DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
you've acknowledged China's demographic issues and your solution to it was essentially ai enabled robotics to handle elderly care in order to keep the ratio of dependents to workers manageable correct? The happy case for China multipolar strength seems to rely on a pretty narrow outcome where AI is powerful enough to do a huge amount of menial labor but not powerful enough to where being ahead a couple years differentiates world power standings.
Americans have invented themselves a lot of cope about China, to the extent they're not paying attention to similar domestic issues.
Right now Mainland Chinese are younger by over 4 years than White Americans (40.1 years in 2025 vs 44.5 in 2020 median). By 2040, they'll become about on par I think (46-47). I don't trust fertility projections after that, we've seen nations rapidly fall into the East Asian model, including throughout South America (Central America for now is holding up admittedly). American solution to American demographic issues is importing assorted Hispanics to take care of white boomers and hoping that Hispanics will somehow also become a replacement for the working population. I don't believe this is happening as far as O-ring economy goes (software, finance, deep tech jobs now ride on adding Indians and Chinese to local numbers; Indians don't have that deep a well of talent and they're having a demographic transition too, especially for higher castes; Chinese net flow is reversing), so in my view your productive working populations are shrinking at a similar pace. After seeing stories of elderly abuse by immigrants in the US, I am positive that robotic caretakers will at least reach parity soon for augmenting blue collar work and and caretaking. Americans are trying to add robots to industrial workforce and will likely begin to automate retirement facilities too, they're not that dumb and there are Western robotic projects clearly aimed at home labor. Robotic mobility is now at this level, and this is a blind policy. Progress in manipulation is similar, China reigns supreme in actuators market and casually make dexterous hands now, it's a very nice fit for their industrial model so they'll only increase their lead there. Robots will suffice for menial labor, both in China and in the US (probably marginally more so in China but it's not a crux). Finally I don't believe in the necessity of unproductive population to "provide consumption", rich people with robot slaves can consume as much and grow GDP as much as multiple poor people. On the whole, I am of the mind that demographic trend difference is a dumb and, again, Zeihanite red herring that ignores medium-term predictable AI progress.
So abstractly, it's not a narrow outcome, because as I've just said, the floor is basically established, and China won't have to make up for a large extra deficiency. The whole question is about those huge gains of productivity on the right tail, it's the US that will have to make up for having fewer and lower IQ people, NIMBYism, alienating allies, degraded supply chains and retarded and worsening political culture with geniuses in a datacenter, by gaining a couple years of edge in AI progress and not fumbling the application of gains (and starting at 7:44 here, Molson gives me a reason to suspect that China will also be better at applying what gains they make with AI throughout the period).
Now, I believe AI is going to be really useful. A review commissioned by DeepMind predicts that at a minimum, 2030 level AI will boost productivity for desk-based research by 10-20%.. That's a lot. All things considered, is this enough to "compound" your way to lasting hegemony after 2030? I wouldn't bet on it, but Americans are Winners by nature, so they might. The upside of hegemony is, in theory, near-infinite. The downside is just having a worse place in the eventual bipolar world. Whether to take this bet depends on the odds (and nuances of the value function). I'd say the US has maybe 25% chance of "winning the race" to hegemonic condition.
Except GPUs are even more interchangeable than other weapons systems.
This is just prolonged "nuh-uh". CUDA and CANN will continue to evolve divergently, Chinese models will likely be built around extreme sparsity and multi-tier memory (like ByteDance's UltraMem), scheduled Huawei systems are increasingly different from Nvidia's lineup (vaguely like Google's pods but Google doesn't yet sell those). We see that American providers took almost a year to implement DeepSeek and it's been just slightly unconventional, actually trained on H800s; SiliconFlow rolled it out on CloudMatrix 384s weeks after they were delivered. Lock-in happens on the software and hyperscaler level.
That said, all of this is beside the point because your idea is "hopefully we'll leave them so far behind their market won't matter much".
I don't think Xi is playing factorio but the CCP does obviously practice extensive industrial policy. Making it kind of ironic to go this hard against one piece of American industrial policy.
Industrial policy is about advancing domestic capability, protectionism and targeted subsidies – CHIPS act, banning Huawei in the US, not Nvidia in China. You're just calling any policy that has something to do with industry "industrial policy" I guess, but your argument is purely geostrategic and has no direct bearing on industry development in the US.
It's kind of incredible to point out how China is willing to force some of their largest companies to supply demand for their domestic chip industry
Incredible propaganda, yes. DeepSeek has maybe 300 people. And they weren't forced to do shit. If you mean that story, I've checked with the reporter and the report is basically unsourced rumor. This isn't happening, you're working purely from assumptions. There is now, indeed, effort to subsidize the adoption of domestic compute, but that's inevitable when Americans are deliberating on whether they can afford to sell even obsolete inference capacity.
Absolutely. China has found its success through world trade on sea lanes policed by American military might in an environment built by American diplomats. That's what Pax Americana is.
You mean, it's a self-congratulatory, narcissistic Zeihanite myth? You're not protecting shit. You've just lost to Houthis, the first nontrivial challenge to sea lanes in forever. Your navy is designed around offensive operations against nation states and deterrence in nuclear war, not patrolling sea lanes, and its crown jewels are aircraft carriers and submarines. Maybe it would do great to block sea trade, at least that's the plan for Malacca. The global trade will certainly go on fine if it's scrapped.
This is an ironically Trumpist take on things for as much as you rightly excoriate his team's perspectives elsewhere.
Trump generally campaigns on real if exaggerated problems and popular frustrations, it's just his solutions are often hare-brained. China would definitely like to increase value-add, of course, but it wouldn't mean canceling "industrial policy" and shedding dominance in stuff like photovoltaics, they'll simply make factories more automated. Interestingly, in this case I even agree with Trump on selling GPUs to China, for once his mercantile instincts are appropriate.
Demand is also a pretty important part of this all as well
Demand as such has zero value because it is easily produced at infinite scale and, for the purpose of this conversation, it's a malign concept. People don't sell to the US because the US pays back with some demandium, they just trade their work for a piece of liquid and appreciating American assets (insofar as those descriptions apply). Also, we've seen that as trade with the US fell due to tariffs, Chinese exports to ASEAN increased (and no it's not transshipping, the composition of goods is totally different) and fully canceled the drop in trade surplus. The world can produce plenty of "demand". You aren't that big anymore.
multipolarity doesn't seem very stable in any case
I think it's pretty stable (dysfunctional shitholes like Russia and even Iran stand strong), AI is likely to make it more so. Cybernetic superweapons are unlikely because hardening systems when you have unlimited time and root access is easier than pen testing; we'll get to verified kernels for everything much sooner than AIs become expert hackers. Material science and engineering advances promoting lasers, drones etc. are great for defense. Panopticon angle is obvious enough. I strongly doubt AI will enable some sort of super-nukes. This of course is a matter of opinion.
Then I return to being very confused as to why we're going to regret this.
Selective quotation is a hell of a drug. On a single chip basis, even Huawei admits they can't compete and won't be able to in the foreseeable future (EUV breakthroughs may change that). They can make do with better systems integration and produce competitive (also due to more electric power, better grid) systems and that'd suffice to serve domestic demand, for lack of better alternative.. For the end product (AI), they'll be slowed down relative to the world of uncontested Nvidia dominance. I posit this is not critical. The critical thing is that this market will keep growing exponentially, and before too long you're forfeiting not tens but hundreds of billions, on not selling one of your few truly unparalleled products. Is the idea to make up for that with Singularity stuffa nd extorting allies in the meantime? This is a Hail Mary.
I guess this is the crux. In your world, where unipolarity is the default trajectory, it makes perfect sense to cling to Pax Americana and play negative-sum games hoping to outlast the opposition. Like, what is the alternative, capitulation, suicide? In my world, China is basically guaranteed to not only exist in 30 years but have comprehensively stronger economy than the US plus closest allies, no matter what you sell or don't sell, buy or don't buy. And the US will have to figure out how to exist, and exist well, without boons of global strategic superiority, in a bipolar world, and hopefully remaining a hegemon in its own backyard. That figuring out has got to begin now.
I have to note: I am undecided on what's better for me. I argue for the sake of argument. I believe the current US policy will end up making everyone poorer and American global standing lesser, as in the long term it will guarantee a separate technological civilization existing and building in and around China. So, given how undesirable your hegemony is, maybe that's overall a good thing and I should shill for export controls. Maybe this mad bet on the AGI race will work and I'm wrong, though.
The traitor, the treasonous little worm
This made me smile. Very "nationalize SpaceX" energy. You do realize that your Hail Mary attempt at preserving hegemony largely depends on him? For some reason, Loyal Americans run their hardware companies into the ground. I do think he believes that this game will continue for decades, and China is not going anywhere, it's not going to critically fall behind, and so he wants to keep a piece of that market for the US. And that can be done.
China is already exerting the maximum amount of demand and political pressure it can to try and compete on chips. The internal market demand is irrelevant. The government will guarantee every chip is sold and prop up all the companies making them. Whether or not AI labs can use NVDIA hardware has zero actual influence on the development of their ecosystem. Hardware "lock-in" on these labs is an entirely made up concept.
The internal market demand is irrelevant. The government will guarantee every chip is sold
Asinine. As it's said, "there is nothing to be learned in matters of faith". If anything, this describes Intel. No, market demand is not irrelevant, PRC corporations actually have incentives beyond 5-year plans, largely because they have slim margins. Americans really have worked themselves up into a frenzy with this doctrine that everything in China is massively subsidized and so can be unprofitable forever. It's not about subsidies, they're just more productive than you and have a more ruthless market, to the extent that the state is trying – and failing! – to arrest "involution".
Just because you hate the CCP really, really hard does not give you the license to spew bullshit. Being very confident doesn't help. It is not, in fact, possible to create a competitive ecosystem by decree, even if it's super-duper maximum pressure. This just takes too many people. I know DeepSeek has been asked to and declined to do serious training runs on Huawei due to immaturity of CANN stack. They have this choice, for a little longer. They're typical. There are maybe 2 Chinese companies doing large-scale training on Ascends, and one is iFlyTek, which has been on entity list since forever and has no choice; they haven't achieved much. Even Huawei themselves are yet to release a single compelling model, they literally can't keep top-tier people interested as they leave to companies like DeepSeek. Huawei has 200K employees, for reference.
On a smaller scale, we've seen this when Microsoft attempted to make Windows Phone a thing. Tremendous effort went into it, a formidable corporation was banging against the wall for years, subsidizing the app marketplace, and it all fizzled out. No developers, no users, no network effects, no future.
We know what PAX Americana looks like and it looks pretty good actually. Billions rising up out of poverty
One of those "billions" is in China, can you really take credit for it? I call bullshit, mostly it's just post-WWII economic growth the nexus of which was the US for reasons of not being bombed out, not some profoundly benign and productive doctrine or culture or people. India is illustrative: they wanted to latch onto Pax Americana and get something out of it; what have they got so far for India proper? I am in your "sphere of influence", so to speak, and it really doesn't look like you're spreading prosperity around. In fact it looks like you have nothing to spread, you don't invest, your own riches are a speculative bubble and you mainly "supply demand". You're demolishing your nuclear infrastructure, you don't build anything except datacenters, certainly you can't boast of turning Pakistan into a solar-powered economy or something. Outside a few premium items like these very GPUs, your wares are non-competitive trash that people abroad have to be compelled to buy, you're even pathetically forcing third parties to share your tariff regime to cling to some markets (very funny in this context of "market share is useless"). Yes, in theory you could cheat with AGI, but ask yourself, if a cheat on the scale of AGI is needed to redeem your claim to hegemony, what do you, as a people, stand to contribute? Having created the solutions where you've got AGI earlier than others?
But CCP dominance hasn't even been particularly good for them. China is host to the poorest and least prosperous Chinese people in the world.
This is a very tiresome talking point. They didn't have the benefit of a sane administration until 1978, after which they've consistently had the highest growth rate of all major economies. In any meaningful sense, including consumption spending, general QoL. GDP per capita comparisons are misleading. I've been reading on Taiwan recently and it seems that they're straight up having poorer lives than coastal Mainland Chinese in comparable population centers; like, they have higher costs of living and don't have meaningfully higher salaries. This, too, is Pax Americana; not even the smallest and most important clients can be sure to prosper. What else do we compare to? Singapore, Macao, Hong Kong? Please.
Now, history doesn't start in 1978. But nations change, even under the same regime and slogans. The US of today is not the US of 1960s either.
surely you understand the "equals across the sea" isn't an option on the table. That isn't what is in store if we give up all our advantages in this sector.
No. I don't understand. Why? What happens to the US that did not "win"? Unlike the USSR, China doesn't even have a messianic revolutionary project.
I think this is just wounded ego. You're used to hegemony, it's part of your personal identity, and it slipping away, likely forever, is perceived as existential horror, with appropriate rationalizations. This sounds about as compelling as Russian noises about NATO threat and absolute rationality of going all in to "denazify" Ukraine. In reality Russia could well survive Ukrainian integration with the West, it was merely humiliating (and deserved, certainly so after 2014 when we've demonstrated our mettle in managing "people's republics") but not affecting the survivability of the Russian state, and the costs of war have already far exceeded any sane estimate for costs of doing nothing.
China will take the chips, use them to accelerate their position, including in advancing their own semiconductor industry
Like what, using AI to design floor maps? They're doing it already, it doesn't take a lot of compute. A rather contrived concern.
As soon as China has even slightly competitive chips they will crumple up NVDIA and toss it out like so much garbage.
The thing is, chips are very, very hard and ensuring the supply chain is all outside China has been one of the few truly great American political successes (not that it was hard, this chain was mostly complete when China was around $2000 GDP per capita) . The trifecta of ASML-TSMC-NVDIA (nevermind their multiple one-of-a-kind suppliers like ZEISS, and EDA software) will genuinely take China a decade or more to even approach. They will not have competitive chips. They will have (already have announced for Q1 2026) competitive systems, but those only exist because NVDIA is prevented from exporting the good stuff.
Again, I don't know what I should "rationally" shill for here. And anyway this might be too late. The US has clearly stated its hostility, burned the bridges, and will have to "lose", in a war of its own creation.
but to do so below market rate?
This is pretty asinine. You're defending export controls with the claim that their absence would… distort markets? Do you think that's what Nvidia is trying to do, sell GPUs below market rate, despite having an unsaturated domestic market that would generate higher margins? Why do you imagine they would hurt themselves like that? Might it be time to install some loyal apparatchiks on board, or do a little witch hunt for Communist agents?
China is not going to forego building their own echo-system and hasn't for any other sector they've found strategically important.
As I've said before, "China" is not omnipotent and cannot create an ecosystem solely through political will and subsidies, they've been trying for decades and it hasn't been working so long as Nvidia was the obvious superior choice. Even now, nobody wants to use CANN if afforded the chance. I think this is how Jensen views this: he's straightforwardly fighting as the CEO of American company Nvidia, not just for line going up in quarterly reports but for enduring global dominance of his stack.
It's banking on the certainty that surrendering our major advantage in the AI race to china for no reason or gain will turn out badly for us, obviously. I can't even fathom how a thinking person could convince themselves otherwise. You've already highlighted their advantages, is your position that the race is already over despite us currently being ahead?
Are you avoiding the question, or does it not parse for you?
I think that to discuss whether "the race" is over, it's important to establish whether a race is happening and what it is that you are racing towards. The US is ahead in AI. Again, without American chips, China will be developing AI slower for the next few years. Is that a "race"? What happens when you reach the finish line? Don't huff and puff, say concretely. Do you build an AGI superweapon that disables their nukes with nanobots? Or what? What's the end goal, in the face of which every thinking person would deem hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars of profits a mere short-sighted distraction? Can you spell it out?
Our one chance at dominance in this sector is remaining ahead in AI and reaping compound interest on that lead whether it's AGI or simply accelerated AI and chip development. If it's not enough
Not enough for what? Like, what's the theory of victory here? Repeating the Great Divergence, now with automation, relatively growing so quickly that China is forever left in the dust? Lights-out factories spawning across the US, producing ungodly goods optimized by AGI, incomprehensibly advanced weapons systems, Pax Americana becoming permanent?
How likely do you think that is? And what happens if this doesn't work out?
I think the answers are basically "yes/likely/better not to think of this", and personally, I believe this is all deluded and very much in the spirit of last days of Nazi Germany. Both sides will have adequate AI to increase productivity, both will have "AGI" at around the same time, you're not going to have some dramatic inflection point, you will not leave them in the dust as a military or economic power, you'll just slow down global economic growth somewhat, and in the long run end up poorer and have a smaller slice of the global market. That's all.
We benefited our rival for... What? A few quarters of sales for a couple of firms?
Do you realize that the entire windfall from Trump's tariff nonsense would be an order of magnitude less than those quarters, even as it destroys similar value (hundreds of billions)?
It seems Americans aren't happy with this whole concept of trade anymore. If they buy foreign stuff, that's bad because they're losing dollars, gotta reindustrialize and implement tariffs. If they're selling stuff to foreigners who aren't completely inept and subjugated, that's also bad, because then those foreigners may develop and get richer, and for an American, the world is zero-sum, so the only Deals Americans are now willing to make are that which make the other party poorer, like the humiliation rituals you subject "NATO allies" to. Trump's rhetoric around coercing South Koreans and others to "invest" (he apparently understands FDI in very childish terms, "they give us moneys because they're our bitches") completes the picture.
Yes, I admit this makes me even more sympathetic to China.
5G/6G is not very relevant to this issue, but they have extremely advanced datacenter network architecture and their new systems are based on it. This will allow them to cope with lower performance of individual chips.
If China has the ability to leapfrog Nvidia and other western AI tech, they're gonna do it irregardless of any sanctions on chips
This is not true. People act like "China" is a perfectly coordinated single entity, a game of Factorio Xi plays, but it's still a country with different economic actors. If Huawei can't sell their crap because everyone in China who is actually good at AI uses CUDA and Nvidia hardware (like, again, DeepSeek), Huawei will not improve as rapidly. Subsidies in isolation cannot replace organic ecosystem support, they just prolong the agony, and at the current level not even China can subsidize the development of the entire supply chain, it's to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
What is the end goal here? Or any goal?
OK, you're slowing them down alright. They will not have as capable models, as quickly or cheaply, in the next 4-6 years. Then what? Is this just banking on an AGI superweapon to make economic dimension irrelevant, or on the windfall from economic growth this is supposed to beget? Huawei is superior in networking equipment, China has an overabundance of energy and skilled labor, if they scale up production of even past-generation compute chips (and mainly HBM), they will have a fully adequate and incompatible domestic ecosystem and Nvidia and others will never reenter their market, and American slice of it will be that much smaller.
I think everyone here recognizes that the George Floyd sanctification was extraordinarily pathetic and even humiliating for the US. It will be very hard to beat, frankly impossible in this case, not least because Kirk was a normal and respected person (no matter how little worth I personally see to his political work) and Floyd was scum of the society. But this is not a good reason to try.
I do think I am far smarter than you, to the extent that you are incapable of modeling my thoughts.
What? How is that a "vs"? That was a national manhunt, the EU Parliament almost had a minute of silence for said father of 2. If the killer can be traced to 4chan, and with OwO shit he almost certainly will be, the blood in the visceral video is also on their hands. I am not proposing some far-fetched guilt by association here, this is imageboard slang, and people were getting ready to obliterate trans rights when it was suggested that casings have some "trans" stuff, why do you think another guilty group would suffer less ire?
A market where the stronger party selects whom it gets to compete with is not a very good market for evolving ideas. I am a snob but I'm a snob from 2ch, a cognitive elitist, opposed to self-appointed aristocracy. Compete on an open field with whoever is strong and willing to fight, live by the dunk, die by the dunk (which is why it's inappropriate that he literally died by a bullet from a hidden assassin, a total violation of the spirit). I like Fuentes more because he and his groypers invaded his debates and disrupted Kirk's silly scheme with even more insidious gotchas, and made deserved gains on it.
will be very unfortunate for Fuentes if it was one of his more mentally ill followers.
I admit I expected to get modded on moderately unfair grounds when I scrolled to this username, a nice surprise
Until very recently, top of the line iPhones were totally getting more expensive. And iPhone is not the luxury phone any more, that's more like some overengineered thi-fold Huawei (to be matched by a folding iPhone when it comes out). But fair, iPhone index is worse than Big Mac index and if we want to study premium consumption, we need something else.
"OwO notices bulge what's this" is a gay 4chan joke, nothing to do with trans, it's more femboy-coded if anything but first of all anonymous imageboard coded. I'll spare the inane details because the truly funny thing here is that 4chan "investigation" pinning this on some random weird transgender went viral, and that was fueled in large part by initial reports of "trans" messages on casings. This can be spun into "radical far right killer 4chan tried to pin the blame on trans", and to an extent it will be. This is such a disaster.
It's not an illusion due to the stock bubble, Europeans are poorer and only now starting to dimly appreciate how much poorer. But Conrad Bastable had a good blog post on this back in 2020. Unequal Growth: The Zero-Sum Games You Don’t See. Since then, everything became even more grotesque. I strongly recommend reading.
This essay began with one observation: In the first decade of the 2000s, the top 2 nations generated 31% of all the Economic Growth. In the next decade, their share double to 60% of Global Economic Growth. Growth is now a 2-player game.
……… The only escape is to grow faster than the median. Salary, investments, wages, bonuses, stock options, etc. etc. Whatever it takes. If you can grow faster than the average person, you’ll grow your personal Wealth quicker than the costs of these mandatory purchases are being raised.
That’s the only path to individual Wealth.
But the lesson applies at the national level too. Grow faster than the median or cost disease will eat your Wealth.
The first iPhone launched in mid-2007. You think Apple is going to lower prices in foreign markets just because those markets aren’t growing?
Don’t be silly. This chart applies all through your economy, for consumer and industrial goods alike.
Sure, there’s a bottom-tier product that exists to capture the revenue potential of whoever exists at the bottom of the market. But the top-tier product, the new technology, the new release, will continue to be priced under the assumption that those who purchase it are growing.
“Just economize, silly, nobody needs the newest iPhone” — yeah, I agree, I’m still using my 2016 model #pleb. But there’s a huge middle class in Japan and Europe that expects to have a certain purchasing power. A certain economic relevance. They’ve had it for 60+ years in most cases.
One imagines that feeling it slip away is a painful experience.
………
Conclusion
If United States GDP shrinks by $264B, while German GDP shrinks by $332B, as happened in 2009, both nations are hurting.
And Germany clearly hurts more — $68B more on an absolute basis, and by a greater percentage of its 2008 GDP. That difference widens the gap between the two nations.
But if the United States GDP grows by $2.5 Trillion while German GDP grows by $0.5 Trillion, as happened from 2016-2018, the gap between the productive capacity of the two nations widens by ~$2 Trillion.
Relative to the United States, Germany perhaps performed better in 2009 than 2016-2018.
Rationalists will be quick to point out that this is an unreasonable lens, as rational human actors should rather increase their personal income by $[X] even if their neighbour’s income increases by $[2X], than see their own income decrease by $[Y]. Assuming prices are static, I agree wholeheartedly.
But the lesson of Considerations on Cost Disease, The Bermuda Triangle of Wealth, and The Uncharity of College is that prices for the most important purchases will rise to consume most of the increased Wealth a society generates.
Globalization means the societal reference frame for many prices now becomes [the Most Productive society on Earth].
US GDP growth isn’t going to skyrocket your local rents in Germany (although Chinese GDP growth does appear to impact rents in Vancouver), but some of your favourite consumer goods will be priced according to US growth expectations.
You can grow or not grow, but that new iPhone will cost more regardless.
But "the morality of a child" is, I think, putting it too kindly. Kirk was not a child, he was a cynical propagandist in the job of training unprincipled partisans, ever changing his tune precisely in alignment with the party line and President's whimsy (see the pivot on H1Bs). I admit I despised him and his little, annoying gotcha act of "debating" infantile leftists, milking them for dunk opportunities. They deserved the humiliation, but the pretense of "promoting dialogue" was completely hollow, and the massive number of shallow, cow-like people in the US for whom it is convincing depresses me. I find his more resolute enemies still significantly more repulsive, and more so now that they're libeling him with absurd exaggerations of his less liberal views and gloating about a callous murder (of a man who was quite aware that political violence is a risk in his line of work, yet did public appearances; so at least in bravery quite deserving). But it is what it is. It's the morality of a soldier. You want to be a soldier in a culture war, because it's easier this way. Soldiers are obligated to suspend most of their moral judgement that is not directly instrumental to following orders, and this makes things so much easier.
Kirk was recruiting soldiers. He didn't care about Israeli victims of Oct 7, he cared that Israel is Our Greatest Ally (according to the President and GOP consensus; he started calibrating this message to go with the times recently). Kirk certainly didn't care about civilians in Gaza and anywhere else. He wasn't very sharp, but I think he understood well that a war with a just cause is not necessarily a just war, that even a just war can be fought by unjust people and with unjust methods. That it is possible for "good guys" to turn into "bad guys" depending on how they act in pursuit of their alleged goodness, and that remaining marginally better guys on the balance of evidence can still be not good enough to justify participating in a race to the bottom.
I much prefer the types of Fuentes or, better yet, Sam "Hitler's Top Guy" Hyde to those disingenuous establishment figures who pollute the commons with fake debate, fake intellectual engagement, fake morality. Kirk, PragerU, Bari Weiss stuff, it's all such fraud. Better yet have some beliefs and openly say what you mean. Even if you don't seek debate, it at least becomes possible in theory.
P.S. mild suspicion of Hlynka resurgence
The tyrant’s dream is to stop things from changing, since for him any change can only be for the worse—in the same way that, for a man atop a pyramid, moving in any direction means going downward.
This is just narrative. What things? Changing how?
It is worth noting that during Xi's reign China has changed a lot. Not in all ways for the better, but that's covered enough. They've become a high-trust society, in many respects higher-trust than the modern West. (So now we have pathetic protestations of things like safety in the streets or general politeness not counting, because it's compelled or whatever). They've doubled energy production per capita (the US has fallen a bit, while say the non-dictatorial UK has fallen off a cliff by 30% and is now far below China). They've transitioned from makers of slippers and "plastic crap" with a pathetically corrupt and infiltrated military and government to a technological superpower half a step behind the US and spooking the US into an increasingly undignified retreat from the Eastern Hemisphere. The list can go endlessly, it's arguably the most staggering timeline of national ascendance since the Industrial Revolution (if mostly by virtue of absolute scale), and of course it can be said that none of that is Xi's achievement, but he sure was well equipped to arrest those and other changes. He, however ineptly, struggled to accelerate them. Wouldn't it be easier to rule over impoverished peasants? Well, probably not. Chinese peasants sometimes used to decide they've had enough, successfully kill their emperors and usurp their thrones. "Lost the Mandate" and all that. Stupid slavish bugmen.
Taking it charitably, we know Xi was interested in Eastern mysticism and would likely love to be an Immortal Emperor. He also would opt to keep stagnant things he genuinely believes are good enough already: the "Democratic Centralism" and other buzzwords for the mechanics of the One-Party State he is lording over. That would necessitate stagnation and repression in significant aspects of culture and society, which we observe. But I'm not convinced a single immortal guy would achieve that better than an ever-regenerating hydra of government and quasi-government actors. Is there some cabal of ancient vampires maintaining American Civil Rights regime? No, they seem to keep recruiting. The Party, as O'Brien taught us, can be immortal even if the individual cell is frail. I think that's the core tragedy of our species – we have functional immortality for crude structures of power, often obfuscated in discourse by handwaving about "memes", but not for humans who, if they don't grow senile, can actually learn and acquire wisdom. Yeah, I think that even immortal dictators can be better than dictatorless dystopias, and it's too easy to build those.
Moreover, Xi said "in this century humans might be able to live to 150 years old". It sounds like he describes the opinion of scientists about the probable outlook for life extension technology, not some secret project he could realistically monopolize. Technology of this nature is, in general, hard to monopolize, and its very realization depends on scale.
I don't think we will see an immortal Ubermensch King in the East. Or at least, there will be a sizable class of lower-tier Immortals cultivating towards ascension – like in those Xianxia novels young Chinese read so much.
It's funny how you say "God-shaped hole", whereas it's clear you mean "immortality-shaped hole", for which God is the go-to plug. But it's much sillier than cryonics.
even if cryonics worked freezing yourself wouldn't save you from a bullet or a skydiving accident or anything else.
This is a very strange objection too. OK? How about not getting shot? Nothing is ever guaranteed but one can take reasonable precautions.
I do mostly mean LandSpace with Zhuque-2/3, and Space Epoch's Yuanxingzhe-1. Yes, I assume that these designs will be almost fully preserved in product version. They are better than Falcon-9 in that F9 is pretty old, and they're copying Starship as well. Methalox, steel body, more robust build (F9 diameter was limited by stupid American railroad/highway standard). This has the potential for rapid reusability and mass production. And you don't need to scale to Starship if you can scale to dozens of vehicles instead. I've heard that LandSpace may get facilities currently involved in metalworking for military aviation.
Long March 9,
I am completely jaded about the Long March program and it isn't factoring into my estimates. Robin Li was wise to insist on liberalizing the space market to enable those private efforts, they will determine Chinese ceiling.
I don't see much military use either, all that data will necessarily be related to Earth and they have a decent communication network as is. It might be an initial experiment for actual off-world datacenters, and also for processing signals collected by satellites themselves.
I think megalomaniacal projects are inherently collectivist, a National Pride thing. You can do that when you have some particular mixes of populism and optimistic technocracy, perhaps; or when you're an authoritarian quasi-fascist (by modern standards) state that doesn't feel the need to pander to felt mundane needs of the electorate and is able to sell random infrastructure as a cause for celebration. Britain these days sounds more like it might do a mega-housing project for immigrants, or a renovation of state surveillance grid. That can be sold as visionary, too.
So speaking of China, yeah they've got that in droves. What @roystgnr said about rocketry (I am more optimistic, their currently tested designs are innately better than Falcon 9 and may allow rapid scaling beyond Starships, though this might take 5+ years). They have started to assemble a distributed orbital supercomputer (again, bottlenecked by lift capacity). There's preliminary research into using Lunar lava tubes for habitats, with the goal of eventual settlement of the Moon once they have the means to deliver nontrivial mass. What @RandomRanger said about the big dam; for datacenters, I like that they have a project of national «public compute» grid to basically commoditize GPU cycles like electricity and tap water . They have this Great Green Wall project, planting a Germany-sized forest to arrest the spread of Gobi desert. They've done another one in Xinjiang already. Mostly it's trivial things at vast scale – like installing thousands of high-current EV chargers, solar everywhere etc. There's a lot going on.
I think Britain would be very much improved by something mundane like that instead of flashy awe-inspiring megaprojects. It impressed me today to find that this July, China has increased residential power consumption by 18% versus July of previous year. «Between 2019 and 2025, residential power consumption in the month of July rose by 138%». I can't readily find the equivalent stats for Britain, but energy use per capita has declined by 14% in the same period; incidentally China has overtaken the UK on per capita total energy use in 2019-2020 (you can click your way to apples-to-apples comparison). The decline in energy use is a very clear sign of British involution, and it wouldn't take that much, logistically speaking, to reverse – Brits are still rich enough, and they're small enough, to procure gas (Trump rejoices), and maybe some Rolls-Royce reactors, and reduce costs and raise quality of life. AC in the summer and ample heating in the winter would do wonders to make the island less dreadful.
When have the Democrats nationalized a private company?
Consider also that this is simply retarded. It's not Trump or Republicans who will own $INTC, it's the United States Government, and so in 3.5 years it'll likely be handed to "Democrats".
Well, State-Owned Enterprises are a feature of one notorious, nominally Communist state that the US is dedicated to beating, and this does look like a market-flavored convergent evolution in this direction, but no, I don't think it's theoretically leftist. It is of course statist and industrial-policy-pilled. Probably prudent; will allow the state to strongarm Intel into restructuring by TSMC executives, which seems to be the plan to save the beleaguered corporation.
Are there risks of corruption arising in the Trump administration
Oh yes.
This explains so much. When I said "We've had the same issue with Hlynka", I should have focused on this thought instead of getting triggered by the usual Hlynka rhetorics. In a sense, it's impressive how he did basically nothing to obfuscate his identity, exactly the same cocksure loquacity glossing over substantial flaws, and could rely on good faith alone.
- Prev
- Next
This is the part of Uncomfortable HBD Facts that is very underdiscussed: Blacks More Likely to have paranoid schizophrenia.
There's a ton of results in this vein, and his Arabic name makes me suspect that his parents were into Nation of Islam stuff, Yakub doctrine and all that, which is of course schizophrenic throughout (very funny though), so it might be hereditary for him, on top of direct schizophrenia-promoting nurture.
But I don't think the beancounting method really explains the problem. Many, many, many more Blacks who don't get any diagnosis and generally function well buy into this zany conspiracist bullshit. In the limit, the whole narrative of Black existence under the yoke of Systemic Racism and mass slaughter of unarmed black men by the police in the US is a giant conspiracy theory with clear paranoid motives, and spotlight cases like Nick Cannon going off about melanin, people buying into Jussie Smollett hoax, Candace Owens spiraling into even crazier hypotheses about secret societies behind Macron's wife being a man, "black scholars" with mind-bogglingly idiotic and racist doctrines propped up as real intellectuals (I like Kobi Kazembe Kambon a.k.a. Joseph A. Baldwin, read it up), etc. etc. all add up to a general schizophrenic-paranoid tone in the Black community. Except – wasn't it Whites (and Jews, but in any case, the well-off, educated non-Black demographics) who championed the doctrine of systemic racism? Aren't Whites also buying into many of these hoaxes and libels today?
Unless you exaggerate greatly, Hassan sounds like he has quite a low IQ on top of his "schizophrenia". Mentally, he's close to an 8-10 year old White or Asian kid.
And I think this is the elephant in the room. There is simply not enough capacity to suppress delusions induced and exacerbated by the information environment. There is no clear separation between delusions and sincere confusions, Hassan won't have a mature enough epistemology to distinguish things that he pathologically overfixates on from things that just kinda legit sound right, even if you pump him full of antipsychotics. This is the ground zero of Black American Madness, along with smarter people than Hassan who also have a more profound illness and/or higher ego strength so they keep it together and spread their nonsense around. Then there are borderline cases who are relatively gullible and either propagate the message or simply do not push back, like that smart and non-insane Black guy once did for another celebrated Guggenheim scholar, Ibram X. Kendi:
Well, Clarence then probably got a normal job and never achieved prominence as a thought leader for his people. He wasn't exuberant enough to be made a champion.
…and then comes everyone else, who is simply overwhelmed by moral blackmail, the volume of second-hand "corroborating evidence" and plain emotional confidence. And here we are.
In short my thesis is that a small (large relatively, but still amounting to fractions of a percent of the total population) difference in the rates of paranoid schizophrenia, compounded by significantly lower IQ, creates a critical mass of self-propagating cultural madness in the Black community, which lowers general epistemic standard to rock bottom and then spills over to the broader society, warping the entire default narrative of what it is about. And now we're training large language models on this oeuvre, which seals the bubble of the consensus reality. I bet if I feed this exchange to any frontier LLM, it'll rebuke me harshly with the usual tut-tutting routine about how systemic racism is totally real and Scholars say so.
Regarding your actual question: I think paranoid schizophrenics, no matter how "functional" for the moment, certainly can't have guns. This isn't hard.
More options
Context Copy link