Fascist dichotomy: the "others" are both strong and weak at the same time.
Just like immigrants are both "lazy" and "taking all the jobs" at the same time.
this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2024
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Highly skilled North Korean hackers / a population of starving and downtrodden farmers who eat dirt for dinner.
Is this a contradiction? 99% of people are starving farmers who eat dirt for dinner and 1% are chosen from birth to be taught nothing other than how to hack the West
Edit: i forgot to add /s
Source
Yea, no. The DPRK is poor, but most areas are surprisingly "normal." The period of mass famines was decades ago, it's closer to how Cuba looks than it is to, say, Chad.
For what it's worth, both can be true. An economy can be both strong and precarious, such as many world markets in the 1920's right before the great depression caused the economic collapse of the west.
The tariffs thing though is a joke. Not to the people who will be hurt by it, of course, but the idea that it will accomplish anything meaningful. It's just a scapegoat tactic to blame foreign powers for a weakening dollar.
> shunned from international space collaboration
> makes their own space program
> nobody notices
Kinda wild how the west dissociates from China's space program basically in a modern day space race against everyone else. Imagine how much farther along humanity would be without the paranoid sinophobia. Some For All Mankind type of shit. Instead we're getting the Mirror Universe Terran Empire.
It has always been
I get your point, Western propaganda can't make up its mind about if they're strong or weak.
But it's not really a funny joke because economic instability isn't mutually exclusive with outcompeting, so the Schrodinger doesn't really apply.
It kind of is, because the kind of outcompeting that's happening requires decades of planning and development at scale. If you don't have economic stability, like we don't in the west, then it becomes impossible to run large scale projects like this. Hence why the west is being outcomepeted.
Instability in the present doesn't mean instability in the past where preparation could have been done. But setting that aside:
I really think that the way that the USA is being outcompeted (according to these seemingly hypocritical sources) could be competitive spontaneously given the size and resources of china.
It's always things like EVs that these news sources focus on, and China did invest heavily into battery tech during a time of relatively stability in the past, which is paying dividends now, also they're just able to manufacture nice cars for cheaper, plain and simple.
They outcompete for electronics manufacturing due to the lower cost of labour, the scale of manufacturing they can provide, and proximity of materials, and the existing tooling.
Etc.
And even if none of that was true, have you never seen a store that is almost bankrupt, putting on crazy sales to attract new customers? Undercutting competitor could be what causes the instability.
All this is hypothetical, I'm not arguing that's actually what's happening in China, I'm just describing how these things need not be mutually exclusive.
Except that there is zero evidence for any sort of instability in the present. When there are actual tangible instabilities at play, then it's easy to see that. For example, everybody can see social and political tensions across the west today.
The reality is that China is outcompeting the west across the board technologically. This shouldn't be a surprise to anybody. China has a bigger population, better education system, and the state actively guides the industry towards productive purposes.
To sum up, you're just coping here.
Dude, calm down and read what I wrote again.
I explicitly went out of my way to say how none of what I was writing was a reflection of the realities in China, but rather an explanation about why a joke about Schrodinger doesn't apply.
I didn't say that China had an unstable economy, I said that even if it had an unstable economy it could still outcompete the USA. How it's not a mutually exclusive condition, like the cat being both alive and dead.
That wasn't a fair way to characterize me or what I said, and it's pretty upsetting that you made such a judgement about me, seemingly without reading what I wrote 🙁
lol well sorry about mischaractarization there. That said, my original point was that you absolutely do need a stable economy to do large scale development. You might be able to get short term gains with an unstable economy, but doing things like building mass rail infrastructure or developing chips domestically requires stability. What you're saying is that you can have a Potemkin village, but it's clear that it's not the case with China hence the meme makes perfect sense.
look up US versus China steel production then look up the world total
What is it that you think I'm arguing, that those figures would be impactful.
I explicitly said that I'm not calling China's economy unstable, that instead I'm using hypotheticals to discuss the joke itself.
Hilarious how tarriffs are a few against imports and we as a people pay those. The exporting country sees nothing and the importing companies have to pass on the cost. So weird how a giant set of Americans don't realize that it will raise the cost of almost everything.
I mean, the idea is, that the tarriffed stuff becomes less attractive compared to the non-tarriffed stuff due to the higher price, so less people will buy it and instead the nationally produced alternatives thus strengthening the national economy and and weakening the tarriffed ones.
Of course that can only work with stuff that has nationally produced (or at least non-tarriffed) alternatives.
Exactly, the whole point of tariffs is to protect domestic industry. However, if that industry doesn't exist then what's being protected?
Almost always, the US companies given monopoly/cartel protection by tariffs, boost prices more than production. The emperor could make a deal next week, so long term investments are sketchy.
If Aliens showed up to earth to trade cheap stuff and energy from their star trek replicators, I'm pretty sure the US oligarchs would ensure a rulership that goes to war with, or at least install prohibitive tariffs on, the Aliens instead, to protect their profits. China offers a similar role.
We could have full employment if we just get rid of wires and pipes that go to homes. Hire people to go get you firewood and water from the river, and throw your waste into the street. This does result in a subsaharan economy, and cannibalism, but everyone is structurally guaranteed work.
If instead you import from China/Aliens, you are rich in stuff. Still plenty of work available in construction and selling stuff, and UBI is a path to keep the "country" rich, primarily in being a desirable place to live in freedom.
Even in the unlikely event of US reindustrializing to become an uncompetitive economic island to rest of the world, it would result in a relatively declining standard of living, and no exports, compared to those trading with the Aliens.
The left it's should be an its, no apostrophe
Last when I was into this topic, no expert on the China economy ever said that China was going to collapse. Rather their prognosis is that the economy is near its peak and likely will stagnate from now on, maybe shrink a bit (maybe) . But not collapse
Rags like The Economist have been predicting its collapse for years and years and years. It’s a meme at this point.
They shouldn't stop now. They're about to be right. Any time. Aaaaanyyyy. Time. Not yet? Aaaaanyyyy. Tiiiiiime.
The latest predictions are based on aging population. Not only does China have a much higher birth rate than US, they are ahead in robotics for manufacturing production (lower physical labour need), and US is about to deport 10m relatively young people.
*its economy
Not surprised by the comm.
A meme on memes?
The trick is that china is a very large country and some part of it is always collapsing while some other part is advancing.
Yup that totally makes sense. Must be why incomes are rising in the poorest parts of the country.
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China%E2%80%99s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&%3Blocations=CN&%3Bstart=2008
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income.
2019 has the fullest set of country data, but that share increased in 2022, while US dropped below 2019 levels after end of covid stimulus.
Wouldn't most large countries be like that?
And what value/meaning would such a 'is collapsing' statement have outside of clickbaityness?