China has the upper hand and the US is being run by morons. With the US cutting itself off from the largest supplier of electronics while simultaneously destroying the basic research infrastructure that keeps America on the bleeding edge you can expect a brain drain towards Europe and Asia. The damage from this administration will last generations.
We are being run by abject morons who will never be able to understand simple truths, one of which is China is in a far stronger position: their factories are missing dollars. We are missing goods. One of those is easy for a central bank / government to replace.
Watching these people discover where the world's rare earths come from is equally amazing and terrifying.
Rare earth metals aren’t very rare, they’re just messy to extract and refine.
There are reasons that the Chinese (government) want so many dollars, and the external funds are not easy to replace (or they would have done it already). This is not to support the current trade ‘war’, but just to point out that it’s a bit more complicated than you can describe in a pithy comment.
Don't worry, we'll just mine everything we need ourselves in the active warzones in Ukraine! I bet Yosemite has tons of the rare earth we need, we just have to dynamite everything in there to find it! /s
What do you think the point of rebalancing trade is? To get out of dependence on foreign suppliers. "China's economy, copmposed of massive domestic production, industrial capacity, and manufacturing inputs is in a stronger position"
Yes, sounds like something that should be changed to increase the strength of the US. China has protectionist economic policy and trade barriers. If that equals strength why shouldn't we do it too?
>If that equals strength why shouldn't we do it too?
Tall order to prove this. Does it actually equal strength? What is strength and does China actually have said strength? None of this is defined.
Additionally, China has economic policies that if the US followed would be very, like the games they play with their currency valuation for example. They also have stringent capital controls, many of their largest businesses are the government has a large slice of the ownership, they subsidize export corporations to a much broader degree etc.
Are you also arguing for those things as well? Because its not simply tariffs that mark the only difference in economic policy between the US and China
The other asinine thing is we implemented tariffs against all countries, without a plan, and without a definitive proven reason as to why. As many economists have pointed out, the trade deficit is very deceiving and does not equate to there being a problem for the US inherently.
The current nonsense is the opposite of strength - it is empty bluster, based on ideas two decades out of date, by a "man" who talks like he's had a frontal lobotomy and who can't even sit on a chair properly.
Actually righting the severe damage done to our industrial base would take constructive direction by the government to build it back - once again the complete opposite of what they're actually doing by attacking our still-existing educational/research institutions.
At best high tariff taxes are just closing the barn door long after the horse ran away. But really it's just the same old pattern of the same type of hollow politicians using pent up frustration about the last scam to drive support for their next scam.
I agree with the barn door analogy and that the US badly needs a plan for building manufacturing.
It also needs a plan for mining rare earth minerals as well as a plan for processing them.
On the flip side the deal with Ukraine for rare earth minerals might just end the war, if not Russia see this as an opportunity to get all of the territory it currently occupies.
In all seriousness though, China is also not some young slick economic powerhouse. It's largely propped up facade with serious structural issues that the US doesn't have.
Also keep in mind that while countries are annoyed with the US, that doesn't mean they are going to welcome Chinese ships into their waters.
They are far and away the leaders in manufacturing. Also the only country with a tech sector on near parity with the US.
Yes, their housing market is messed up and that causes problems in the financial sector, but it's a real stretch to call everything else in the country "propped up".
Other countries simply don't have the same supply lines and trained workforce. There are no other countries with anything even remotely comparable to something like Shenzhen's electronics market, for example. Who wants to go to a different country when your product will take longer to ship, will have a worse quality, and will be more expensive to manufacture?
Besides, the US doesn't have a stable foreign policy. Moving your manufacturing to a different country takes years, why would anyone start that process when there is zero guarantee that the same tariffs will be in place a month from now, let alone a year or two from now?
And where would you move to? Any country which attracts a significant amount of manufacturing is pretty much guaranteed to be hit with the same kind of tariffs. The only safe option is the US itself - but it's often cheaper to just accept the tariffs!
I bet a lot of companies are just going to accept the revenue loss and wait for the US to stop acting crazy. The tariffs are only just starting to hit and people are already getting mad. This won't last forever.
> Other countries simply don't have the same supply lines and trained workforce
This is tempered, isn't it?
1) the whole advantage of China that we exploited WAS a large untrained uneducated workforce. That wasn't worth it anymore and things like textiles have already largely moved.
Of course, this doesn't apply to a number of sectors like electronics. But:
2) anyone educated and/or with money is scrambling to leave China, and this is nothing new.
I think the answer fairly conclusively in the global south is that, yes, yes they will let Chinese ships in their waters.
It will be bizarro-land if we have people in Kenya, Colombia, South Africa, and Peru driving around in 10000 dollar Chinese EVs and using 5000 dollar Chinese robots to clean their homes. While we pay 5 to 10 times that for the same conveniences.
I seriously think there's a really good chance the world 25 years from now may have a fundamentally different structure than it has had for the past 100 years.
It's time to open your eyes to the way the rest of the world lives because "bizzaro land" is basically here. Cheap Chinese roomba replacements clean people's homes, $15000 Chinese EVs are insanely popular, and the price of all these goods certified for the US market is 200-300% higher, so many Chinese companies don't bother.
Some quick searches on car costs and converting between South African rand and USD, it looks like US consumers already pay around 2-3x as much for a car (just in general using averages, didn't look for specific models or EVs).
Car prices in the US are way up over the last few years—prices, which were already trending up, spiked with "Covid shortages" and then just kept going up after those should have been alleviated. Was the ratio as bad in, say, 2015? (I really don't know)
Are Chinese ships not already delivering products and welcomed?
I was Peru last year and saw nothing but Chinese made electronics, especially phones, and a lot of cars. I see more and more Chinese electric cars in Mexico too. Talking to the locals they seem to like Chinese tourists just wish they spent as much as Americans.
Nope. All other Asian countries are putting transshipment controls in place to prevent Chinese trade getting funnelled through. They went around Trump in his first term and now he is out for revenge. Mfgs must leave China now if they want access to the US market. He just skull fucked Chinas economy.
The brain drain started decades ago. We've been importing people for STEM jobs and exporting manufacturing for a while, leaving behind large numbers of people with no hope for a better future. Now the rest of the country faces that prospect as well
Yep, was there 20 years ago. The secret is having first class universities and a stable, thriving economy that attracts bright students. American exceptionalism is that momentum.
The brightest people in the world want to come here and contribute to our economy and spend the money they earn here at your businesses. That’s a privilege, and it’s too bad we don’t value it more.
I think it's worse than generations. It will likely never recover. What's happening resembles when private equity takes over a company and runs it into the ground intentionally.
I think this is the wishful thinking of people who want to believe that consciousness is a deep mystery that won't be solved in their lifetimes. All while the capabilities of simulated neural networks are eclipsing humans in relatively short period of time.
It's possible human thought leverages quantum processes. That doesn't mean it's likely.
Eh, you’re giving technology too much credit and not considering what biology has developed to do naturally and far more efficiently. It’s also postulated that computational technology is nearing its current limits. Humanity’s hubris around technology is going to be our downfall, like how we think we can “stop” climate change with theorized technology even after we let the climate go too far into the red. We are greatly overestimating and exaggerating what tech can do.
DDG’s bot’s summary of the linked article and one other:
“The computational power of the human brain is often estimated in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS), with estimates ranging from 10^12 to 10^28 FLOPS, depending on the level of detail considered. In comparison, modern supercomputers can perform up to several hundred petaflops, but the brain is believed to operate at a similar or even higher efficiency due to its unique structure and processing capabilities.”
No idea how they got 10^28. There are only 10^11 neurons and their firing rate is 2*10^2. Even if you assume they do fp16 accumulation (which I doubt, it is unlikely they are that precise), that adds maybe 10^5 to the total of 2*10^18. That's a very optimistic estimate.
I just don't find that convincing. If every aspect of human planning, skill, and knowledge are reproducable via classical computing then it seems unlikely that consciousness is some special case that requires quantum processes.
Today's classical computing accomplishments are impressive, but nowhere near what a human can do. Perhaps someday soon a single AI could (in the words of Heinlein) "change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly" but that day is not yet here. If we struggle to build such a device, we might consider that our computers are too limited.
I think you're both right. Prices going low means less incentive to pump, which leads to decreased supply and prices stabilize.
Also prices going low means companies fold, people get laid off, the economy gets weaker, so demand goes down some more.
These things are going to feedback until equilibrium is reached.
A related factor is what part of the ratchet we are in. In the 1800s the ratchet was "ever upward" and if economic factors shutdown some pumps there were plenty of incentives to keep that shutdown temporary and through more capital investment at it to bring back when market forces shifted again. In the 2000s we may truly be in the "downward spiral" ratchet where enough pumping shuts down, those shutdowns are permanent. There's far more competition from increasingly cheap solar and wind and other renewable energy sources than there ever was.
Eventually permanently decreased supply can also drive prices back upward, sometimes faster, as less competition means more supply-side bargaining power.
(Permanently decreased suppliers of oil may be a win for the planet in the long run, hopefully, but breaking the entire economy is perhaps the dumbest way to try to do that.)
Carbon taxes become progressive with the simple step of returning the revenue to taxpayers as a dividend payment using the existing social security payment infrastructure. Richer people have such outsized carbon footprints that most people would get back more in dividends than they lost in higher costs.
It's a fun read. It does seem to imply that the parachutes slowed them down from 25,000 mph, but the heat shield smashing through the atmosphere would have slowed them down first.
My favorite goal in Kerbal Space Program is not the more common “return from a high gravity planet” or “orbit all the planets in the solar system in one trip” but instead “use every method including atmospheric air breaking, parachutes, and gravity assists, and mining resources /lunar/martian refueling to land a single stage rocket on mars and return”
Most fun thing to plan build and execute in the whole game IMHO
Bonus points if you bring and execute all types of science experiment available. This, and mining to refuel makes SSTO much harder.
*If you find this too easy then an upgrade is to do the same mission, but bring and deploy a permanent base to laythe (fictional moon of Jupiter with oceans). (bonus points if the base is mobile/submersible)
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