It's not practical, one should always assume or even pretend to be the cause of problems yourself.
Maybe it was not a good idea to kill RND in favor of greed?
Do you remember the parable of the ground breaking publication with its findings never finding a way into industry?
Musk often moaned about how hard it is to make things. It's our culture/society/economy a lot of the mechanisms are things we've made up sometimes going against reality. If we want to make something easier we would have to apply ourselves?
In 1950 the Chinese had 83% working in agriculture, the USA had 7%. (Today it is 22% and 1.6%)
You could argue they had access to abundant cheap labor but it is more practical to say we don't have access because everything is insanely expensive. Everything we do primarily benefits people who are useless to the process.
If you cant afford babies there is no need to have a family, no need to build houses for them. If one does accidentally a baby training and educating it should benefit everyone except the baby and the future?
We did all that and then boo hoo, China this China that?
China is not going to be able to invade Taiwan, it's too old and too broke to do so. Too old as in its demographics will be 30% over 60 years old in 10 years. Too broke as in the local governments are bankrupt, and the central government is barely hanging on, so much so that it had to issue ultra long bonds in 2 of the last 3 years. Keep in mind that Chinese government differs from other governments in that the other governments source of main revenue is taxes. Whereas the Chinese government has the revenue from all the state owned enterprises which are monopolies in major industries such as banking and oil. so if the Chinese government still can't get enough revenue from those state owned enterprises to cover existing debt payments, it is pretty fucked.
It's also hard to attack an opponent, when the opponent has been preparing for a number of years, with its allies. US, Japan, Australia, India.
If what you say is true then that increases the chance of war soon, it doesn't decrease it.
AFAICT, the Chinese administration believes it must reunify Taiwan; they've backed themselves into a corner with their rhetoric. They haven't because they believe it's better to wait because the chances of it happening militarily or peacefully are greater in the future than they are now.
But if it's going to be harder in the future, they must invade now.
Luckily I don't believe your argument holds.
Taiwan's birth rate is roughly similar to China's, so it doesn't really affect their relative positions.
China's debt is 85% sovereign so it's not a forcing factor either.
Its more a glue a state falling apart together with external opposition kitsunagi approach. Taiwan wirhout tsmc is less valuable, same as hong kong is less valuable once owned by the ccp.
Finally there is a level of people you integrate who know how flimsy dictatorships are that a dictatorship cant survive.
As a peer mentioned, China has 12 million unemployed men. That's more than in all of NATO.
> China imports vast quantities of goods, so yes, debt matters.
Yes, external debt matters. However, they don't have much external debt.
And China's imports are decreasing faster than their exports are. And that trend will accelerate because the two biggest are electronics which we are sanctioning and oil which they are rapidly weaning themselves off of.
Meatgrinder hasn't exactly worked for Russia yet. Especially if the Chinese soldiers are all sitting en mass on large, slow moving boats going across a 100 mile strait.
Unless you think the China's plan is to fill the Taiwan straits with so many dead bodies/boats so quickly, that it will create a corpse bridge for tanks to roll on.
> Meatgrinder hasn't exactly worked for Russia yet.
The point is that delaying the war would have made things even worse than they presently are. 2022 wasn't a good time for a war, but it was a better time than any subsequent year.
> But if it's going to be harder in the future, they must invade now.
That depends on the timeframe outlook. My impression has been they keep the rhetoric up so as not to abandon their claim over Taiwan, but are willing to wait a few lifetimes to get it.
China could invade Taiwan anytime they wanted, and given the current instability in the world, it would probably be the most opportune time. Additionally, Taiwan's defences would easily be annihilated with several strategic hypersonic missile salvos. Taiwan wouldn't know what hit them. And since they're an island, China would prevent all imports until they surrender. As for your argument regarding its allies, no one is going to mess with China and its arsenal of hypersonic nuclear weapons.
Ukraine is still holding its own despite Russia's hypersonic missile prowess.
If you are talking about a blockade, as we've seen from Russia's invasion, Russia's world's second best navy is already powerless against Ukraine's drone attacks and missiles. And US has already warned China on a potential blockade as being very high cost.
That seems like a massive exaggeration. The Russian navy wasn't that great even before the war. I'm not sure they really have anything going for them besides their submarines, even their single aircraft carrier is permanently under repair and won't reenter service any time soon. Even the Royal Navy is probably significantly strong even on its own.
I had the same expectations about Russia in February 2022. Too old, too decrepit, not enough soldiers on the border to take Ukraine (200 000 is far from enough, country of that size needs 10x as much occupiers to be safely subdued into submission), not worth to burn all the relations with the West over.
Oh boy, was I wrong and the doomsayers were right. It is tricky to emulate mind of a 70-y.o. wannabe emperor who dismantled all the previous oligarchy in favor of one-man rule.
And that sound like China, too, with the difference being that the sea between China and Taiwan is a very formidable obstacle that just might raise the overall stakes too high.
I'm not so sure I would bet on it. I think China would rather "reunite" without force, but Xi has put his personal imprimateur on "reunification". Nothing gets people to forget about economic anxiety like a good old-fashioned patriotic war. At this point, I think a lot of it is bluffing- better to have the Americans give up on defending Taiwan without a shot being fired. Better to make the Taiwanese think that "reunification" is inevitable and forget about notions of freedom.
I hope you're right but think about it like this: with a high youth unemployment and supposedly more men than women, they can throw away a couple million people.
Also them being a manufacturing powerhouse, I think they may have enough, even if they're at low point in the economic cycle.
It wouldn't be smart and even the invasion were successful, not sure what they'd gain, besides more hate from all of Southeast Asia and maybe Western sanctions.
I have family in Taiwan and I'm told their military isn't very well funded or equipped.
China can't afford to throw away only sons, and have them sink into the bottom of the ocean. Families would revolt pretty quickly. As we saw from the millions of protestors in Hong Kong in 2019, and the violent protests in Shanghai in lockdown 2023, Chinese citizens are capable of grouping together in mass numbers.
China may have the factories for manufacturing, but they need materials and money to keep a war going. That's hard when they are broke, and also supporting other dictatorships, such as Russia's war effort, Iran, North Korea.
Putin can't invade it doesn't make economic and demographic sense to my western values universal sensibilities.
Meanwhile they have regularly brushed millions of deaths under the rug,to stay in power, to save face and just propagandized that away.
Something would be won if a lesson was learned from Ukraine. The west is not universal and a deterring reaction must be tailored to the deterred, not to the deterring.
You would be mostly correct if their leadership was logical and well informed. I am not convinced that has been the case for at least the last 3 years. When your outcome depends on one dude been told something he isn't going to like by the mountain of yes men left under him after purging disagreeable people for years, you end up wrong way more often than is ideal.
I mean, most likely how you called it above will come to pass but the chance of something deranged isn't close enough to zero anymore to ignore it. I would put the change of something deranged at more like 10-15 % but that's just my gut feeling.
There were a lot of good reasons why Putin shouldn't have invaded Ukraine either. Yet Putin had been making shows of aggression and threats to invade, while securing his political position in Russia for a decade. You can see that Xi had been pursuing similar moves. I'm not sure autocrats see things as reasonably as you do.
Putin thought the war was only going to be for a few days - according to research by the think tank RUSI, when Vladimir Putin began his invasion, he expected to take control of Ukraine within 10 days https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/how-Putin-lost-in-10-days. He couldn't pull out of the war subsequently in fear of losing control and face. Xi is an idiot, but even he can see his potential downfall, given Russia's failure.
Meanwhile, in China, there are yearly flooding in major cities, where the water can't be drained through drainage due to poor planning, corruption in purported drainage fix, and now no local budget for any fixes. these floodings affect millions of Chinese each year.
For example, just in one instance, 127 million people has been affected in Guangdong province this April.
Deforestation would cause water too run off more quickly, overwhelming local services, drains, ditches. Building on flood plains also puts people at risk - rivers might not flood every year. These factors could play a role in this situation. These are the factors I would like to know more about for the Brazil and China flooding... Is it just bad governmental town planning?
In case for China, there are numerous reasons, from rapid urbanisation which meant the spread of impermeable concrete surfaces and reduced natural wetlands and marshes that had in the past absorbed rain. To Soviet-era urban drainage systems of shallow buried pipes leaves cities vulnerable to waterlogging during heavy rain.
> These are the factors I would like to know more about for the Brazil and China flooding... Is it just bad governmental town planning?
The systems Porto Alegre and Canoas had in place used to work. When the river there goes over 3 meters it starts to flood some places, okay? Once every few years there was a flood of like, 3.5 meters, 3.7 sometimes. Those were floods that rose slowly, giving ample time to answer to situations as they arose.
In this case, on the 2nd of May, the river reached 3 meters. By midnight, the river was at 3.60 meters already. 24 hours later, the river was at 4.9 meters, and it still rose, slowly now, to 5.3 meters.
The system that was in place was completely overwhelmed. Pumping stations failed and the water started coming through the pumping stations, for example.
That said, yes, the writing was on the wall. If a place regularly floods a bit to the point you need to have dykes and pumping stations in place, eventually it will flood a lot.
there's no reason for you to reply to maxglute. they never quote anything for reference, preferring to hallucinate things out of thin air. and they always want to have the last word, which is a sign of immaturity/insecurity.
Huawei is basically Chinese government's military tech arm, so a few reasons might be - increased Chinese military support for Russia, cold war tension ratcheted, US view China as very weak right now and want to increase the pressure
US big tech is basically US government military tech arm. We have all seen those Snowden revelation and those leaked Google project Maven and Microsoft holo lens hud stuff. Does it matter for non US or Chinese citizen for most of us its just cool tech. The more players in that field the better the products.
> US big tech is basically US government military tech arm.
Completely different from that of China. US big tech are own by individual organizations out of US government and cooperate with it. Huawei benefits people from CCP directly.
GDP growth figures published by e.g. the IMF are not just verbatim replications of what a country says. It comes from extensive analysis, verification, cross referencing against other data, and validation. It's why IMF data will often differ not only from what a country says, but even from what other organizations such as e.g. the World Bank or UN might say, as the latter are also independently carrying out their own similar processes. But all figures tend to fall pretty closely, because under this scrutiny it's practically impossible to meaningfully fudge things.
world's biggest market by population perhaps, but out of the 1.3B population for China, 700M of them make less than $100/month. 200M makes around $1000/month, but with the recent wage cuts across industries, more like $500/month for most middle class.
You are telling us western companies that report record sales in China are in cahoots with the CCP to fudge numbers ?
When Mercedes and VW say that they sell more cars in China than in the US and Europe,it must be a huge psyop ..
"Russia had been forced to repeatedly establish new supply chains for acquiring chips. As sanctions disrupted existing smuggling routes, it had set up new ones, likening these outcomes to a game of “whack-a-mole”, that was frustrating for both Western governments as well as “supply-chain managers at Russian missile and drone factories”.
The biggest failure in enforcing the controls is not that Russia continues to have some success in smuggling — that’s not a surprise — but that China continues shamelessly to sell Russia so much via normal trade routes."
Yeah, but if the sanctions cut off Russia <- US import path, but then Russia and China established Russia <- China <- US import path, it makes some sense for the US to cut off the China <- US leg.
In what appears to be a first, a former employee of ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, has outlined specific claims that the Chinese Communist Party accessed the data of TikTok users on a broad scale, and for political purposes.
It's very clear that China is an enemy that has to be dealt with by US