> It’s art that bursts the seams, demanding that the world bend to it and not the other way around, refusing to comply with the arbitrary bounds of property law—those meaningless slips of paper meant to legally confer ownership of land, buildings, bridges, trains, and anything else that might serve as the artist’s canvas.
I won’t touch on the property issue because it’s really tiresome - sometimes I wish there were working communists countries so these people could simply go there and we wouldn’t have to suffer them.
But it’s really the first part of this quote that gets me: it’s precisely the fact that graffitti is forced on us that makes me despise it so much. Imagine having to listen to anyone aspiring artist’s bad poetry when you’re on and about. It’s not much better than appreciating strangers’ music taste on the street or public transit. It’s worse than advertisement: at least ads are bland and repetitive, you can easily filter them out.
> When I see DEFUND BPD hovering above North Avenue in enormous, spray-painted letters, I don’t see the opinion of one idealistic graffiti artist; I see someone expressing an increasingly common sentiment.
There are many graffitis out there asking non-politely that refugees go back to their homeland or that certain kinds of people are not welcome. I suppose, maybe unfairly, that the author would consider these demonstrations a noisy hateful minority speaking for themselves and their little minds. That’s the positive side of living in a democracy: we shouldn’t need to trust that rogue public demostrations, due to the central limit theorem or something, converge on the public sentiment. We have elections for that.
And I don’t disagree that graffitti has artistic merit, however illegal or unpleasant to my eyes. I’m not that egocentric. I just think there are things more important than art.
Property rights are not absolute (except when powerful people have property and want somethign).
> I just think there are things more important than art.
Sure, nothing is absolutely important, but what's the higher priority here?
> It’s worse than advertisement: at least ads are bland and repetitive, you can easily filter them out.
... that you can 'easily filter them out'? (Ads are generally far larger, well-lit, more prominent and designed to be hard to filter.)
> That’s the positive side of living in a democracy: we shouldn’t need to trust that rogue public demostrations, due to the central limit theorem or something, converge on the public sentiment. We have elections for that.
A side of living in democracy is that free expression is restricted to voting? ???
It’s a good thing that Chinese companies have zero expertise in leveraging consumer demand for lower-end tech to develop know-how and catch up with the state of the art from Western-aligned companies and then economies of scale to surpass them in distribution.
>pursuing quarterly profits and forgetting to look up
"Forgetting to look up" implies a desire or intent to do so. The United States - former leader of the collective West - made the choice decades ago to sacrifice everything on the altar of quarterly profits. All that remains are the consequences of that decision.
You can round it down to Milton Friedman as the ideology and Jack Welch at GE in the 80s as the implementation and figurehead, but the original seeds were in the SEC mandating quarterly reporting as part of regulation after the great depression.
We can all agree to blame Jack Welch as shorthand though, I think.
It's not real. Companies routinely lose money for years in pursuit of long term growth. But for some reason people love to use this as an explanation of everything wrong in our country.
I'd cite as a counterexample in recent memory Sears, GE, Boeing, and Intel. I think collectively they've destroyed close to a trillion dollars by focus on quarterly results over long term, and they're not alone.
I sometimes wonder what a Drucker or ishikawa would say of today's "vaunted American management". Speed roughly short term thinking is too strong of a force in our American thinking. Heck I've counted three recent HN posts this month pushing for speedy software development too.
Yes, and we all saw what happened. They've experienced serious financial consequences, some went out of business. This is exactly what is supposed to happen when you do dumb shortsighted things.
There's also risk in investing in very long-term things that may not pan out.
FAANG-like stock, in general, has paid little to zero dividends for long periods of time post IPO, their rational stock values being based on hypothetical future dividends only after the initial self-investment phase is over.
Don't most tech startups lose money for years before they maybe make a profit?
I mean, I agree that such companies are over-represented in thinking about small businesses if that's what you mean. Normal companies have to be profitable quickly for sure.
It feels like tons of companies get valued based on userbase or revenue or theoretical breakthrough rather than ever having to really think about breaking even, but I know that's just because those folks get all the press.
> Companies routinely lose money for years in pursuit of long term growth.
But much of that long term growth now is just the company growing to displace competitors in existing markets, often by subsidizing prices and dodging regulations - see: Uber, Lyft, Air BnB, etc.
We've all seen the playbook a dozen times now: move into a market, keep prices artificially low until the existing competitors are displaced, then the raise prices to return the initial investment and more. That kind of growth-by-displacement is genuinely necessary sometimes but in these cases it's more like a fungus than a plant, just metabolizing an existing system.
It's not the same thing as actually expanding a market or investing in concrete assets (steel mills, power plants, boats, railroads) or R&D that compounds future growth. When the actual investment is just spent artificially lowering prices there's no actual efficiency gains and the consumers ultimately pay the price and more when the company hits the peak of the existing market and shift to enshittification mode to really extract wealth.
My counterpoint is that it’s not possible to buy appliances which last for decades anymore, because the entire industry has changed. Consumers eventually don’t have a choice
They have much less choice because all of those businesses that cared about quality have gone out of business!
100 years ago clothes were expensive items. Which is why they were class signals - less because of fashion and more because if you were poor you needed to buy long lasting fabrics. Clothes for the poor were expensive as well as the rich.
You can buy those same quality items today but nobody will because we expect clothes to be cheap and not have to repair them.
Take flights... For all the complaints about lack of legroom etc the price of a flight 50 years ago was the same as first/business class today. And yet how few people will pay for it. They'll grumble about small seats and bad snacks but hardly anybody will fork out for the upgrade. Not because they can't actually afford it but because they believe it should be cheaper.
I think some people can afford those quality goods, the same percentage roughly as could afford it before things got cheaper. The people complaining are people who couldn’t afford those quality goods earlier and now are buying the cheaper versions they can afford. But that has shaped broader consumer preferences for cheaper goods across the board
When a manager at GE decided to turn into a bank and get rid of all the making stuff, how was the consumer supposed to continue buying quality things that didn't exist?
When Sears was looted by management, how were consumers supposed to continue purchasing quality stuff from a historic company?
You've got your cause and effect backwards. American companies fired everyone who was paid enough to afford good stuff, and replaced them with workers in other countries, and then those people didn't really have a choice but to buy the junk because it was the only option left on the market and they couldn't afford anything else
What happened was that American business theory abandoned the American worker.
I would just be careful to discount the capitalist West. You’d have to be blind to ignore the massive overbuilding of property in China, which they are now demolishing. All of that wasted capital. Authoritarian regimes with controlled media always seem successful… until it doesn’t. Up until the USSR collapsed there were many prominent people in the West saying it was the superior system. The market test - meaning floating prices and the response to them - is a superior way of allocating capital. We need to see how all of this plays out
I swear I've been reading about overbuilding in China since, like, 2012. And I've definitely used it in arguments myself. Not only China hasn't collapsed, but it has improved massively since then, as far as I can tell.
The US also had a period of time in which their government directed large construction projects, and they too were particularly prosperous in the time afterwards.
Yep, it's way better to overbuild than underbuild. Lack of houses for young people looking to start families / move in for better jobs has big negative societal impacts that we're only starting to see.
> I would just be careful to discount the capitalist West.
I would. It's showing the weaknesses and limitations of its ideology.
> You’d have to be blind to ignore the massive overbuilding of property in China, which they are now demolishing. All of that wasted capital.
So what?
> Authoritarian regimes with controlled media always seem successful… Up until the USSR collapsed there were many prominent people in the West saying it was the superior system.
The West is literally de-industrializing and can't seem to built shit except slowly and expensively. Industry after industry gets hollowed out as China takes the lead.
Do not make the mistake of reasoning about US vs China from the experience of US vs USSR. China doesn't have a command economy, outproduces the US, and controls many key industries. The US is resting on its laurels, and its people cope by thinking of the few industries where it's still ahead, but those are dwindling.
> The market test - meaning floating prices and the response to them - is a superior way of allocating capital.
That's not truth, it's a dogmatic assumption.
China has been able to exploit a dogmatic belief in the free market to siphon the real capital out of the West and into itself (industry and know-how) in order to achieve dominance. The US elite is content to have paper. We'll see how that works out.
> We need to see how all of this plays out
If you're rooting for China. If you're rooting for the US, by then it will be too late to course correct.
> You’d have to be blind to ignore the massive overbuilding of property in China
Isn't the same now happening with the US with the massive overbuilding of AI capacity? Seems like a tightly centralized capitalist system is not that different from a communist one.
Or rather thinking one step forward the question arises, whether we use the right words for the right things?
Does the capitalist West has any defining economics characteristics of a liberal free-market capitalism at all?
Private ownership of means of production: On an atomic, legal level of course. But if point at an NVIDIA based compute rack at a US based random datacenter, can someone tell me actually who owns it? I am interested in the actual natural person who has an ownership share of this capital asset, not the myriads of layers of corporate and financial networks of equity delegations through investment banks, but the actual owner?
Profit oriented: Of course, it is said so. But do really companies, entrepreneurs do things to maximize the profits of the actual owners, shareholders? Are the executives and boards really that keen on putting forward the interest - of the previously referenced unknown - actual owner of the capital assets?
Free market based: This has also multiple sub-characteristics, but most importantly something about competition, or rather the lack of collusion and that economic actors (including consumers, (natural person) investors) are all fully informed. How much is this true in the West?
> West-- as usual-- is pursuing quarterly profits and forgetting to look up.
The companies building out vast data centers for AI aren’t looking to make profits for several years (if ever), and are catching a lot of flak for it. The shareholders who seem to be focused on short-term profits and punish them every time they get cold feet. Oracle is a prime example of this.
I don’t know if the markets in Asia work differently, or if the investors there are just as fickle.
And they should be catching a lot of flak for it because it's not really long term strategic planning, it's overhyping a technology and running roughshod over society promoting misuses and AI slops.
Although I'm the first to agree with this, it is actually commendable in the sense that it breaks with the quarterly profits approach.
Like meta with the metaverse thing, I hate it with a passion, but pouring billions yearly with little return just to support your vision is at least a break with tradition...
To be very fair, Chinese companies are also pursing quarterly profits. They're just better at scaling things up and down very fast because of immense supply chain options.
so this begs the question - why isn't the west's own supply chain options as immense? My unresearched answer is that the gov't policies of the west doesn't induce it, while china's gov't does (which includes targeted subsidies, tax incentives and state driven finances).
The "hidden" cost is that the workers in this supply chain isn't as well paid and isn't as powerful as the workers from the west (there's no unions in china for example).
> why isn't the west's own supply chain options as immense?
They used to be. Since roughly the 80's, policymakers have decided it is better for the shareholders to outsource most of that industry overseas to China and India and etc, where the labor is cheaper.
Note that workers and especially union members actually have every incentive to keep that production domestic, but shareholders and CEOs profit when they can cut labor costs and the typical Western consumer values cheap products more than the health of domestic industry.
Western industries have been supported by subsidies, tax incentives, bailouts, low interest rates, and a dozen other things from the gov't but the same policies reward outsourcing and financial engineering more than actual production capacity.
> Rather, the US wants its worker coming up with the concept of drones to begin with.
Sure, but that idea is too stupid and arrogant to event consider. China's not going to cede that kind of high-level work forever. They'll learn how to do it, and when that happens what will the US do?
And then, in the conflict, can your "concept makers" get their implementation done by the hamburger assemblers, with their hamburger assembler skills and hamburger assembly equipment?
> They'll learn how to do it, and when that happens what will the US do?
Continue coming up with even more advanced ideas. This is like the Winklevoss Twins getting mad at Zuckerberg for 'stealing their idea', and the dean of Harvard lecturing them about how they're Men of Harvard and as such they'll simply come up with another idea, because that's what Men of Harvard do. They don't just one and done with one good idea.
The US built the world's most advanced idea factory, but the people who hate smart people got into power and now they're stripping the copper out of the walls.
> And then, in the conflict
There won't be a hot conflict between nuclear powers. Or there will, and whoever can make the most drones will be irrelevant in the first 24 hours.
>Sure, but that idea is too stupid and arrogant to event consider. China's not going to cede that kind of high-level work forever.
The "stupid and arrogant" idea has worked for decades and the only real problem with it is espionage. Stealing someone else's labor is an enormous amount of China's progress, and a good thing to remember when musing about a country's future.
> The "stupid and arrogant" idea has worked for decades and the only real problem with it is espionage.
No, the stupid and arrogant idea is the one that the Chinese will be content to occupy the subordinate position forever, taking direction from Westerners and doing only the grunt work the Westerners often think is beneath them.
It's also stupid and arrogant to think the Chinese are not capable of innovation on their own. The espionage was a tactic to catch up more quickly, and now that they've done that, Chinese are innovating on their own now and have better technology in many areas. But that's not the only thing going on: Western countries are literally going over to China, teaching them what they'll need to know to out-compete them in the future.
US and China are on completely different stages of industrialization: The US had its massive boom of manufacturing almost a century ago, enriching its population massively. Those rich citizens make the same manufacturing uncompetitive today, because no one is going to work in a factory for $20k/year (median wage in urban China), when he can work for other "rich" people for more than twice as much.
Switching paths is not feasible for the US in the same way that it is not gonna be feasible for China to hold on to all its industry as wages rise: You can't compete globally at "poor people wages" while being "rich", as simple as that.
The only thing that the US is on track to is getting a taste of what real corruption feels like, enriching Trump's friends, and hollowing out its middle class.
Joke's on them. If a wave of post-trump anti-corruption retribution doesn't come when the Republicans get swept out of power, we're going to have a whole generation of Luigis.
There are lots of reasons, but also, having 1.4B people under the same government that has more-or-less aligned strategic goals help. Like supply chains within Japan, from what I've seen and experienced, are pretty strong. However, the options will always look smaller compared to a gigantic organism across the pond.
The West (with particular emphasis on the USA) got infected with this insane ideology that the best way to restore democracy to China would be to "corrupt" them with capitalism. Hence open them up to international trade, allow joining WTO etc. With prosperity the people would demand democracy.
You can also see this in the German approach to energy trade with Russia.
This toxic idea needs to be put to bed. All it did was feed and enrich foreigners at the expense of locals and create supply chain dependencies that made themselves hostage.
> why isn't the west's own supply chain options as immense?
Because each city in China has become specialized. You want to have someone make hairdryers for your company to sell? Then go to Cixi. There are dozens of small suppliers making the parts that go into hair dryers. There are dozens of companies making small appliances (just like hairdryers) They're all "just down the street" from each other. This means that the knowledge and infrastructure and workers are all in one place. You don't have to ship a truckload of heater elements across the country to some factory that some CEO decided should be built in the lowest cost real estate. The same reason that all of the America IC manufacturers got started in Silicon Valley.
This sort of specialization/concentration used to happen in the US. That's why NYC had a "garment district" where you could get clothing made from design to ready-to-sell. Los Angeles used to be one of the major hubs for making aircraft because of the large number of small companies making stuff that the aerospace companies assemble into aircraft. Jacobs wrote about this sort of thing in Cities And The Wealth of Nations about how the Shah of Iran wanted a helicopter factory in Iran. It was a flop because none of the seats are made across town, they're made in America, like the blades or engine or windscreen or avionics. All the Shah got for his dream was an assembly plant. There was no transfer of technology so that the parts could be made in Iran.
Before shipping containers were invented, shipping goods was expensive enough that factories making things tended to be located close to their suppliers. That was why Detroit became a center of car manufacturing. Shipping containers made it cheaper to transport some item across an ocean than it costs to drive it across the city.
The beneficial owners of the US economy sold our industrial manufacturing base to the Communist Party of China because the price was good. China got our hard power and US capital owners got to break the back of the US labor movement. A win-win deal for the ages.
Chinese companies are simply not as beholden to shareholders - the stock market really doesn’t dominate the country’s financial landscape as it does in the US
It might be a bit nihilistic but at this point I don't think the current US administration has any strategy. In past administrations, it felt like even if there was a strategy, bureaucracy and lack of caring enough to do their job led to nothing happening. In this administration, it feels like there's no care for the rules so in theory a strategy could be pushed through... except there isn't one - literally whoever is the last person to talk to the president is the person who gets to set the direction.
> I don't think the current US administration has any strategy
I 100% believe the strategy is to enlarge the Trump family's wealth, and it's been a wildly successful strategy (in the past year he's been able to create billions in wealth for his family [0]). At least this vaguely ties Trump's success to the success of the United States in a limited capacity. Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him, but it's clear all policy decisions being made are being done so based on their capacity to improve Trump's situation.
We've been headed this direction long before Trump, from both parties, increasingly American policy is about what's good for American companies and in particular the people who own them. Now that pool has just shrunk a bit.
> Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him
How can you say? The ultra wealthy are not playing team sports. If the country burned tomorrow they would just sit on their yacht or buy citizenship somewhere else.
Sure the lion share of his investments are currently in the US, but that could easily change.
Most cynically? I sincerely believe there's more value he can extract from American workers if he can keep the ride going on just a bit longer. For example: it's better to keep the stock market a float a volatile so he can transfer a bit more wealth from the American people before it does eventually break down.
Yes, they'll all be on yachts when the shit hits the fan, but they're still fighting to figure out who get the biggest yacht, and right now it seems like Trump has more to milk from us before he entirely lets this thing fall apart.
He also has dementia so he probably can't plan that far ahead. He's operating on a very short term feedback cycle: this reporter asked me a question that makes me look bad, so I call her piggy. That's the timescale we're operating on. Not even quarterly profits but moment-to-moment.
> Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him,
Exactly, just as taking out structural supports when stripping copper and goods from a three story walkup is sub optimal and potentially fatal.
But make no mistake, from way out here (Australia), having watched the US for decades, it really does look like you've a grifter inside the house taking everything that isn't nailed down with zero concern for anyone else in the US.
It's a bad time for those that cannot afford shiny gold baubles.
> Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him
Nah.
He wants to be a dictator that extracts wealth from it's citizens.
He has a benefit from following the communist path to extract wealth. Make lives miserable, so they are living off the state ( eg. standing in line for bread), so they can't protest.
Putin is not Trump's friend, but Trump idolises him for extracting enormous wealth from Russia, censoring news ( propaganda) and imprisoning political opponents, ...
Just check the "firehose of falsehoods" ( a Russian propaganda method), it will explain a lot about Trump.
>Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him
People like Trump are perfectly happy to destroy a trillion dollars of GDP as long as they get a billion. Project 2025 and all the techfascist dreams of "Network states" are exactly about destroying the US and ruling over the ashes. Christian fundamentalists for example are perfectly happy to have a shell of a former good country as long as they get to institute sharia law.
> from both parties, increasingly American policy is about what's good for American companies
When democrats lost the election to Reagan by a landslide, it was pretty clear Americans had no idea what good policy was and would not vote for it. That's what the problem was. Bill Clinton did neoliberalism and "It's the economy stupid" and democrats pushed for the Crime Bill because those slogans were what the American voter will respond to, at least until right wing media improved it's propaganda power to turn the entire concept of "democrat" into a slur.
Voters in the 80s decided that hard work and building a better future was for suckers, and they'd rather loot the future and do cocaine now. So here we are. Now the exact same people are pitching a fit and giving everything to Trump because they are angry that the policies they supported the past 40 years did exactly what they should have expected.
People keep voting for republicans because "the debt is bad" despite 25 years of direct and objective evidence showing that to be the worst idea.
People keep voting for republicans for "anti-war" despite Bush Jr. getting re-elected for running multiple criminal wars against the middle east, not even the right fucking countries, "for doing 9/11"
People keep voting for republicans "because of the economy" even though republicans haven't shown any ability to run the damn economy for decades, and Trump specifically pushing for things that harm the economy outright.
I think it's the same problem as the past administration and most members of congress- they're just too old to care about 50yrs from now. I don't think they're actively against the 50yr+ future, it's just that the world is changing too fast, and they're falling back to what they know- competing with their peers for power, money, and status. They only have some inkling of actual empathy for the communities their grandkids are in at a personal level, and just have the "throw money at it" mentality for the bigger issues like healthcare, since that has been their MO for the last couple decades. Instead of taking leadership positions and driving change, they seem to just want to squabble and create fiefdoms and have others do the work.
I do think the current administration is still a step down from the (not particularly great) last, though. Congress has essentially given up their authority on everything so any movement must come from the top… and the top has an extremely small attention span.
Did you miss the Infrastructure act that spent $500B on roads, ports, and water projects? The CHIPS act that spent $50B on decoupling and R&D?! The Climate & Energy act ("IRA") that spent $400B on clean energy subsidies??!!
I can understand the perspective of wanting more, but the forward-looking policies of the last administration were in a different galaxy compared to those of the current administration, where the big plan is to chop USAID, boost deportations, and cut capital gains tax.
This is the difference between corn and the cob and corn in the toilet. No, it is not the same.
The problem is that China could have built the same infrastructure for $100B and in 25% of the time. Pumping subsidies into our bloated bureaucratic nightmare of a system is only going to make the lawyers and bureaucrats who are its gatekeepers fatter.
TSMC Arizona Gigafab, Intel's Chandler fabs, Micron's Boise megafab, these are all giant buildings full of equipment cranking out chips or credibly preparing to. I'd hazard a guess that more than lawyers were involved.
Oh, but trollbridge saw a lawyer once! That's it, phone it in, shut it all down, corruption proven, the gigantic buildings must be all be a mirage. Trollbridge saw a lawyer and that disproves everything!
In the google results, if you had bothered to google. It turns out $50B was enough to tip the investment calculus on half a dozen large projects and a dozen or so smaller ones.
So tell me: was it learned helplessness or partisan hackery that made you severely underestimate what turned out to be possible?
My opinion comes from my personal experience with CHiPs funded projects but admittedly thats merely anecdotal knowledge so I’m very glad to hear that Biden’s “biggest ever!”(tm) inflation reduction package met its goals and wasn’t just money printing and political cronyism. Imagine where we would be without all those new chip fabs and infrastructure fixes you mentioned finding in your Google search. You’re right, that was 50 billion, give or take, well spent!
Current US strategy is to get South America+Canada resources and call it a day. They looked at global geopolitics and it looked too complicated for them.
Without getting overly political, it is nihilistic because one of the major US parties got so high on its own supply of lies that the people currently running it FORGOT they were lying. You're looking at a similar situation to many authoritarian or fascist political systems in which they way to get ahead in no way involves doing your job, but making sure Stalin or Mussolini is happy with you. This started in the US in the mid 1990s when GOP leadership bought in on power being its own end and is now on full display.
People have all sorts of mythologized reasons for why the USSR failed, because while it often produced immense amounts of goods and services and well educated people in certain areas (sometimes beating "the west" by a good margin for one or two years at a go), it also made long term advancement contingent on the party and not the real world and became incapable of handling major changes.
We're witnessing that now in the US with perhaps one of the most incompetent governments in history that is also burning down the non-political institutions of expertise that for all their faults and mistakes, at least had educated and motivated people that cared about their purpose.
It's more accurate to say everyone who wants to do the right thing is a Democrat, than to say all Democrats want to do the right thing. Most of them are just the lite version of Republicans.
Oh, they know. The industry has been lobbying quite badly for exactly this to happen. Why spend a fortune on innovation when a few bucks of lobbying can get the government to ban your competition because "China bad"?
As the comment you responded to said: it's all about the next quarterly profits. The fact that we are getting leapfrogged by China doesn't matter to those CEOs: that's a long-term thing, and it doesn't impact their next bonus.
this is one of those 'elections matter' cases. There's no strategy. Americans made it clear they want a country run by real estate crooks, crypto bros, gambling advocates and bizarre entertainment personalities. A country sized Las Vegas maybe and the beauty is the people get always what they deserve.
Or, to play Devil's advocate, people called in the rabid dog because they felt they had been sold down the river starting in the 1970s. The hollowed out industrial towns weren't good places to grow up, and when they did manage to go to college and play by the rules the ladders were already in a fast retreat up the walls..
Failed empire? Probably. That doesn't mean that China's government is somehow less horrific on its human rights record. Both countries can simultaneously have issues, but I sure know which one I'd rather hang out in, even with the current dumpster fire of an administration.
I took the previous comment as satire, considering that - for example - Chinese electric vehicles are now far more affordable than anything produced domestically in the US.
You are 100% correct on that, I fully expect that importing cheap GPUs and NPUs will be banned in the US, or tariff'd so heavily that it doesn't matter should they become available. But that will just allow Nvidia to fall behind until they get surpassed like AMD passed Intel.
A move like that will seriously hurt our ability to train and raise new software developers and the domestic game market.
Importing might be banned until the US loses access to its main source of GPU manufacturing. And what are the US going to do about it? Defend Taiwan? With missiles made with components and materials processed where, pray tell?
The US does need to start protecting its manufacturing again, but it’d be lucky to start at a level as high as high end semiconductors. That’d be like a stroke victim trying to run before they re-learn to walk.
As others have pointed out, this means less services, more manufacturing, less consumption, a probably a lower standard of living. But with the business as usual alternative looking a lot like business as usual in the western Roman Empire circa 450 CE, taking a hit to your standard of living while investing in a future which you still have the slightest control over, maybe feels like a decent trade.
The fact that we banned the better products out of spite doesn't mean they're not better products.
Imagine if in 2010 the USA had banned itself from using computer hardware more powerful than they had at the time. Where would they be in the AI race? That's the situation the USA is heading for.
When it comes to China and its ability to quickly mass produce items while incrementally improving on them, I absolutely will view the past as an indicator of the future.
One function of R&D involves how to manufacture things cheaply, quickly + en masse.
Those efficiencies that started with consumer drones now serve drones used in war. DJI being used at the start of the war is the evidence of that.
Continuation of that investment in R&D will also lead to new technologies: such as quieter drones, drones that can carry more, go further, and be controlled through difficult to counter means.
It's blithely short sighted to think that the technology is already at its maximum, or that these concepts are disconnected from each other. It's a type of naive thinking that people on the internet do to rationalise a false sense of security.
Also: to address another set of comments in this thread - China aren't looking at EUV so they can break into the graphics cards market or lower the price of RAM. Absolute utter numpties.
Procedurally generated game worlds have been a thing since video games started, some of them even garnered some popular appeal, like a lego-looking one about crafting mines or something
The reasonable interpretation of such a project is not to pump the stock market even higher by getting children to invest their savings into it, but to inculcate the habits of investing over time so they can do it properly as adults.
I'm sure Mr. Rothschild would be fine with this learning tool.
The Rothschild bloodline is responsible for helping to orchestrate every modern war since the Napoleonic Wars, by loaning money to both sides of the conflict. Major General Smedley D. Butler wrote about this in War is a Racket. I personally, don't give a damn what Mr. Rothschild would be fine with, or the rest of his disgusting family.
Standard bs defense to prevent any legitimate criticism of Jewish people no matter how reprehensible their actions are. Please spare me.
Maybe we should get into what Natalie Rothschild said while being interviewed, about her family's fondness for incest? Or would that be anti-Semtiic as well?
What exactly can you say about the Rothschild bloodline (except for praising them) that isn't considered anti-Semitic? Please do tell!
To your credit, your original comment didn't mention all Jews, just made heavy allusions to stereotypes about them. But now you've removed all possible doubt about what you meant.
Criticize individuals all you want, but don't do it by "bloodline", ethnicity, or whether they're a banker or not. Agency lies with the individual.
I am criticizing individuals - individuals who are members of a bloodline that have historically engaged in war profiteering and have been instrumental in running the international central banking cartel. You're right that I didn't mention all Jews, because that would indeed be anti-Semitic.
Sorry but I'm not going to kowtow to your ridiculous logic. It's perfectly fair to lob criticism at bloodlines, and if you had ever opened a history book you would readily understand that.
Criticizing individuals because they're part of a bloodline / ethnicity is:
- the exact opposite of criticizing individuals; you're really just going after the group
- the definition of prejudice
- the foundation of most (all?) giant human catastrophes like the Holocaust, the various communist land reforms, the crusades, and all sorts of horrible events
I'm a conservative, but I have to say this idea of not being prejudiced is really something great that liberalism brought to the table over the past 100-200 years. I'm gobsmacked to see people rejecting this idea.
So when authors of history-related works criticize or make remarks about bloodlines such as the Hapsburgs or the Medicis or the Colonnas are you equally as outraged as when it involves a bloodline of Jewish people?
If I navigate to - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogy_of_the_Rothschild_fa... - every section of the page mentions the family being involved in banking. Am I stereotyping members of the Rothschild bloodline by saying they're involved in international banking? I don't think so.
I'm equally gobsmacked by people who claim we shouldn't utilize pattern recognition or who want to pretend stereotypes materialize out of thin air.
I think the word "bloodline" has gotten people wrapped around the axle. You could have just said "the Rothschild family" and been in the clear. "Bloodline" veers a little close to smearing an entire ethnicity over the actions of one relatively small family. I'm sure it's not what you meant, but as soon as you start talking about the contents of people's blood, people's ears start perking up and looking for bigotry.
Well I don't really understand the difference between the words family and bloodline, because what is a family besides a lineage of people connected by blood? Just for clarity - I am referring to Mayer Amschel Rothschild and his descendants who have been and continue to be involved in central banking. I am most definitely not referring to all Jewish / Ashkenazi Jewish people, any ethnicity or anyone with the last name Rothschild who isn't or hasn't been involved in central banking and orchestrating wars.
Thank you for pointing this out. I'll try to be more careful in my choice of words moving forward.
"Blood" euphemisms are commonly used by antisemites and racists of all types. Hitler made many reference to "German blood, "Jewish blood," "our blood," and so on, essentially as shorthand meaning ethnicities. The KKK repeatedly emphasizes the importance of "blood purity" to promote its ideology. Which is why Trump's recent claim that immigrants are “poisoning the -blood- of our country” got so many people riled up--it's an obvious dogwhistle, using the preferred terminology of some very, very bad people.
Thank you for shining light on these examples for me. I've been studying quite a bit of history, esoteric spirituality and the occult sciences over the past few years and have fallen into the habit of using this term when talking about lineages of influential people and their families.
I definitely did not mean to sound like I was into eugenics or racial purity - I think these concepts are grotesque and as you said, people that focus on them or use them to excuse atrocities are indeed, very bad people. Thank you for giving me the benefit of doubt and highlighting why my choice of language is problematic.
For what it's worth, my reaction to the word "bloodline" used in this way is exactly what it would have been to the word "dynasty".
"Bloodline", as in, the line of inheritance for an extremely wealthy and powerful family, like Medieval monarchs.
Perhaps we should be a tad more careful about our language use, but I see far too much outright bigotry to be worried about something obviously not used as a dogwhistle.
> Calling it a bubble just because the numbers are big is the weakest of financial journalism
Yeah, exactly. The current AI investment wave could be a bubble. Or not. If anyone knows, there are millions to be made in the stock market. The answer depends on the actual expectations for those investments and how actual business metrics are tracking them.
But pointing to ambiguous “evidence” just adds noise. If someone screams fire in a movie theater journalist should report if there’s a fire or at least smoke, not write articles showing concern about how flammable all the furniture is
Civil liberties, like elections and liberal principles in general, are unfortunately only popular when the right side (coincidentally one's own) is winning
I won’t touch on the property issue because it’s really tiresome - sometimes I wish there were working communists countries so these people could simply go there and we wouldn’t have to suffer them.
But it’s really the first part of this quote that gets me: it’s precisely the fact that graffitti is forced on us that makes me despise it so much. Imagine having to listen to anyone aspiring artist’s bad poetry when you’re on and about. It’s not much better than appreciating strangers’ music taste on the street or public transit. It’s worse than advertisement: at least ads are bland and repetitive, you can easily filter them out.
> When I see DEFUND BPD hovering above North Avenue in enormous, spray-painted letters, I don’t see the opinion of one idealistic graffiti artist; I see someone expressing an increasingly common sentiment.
There are many graffitis out there asking non-politely that refugees go back to their homeland or that certain kinds of people are not welcome. I suppose, maybe unfairly, that the author would consider these demonstrations a noisy hateful minority speaking for themselves and their little minds. That’s the positive side of living in a democracy: we shouldn’t need to trust that rogue public demostrations, due to the central limit theorem or something, converge on the public sentiment. We have elections for that.
And I don’t disagree that graffitti has artistic merit, however illegal or unpleasant to my eyes. I’m not that egocentric. I just think there are things more important than art.
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