unanimous because reams of data back the legislation.

“This allows China to accomplish a great deal in a short time because your winning solution will be quickly propagated throughout the country. You’ll be a front-page hero, invited to high-level meetings in Beijing and promoted. As you can imagine, the competition to solve problems is intense. Local governments have a great deal of freedom to try their own things as long as the local people support them. Various villages and small towns have tested everything from bare-knuckled liberalism to straight Communism”.

Thousands of Trial Spots generate immense volumes of data, says author Jeff J. Brown, “My Beijing neighborhood committee and town hall are constantly putting up announcements, inviting groups of people–renters, homeowners, over seventies, women under forty, those with or without medical insurance, retirees–to answer surveys. The CPC is the world’s biggest pollster for a reason: China’s democratic ‘dictatorship of the people’ is highly engaged at the day-to-day, citizen-on-the-street level. I know, because I live in a middle class Chinese community and I question them all the time. I find their government much more responsive and democratic than the dog-and-pony shows back home, and I mean that seriously”.

Long boomer post on Proof of Work there’s also Proof of Stake.
Go binge watch coin bureau vids also, learn about paragraphs.

98% home ownership is significant for two reasons, one of which you may be too young to recall. The US used its high ownership–which reached 69% at one point–to tout ‘democracy’ and, now that the figure has fallen to 66%, is silent about that metric. The numbers of people sleeping rough in every German city does not speak well for Germany’s policy.

I am old enough to recall when reckless promotion of home ownership at all costs detonated the world economy.

It’s certainly true that home ownership is a staple plank of the so-called American Dream, but the fact that Americans propagandize this does not mean that a high rate of home ownership is desirable.

It’s a policy choice with tradeoffs, no different than something like farm subsidies or tax policy. Incentivizing a high rate of home ownership may increase housing and retirement security for instance, but this can come at the cost of reduced labor market flexibility. High home ownership can also produce a large gentry class with a vested interest in rising property values, paradoxically rendering housing unaffordable for the young.

As for vagrancy, in advanced countries this is less an issue of housing affordability/availability than of the social dysfunction which you pointed out plagues America (and many other countries).

German housing price data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QDER628BIS

A comparative chart from The Economist:

Note the relative stability of German housing prices.

I don’t know the particular laws on this matter in Germany, but in the USA vagrancy laws were rendered unenforceable by SCOTUS almost half a century ago. A large number of the homeless in Germany are also not be Germans at all but Merkel’s invaders. This article is a few years old, but note that half of the homeless in Germany then were so-called refugees: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-150-percent-rise-in-number-of-homeless-since-2014/a-41376766

As for the remainder of your post, my comment was a thought experiment and not a description of China which is of course not a command economy. For analogies between actual countries you could take, say, the Khruschev-era Soviet Union and compare it to the Spanish State of the same timeframe. The USSR in this timeframe was a federation, and economic planning was also disaggregated from the ministries to the regional republics. Spain, meanwhile, was a unitary capitalist state. Spain had far less “top-down” decision-making for the simple reason that it was a market-oriented economy.

However, in this particular case, the Chinese government has commanded the end of cryptocurrency within China.

the goals, which were set 2500 years ago, have been reaffirmed every year since 1951

Forget the hundred year plans, forward with the thousand year planning!

The explanation, in its full scope, would have to be very, very long. I think the effect of diasporas on their origin countries alone is a huge study topic. Then there are the philosophical questions revolving around the topic. The benefit you speak of assumes that it is good to keep national identities as is, and reduce the intermingling of people and minimize cultural exchange/change. In another word, I think you are saying, “I want China to remain Chinese alone and prevent any migration.” Meanwhile, CCP is encouraging Chinese migration into Africa and bringing Africans to China (not on a Western scale, but this is still CCP we are talking about). So, most countries/civilizations that have global aspirations are allowing migration to extend their networks, footprint and reap long-term benefits. Bottom line is, multiculturalism to some degree, is inevitable unless the country is self-sufficient. I didn’t say whether multiculturalism is good or bad, I said from an economic and political perspective it makes sense and it is not all bad for Western nations. In fact, it is a necessity for Western strategic and economic goals (maybe not at Swedish scale, I’d say 1% to 2% of the country’s population would suffice), especially considering their colonialist pasts (colonies used to be much more nationalist and angry).

But it is still a choice for Western people as well, to say, “I don’t care about having 2-3 cars, large homes, and being able to find and afford whatever I want to consume” and ban immigration completely. The thing is, so few are of that mind, and even among those who think like that, I believe most would immediately drop that position if they realized the economic cost nativism and protectionism would imply on their day-to-day lives.

Have you noticed that since China began cracking down on its oligarchs, and declared that it was seeking to create a more equal society, that the hate-mongering in the West has notched up even more? Could one imagine anything more threatening to the Western bloodsucking elites than a great State based on egalitarian principles. The hatred of blood-suckers like the FoxNews detritus is now utterly unhinged. The local ABC, Sixty Minutes (truly insane!) and SkyNews are absolutely slavering for WAR!!!

Meanwhile the Austrayan MSM declares everything in China to be ordered by ‘dictator Xi’, and the Chinese people to be chafing under his dictatorship, dreaming of ‘Freedom’ like Austrayans. The swinish ignorance of the MSM presstitutes, their habitual 100% Groupthink, and their arrogant assertion to speak on behalf of the suffering Chinese masses, is truly preposterous, but uniform and undifferentiated across the entire Groupthinking ‘Free Press’.

The benefit you speak of assumes that it is good to keep national identities as is, and reduce the intermingling of people and minimize cultural exchange/change. In another word, I think you are saying, “I want China to remain Chinese alone and prevent any migration.� Meanwhile, CCP is encouraging Chinese migration into Africa and bringing Africans to China (not on a Western scale, but this is still CCP we are talking about). So, most countries/civilizations that have global aspirations are allowing migration to extend their networks, footprint and reap long-term benefits. Bottom line is, multiculturalism to some degree, is inevitable

To give credit where credit is due. The CCP has examined prior failures in Africa, determined the root cause of those failures, and has a different plan. CCP hyper colonies in sub-Saharan Africa operate under a staffing philosophy of total replacement. If there are 10,000 mission critical jobs in an African project, they will be filled by 10,000 Han exported from China. There will never be a need to bring Africans to the PRC mainland.

An obvious analogy is the lengthy economic success of South Africa as an Apartheid nation. Will Han African hyper colonization work? I do not know. But, what they are trying has produced good ROI in the past.

Looking at the CCP portfolio, there is an over emphasis on “large vessel port projects”. Is this coincidence? Or, is the PLA looking ahead to military logistics? These facilities could easily serve as loss free beach heads to land quantities of tanks, APC’s, and the logistical supply & support to field them effectively.

PEACE 😇

I using it in the commonly accepted form, “The people living in West�. I suspect you are trying to use it in some other way as a reference to tiny numbers of powerful elites in anti-Western Hollywood and anti-Western Wall Street.

No, I don’t mean ordinary people. I also don’t mean anti-Western people. I am talking about states, strategies, and politics. So I mean whoever plans those.

That is the academic theory. However current reality is very different.

Reality isn’t very different everywhere. That’s why they are reining in on China.

American workers lose their jobs as production is moved overseas. SJW Globalists win while non-SJW Westerners lose.

As far as I know, American workers have higher living standards than in the past, by Western measures. Globalists aren’t SJWs, SJWs are just a subgroup that globalists use for their goals.

Reinstating tariffs as a significant source of revenue would result in more domestic jobs. A win for Western workers and a loss for Globalist MegaCorporations.

Yes to more domestic jobs, and loss to mega-corporations. But having a higher paying job doesn’t mean a higher life standard if the prices of everything you buy go up more than your salary.

I think we concur on this point. Migrants damaged by anti-Western SJW culture are a threat to both Western culture and their home culture.

You call SJWs anti-Western, I don’t see it that way at all. It is the West in your ideal that may be under threat, but the West you have are them in the real world. I agree they are a threat to their home cultures, but I don’t think they are as much a threat to Western cultures. What do you expect? Someone from Somalia or Mexico to suddenly start listening to Mozart and appreciate Picasso as soon as they migrate?

You have bought the Hollywood trope hook, line, & sinker. Christianity is very much alive out in Main Street America.

They are conservatives yes, as far as I can see, they claim to believe in Christianity but they are very much seculars. It is like a weekly therapy for most Christians or just some cultural artifact. How many of them live by the values of Jesus? They don’t follow almost any part of their scripture, so how are they Christians?

Nationalism would make it much easier for Christian countries to avoid infiltration by Chinese and Iranian agents.

Christian country definition is a bit problematic because no country is Christian, they are all secular countries as far as I know. Yes, if you block immigration you can definitely avoid infiltration, but it cuts both ways you also cannot complain when they reign in on Christians in China, who according to some claims number tens of millions. Side note: Jesus was not a nationalist, he was a universalist.

Those who call for Christian Populism (e.g. MAGA) know exactly what they will obtain. Jobs and a return to traditional values.

I didn’t know MAGA was Christian Populism. Jobs yes, but higher prices also yes. Return to what traditional values? I don’t know what you mean by traditional values. As far as I can see, most Republicans aren’t traditionalists to begin with.

An end to other countries exploiting America.

Trust me, no country exploits other countries as much as America does. The only ones that could be said to exploit America could be its Western allies, such as European countries without proper armies. I don’t see how China exploits America while it was Chinese workers who were working for a dollar or less per hour for decades, allowing extremely high profits for American businesses.

Cryptocurrencies’s market has multiple, undeniable strengths, that could make you optimistic for them.

It will be something like 99,99% or more of the buyers of the cryptocurrencies, don’t understand any of the field of cryptography in a serious way, while those who understand a little and don’t have productive jobs are often making their own currencies and accessing a money printing machine.

The important thing is not to understand whether the product has value from any technical perspective, but to predict what will be fashionable or not in the media/cultural sphere, as the investors have no way to assess the product’s real value, Its technical advantages, (not so much) robustness to hacking, etc, are not at all understand by most of the creators. This is the “epistemic opacity” value of an industry, whose investors and even creators do not have much ability to judge the product.

Followers of the cryptocurrency fashion are mostly amateur, naive, and very loyal investors. For example, I’ve seen they had some faith in one currency because it was being promoted with academically published computer scientists. (Everyone who has been in an investment presentation, knows how often specialists and academics are promoted – it’s no indication of future success or failure of an investment).

The fact cryptocurrencies are funded to a significant extent by loyal amateur/naive money, is an extremely important advantage.

As for customer loyalty. People who buy the currency, are encouraged by the internet propaganda to develop a brand loyalty, in which part of their identity and dream of future wealth, merges to the brand of currency they bought.

Additional advantage is that due to the “Ponzi style structure” of the cryptocurrency (value of the product depends on inserting fresh money into it), the purchasers of the currency are encouraged to “religiously convert” their friends and family to the cryptocurrency. So there is a financial incentive for them to develop product loyalty and behave like a religious cult trying to proselytize for new members. It has some psychological similarity to “crowd funding”, and also how brands like Tesla and Apple have been promoted in the 21st century.

Another advantage is that it provides a function for amateurs who otherwise cannot access investing, and this investing is psychologically most similar to “sports betting”, “online poker” or “gambling” – it’s providing great pleasure for people who enjoy gambling, and gambling is a vast multihundred billion dollar industry.

Finally, and yet another advantage of cryptocurrency – it is possibly useful for money laundering.

Cryptocurrency is therefore in a very strong position to generate profits for its founders. It is based in an area that few of its investors (and many of its creators) understand. It is also including the advantages of “naive customers”, “sports betting”, “money laundering”, “ponzi schemes” and “religious cults”.

For sceptics who claim that cryptocurrency is “a bubble that will collapse”. It’s possible that nonuseful, nonproductive products like cryptocurrency, might be surprisingly successful.

Things like “modern art industry/concept art industry”, has not yet collapsed, even after decades of incredible escalation in its value. “Concept art” has two of the advantage of cryptocurrency, in which its technical value and practical use isn’t understood even by its founders, and such kind of art is useful for money laundering.

Similarly, the betting industry has an eternal popularity and is a vast industry, and religious cults like “Scientology” can continue for generations.

The danger for cryptocurrency will be in the government regulation. Betting, money laundering and religions, are often regulated by governments. So worry is that governments could intervene to regulate its activities – as they are trying for gambling, money laundering and religious cults. If the government doesn’t intervene, then I will guess that cryptocurrency might continue to be very profitable.

–

* There is possibilities danger of instability in introduction of naive nonprofessional investors. Amateur investors for the “Gamestop” were apparently herded on sites like Reddit, that have no security features. (Anyone can use bots to control the upvotes and downvotes in Reddit, and they are too lazy to add security features against it.) Billions of dollars profits were generated for Blackrock and Fidelity Investments. Perhaps the exploitation of this kind of investor, could create an additional instability for the economy. Maybe a pessimist who had understood the implication more than amateurs like myself, could be fearing the destabilizing effects of the exploitation of “subprime investors”? Although this is just an intuition of an amateur observer of such topics.

which basically means someone found it hard to pay for food at a certain point in time.

Yeah, like the stupid cashier said that I only had enough money for the Cheez-its or the MD 20/20. What are you gonna do? You have to take care of the basics, right? Is this America or not?

You seem confused. Migration is not a single thing. Different migrants have radically different effects on different countries. The US gets the best of Asia. This undoubtedly helps their economy. Meanwile yhe UK imported a large number of Mirupuri peasants from Pakistan. This has been detrimental to the economy and very detrimental to the society.

All of this can be drilled into further, but given that only the top few deciles of earners pay more into tax than gets spent on them, only migrants who end up in the top few deciles are beneficial for the economy. This is clearly not the case for most of them, otherwise they would form an elite economic group, rather than one which is always having to be helped through “systemic racism.”

All good points and food for thought.
I support widespread home ownership for social stability, if nothing else.
The Chinese government commanding the end of cryptocurrency within China is what the Chinese expect their governments to do: govern in the best interests of everyone. PRC think tanks have looked at crypto from every angle and decided that the country is better off without it. We will have to wait a while to see how this affects their society, and judge the impact of the e-RMB. But I struggle to understand why or how the ban will negatively affect the bottom 99% of people.

Westerners are plunderers, not planners.

They don’t bother reading the current five-year plan. They don’t realize that there is a 2035 plan and a 2049 plan.

One can construct a tax argument that the state will ultimately embrace eugenics.

I.e, dysgenics causes the number of taxpayers to drop, while the state intrinsically desires to have more revenue. And smarter people tend to pay more taxes.

But I am not sure it is faultless logic – a dumb state may not be able to grasp this.

They’ve turned it up to eleven, no doubt.

Comment sections have been shut down and those that still operate censor readers’ comments relentlessly. Even Amazon reviews are censored. Confucius institutes are closing every week.

Our elite will do what all elites do: ride the sucker into the ground. It’s smash and grab time, but the media won’t report the crimes.

All these can be undone by a single video of a Chinese EV engulfed in a fireball, on Zuccbook. And some import restrictions in the name of “quality control”.

Chinese workers who were working for a dollar or less per hour for decades, allowing extremely high profits for American businesses.

American businesses? Come on… What you are talking about are anti-American Internationals.

An American business would benefit American workers. SJW MegaCorporations are an anti-Western blight that intentionally suppresses U.S. workers with DIE [Diversity, Inclusion, Equity] theology. They really want Americans to DIE.

having a higher paying job doesn’t mean a higher life standard if the prices of everything you buy go up more than your salary.

Having more U.S. jobs and higher paying U.S. jobs yields increased real disposable income. Reindustrialization will lead to net price reductions versus salary.

Yes, if you block immigration you can definitely avoid infiltration, but it cuts both ways you also cannot complain when they reign in on Christians in China, who according to some claims number tens of millions.

The Elite Globalist CCP has used “state churches” to establish a faux soulless SJW non-religion. The number of identified “Christians” is thus highly misleading. With no hope of a Crusade to reestablish real Christianity, that battle is lost to the Globalist CCP for my generation.

Protecting what we have in the U.S. is therefore the best strategy. Expansion of Christianity is a task left to posterity.

I didn’t know MAGA was Christian Populism. Jobs yes, but higher prices also yes. Return to what traditional values? I don’t know what you mean by traditional values. As far as I can see, most Republicans aren’t traditionalists to begin with.

The GOP has a long standing problem with Establishment RINO’s. A low point was reached about 20-30 years ago when NeoConDemocrat infestation gave us GW Bush. A President only the pro-War left could love. Your skepticism of DC swamp Republicans is correct. MAGA is targeting these creatures, such as the despicable Liz Cheney.

MAGA is clearly rooted in traditional values and Populism. It is not exclusionary Christian, so Judaism and other believers in family and country are able to join in. However, U.S. demographics plus simple math shows that any faith based conservative movement will be predominantly Christian.

If wages go up 50% and prices go up only 10%, that is a 40% win for U.S. workers. I do not think you grasp the sheer magnitude of devastation and annihilation that decades of low skilled migration has had on U.S. blue collar wages. Reduced migration plus MAGA Reindustrialization is a no-brainer, obvious win for U.S. citizens. Mythical “inflation risk” is an SJW Globalist fabrication and feeble scare tactic.

PEACE 😇

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-climate-change-business-lifestyle-environment-and-nature-f938f477ef5416015120884c0dcf0ece

They have been grappling with electricuty shortages, but this time (rather than ailing hydroelectricity in Taiwan) the damage is self-inflicted a la Europe.

Why don’t China bulls realize the CCP is as eager on the climate change agenda as Europe?

The CCP has not bought into Global Warming Mythology. They are doing what is necessary to provide affordable energy to industry: (1)

China is planning to build 43 new coal-fired power plants and 18 new blast furnaces — equivalent to adding about 1.5% to its current annual emissions — according to a new report. The new projects were announced in the first half of this year despite the world’s largest polluter pledging to bring its emissions to a peak before 2030

China is leading the world in new coal power plants, building more than three times as much new coal power capacity as all other countries in the world combined in 2020. It isn’t alone in its reliance on coal, however. China and four other countries, India, Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam, account for more than 80% of the coal power stations planned across the world

Actions speak louder than words. And, building coal plants is quite clear as an action.

PEACE 😇
__________

(1) https://www.technologytimes.pk/2021/08/20/china-plans-to-build-43-coal-driven-power-plants/

Lest you miss the point of the news item here’s the headline I forgot to add:

China’s power cuts may foreshadow shortages of global goods

uniform and undifferentiated across the entire Groupthinking ‘Free Press’.

It’s not so much groupthink, or any kind of thinking, for that matter. It’s an illustration of the saying that “he, who pays the musicians, calls the tune�.

It is a philosophical difference.

In the West, what ever medium or system that can be devised to create currency is valued. It doesn’t matter what it is. It doesn’t matter how it works, or anything like that. Which is why the United States is a nation with a million tiny, tiny hands in your wallet. Everyone takes a cut, all the time, in very small bites. It’s considered a “good thing” because someone is accumulating currency.

In China, the role of the government is to facilitate a moderate lifestyle along traditional Chinese social constructs. The people must be able to afford reasonable housing, reasonable food, reasonable transportation, and a reasonable way of life. Fundamental to that is a stable medium of exchange; currency that is a function of the labor of society.

Cryptocurrency is a technique of electronic currency exchange. China has no problem with that.

What China does have a problem with; is the speculative activities of those who use to use currency as a method of creating more currency.

This kind of speculation, manipulation, and control of such a fundamental “glue” of society is dangerous and puts control of the finances in the hands of people who do not have the best interests for China. Thus it is banned, and policed.

It’s very simple, really.

That’s ok if you don’t like it. You can stick to the “freedom”, and “liberties” of a “free society” and live the “Wild West” roller coaster as mega-oligarchs fight over how to control the downtrodden debt-serfs. It’s your choice. China has shown the way out the door. It’s up to everyone to decide what kind of life they want.

Western oligarchs want their flocks ignorant of greener political pastures, for sure.

But what’s the end game? As I keep pointing out, there are now more hungry children, drug addicts, suicides and executions, more homeless, poor, illiterate, and imprisoned citizens in America than in China.

What will the media say when China achieves common prosperity (Gini of 28%) in 2035, and the average Chinese median net worth and life expectancy and general QOL surpass the West?

We are in the Denial stage.

Next comes Anger–which is why China is preparing for war.

Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance will be painful, but not fatal..

I tried to escape but had to return for many different reasons… to bury my ex and take care of our youngest. Didnt want to come back. Loved living overseas away from the American madness but even overseas has it share of craziness. I pray I have the time to pull things together and sell everything before splitting for good. We shall see.

Whew! That was a long treatise on what essentially is the primary purpose of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin: MONEY LAUNDERING. And that in a nutshell is what makes Bitcoin so attractive: every Tom, Dick and Harry who does Bitcoin mining is involved in MONEY LAUNDERING. The fact that Bitcoin was designed to be PERMISSIONLESS (‘Hello Everyone!”), DECENTRALIZED (“Hello World!”) and thus ANONYMOUS (“We Miners are now the Bankers of the World!”) gives Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) all the essential characteristics for hiding ill-gotten wealth in digital form which can be transported surreptitiously across national borders, thereby bypassing the highly-regulated banking/financial industry.

You’re right that Bitcoin mining started out as a hobbyist industry involving geeks who had nothing better to do than try out Bitcoin mining for fun. But illicit funds started flowing to Bitcoin when its utility was proven to be effective in circumventing FX controls which is exactly what happened in China. So you now have a global network of Bitcoin miners effectively running a digital MONEY LAUNDERING network which has attracted institutional investors wishing to cash in on the Bitcoin craze.

Contrary to popular misconceptions, Bitcoin is ineffective as a medium of exchange, given its computational demands as well as its unstable value. That’s why another class of cryptocurrencies — stablecoins — were invented to assign a fixed value to a cryptocurrency token. But that’s outright fraud because those stablecoins are not backed by cash reserves representing their market value, illegally misrepresenting fiat currencies without the legal authorization to do so.

Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) have all the negative attributes of vice industries such as gambling, drugs, etc. My expectation is that sovereign nation-states would have to regulate if not outright ban the cryptocurrency industry to protect their societies and peoples from its harmful effects.

Every transfer and use of money governments don’t want to see is “money laundering”.

Earning wages in physical money/currencies when CBDCs are mandatory, and spending them will also be “money laundering”, too.

Thank you for giving a seriously considered defence of crypto in good faith, and not a load of pompous unverifiable guff, like example, comment 40 here.

Whether or not cryptocurrency is beautiful may be a matter of perspective, but you have no doubt noted that many people are attracted to it. Properly designed cryptocurrencies also share the scarcity feature of gold. Thus cryptocurrencies thus have certain properties of moneyness.

But as our benevolant overlord has mentioned earlier, it appears that this ‘attraction’ almost certainly derives from the sudden, meteoric rise in the nominal value of these ‘coins’, alongside their extreme volatility, which essentially throws in the allures of gambling as well.
Of course, everyone dreams about getting rich quick with minimal effort, and the narrative of people who bought crypto ‘early’ seems to have convinced many that if they too, get comparatively ‘early’ now relative to some undefined future, they can also strike it rich without effort.

Properly designed cryptocurrencies also share the scarcity feature of gold. Thus cryptocurrencies thus have certain properties of moneyness.

Yet there are also several dozen competing ‘cryptocurrencies’ being aggressively traded at any one time. Can they seriously be argued to hold ‘scarcity value’ in such conditions? I don’t know the difference between the various competitors (frankly, I don’t have enough interest to research this myself), but how different in technology from each other can they be?
From my disinterested observers perspective, I’ve only noticed various examples of this vaunted ‘free speech money’ variously branded under the auspices of ‘DogeCoin’ (which only heard of due to the speculative hit-and-run in it of your that all-American Hero, Elon Musk), ‘Asscoin’, and my personal favourite, ‘Hitlercoin’, complete with 1488 ‘tokens’, iirc.

The earliest paper currencies were issued by merchants and banks in order to avoid the cost of transporting bullion.

This is going off-topic, but the archaeological evidence suggests that it’s almost a certainty that the first issued ‘money’ (defined as tokens or notes that are valueless in themselves) came from top-down government initiatives, not private individuals (a favourite hypothesis of Austrian economics proponents and similar such scumbags). Michael Hudson, Baruch Levine and Karl Polanyi write well about this, if you’re interested.

Most commodity-backed currencies were issued in amounts greatly exceeding the underlying physical assets that backed them, and eventually successful fiat currencies emerged backed only by law and the habit of not destroying their value through excessive monetary emissions.

Sure, but doesn’t this precisely illustrate why governments around the world would react to crytocurrencies with extreme prejudice if people began taking them at all seriously as a means of transaction?
China’s government is both competent and takes itself seriously (qualities which neither Russia or the US possess both of), which would perfectly explain why it’s the first country to seriously crackdown on ‘cryptocurrencies’.

I agree with your prediction that the valuable technological features of cryptocurrencies will eventually be incorporated into sovereign currencies. This, however, does not mean the end of private sector cryptocurrencies anymore than sovereign bonds eliminate the market for corporate securities.

The latter seem much amenable to government oversight and control that cryptocurrencies (of which it appears can be created by anyone with the necessary tech know-how) though, don’t you think? Again, I don’t know much about the topic, so maybe you can tell me (and other skeptics here) something I’m not aware of.

Private sector cryptocurrencies (as opposed to non-currency blockchains) will have a role in paying miners, running the decentralized exchanges that most transactions will take place on, black market transactions (a real use even if pooh poohed), evading capital and credit controls, distributed grid computing, and other applications not yet envisioned.

All of these uses look like net-negatives to society for me, with the exception of the last, but I know nothing about IT myself, perhaps our benevolent overlord could chip in on it.

Private cryptocurrency may therefore ultimately displace the Dollar as the international reserve asset of choice.

Possibly, supposing that that that these cryptocurrencies truly are state-neutral. But something, call it hunch, makes me suspect they’re somehow integrated into and serve the current American ‘bullshit economy’ in some way. Comments regarding intelligence agencies (in this context, I can’t see anyone outside of the Mossad/CIA, and their underlings, using crypto) don’t exactly fill me with confidence either.
Of course, I could be totally wrong..

Possibly, supposing that that that these cryptocurrencies truly are state-neutral. But something, call it hunch, makes me suspect they’re somehow integrated into and serve the current American ‘bullshit economy’ in some way.

What bullshit?

I agree with the general spirit, but I’m rather skeptical re. details.
We simply cannot predict the future, even a few decades.

My old example is 1900 and 1930- in 1930, you got tanks, quantum mechanics, relativity, air-planes, telephone, radio, high modernism in arts, wider approach of psychoanalysis, film, cars, fascism, communism, modern concentration camps, …

Nobody could have predicted that.

I can imagine cryptocurrencies are useful for intelligence agencies as they are for their often partners in organised crime.

Bitcoin heading down to 18k to 20k as the speculative bubble across assets deflate.

The US is able to compete with China on raw GDP so the hope is that they can retain an edge on cutting edge technology, I don’t see that happening either.

The raw GDP of both (or any “developed” country) are likely inflated.

Are you a bot? If so, the Chinese aren’t doing great with AI.

At least you realize that you have options and they’re better than the US.

Most think that any place else is, well, unthinkable. They build their own prison because the rest of the world is off limits to them. They chant USA, USA, USA at some mind numbing ball game, venerate the US flag, say thank you for your service and back the blue and bend over for the tax man and every stupid law without ever saying NO. The Fed Gov initiates all the problems but the people cement them in place through their willingness to submit.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong, which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either rods or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Frederick Douglass

Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government … doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety… It’s interested in its own power. That’s the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.
George Carlin

You can run, but you can’t hide from whoever pushes their agendas thru the UN.

You are correct.

However, the capabilities of the ruling regime where one domiciles has a lot to do with how one is treated. Many gov’ts wish they could be as intrusive and nasty as the US Fed Gov, state govt’s, municipal govt’s, city govt’s, but they simply lack the resources. It is the limitations that the local environment imposes that limits their effectiveness as totalitarian masters.

For example, I haven’t had vehicle insurance, medical insurance, home insurance for 16 years saving a considerable amount, because they aren’t mandatory. I can purchase anything I want at the local pharmacy because almost everything is over the counter and as cheap as dirt. I haven’t had a traffic ticket since leaving Texas because the local cops don’t have radar guns and there are no stop signs or traffic lights. There are speed limits that no one pays any attention to including the cops. My taxes amount to what I routinely keep in my wallet. I see a cop about once a month and have occasion to interact with the gov’t once a year for routine paperwork.

The US is what every nation yearns to be toward its captives known as citizens. Reality intercedes for the benefit of the individual if you pick carefully.

You can run, but you can’t hide from whoever pushes their agendas thru the UN.

Why would anyone run or hide from the UN?

Pointing and laughing is a more typical reaction. Every UNGA resolution is a symbol of total incompetence and utter failure.

PEACE 😇

MX isn’t perfect and it’s not what you are used to. But you do get used to it. And it’s a lot is more civilized than the US.

There is a bureaucracy, but it leaves you alone. For example, if you fall behind in your property taxes the government will not seize the property or attach liens— ever. They wait until it changes hands to take their cut.

Crossing the border is a good illustration: Crossing into the US is always unpleasant; US nationals are treated like slaves and usually subjected to an inquisition. Crossing into MX , even as a foreigner, is nothing like that; it’s always pleasant.

Unlike the US, Mexico’s border is not open to the trash of the world. You will be allowed legal residence only if you are able to contribute to Mexican society.

The Party has a hundred year plan, which consists of vague guidelines, because whatever their flaws, they consist mostly of relatively sane people. There is obviously no thousand-year plan – they realize that they have no way of predicting the future; and no, utopia or datong is not a plan.

I actually took the effort to look up what China was doing in 1021, just for you. Looks like the Song dynasty was still going pretty strong. They had some interesting ideas, possibly even socialism(I need to check the exact date), but the idea that they had plans involving getting crushed by the Jurchens and later the Mongols is pretty ridiculous.

Of course I meant to type unable.

Recently, I had a Honduran national remark that he and his friends toured Europe and only saw significant numbers of face diapers in Spain along with incessant interruptions in their travels to check on covid papers. I suspect they’re all in the drug trade because they have loads of money and have no visible income. I know them all and they’re very nice people. He got vaxed in Honduras but some of his friends were unvaxed, so a Spanish local told them how to get Spanish vax passports that will satisfy the jerk cops in Spain as well as many other places.

All one does is present a vaxed person at a certified facility to get tested for being vaxed or not. When the test comes back as vaxed, a Spanish certificate is sent via email to the persons phone. The trick was to provide an unvaxed persons email address. Anyone checking doesn’t take the necessary time to look for any inconsistencies, so it effectively works.

Those countries that are determined to impose ridiculous measures that are nothing more than harassment will eventually feel the sting of reduced tourism and income. My friend said they’ll omit Spain from their next months long touring.

Well, while EU is of course in headlines with their energy crisis (launch the Nord Stream 2, silly people), Chinese have their own power and electricity problems now.

Where this gets interesting is the entire “renewable energy” industry is powered by Chinese coal (the only reason it got cheap and competitive), and Chinese coal is not longer cheap, so this feeds into things like silicon metal prices, and a whole range of other energy intensive industrial materials required by Green energy manufacturers.

Metal-grade silicon price up from $4 to $10 per kg this month on power, coal crunches in China. About 1.1kg of metal Si is needed per kg of polysilicon, so that's going to hurt even at current polysilicon prices of nearly $29/kg.

Hoshine's stock price up 500% since Jan.

— Jenny Chase (@solar_chase) September 28, 2021