There's some intersection point between long term decreasing in China's ability (demographic collapse) and long term increase in China's ability (their current build up of military hardware in air, land, and sea that is currently outpacing America's). Maybe somewhere in 10-20 years where their regional military power is much higher than America can project across the Atlantic but they still have a lot of military aged men.
Atlantic? IDK if China even has aspirations to play World Police like the US. Military protection of things like their interests and the stability of Belt and Road, sure, but I don’t see China trying something like the Gulf War or OEF.
It’s very possible that they will be able to dominate South China Sea and their zone of the Pacific, even now, given the proximity advantages and ship/missile production; and I think that would be satisfactory to them.
20 years from now, China’s sphere and America’s sphere are separate, with China having a lead in competing for Africa, and Europe in a very weird place socially, economically, demographically, and WRT Russia/US competition.
I mean... this one's actually a pretty good paper, but we also had Linus Pauling pontificate on Vitamin C, so maybe we should cool it with the appeals to Nobel authority alone.
It's not easy to separate cause and effect from direct and strong correlations that we experience.
The job of a scientist is not to give up on a hunch with a flippant "correlation is not causation" but pursue such hunches to prove it this way or that (that is, prove it or disprove it). It's human to lean a certain way about what could be true.
I was thinking more people would be annoyed by it bringing up unrelated conversations, thinking more I'd say you're probably right that more people are expecting it to remember everything they say.
Yeah this is usually how it happens. Whether its ancient Rome, modern Russia, Venezuela, etc all the dressings of the old Republic stay but become subverted by an autocrat.
I assume the idea is more money could've been invested into bringing the bottom rungs of American society up and created a more skilled and educated workforce in the process.
The US has pushed a shit ton of money into education. I mean an unreasonable amount of it went to administrators. But the goal and the intent was certainly there.
Education is part of it. But a lot of the social capital which makes societies prosperous is separate from what we usually consider to be education. On an individual behavior level that includes things like knowing how to show up for work on time, sober, and properly dressed, and follow management instructions without arguing or taking things personally. These are skills that people in the middle and upper classes take for granted but they forget that there are a large number of fellow citizens in the economically disconnected underclass who never had a good opportunity to learn those basics. As a society we've never done a good job of lifting those people up.
> On an individual behavior level that includes things like knowing how to show up for work on time, sober, and properly dressed, and follow management instructions without arguing or taking things personally. These are skills that people in the middle and upper classes take for granted
I don't see your point.
Those rules does not apply to the upper class and middle class workers have way more leeway regarding that than the lower class.
This seems to be saying that a large fraction of poor people are poor only because of bad habits, which they have only because nobody taught them any better?
There will be some people like that (e.g. middle class kid has terrible work ethic; communicates it to his kid and now that kid has bad habits), but in the large it's more about culture than individual habits.
If one person doesn't show up on time, that's a bad habit. If no one shows up on time then that's a cultural issue[0], and much more devastating.
As an example, Zim dug itself a huge hole by kicking out the productive white farmers in 2000-2001. One of the key issues charitable foreign people trying to help Zimbabwe addressed was in re-educating the local population in why it matters that all the planting work is done by a certain time of year. The white farmers had all that knowledge, and cultural experience of hard work, and had made Zimbabwe the breadbasket of Africa.
The productive decline of the farms is because of the fast-track land reform. Before 2000-2001, there were no effective national programs to prepare the people to run the farms. The opposition party was gaining ground, and so to stay in power, the ruling party rushed the land reform with no preparation.
Not sure how this is a relevant example of a culture that don't value punctuality.
Well, for the reason I said. You've reframed it in a way that removes responsibility from everyone involved, but that's just an example of how to reframe things. It's not actually useful.
> You've reframed it in a way that removes responsibility
No, the comment you're replying to pretty clearly put the responsibility on the party that "rushed the land reform with no preparation".
And also accurately noted that a nation seizing capital and redistributing it to people who don't know how to use it is rather different from what had been the thread topic of personal skills / useful habits being purportedly unattainable by the lower classes without explicit instruction.
What's your point? I didn't make any claims about averages. We could do a lot more to improve opportunities and social mobility for people caught in the permanent underclass.
But we have. The underclass today has much better lives in many aspects than the highest class from many decades ago. The absolute level of wealth has increased, it's simply that the delta between the high and the low is widening.
Would you rather live equally in poverty or live comfortably with others who are way more wealthy than you? Surprisingly people do seem to prefer the former, though I'd prefer the latter
> I mean an unreasonable amount of it went to administrators. But the goal and the intent was certainly there.
This is wrong.
The increase in administrator pay began well after the crises cited in OP.
You could cite spending on the sciences (and thus Silicon Valley), but the spending by the US did not accrue to administrators; and further, federal money primarily goes to grants and loans, but GP is citing a time over which there were relatively low increases in tuition.
Edit: Not at home, but even a cursory serious search will turn up reports like this one that indicate the lack of clarity in the popular uprising against money "[going] to administrators"
> For universities, yes. But not for primary education. Administrative bloat is the worst in K-12.
First, where is your data?
Second, this discussion is clearly about post-secondary education ("the idea is more money could've been invested into bringing the bottom rungs of American society up and created a more skilled and educated workforce in the process.")
I have the same thing, I can "walk" through my childhood home. I see how the living room was set up, I can walk from there to my bedroom and "see" everything. Honestly if I had good art skills I feel like I could draw it out pretty well. However I would in no way describe it as looking like I'm there at the real thing or looking at photograph, not even close really. It's kinda just a hazy construct in my mind.
I feel like that is where a lot of the miscommunication comes from, people who think others can close there eyes and be transported somewhere else by imagining it. That is unless I actually just have aphantasia.
There's a lot of companies with IP that can be extracted or systems that can be sabotaged by a bitter employee. There's also the extreme cases of someone who knows they are being fired who can do a shooting/arson/some other extreme scenario.
I'm not saying I agree with the shock approach but there are definitely some generic risks that I don't think paint a bad picture of the company by their existence.
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