DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
27d ago
Looming? What do you mean concretely?
There's reportedly been 9.5 million babies born in China last year. Something like 3.6 million in the US; of those, 1.8 million white babies. Accordingly, in 18 years there will be 5 times as many Chinese 18 year olds as there will be their White American counterparts. Yes, they have lower TFR, but at current trends they'll have a vastly larger workforce for many decades.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
27d ago
The likelihood of winning a conflict has little relevance to whether that conflict should be waged in the first place.
It actually has a lot of relevance. The real reason you act like it doesn't is that you do not seriously engage with the possibility of losing, and losing badly (losing what? To what degree? How many cards do you have left at the point of losing, and what terms can be negotiated?). People make unreasonable maximalist demands when they are assured of their invulnerability. You treat a great power conflict like another Middle Eastern adventure, “oh we found WMDs in this shithole, our Democracy will perish if we do not conquer it hue hue!”. It's an instinct that's hard to overcome after a century of uninterrupted wins and cost-free losses. The same Main Character Syndrome, coupled with low human capital in Trump team, explains decidedly suboptimal and cost-insensitive means that were chosen for prosecuting the conflict. Americans think they can afford anything, because that's recorded in their institutional DNA. But they have never fought a superior power, due to it never having existed prior to this day. So they have developed an auxiliary belief that the very fact of them antagonizing any power confirms it is inferior. It's hard to feel pity for such a narcissistic people.
it is the serf who acts in accordance with prudence and rationality. The serf is a serf precisely because he correctly calculates that servitude is what gives him the best odds of continued survival. The nobleman, in contrast, acts in accordance with virtue, even when the outcome is certain destruction.
In Imperial Russia, there was a trend when mujiks, LARPing as nobles, initiated duels over petty spats, murdering each other with axes; eventually the state had to put its boot down. Due to extremely low literacy rates they couldn't have plausibly cited Nietzsche when doing so, but I believe that they'd have appreciated your quote.
Self-serving, petulant, handwavy, shallowly aesthetic notions of virtue are cheap and easy to brandish in defense of one's animalistic impulses; any kind of impulsive retardation can be dressed up as a calling of aristocratic, virile masculine nature, there's a whole genre of extremely popular Western music about it, authored by the impromptu warrior aristocracy of the streets. Your own elite has been wiped out to such a degree that this whole discourse is vacuous, we can't consult with a living bearer of a tradition, only speculate. It is plausible that I am wrong and there's just never been any substance to the whole fraud.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
27d ago
No, you're correct. In fact, had the US continued the course it had just half a year ago, I'd still be largely holding this opinion. But the election of an illiterate boomer strongman does change matters. Xi also has managed to not do anything too self-defeating long enough. I admit I was wrong: the US does not have a functional elite to make appropriate use of its genuine (if transient) political, economic and technological advantages and keep the Chinaman down.
ASI may restore my faith in the previous model, but this is looking like a remote possibility.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
27d ago
After all, if the American GDP is in some way fake how come the median American can buy so much Chinese production with his or her dollars?
Largely because China (like everyone else) is buying your assets and the USD is the global reserve currency.
Trump is doing what he can to fix this pathological situation, by being laser focused on goods.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
27d ago
But he actually argues that the Chinese services sector size is underestimated, by Chinese accounting mainly.
We believe China’s GDP and PPP GDP are lowballed by an incomplete transition from the Material Product System (MPS) of national accounts, which excludes services by design. The World Bank is likely dutifully doing its sums with goods consumption in China multiples of the US but measuring services consumption as a fraction of the US.
The United Nations System of National Accounts (UNSNA) provides voluntary guidelines and specifically states that nations should base their national accounts on local conditions. What that has meant in the West is to adopt all UNSNA “innovations” introduced over the years.
Items like imputed rent, legal fees and R&D are now all included in GDP. The UK went hog wild with both illegal drugs and prostitution as now part of their GDP because… hey, why not? UNSNA’s 2008 guidelines explicitly recommend that illegal market activity should be included in GDP.
China’s NBS stood its ground on a conceptual level. Rightly or wrongly, the Leninist MPS considers services necessary costs of material production rather than real value creation. In China’s first attempt at converting MPS to SNA in 1985, it tacked on a ludicrously low 13% to the MPS number and called it China’s services GDP.
Over the years, the World Bank has twisted the arm of the NBS for modest increases to China’s services GDP – with limited success.
The affordability crisis in Western economies, the US in particular, is largely driven by inflation of necessary services – rent, healthcare, education and childcare – not by manufactured goods. While these costs have also gone up in China, they have increased less and much are left out of GDP anyway.
Also not captured by the ICP survey conducted in 2021 are the price and service wars that have broken out across industries and products – a bane on businesses but a boon for consumers.
This is most visible in China’s car market with OEMs either cutting prices to the bone (Hyundai Sonatas down to $17,000 from $42,000) or offering cutting-edge technology for peanuts (a 2,000-kilometer range BYD Q plug-in hybrid electric vehicle for $14,000). The price of solar panels fell 50% in 2023 and continues to trend down in 2024. CATL has announced plans to cut lithium-ion battery prices in half by the end of 2024.
Restaurants are offering white glove perks like hot towels, lotion by the sink and snazzy remodeled decors. Hairdressers hand out bottled water and fruit plates. Tech companies have slashed large language model (LLM) prices to basically free. Service quality in China, impossible to quantify, is now head and shoulders above the West and probably even Japan.
Adherence to UNSNA has caused a breakdown in the meaning of GDP. As necessary services become an ever larger share of Western economies, their growth does not appear to result in discernable improvements in living standards.
It's not a workshop country. The thesis isn't that they have a strong industry - everyone knows that.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
27d ago
This would actually make more sense yes. Allegedly, Trump’s Love for Tariffs Began in Japan’s ’80s Boom:
WASHINGTON — Donald J. Trump lost an auction in 1988 for a 58-key piano used in the classic film “Casablanca” to a Japanese trading company representing a collector. While he brushed off being outbid, it was a firsthand reminder of Japan’s growing wealth, and the following year, Mr. Trump went on television to call for a 15 percent to 20 percent tax on imports from Japan.
“I believe very strongly in tariffs,” Mr. Trump, at the time a Manhattan real estate developer with fledgling political instincts, told the journalist Diane Sawyer, before criticizing Japan, West Germany, Saudi Arabia and South Korea for their trade practices. “America is being ripped off,” he said. “We’re a debtor nation, and we have to tax, we have to tariff, we have to protect this country.”
Thirty years later, few issues have defined Mr. Trump’s presidency more than his love for tariffs — and on few issues has he been more unswerving. Allies and historians say that love is rooted in Mr. Trump’s experience as a businessman in the 1980s with the people and money of Japan, then perceived as a mortal threat to America’s economic pre-eminence.
That's from 2019. If China is just a stand-in for Japan (which he also tariffed anyway), it is no wonder that he acts so brazenly. You can bully Japan with no repercussions. He can finally get back at them for that piano humiliation.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
27d ago
I can only say that engaging with the Chinese, and with people like you, has gradually convinced me that White People (Hajnali European stock specifically) are basically jumped-up serfs, the confused lower caste of prawns from District 9, with little more to offer to the world sans stale kanging and hollow, corporate-coded pretense of “soul” that, if it ever existed, resided in your currently extinct owners. You don't even notice my point about simple economics and logistics, so lost you are in your racial superiority masturbation. But of course those issues are related.
if Japan were in China's position instead
But it isn't, and you are largely responsible for that, because your previous generation had the exact same attitude towards the Japanese. Deaths from overwork, rigid hierarchy, soulless collectivist automatons cheating and copying to flood the markets and dispossess our Christian Germanic workers – this can't be allowed, can it? Oh, what a pity that now that we know them better, Japan is a geriatric country of no ambition, that mainly produces anime to give you some respite from the toxic antihuman sludge of your own media. (Presumably this is the fault of Joos. Somehow for all your natural nobility of spirit you are not capable of resisting a tiny tribe of natural wordcels. At least the Chinese managed to overthrow the Manchu).
Regrettably, China is 10 times larger and the same tricks won't work.
A change in American economic policy sent global markets into a tailspin, so objectively speaking, America is in fact a big deal.
Yes, you can do a great deal of damage to humanity. This is akin to the bafflingly swinish line of argument that “China needs us more than we need them, because they need to sell their valuable manufactured goods to someone; our consumption is more valuable than production”. We shall see how well this philosophy works.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
27d ago
My impression after obsessively monitoring this situation for days (of course) is that neither side will fold, tariffs are here to stay, and everyone will be poor and mad for it. China of course won't fold, the idea that they're at risk is preposterous, they can well weather complete cessation of export to the US.
Broadly I have concluded that the main problem the US faces is racism towards the Chinese; the ill-earned sense of centrality and irreplaceability. I believe that Trump, Navarro and the rest of that gang are as misinformed as the average MAGA guy on Twitter, given how they speak and that amusing formula. Americans still think that their great consumption is the linchpin of Chinese economy, 10-30% of their GDP (it's more like 3%); that the Chinese produce apparel, “trinkets” and low-quality materials (they also produce things that Americans plausibly cannot start producing at the same quality in years); that American IP is vital for their industry (they're making their own software, OSes, CPUs…) and so on. The idea that American de-industrialization is a product of betrayal by Wall Street Elites who offshored jobs to China also feeds into the delusional notion of possible parity – but the truth is that there has never been a point in history where American industry had scale or diversity comparable to what's going on in China now. The issue with their bad financials is also overblown; as for losing markets, they have the capital at hand for consumption stimulus. This guy from Beijing writes:
China’s PPP GDP is only 25% larger than that of the US? Come on people… who are we kidding? Last year, China generated twice as much electricity as the US, produced 12.6 times as much steel and 22 times as much cement. China’s shipyards accounted for over 50% of the world’s output while US production was negligible. In 2023, China produced 30.2 million vehicles, almost three times more than the 10.6 million made in the US.
On the demand side, 26 million vehicles were sold in China last year, 68% more than the 15.5 million sold in the US. Chinese consumers bought 434 million smartphones, three times the 144 million sold in the US. As a country, China consumes twice as much meat and eight times as much seafood as the US. Chinese shoppers spent twice as much on luxury goods as American shoppers.
…It is prima facie ridiculous that China’s production and consumption, at multiples of US levels, can be realistically discounted for lower quality/features to arrive at a mere 125% of US PPP GDP. … Similarly, analysts who lament that China accounts for 30% of the world’s manufacturing output but only 13% of household consumption are far off the mark. China accounts for 20-40% of global demand for just about every consumer product but much of the services it consumes have been left out of national accounts.
Accordingly, with a higher real GDP, their effective debt to GDP ratio may be as low as 150%, not 200-300%. They have US assets to sell too.
So China can trivially absorb half of the overcapacity freed by reduced trade with the US, and might find buyers for the rest.
My thesis is that in picking this fight, Americans don't understand that they're actually not that big of a deal. Unfortunately, their delusions are globally shared and become reality in their own right. But perhaps not enough to offset the gross physical one.
The actual dangerous thing for China here is that Trump seems determined to immiserate the whole planet, completely irrespective of any geopolitical rivalry, because he's an illiterate anarcho-primitivist and thinks that all trade is theft unless it's barter, basically. America vs. The World, especially with a chain reaction of tariffs on Chinese (and likely also Vietnamese etc…) capacity spillover, results in massive reduction of productivity for everyone. For now, nations like Vietnam are unilaterally dropping tariffs on American crap, but that can't be a big effect because their tariffs were low to begin with, and Americans just don't and cannot produce enough at price points that people of those nations can afford. (We may see IMF loans for 3rd world countries importing overpriced American beef or Teslas or whatever to placate Don, but I doubt it'll be sustainable). I suppose in the long run the idea is that Optimus bots will be churning out products with superhuman efficiency, at least Lutnick argues as much. But that's still years away. Perhaps this extortion of zero balance trade (so in effect, the demand that trading partners buy non-competitive American products) is meant to finance the transition to posthuman automated economy. Bold strategy.
I am of course very amused and curious to see how it'll go. Will Fortress America intimidate the rest of us into submission, likely forever? Or will it be so stubborn, brutal and ham-fisted that humanity will finally rebel and ostracize the rogue state, letting it broil in its own supremacist fantasies? Can Bessent et al. turn 1D “trade le bad” checkers of the King of Understanding Things (懂王) into 4D chess? We shall see.
I really appreciate that Americans have been so fed up with a demented president that they elected a retarded one instead. It's clear that Trump is simply illiterate – and perhaps literally so, do we know for sure that he can read English, has anyone seen him read a book or something to that effect? At the very least his takes aren't better than what I'd expect from an average voter with a stubborn child's notion of economy. Give me money, take my goods, very short words, very petty grievances.
The awesome thing about it is that with a stunted child in total control, you can truly just do things. He could threaten allies, the way he's doing it with Europe: buy our oil (more than we produce… pay in advance, 10 years on year, or whatever!) or we drop out of NATO and leave you to deal with Putin. He could threaten with direct military aggression, like the Greenland case. He'll feel very clever and smug in doing so, and his base will also gloat about his genius.
He may well succeed. American negotiating position (as the world's greatest military power) is strong. We may see democratic nations transform into communist dictatorships liquidating their pension funds to fund American war factories, or taking IMF loans to buy Teslas. There is no ceiling to winning here.
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