Muslim subcontinentals
Although I inadvertently started this, I don't want to engage much. But... I have long been fascinated by Persian(ate) culture and learned Persian (and Arabic). Shia Islam has some weird things, but remains in conversation with philosophy, logic etc. while Sunni Islam literally rejects philosophy, science (a fire burns because God wills it, there are no "chemical laws") and... asking questions. Subcontinental Muslims are Sunni - and they mix it with ugly tribal practices (nominally banned by Islam itself). The upper class Pakistanis I discuss Persian poetry with and dated in the past, are quite nice, insightful etc. but some habits and beliefs really shock me.
edit: I didn't state the core conceit: The Islamic subcontinent was heavily Persianized, the court language was (Afghan) Persian until the 1830s when the East India company changed local governance and administration (until then their agents learned Persian and kept records in it) although the population overall never spoke it much.
Frank
1d ago
If you oppose China, you should be scared and try to actually learn about it instead of repeating comfortable copes. Chinese capacity and progress is truly impressive - reassuring for human industrial civilization, but horrifying for me as a Christian who wants true freedom.
People have been repeating these same copes for hundreds of years, about the US then Germany then Japan and... 40 years already about China. The Chinese market is freer than the US and US government spending is a higher percentage of GDP than China's. Even with rather high (new) environmental regulations, Chinese companies can just do things, build factories quickly etc. which take 5+ years to receive planning permission in most of the US.
China has much more competition than in the West. Even when the government directly orders something, it's just broadcasting goals which many smaller governments try to reach in many different ways. Once an effective method is found, the people behind the effective method are promoted to try to implement it elsewhere while new competitions are started. In the US the 50 states have long since stopped experimenting with weird policies and the federal government offers many carrots and some sticks to standardize everyone on mediocre stagnation.
You repeat copes like "China just steals" but China has been inventing leading technology for at least a decade. Materials science, engineering, chemistry, mathematics etc. high impact papers have 60-80% Chinese authors.
demographics suck ... China ... does not have nearly the same social security safety net
Chinese demographics don't matter, because those old people don't have much wealth and won't bend half the economy to care for them. Those old people were also poorly educated. They are being replaced more educated people, who grew up with better nutrition. 1.4 million engineers graduate per year vs 200k in the US. Their factories are also heavily automated. Their elites have no need to replace the people - indeed, they even emphasize traditional culture and architecture in a way we can only envy.
Frank
1d ago
But what is a thene? (Being countable implies discrete things/examples, perhaps it shouldn't be countable.) Mild inspiration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emic_and_etic_units
Frank
2d ago
New Chinese cars are about 1/4 of US prices and significantly nicer. Reliability seems roughly equal (newer cars in the US seem to break way more than 2 decades ago), but we'll need some years to tell. Either way, these $8000 Chinese electric cars are quite nice for many purposes. This is all 2nd hand though - I don't like cars much. But for heavy vehicles, you can get a Chinese fire truck for $100k instead of 1.5 million in the US. In Mexico, Chinese semis like Shacman seem to already have 1/3 market share. A mine I work with is considering buying 200 (originally 40 but they can get this many more and hire drivers for the same price as they expected for 40).
I don't see how Western industry can compete without actively improving infrastructure to drive cost reductions. At the moment, it's more expensive by pure energy expenditure to move parts around the US etc. than in China, besides higher technical competency, faster turn around times etc. For a while, I was curious whether the Great Lakes could compete with the Yellow River Delta but without immediate ocean access, barges down the rivers or canals are 1/3 as efficient as cargo ships in the sea.
US economic complexity has been decreasing and the largest Western nations aren't doing much better. I'm partly to blame, provisioning tools for extractive industries - but in the short-medium term I don't know what else small Christian societies can out compete on. @Shrike N.b. I am not a China booster (what freedom does the Gospel have there?) but coherent economic planing, growth and improved standards of living are good and emulatable. Western stagnation is recent, but deep - and in these conversations, we tend to embrace the worse possible choices; for less short term pain guaranteeing great pain later.
Frank
2d ago
better to submit to Xi Jinping than suffer Houellebecq’s Submission
Particularly as Putin welcomes millions of Indians to Russia too. Scary is the future ahead.
Frank
3d ago
A man who was convicted and fined for setting a Koran on fire, while the man who attacked him with a knife while he was doing so only received a suspended sentence
A German girl was jailed for ...defaming (cyberbulling?) a gang rapist whose sentence was entirely suspended. Similarly, in Oragen a stabber was acquitted because the victim said a racial slur.
- The EU Omnibus I proposes to deregulate a bit, let's see where it goes.
- The Western European elite hasn't changed in ages, the same families control London, Milan etc. as 800 years ago. European class structure is roughly: super elites with assets, wealthy politicians gaining from their place in the apparatus, middle class bureaucrats (earning less than a McDonald's employee in the US), poor working class, lumpenproles (indigenous and foreign) including retirees which consume 1/3-1/2 of GDP (bribes to keep riots down). Politicians (in nearly all parties) don't understand how to drive economic growth besides by hiring more bureaucrats (but there's no tax base left for this.) In the US, it's been possible to work hard, even at McDonald's and invest everything and build enough wealth to retire early (although consumerist culture infects people away from this). In Europe, most remuneration comes in the form of mandatory expenses (like bureaucracy controlled retirement funds with below market returns or high taxes for social services). Everything functions better than the US, with less waste for transportation, healthcare, school etc. (similar to better results for far less GDP expenditure) places you can physically socialize in (because you don't have a long commute far from work and friends) etc. but it's rarely possible to do better or excel. Class mobility is almost impossible - certainly not creating generational wealth. The middle class is tiny, because big business is structurally encouraged and even amassing capital to start or receive a loan is difficult. (Hell, after 20 years the EU still lacks a common capital market..) And well, I made a few million working in Eastern Europe which would have been impossible in the West. All this is to say: The West European elites truly hate you and me and structurally tries to keep everyone down (high income and capital gains taxes retard capital accumulation, so generational wealth in Europe remains the only wealth around.) The US at least has competing elites, rising through entrepreneurship (vs. the bureaucrat happy establishment side).
Frank
4d ago
current estimated lithium reserves are not sufficient
"reserves" are economically recoverable resources. As the price changes, reserves increase. There was a brief lithium bubble where ignorant players thought lithium worked like copper with multi-year lead times etc. but there is more lithium than we should ever need. Bubble -> overcapacity -> price collapse -> reserve decrease. Everyone in commodities knows how this works. But lithium doesn't give you long periods of profit because it's a salt and production ramps up in weeks. You can fill a bore with water then pump the brine out, let the water evaporate and boom lithium. There are plenty of easily accessible molecules, refining is more difficult but you weren't worried about that.
Base metals are in a far worse situation with all recent copper exploration presenting dreadful grades (significantly worse than the gold mining ventures I'm involved with). Grades are half of what they were in the 90s and brownfield expansion costs have ballooned to rival greenfield. Only 14 deposits have been discovered in the past decade! Marimaca and Glencore are still interesting here.
Now, I believe the peak oil narrative was 100% correct and fracking only caused a 10 year delay as incinerated a trillion in capital (because of short well lives and gassing out) although there are still great conventional opportunities e.g. Prio in the Brazilian presalt layer. But even without nuclear, China's found a way forward with much to most of its heavy vehicles already running on LNG instead of diesel and build outs of synthetic gas, which I suspect will build a price ceiling around $80 BOE by the end of the decade, powered by cheap solar (which certainly has a positive EROI in their deserts.) I suspect there will only be one more oil bull market. I am rather pessimistic about the West (baring Chinese largesse) here. In the US, Trump finally cut the Gordian knot and freed mines from (in some cases) 30 year permitting hell - his talk of price floors and raw material tariffs makes me suspect auto-genocide from the right too. Financing is still hard abroad (ESG inertia still keeps US funds away and EU banks still have such laws, royalty companies have also seen massive consolidation with all 14 I'm involved with going through M&A this year)...
I didn't praise state capacity once but argued the opposite: China is not state directed like you describe.
My recent post history is full of criticisms of such metrics! You literally have no idea what I'm talking about and recycle the same copes.
More options
Context Copy link