Copium War Observer

It's very frustrating that people see widespread cheap food delivery, a la China, as a sign of prosperity. It's the opposite! Rich countries don’t have millions of people willing to spend their time bringing you lunch for basically nothing!

Computer programming and peacock feathers.

Chinese policymakers continue to offer only modest stimulus measures in the face of this broader economic slowdown. Does this mean they aren’t that concerned given focus on tech & self-reliance or that there are no good solutions to a structural issue?

The difference between China and the West is that China is not deliberately turning itself into a Third World country, but is instead actively supporting and industrialising the Third World. Ethiopia, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Iran – they all benefit from China.

First time seeing a Korean pregnant lady

Let's see hów the ÚS ecónomy béen doíng fór thé pàst 25 yéars

Chinese real estate is actually one of the clearest examples of what I mean by “colossally wasteful but devastatingly effective.” China built far more housing capacity than housing demand required, leaving large numbers of underoccupied or speculative properties across the country. Colossally wasteful. At the same time, that system helped support the largest urbanization process (by far) in human history: roughly seven hundred million people moved from rural areas into cities over four decades. Devastatingly effective. Western observers tend to focus on the empty apartments. Chinese planners focused on ensuring enough housing, infrastructure, and industrial capacity existed for a civilizational-scale transformation before demand fully materialized. To the point about China “thinking in centuries,” that is both true and not true. True in the sense that successive dynasties rose, stagnated, collapsed, and were replaced through iterative “fail-and-learn” cycles over centuries. The key lessons from those cycles—bureaucratic governance, center-local balancing, infrastructure coordination, frontier management, famine prevention, long-horizon statecraft—became embedded in China’s broader national strategic memory. So China does carry forward accumulated institutional learning across millennia in a way modern nation-states do not. Civilizational developmental states have that advantage. But it is misleading to imagine Chinese leaders literally sitting around making 100 or 300-year plans. China is often highly reactive, experimental, decentralized, improvisational, and brutally pragmatic in the short term. The continuity is less about perfect long-range planning than about a civilizational system that compounds lessons over very long periods of time.

So Brad followed up his initial evidence-free claim ("Chinese automakers aren't making money at home") by deflecting with a follow-up claim that Chinese carmaker industry margins are "shrinking" and "eroding". Once again I asked for evidence, which he failed to provide in any meaningful way. Further, he said that I should go out and disprove his claim (burden of proof normally falls on the person making the claim). Despite the quite-childish, intellectually dishonest, and ad hominem-laced responses, I went ahead and did the work that he was unwilling to do (or incapable of) to support his various claims. Fortunately, I am the type of person who reads company financial reports for fun. And to no one's surprise, it turns out the follow-up claim is once again completely wrong.