m3ntat

@t_a_stephens @esrtweet I'm glad you agree with me 🤗

The PRC probably resembles NS Germany more than anything else. Before embarking on a world war to destroy its rivals and settle their lands with Han colonists, the CCP first aims to reunite the fatherland, bring all Han into it and build up its military capabilities. In many ways, Taiwan is a truer successor to prior Chinese empires, even if it lost most of the Qing Empire’s territory to the CCP.

Tom didn't explain his second assertion, but it's important so I'm going to do it. China is in the worst strategic position of any great power in history because it is critically dependent on resources it has to import, and it doesn't have control of the sea lanes over which it imports them. China is neither food nor energy self-sufficient. It needs to import pork from the United States, grain from Africa, coal from Australia, and oil from the Middle East to keep its population fed and its factories running. Naval blockades at about three critical chokepoints (Hormuz, Malacca, Sunda) would cripple the Chinese economy within months, possibly within weeks. China does not have the blue-water navy required to contrast control of those chokepoints. The moment any first-rate naval power or even a second-rate like India decides China needs to be stopped, it's pretty much game over. As a completely separate issue thanks to the one-child policy, Chinese population probably peaked in 2006 and has been declining ever since. Every year in the foreseeable future they will have fewer military-age males than they do now. Most of those males are only sons; their deaths would wipe out entire family lines, giving the Chinese people an extremely low tolerance for war casualties. Then there's the glass jaw. The Three Gorges Dam. Which is already in some peril even without a war - you can compare photographs over time and see that it's sagging. If anyone gets annoyed enough to pop that dam thing with a bunker-buster or a pony nuke, the resulting floods will kill millions and wipe out the strip of central China that is by far the country's most industrially and agriculturally productive region. The Chinese haven't fought a war since 1971. They lost. Against Vietnam. The institutional knowledge that could potentially fit their army for doing anything more ambitious than suppressing regional warlordism does not exist. I could go on. But I think I've made Tom's statements sufficiently understandable already.

@JimTBreakout @esrtweet It was a follow on argument in the reply. See my points on war and Tibet:

Kratman was the one who mentioned communism. Raymond never typed the word, and whether or not China is communist is completely irrelevant to any of his points. In any event, China HAS invaded another country within many people's lifetimes - Tibet. You can, perhaps, argue that China considered Tibet a part of China so it wasn't an "invasion invasion" (as Whoopie Goldberg might say)... but isn't that also what they say about Taiwan?

The 3k vs 5k debate is a distraction — I’ll leave that to historians. My point is simpler: current China is not a modern construct. They ran a communist experiment, it failed, and they reverted to what they always were. Confucianism never really left — social order, filial piety, which by the way has been extended to the relationship between the state and the individual. In exchange for prosperity I receive obedience. This is not a new idea: substitute Emperor with CCP. It's a bargain that both sides understand and accept. The imperial examination system that selected bureaucrats based on merit is now the CCP apparatus. Yes, the CCP is a merit based system. Look at their leadership, they are all engineers with substantial and verifiable accomplishments. They are not wordcels (lawyers) that you typically find in the West. On warfare — in modern times, show me China’s equivalent of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Vietnam, or Korea. The modern record speaks for itself. On Tibet — that history is genuinely complicated. Tibet itself was a feudal theocracy with its own brutal history of serfdom (slavery). Westerners who visited Tibet in the late 30s would notice Tibetans missing limbs, noses, eyes; because in Buddhism you are not allowed to kill anyone, but nobody said anything about blinding! They have museums about this. You just never hear about this narrative in the West. Also the Dalai Lama is a pedo. Tell me how it is possibly normal for a grown man to stick his tongue out at a little boy and ask him if he would like to suck on his tongue (this actually happened). In Tibet if you weren't part of the ruling class (the monks) you were a serf and like most human institutions it was rife with abuse. Look at Tibet today: it is filled with Tibetans, Tibetan language, temples, and prosperity as far as the eye can see. Yes, this must be genocide: Chinese Buddhists persecuting their fellow Buddhists (smh). My core point stands: if your entire strategic calculus about China is built on the assumption they are Soviet-style communists, your conclusions are already wrong before you even start.

The ‘5000 years of history’ propaganda is tiresome. From a civilisational perspective, Chinese history is maybe 3k years old. It’s a bit younger than Greek and far younger than Egyptian or Mesopotamian. The PRC was founded in 1949, as a new society, based on Western Marxist ideas imported from the USSR, and it destroyed vast quantities of relics from Chinese history. By other metrics, e.g., the arrival of the Bronze Age, China was far behind the Mediterranean, Middle East or India, and closer to Northern Europe. Moreover, Chinese history is full of war and conquest. You don’t get such a huge area of land populated by a single ethnic group without those. There’s also been a fair amount of genocide. What the CCP has done and is doing in its colonies like Tibet and East Turkestan is pretty violent too.

You know China isn't a communist country. They're just Chinese larping as Communists. 5000 years of history and old habits die hard. Their system was adapted from the broken remnants of actual communism which everyone knows failed spectacularly. They didn't revert to that failed system. They're smarter than that. They call their system Socialism with Chinese characteristics, which really is a uniquely Chinese system that works only for them. The reason I bring this up is that every single war porn scenario stems from the assumption that China is a communist country like the Soviet Union, hence any further calculus on waging war must be the same. The reality is it is not. The basic premise that China is communist is already wrong. Downstream conclusions are also wrong. China, in modern history, has only ever occupied one other country (Vietnam, as you mentioned), and you'd have to go back to ancient history to find another example. They simply do not have a history of waging war and occupying other nations. These are the people who built a wall *to keep people out*. So your basic argument that China would be the one to wage any type of war is not supported by their history and it's anchored in a flawed assumption of how their system even works.

@m3ntat_ It's not something I want to happen. And it won't happen unless China starts a war.

@Eng_china5 You can't use tape, that's cheating!

An incredible technique the Chinese have used for centuries to package round objects

I do this but only for a practical reasons. It lessens the chance I could be stuck somewhere too far from the airport near the end of my trip and miss my flight. Being in the city, it's easier to find amenities and relax a bit after a long trip. Also it prepares you mentally that the fun will soon be over.

Here in brief is the method I’ve honed to optimize a two-week vacation: When you arrive in a new country, immediately proceed to the farthest, most remote, most distant place you intend to reach during the trip. If there is a small village, remote spa, a friend’s farm, or a wild place you plan on seeing on the trip, go there immediately. Do not stop near the airport. Do not rest overnight in the arrival city. Do not pause to acclimate. If at all possible proceed by plane, bus, jeep, car directly to the furthest point without interruption. Make it an overnight journey if you have to. Then once you reach your furthest point, unpack, explore, and work your way slowly back to the big city, wherever your international departure airport is. In other words you make a laser-straight rush for the end, and then meander back. Laser out, meander back. This method is somewhat contrary to many people’s first instincts, which are to immediately get acclimated to the culture in the landing city before proceeding to the hinterlands. The thinking is: get a sense of what’s going on, stock up, size up the joint. Then slowly work up to the more challenging, more remote areas. That’s reasonable, but not optimal because most big cities around the world are more similar than different. All big cities these days feel same-same on first arrival. In Laser-Back travel what happens is that you are immediately thrown into Very Different Otherness, the maximum difference that you will get on this trip. You go from your home to extreme differences so fast it is almost like the dissolve effect in a slide show. Bam! Your eyes are wide open. You are on your toes. All ears. And there at the end of the road (but your beginning), your inevitable mistakes are usually cheaper, easier to recover from, and more fun. You take it slower, no matter what country you are in. Then you use the allotted time to head back to the airport city, at whatever pace is your pace. But, when you arrive in the city after a week or so traveling in this strangeness, and maybe without many of the luxuries you are used to, you suddenly see the city the same way the other folks around you do. After eight days in less fancy digs, the bright lights, and smooth shopping streets, and late-night eateries dazzle you, and you embrace the city with warmth and eagerness. It all seems so … civilized and ingenious. It’s brilliant! The hustle and bustle are less annoying and almost welcomed. And the attractions you notice are the small details that natives appreciate. You see the city more like a native and less like a jaded tourist in a look-alike urban mall. You leave having enjoyed both the remote and the adjacent, the old and new, the slow and the fast, the small and the big. We’ve also learned that this intensity works best if we aim for 12 days away from home. That means 10 days for in-country experience, plus a travel day (or two) on each end. We’ve found from doing this many times, with many travelers of all ages and interests, 14 days on the ground is two days too many. There seems to be a natural lull at about 10 days of intense kinetic travel. People start to tune out a bit. So we cut it there and use the other days to come and go and soften the transitions. On the other hand 8 days feels like the momentum is cut short. So 10 days of intensity, and 12 days in a country is what we aim for. Laser-back travel is not foolproof, nor always possible, but on average it tends to work better than the other ways I’ve tried. #KKtraveltips

@politicalmath @rhensing It's possible they just decided to be a lifestyle company. That may be why Buffet owns a lot of stock. He's notoriously averse to investing in the tech sector. Apple may be closer to Coca Cola than to SpaceX.

"Tim Cook took Apple from $350B to $4T" So? That's a 11X market cap increase. In the same time, MSFT saw a 14X increase, Google saw a 20X increase, Amazon did 28X, Facebook did 35X. We're not even going to talk about NVidia. Cook led Apple through a period where every tech company expanded. Yay for him? In the meantime, Apple had the most compelling pre-AI experience in Siri. They had everything! They had mountains of user data, audio and transcription training data, the biggest and most sophisticated user data network in the world *by far*. And they blew it. They should be so far ahead of the competition on AI that it makes their competitors fall into despair. Instead, they are a non-player in the biggest tech revolution since mobile, maybe even since the internet. They could have leveraged their data advantage to create astonishingly powerful models. They make their own silicon, they could have beat NVidia to the punch on hardware if Cook had any foresight. Instead they still just make high-end devices and now also they make TV shows and won an Oscar for a movie no one saw. I'm sorry, but that's underwhelming.

@JohnKiriakou Why not post them here?

I've decided to not post my shorts to TikTok. You can instead find them all on my official channel on Rumble.

@SawyerMerritt This is no longer true apparently.

@mobinfiltrator @cra The CRA is completely broken. I have a refund owing and their "normal" timeline for review is eight months. I called them for an update and they said someone opened the file and that's it.

I paid $60,000 CAN in taxes last year. The @CRA stopped my Child Tax Benefits (CCB) They’d been advised I haven’t lived in Canada since 2020. The also audited my personal taxes and a business we sold in 2019 (more than 5 years after the audit) based on this anonymous tip. It took 14 months for me to prove we did live in Canada and was only out of the country for 2024, of which my accountant advised them in my 2024 tax returns. They owe me over $20,000 in CCB and it looks like I’m not going to get it now. I promise you now I will never pay another penny in taxes to Canada. I haven’t filled 2025 yet, but if it comes back saying I owe one cent I sell up and move somewhere I see my tax dollars being used sensibly.

@Aris_Babikian Dude, even the Chinese in Scarb don't dress like this lol.

Today is the first day of the Chinese New Year--Year of the Horse-- celebrations. Hello, Ni Hao! I would like to wish the Chinese Canadian community and especially my neighbours in Scarborough-Agincourt a very Happy Chinese Lunar New Year! This year, we celebrate the Year of the Horse. The Horse represents strength, energy, and success. Every February, in addition to the Chinese New Year, we celebrate and honour the historic and substantial contributions of the Chinese community to our province and Canada. I am very proud to co-sponsor Bill 183, which recognizes February as the Chinese Heritage Month. May you have good health, happiness, good fortune , and prosperity. Gong Xi Fa Cai! Kung Hey Fat Choy Xin Nian Kuai Le! #Scarborough #ScarboroughAgincourt #OnPoli #ScarbTO

@pretentiouswhat I have a lab a and that is so sad about the dog. Asia can improve a lot in its treatment of animals.

China Taxicab Chronicles: Mr. Huang Likes Dogs In Nanning, I hop in the rideshare car for a quick drive across town. Mr. Huang helps me load my suitcase in the back, where I notice a yellow construction hat and a greyish mass of what looks like some kind of dried jelly. 🧵

Hard disagree. One thing the Chinese are good at is manufacturing. I mean really good, better than us. It's to our advantage to bring that knowledge to our shores, just like we did with the Japanese in the 80s where we learned about Kaizen and all that. This time, the Chinese are actually ahead of us, not the other way around. Look at the quality of the cars they build.

“Ford CEO, Trump Officials Discussed China-US Carmaking JVs” China did this to our companies for years to GAIN KNOWHOW AND IP from us, WHY WOULD WE DO THIS? Makes zero sense… Hard no.

@wintonARK They don't care about the fabs. If they can have Taiwan in exchange for the fabs I believe they will take that deal. It's about history and national pride.

some probably too simple thoughts on Taiwan x China Taiwan is only strategically useful to China if they can take control of the island while keeping the fabs running. If by invading they destroy the fabs then they have cut themselves off from the US (and perhaps more importantly) European markets, at great military cost, taking on ongoing political liability (since the Taiwanese are likely to remain quite restive), all for a relatively small island that is no longer geostrategically important. If they could take the island and keep the fabs going then they would win an important geostrategic chip, that they could use in all sorts of useful leveragable ways against Western governments. But it's much easier to destroy the fabs than keep them running. Even just cutting off power for any prolonged period would probably cause irreversible damage. A rational Taiwan, knowing this, would signal (and has signalled) that an invasion would destroy the fabs (and if imminent would probably commit to destroying the fabs themselves conditional on an invasion, so as to forestall the attempt.) It's difficult to conduct a kinetic war, without disrupting underlying infrastructure, and Taiwan may even site its military assets alongside the fabs to make it impossible for China to win without losing. Net, a Taiwan invasion for China probably poisons the entire geostrategic logic of doing so. They get all of the downside without materially improving their position. Compare to the Hong Kong strategy--the slow choking embrace--which provides a much cleaner path to winning control of the assets. It's clearly the more strategically optimal path. So then, why all the noise about invading or preparing for an invasion of Taiwan? Three interpretations: 1) the strategically optimal path is not the politically optimal path for Xi vis a vis retaining power. This is the darkest interpretation. A political leader, backed into a corner, makes a move that is disastrous for himself and for the world, because he thinks it will narrowly bridge his way across eroding support. It's hard to see, however, how even an irrational actor would perceive benefit in violently grappling for a chalice that will surely spill in the attempt to wrest it. 2) China thinks it can kinetically occupy Taiwan without disrupting the fabs. I suppose this is a perhaps more catastrophically likely interpretation of their stance, and would be consistent with other vainglorious military interventions that have run against the rocks of reality throughout history. That Taiwan, as a rational actor (or even a minority within Taiwan) could credibly threaten to pre-emptively destroy the fabs before they are taken, seems like it should dampen whatever optimism there is tho. 3) China is posturing for invasion to increase its negotiating leverage on other vectors as well as for internal domestic signalling of strength. Isn't this far and away the most economical explanation for all of the noise? What am I missing?

@teslaownersSV Choose bankruptcy.

Polestar’s new 2026 campaign ad takes pointed, unnamed shots at Elon Musk, Tesla, and its ventures, framing the EV choice as “past distractions” vs. Polestar’s grounded, Earth-focused future. Key sarcastic lines include: • “Choose conquering Mars (good luck with that).” — Mocking Musk’s SpaceX Mars colonization goals as unrealistic fantasy. • “Choose popcorn Robots.” — A jab at Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot, referencing viral clips of it handling popcorn at events and demos. • “Choose ignoring the science.” — Likely shading perceived controversies around Tesla’s autonomy claims, battery tech, or Musk’s public statements. • “Choose plastic interiors.” — Criticizing Tesla’s minimalist cabins for relying on hard plastics over premium materials. The ad contrasts these with Polestar’s emphasis on clean, no-nonsense electric driving and higher-end design.

@AngelicaOung You're a good source, for one. X has quite a few actually, I'll list one: @RnaudBertrand.

Calling all my Chinese readers: as we all know, the WaPo did a huge layoff, including getting rid of their China-based team. Some might cynically say given the slantedness of their reporting, nothing of value was lost. But this does accentuate a real problem: people who want to find out more about China don’t know where to go. The information is there on the Chinese Internet. But what are the best outlets? Let’s say I’m an intrepid person willing to read the original through a ChatGPT translation. Where do I even start? 👇suggest trusted outlets, interesting individuals to follow, how to search for good articles on Weibo. Provide as much context as possible!

@dieworkwear But are they much more comfortable to wear?

The level of craftsmanship that goes into a lot of Japanese menswear simply doesn't exist in the United States. You can do this for many categories — suits, jeans, hats, etc. In this thread, I will show you just one category: men's shoes 🧵

@ztisdale 99% of new cars sold in Norway are EVs. Also, go look outside and count the number of Teslas on Canadian roads. Idiot!

It's going to be funny watching cheap Chinese EVs utterly fail to contend with Canadian winters. 😅

@EmmetPeppers @jimcramer That would be a dream outcome

@jimcramer Decent chance OpenAI capitulates and gets awarded to Musk as controller/CEO in order for it to keep running and he folds it into Xai somehow (or at least the talent he gets)

This Musk suit against OpenAI is the real deal..and not a good one for OpenAI if and when it wants to go public. It needs to do a private round at a big valuation ahead of the trial. Musk has unlimited firepower