China will be the best country in the world the same day fusion reactors will be available. Always in ten years. No matter when you read this.
this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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I thought it was the Chinese AI we had to worry about. But if you hook the Chinese AI to the Chinese Nuclear Reactors... game over man. Game over.
Depends on how you define "best," I suppose. I'd say we are already there.
This was a couple of years ago but I think the numbers are still the same: sending a shipping container from Hong Kong to Newark cost about $3000 while sending the same container in the opposite direction cost about $500. This is because we badly want the shit China makes while they don't want anything we make (the same situation that led Great Britain to force China to accept opium at gunpoint almost two hundred years ago). Sending a container to China is so cheap that for a stretch we were actually filling them with our garbage because it was less expensive to dispose of it there.
Anyone who think this represents economic weakness on China's part is batshit crazy.
This is because we badly want the shit China makes while they don’t want anything we make
That's not entirely true. China produces a lot of low-margin industrial goods that Americans then assemble into finished products. Americans produce an assortment of agricultural and mineral goods that are in high demand in China (oilseeds and grains, particularly soybeans, followed by mineral fuels and oil). We also produce a number of high-margin technology components (include aircraft and parts, electrical machinery and TV parts, and nuclear reactor parts and mechanical appliances) that are expensive but comparatively smaller by volume than the products China sends our way.
Think of it this way. If China sends us a pound of feathers and we send them a pound of iron, even if they're the same price one of them is going to fill up a shipping container a lot faster than the other. The end result is a net positive number of shipping containers coming into the US.
Anyone who think this represents economic weakness on China’s part is batshit crazy.
It's a generally symbiotic relationship and one that any neoliberal economist would laud. We've stratified our industrial economies such that we're highly specialized in respective fields. It isn't weakness on either side's part any more than the heart is stronger/weaker than the lungs because one beats faster than the other breaths.
Oh man, nice.
Not entirely true, they love our soy beans and alfalfa.... But Chinese junk and cattle feed are both horrible for this world. In fact, you can pack a freighter full of alfalfa and hardly add to its weight.
Containers as cheap home starting points in US is also a function of this dynamic. No need to ship empty ones back to Asia.
The problem isn't the lack of ability to build new houses, it's the lack of land that's in a liveable area, zoned for new development and not already taken. The land doesn't exist.
Run the gauntlet yeye
“Imminent collapse” is a fairly common theme among modern economies
It's a built in, central facet:
Eww Reinhart and Rogoff, all my homies hate Reinhart and Rogoff.
TL:DR Reinhart and Rogoff infamously cherry picked their data and had coding errors to support austerity measures that fucked over much of the world, subsequent meta analyses found that austerity doesn't work.
Growth in a Time of Debt - Wikipedia - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt
a common theme song among capitalist economies
An evil authoritarian regime that is committing human rights abuses and does not follow democratic norms ..... but we'll do billions of dollars worth of trade with them and base a lot of our industries around trading with them. But they're still evil.
Are you talking about China or the US?
yes
Yeah that tracks, same with Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Being aware of America's abuses of power is good. Being contrarian and acting like everything they've ever said about China is a lie is bad.
most of what they say about it is a lie though.
How do you know?
Love how the exact same thing is now being said about the US lmao (the collapse part at least), I LOVE the media machine
hahahaha this one is hilarious
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