I’ve seen some pretty incompetent people just show up and play the game make it decently far. I prioritized learning first and got great offers right off the bat, but I definitely overdid it.
It’s not about the “regulatory environment”, which is almost irrelevant when talking about China. What’s driving this is state-led development with clear goals, like reaching peak carbon by 2030, a claim which they can actually back up with developments like these.
I don’t think Xi cares about carbon. He just wants to build as much power as possible so that China becomes an economic powerhouse (no pun intended). Imagine what would happen in Europe or the US if power is 1/5th the price or lower. It would open many opportunities for building and innovation.
Or he cares about both, but obviously prioritizes domestic energy security. Masses complained about air quality, hence move to renewables. Otherwise no reason to build out new plants that are more efficient / less poluting if old dirty one's suffices for occasional peaking. Or try to shift to renewables so fast that there were power shortages a couple summers ago due to adverse climate effects on generation . Or stop building 100s of billiions of dollars worth coal plants abroad as part of BRI.
IMO Xi/PRC is a little bit TOO magnanimous about enviroment / eliminating carbon. While US continues to increase (and now lead) in oil/lng exports, PRC is leaving good money on the table not building 1000s of coal plants abroad or exporting their centuries of thermal coal stock. That's the kind of irrational behaviour you expect from someone that cares about enviroment.
From what I’ve seen, they’ve extended their environmentalism to beyond carbon into the anti pollution in other forms. I agree regarding power cost though. That’s a huge missed opportunity in the west.
China is all in on renewables because their domestic fossil fuel resources are extremely limited. They import close to 100% of oil and gas and significant coal right now, basically the same situation the US was in before fracking took off. Xi is worried about being cut off from energy by an American blockade.
Correct. They’re building everything, clean or dirty, at a rapid pace. I wonder if they just skip over environmental concerns. In the US these would require a wildlife or wetlands study which take a long time
These coal plants are meant as backups. They specifically invented peakable coal plants so that they can fulfill that role. They even optimized the hell out of these coal plants: new Chinese coal plants are the most efficient in the world. These new coal plants also replace a bunch of older, more polluting plants.
A couple of years ago in China it was cloudy, non-windy, and dry at the same time for an extended period of time.
The energy transition isn't as simple as "build more solar, shut down coal".
Well, the incoming administration seems to be committed to simplifying the regulatory environment in the US too. What's still unclear is if it will also introduce a one-party system to better emulate the success of China?
Well that’s what happens when you frame housing as an investment. If it didn’t outpace the market and the consumer inflation rate, it wouldn’t be a good investment. So by definition it must become unaffordable for the masses.
Unlike many other sectors where prices drop thanks to constant advances in Tech, what is weird is how Tech hasn't made a dent in Housing.
Health I can understand cause it takes a long time to produce a Doc, and there is a high demand and low supply dynamic.
But we can easily build housing cheap. Even if the real estate/investment lobby is busy buying up all the "prime" land, its not like the US is a small country to work around them somewhere.
It's because of the government regulation and how localized it is so you can't pick a fight with just one regulator to force them to stop doing stupid, you need to pick fights with tens of thousands of local regulators (and their tens to hundreds of thousands of unionized government employees). On top of that, building is super capital intensive with long lead times to profitability that are fully controlled by said regulators so you can't pull an uber and just operate on a moderate sum of angel investor money while you also earn money from your service and flip the bird to the regulator. You don't make any money until you beat the regulator into submission, which makes beating the regulator a bad investment.
On top of all the above, you have teh general populace, of which a significant portion own housing they want to see go up so you won't ever get to the point where everyone sees the light and overwhelmingly supports you like uber got to, there will always be significant push back from the populace who want to abuse supply constraint to increase their personal benefit at the severe cost to all of us.
> Even if the real estate/investment lobby is busy buying up all the "prime" land, its not like the US is a small country to work around them somewhere.
Even the US being a big country doesn't help much. The value of land for the purpose of living on it is largely defined by the infrastructure around a particular piece of land: are there schools, shops, doctors, ... nearby, or do you have to drive through an empty desert for hours to reach them? And unless faster forms of individual travel are invented, this will limit the amount of "usable" land even in an imaginary country with unlimited boundaries.
The infrastructure problem should also have a relatively cheap technical solution. I assume the major bottleneck is bureaucracy, which largely has no technical workarounds so far.
It's not a problem of bureaucracy, but rather efficiency. Urban centers emerge because they make sense - grouping together labor, production, and consumption. If we just equally distribute people across the country our economy would implode on itself. How do you get to work? Where do you work? Where does your work go once you've worked on it? Who buys your work? And what work do you buy?
I'm not going to build a doctors office, or a train, or a corner store next to 10 people. I'm gonna build it next to 100,000 people. And now here we are, where we have space but not really because most of the space is worthless.
There are plenty of thriving towns in America with 5k-10k people. I think you need to just get out more. I grew up in one and it was fine. I now live in a slightly larger city (in the low hundred thousands) and enjoy the low cost of living with a high salary. But I'd never live in a major metro area, that's nuts.
> There are plenty of thriving towns in America with 5k-10k people
Very, very few. Rural areas are disproportionately impoverished. It's just statistical, not personal, and it makes complete sense once you consider what an economy is.
> But I'd never live in a major metro area, that's nuts
Those major metro areas make up the vast majority of the US' economic prowess. You don't have to live in them of course, but you should be aware that the American suburbs and rural areas are essentially on the welfare of more economically successful areas.
> Even if the real estate/investment lobby is busy buying up all the "prime" land, its not like the US is a small country to work around them somewhere.
40% of the US population lives in a coastal county:
People can't live inside Kubernetes pod, unfortunately :) . The problem is not technical, it's regulation in three ways - 1) regulations restricting building new housing altogether (USA and Commonwealth issues especially, due to obsession with detached homes and zoning). 2) increasingly long times to obtain all permits (Australia issue and likely many others), 3) economic downturn which is also a type of regulation.
"I will keep house prices rising" is an even better one, although its often funny that every party (in my country at least) wants to send that message but can't say it openly.
The simple fact is homeowners are a large voting block often with the most ability to vote. Gotta keep them happy or its electoral suicide.
There are a few things that could be done to remove the artificial advantage of (primary) residential property:
- remove the exemption (or reduction) for Capital Gains Tax
- remove Income Tax relief for mortgage interest
- remove any exemption (or reduction) for Inheritance Tax
Not all these advantages exist in all jurisdictions.
Then there are other changes that could mitigate distortions, inequality and volatility:
- separate interest rates for residential mortgages, commercial property, consumption and productive investments (industry, infrastructure, education)
- separate institutions for these different credit markets, with different reserve ratios and other regulations
- promote sound(er) money, to reduce inflation, and reduce the necessity to protect wealth by asset investment
- break cartels of real estate agents and aggregators to reduce transaction costs
- streamline the planning process to enable more houses to be built, without delay and costs of excessive eco/nimby appeals
- level the playing field between landlords and renters (means different things in different local jurisdictions)
Finally, there are more radical combinations of these things, such as removing the claim of mortgage interest as a business cost for landlords, which would raise their corporate taxes and deter high leverage.
>- separate interest rates for residential mortgages, commercial property, consumption and productive investments (industry, infrastructure, education)
How do you propose to do that? If I have money to lend, I'm pretty sure I'll lend it wherever I like the return I get. So interest rates are all related to each other - they should be risk-adjusted equal, because the lenders don't care about anything else.
Separate rates and markets already exist. Commercial property is a totally different market than residential, and agricultural is yet another market. Investment into residential is different than primary residence in origination rules and pricing.
- enforce security and building standards to old buildings, this pushing new ones to be built
Japan has this and it is used to enforce new civil engineering tech for earthquake/tsunami/disaster prevention, but it also makes old not up to standard buildings becomes less valuable
I think our homes are not as technological as they should be because we see them as investments to be preserved
Are you aware of the vast disparity of wealth among American families? On the order of 100k for white families, 10k for black families. Wealth being passed down family trees ensures immigrants and people who are worse off now will remain priced out.
Do you know the actual rates, what value the estate must be at for it to kick in, and in which states? Are you aware of spousal transfers and other mechanisms to reduce or avoid it?
Most people get very worried about “death tax”, until they do the numbers on their own estate and realise either it mostly doesn’t apply to them or it’s marginal.
In the UK this is often used as a major campaign point but the number of estates actually subject to it is quite small.
In the United States, federal tax applies when the estate is valued over $13.6M for 2024[1], though as you mention spousal transfers and other methods can be used for tax avoidance as well.
For you maybe. For 99% of the US population, it does absolutely nothing.
> Just over 7,100 estate tax returns will be filed for people who die in 2023, of which only about 4,000 will be taxable—less than 0.2 percent of the 2.8 million people expected to die in the year.
Not fentanyl. Fentanyl precursors. That's a critical distinction.
China has an extremely large chemical industry. They supply the world's pharmaceutical industries for their re-agents, precursors and such.
Fentanyl, like LSD, is highly HIGHLY potent, so quantities of ingredients don't actually have to be so high so that it becomes obvious. Also like LSD, there's analogues up and down the chain. They've banned all analogues of fentanyl and some of the direct precursors, but analogues and other pathways exist and new ones are constantly invented to circumvent bans.
In hindsight, it would have been better to not have wrecked Latin America so much that there's sophisticated mega-cartels that overwhelm whole nations, but what can you do...
Edisons contribution was to capitalize on the discoveries/inventions of Volta, Faraday, Siemens, Gramme, and Tesla, helping to popularize and push electricity into the market. Not insignificant certainly, but if we're talking about doing the actual inventing here, I don't think that supports the thesis.
Things that were patented that he then stole, or things he patented that other people really originated at their core? Former is silly, but latter:
Lightbulb, xray, moving camera, phonograph are some things that were originated by others and refined by him, but that are often completely attributed to him. Again, his contributions are not insignificant, but highly misleading in the spirit of the topic regarding China and the trope that they can’t invent new ideas but that America did. All ideas take lots of collaboration so it’s just wrong to make those kinds of statements.
> won all cases
You mean the patent office awarded him patents, not that he is the undisputed originator of the idea, surely? The legal complexity and resource hungry nature of the patent system makes this a pretty moot point. Even today, patents are largely pointless if you can’t wage a long drawn out legal battle. The robber baron era was not a more just time.
Building the first electrical power grid is quite significant, yes, but still irrelevant, because the core tech is still non American. Many innovations must be made to take those foreign ideas and implement them, yes, but how is that different from what’s going on in China?
The original claim is that they don’t invent anything, only copy. Its a common narrative that’s not only an untrue cope, but also blinds people to the fact that they are on a trajectory to surpass in innovation, in addition to implementation.
And on the bandsaw, it’s very international as well.
I didn't write anything like that. I wrote that you can grow faster by copying existing ideas that have been refined and put into practice than by reinventing them.
You might want to read a biography of Edison, not just a summary on the web. The one by Josephson is good, and goes into considerable detail.
Edison did not invent a glowing wire, nor did he invent electric arc lamps. However, both of those were useless as light bulbs. Existing lightbulbs at the time were low voltage, high current. The lightbulbs didn't last very long, and so were useless. They also consumed enormous amounts of power.
Edison's innovation was to go with high voltage, low current. This cut the power consumption way down. The next problem he had was the filament burning up. This problem he managed to solve with a vacuum pump. Voila! A long lasting, cheap, and cheap to operate, light bulb.
This is why he received the credit for inventing the light bulb, as it was the first practical light bulb. This is why all the other patent suits against him on the invention failed.
If you are interested, feel free to read the Josephson book which covers the patent suits. I don't think you can just dismiss them with Edison had the resources to defend his patents, nor can you dismiss them with the litigants being paupers. The litigants who didn't have money got money to pursue the patent cases from investors who knew that if they won the suit, they would get rich.
Everyone was aware that an entire industry was up for grabs, and so they poured money into fighting Edison. These when on for many years. They had every opportunity to make their case(s).
But Edison prevailed.
As for the bandsaw, I said the invention of the circular saw revolutionized the lumber industry, and that invention was I think from the Amish.
What Edison did was make things that were practical.
BTW, Edison invented electronic vacuum tubes, but he failed to recognize what they would be good for. Would you say he invented the entire electronics industry up until 1960? I wouldn't. It was others who turned the vacuum tube into a practical and incredibly useful device.
Edison invented the idea of a commercial invention lab, and produced so many practical inventions that revolutionized life that he is a contender for inventing the modern world. It's hard to understate his impact.
Interestingly, the Wright Brothers inadvertently invented the modern directed research and development laboratory. I'm probably the only person who ascribes that to them, but before the Wrights, people just tried random things (including Edison). What the Wrights did was:
1. research everything known about the topic
2. identify each problem that needed solving
3. develop prototypes to test and solve each problem
4. put the solutions together to solve the whole problem
and voila! it worked! and everybody else has followed that pattern since.
> 19th century US invented its technology. China simply copied it - which enables much faster growth until one runs out of things to copy.
This is what I would rather focus on. If Edison can be credited with inventing as much as you say, I don’t see why you hold this belief regarding China.
If you define “invention” as the core concept of a mechanism/process/etc, then Edison did not invent much at all, and perhaps China has a lot to prove.
If you define “invention” to include all improvements to technologies which at their core already exist, then China is already the leading innovator globally.
Yes, China has been playing catch up, but I hate narratives that would paint an entire nation of 1.4 billion people as some kind of mindless robot state.
I’ve worked at two market leading, trend setting, American flagship tech companies which did competitive analyses on mass market Chinese tech products. Incidentally, they were at times when Chinese products were beginning to overtake the American ones. People were pretty shocked overall, and shortly after both of these experiences, on both occasions, the US imposed trade restrictions on the respective products.
I remember a while ago, the thought that China was innovative would have been laughed at as it was a silly idea. They were just a factory, no more. Now, people get mad at you for stating the truth that China has evolved and is now out-innovating us. I think it’s fear based. The media paints a grim picture about what it’s like there, but breaking out of the western bubble has been enlightening and humbling.
I now firmly believe that China will be the first to some kind of AGI, I think their EVs will dominate all global car markets, they’ll build embodied AI robots at scale first, their chips will eclipse Nvidia’s finest soon enough, their space program will be more advanced, etc
Most importantly however, their green tech is outpacing us. The west really dropped the ball on what is the second greatest threat to long term survival of organized human life. For the sake of humanity, I hope they’re able to continue this advancement trend unimpeded, since they’re the only signatory of the Paris accords who are taking this seriously and not just meeting but exceeding targets. I hope they can equip the world with their inventions soon enough.
Let's take an example. One country invents a tractor, and makes improvements on it for 100 years. Then, another country that does agriculture by hoe and shovel, buys a modern tractor.
Which one is going to experience faster year over year growth in the next year?
If you bring a cellphone to an isolated Amazon tribe, have you just implemented the most rapid advancement of technology known to man? It’s a ridiculous, meaningless question.
Where is their industrial capacity? Where is their university system? Or their self defense capability? A space program on the way tomorrow perhaps?
Why is it that China’s development outpaces India so much? Why does China have 28,000 miles of high speed rail, doubling in the next decade, when the US has 50? Why did China roll out 5G before the west, when there wasn’t anything to steal yet?
Does the US need to steal some high speed rail technology from somewhere so that it can grow?
These aren’t matters of technology at this point. They are growing fast because they’re committed to it. The growth capacity has been there for so long in the west, but we prioritize the wealth of elites instead. At this point they have a better space station and a better moon landing / colonization plan. Their green tech is better, their batteries are better, their robots are better, their EVs are way better.
This idea that they should slow down because there’s no more technology to steal is inconsistent with the fact that they have in so many areas surpassed us rather than asymptotically approaching the status quo.
Comparatively, the trajectory of material conditions leaves the US in the dust, if it hasn’t already for most of the US populous.
It makes me sad because I’m an American, but it gives me hope because the US may finally start competing in areas like infrastructure, housing, and education rather than letting the private sector take the wheel.
That's the literal opposite of the truth and basically just neoliberal propaganda. It's also quite an amusing take more broadly, considering that the market reforms were implemented by the original Communist revolutionaries, people who were deeply committed to Marxism and vehemently opposed to that idea.
China's system is defined by not letting the private sector take the wheel. Capitalists (major owners of capital, the 0.1%) have very little political power vs. in the West, where policies are almost wholly driven by the private sector.
Marx actually believed that Capitalism was a necessary step to Socialism, which would then turn into communism. Lenin added that a vanguard party would be required to oversee that transition. The CCP fulfills that purpose in China. When the Chinese leaders decided to allow some capitalism, they did so with heavy restrictions, referring to it as a "bird in a cage" policy. They quite explicitly did not allow the private sector to take the wheel, and that continues to this day.
The real history of China in the last 100 years is extremely fascinating once you get past all the western propaganda. If you want to see what happens when the private sector takes the wheel, look up "shock therapy in Russia".
China has much more freedom than I was led to believe growing up. The restrictions seem pretty neatly constrained to things that are genuinely threats to public safety, “social harmony”, or national security.
It seems scary until you think about the kind of information warfare that a certain cross pacific neighbor likes to employ, frequently.
I’ve seen some pretty incompetent people just show up and play the game make it decently far. I prioritized learning first and got great offers right off the bat, but I definitely overdid it.
Different strategies for different people.