FrankishKnight
No bio...
User ID: 645
FrankishKnight
8hr ago
Because an invasion of the homeland is so unlikely
Our homeland, Europe has been invaded.
Household consumption being 40% of GDP means households receive 40% of national income to spend. The rest goes to the state and corporate sectors, funding the investment-heavy model. Even if every yuan buys more calories than we thought, that doesn't change the share going to households versus the share going to industrial buildout.
Not so fast, different systems of national accounting and different relative prices complicate matters.
Chinese housing area/person roughly equals Germany's and energy consumption is nearly there, yet constitutes 25% of Geman PPP GDP per capita, with about 12.5k rent/utilities. Would both use similar systems, China's would be about 10k PPP, while lised PPP GDP/capita is... about 25k. Yet Chinese don't spend 40% on housing and energy, indeed housing's only a few percent of Chinese GDP (this is the imputed rent issue I harp on about). Remember, this is all PPP - supposedly adjusted...
Where US retail sales are 7.3T and Chinese 6.6T, US HFCE is 20T or 2.8x retail sales, while Chinese's is about 6.8T or 1x retail sales? (Then consider changing exchange rates when making the dollar numbers.) How can you compare US and Chinese numbers when the US' includes education, healthcare, travel, imputed rent and China's is just retail sales? @sarker
How is China getting the 70+% of its oil imports in this future?
Oil demand is decreasing if still slowly. Gasoline use is down. Last year, heavy vehicle use made up half of Chinese LNG consumption, which would look like substitution - but LNG demand is decreasing faster and faster. Huge solar and nuclear build outs are taking over (coal consumption is also dropping due to rapid construction of more efficient plants) and today, 22% of new heavy trucks there are electric. China is also building out synthetic natural gas plants enabled by cheap solar creating an effective price ceiling at $80 BOE.
FrankishKnight
9hr ago
in purely thermodynamic terms, if literally everything is cheaper in China, you can ignore standard macroecon, largely eschew exports, subsidize domestic demand and make Qianlong's boast a reality.
Capital begets capital. Increased capital concentration decreases costs of production and labor requirements. Left to expand forever, no one should ever catch up - but everywhere but China (so far) the greatest capital accumulations eventually succumbed to suicidal regulation and extracting value to subsidize non-productive sectors.
FrankishKnight
10hr ago
Won't the US enjoy a quantitative and qualitative superiority in AI though, based on the compute advantage, through to at least the 2030s?
What does that gain you when China can move matter?
FrankishKnight
2d ago
Argument?
FrankishKnight
3d ago
4, 10
Yes.
20, 30
Probably. What's even the difference between fake and wrong?
It's really hard to measure things or make conclusions from them. E.g. if this recent paper is true, modern neoclassical economics and DSGE models etc. are wrong (because tariffs have the opposite impact). I don't think we can really know. But we've had unmeasured endogenous money creation for a long time. Asset prices and credit cycles seem to drive the economy lately, but IDK how to incorporate those into some metric doing what inflation measurements should do.
No, you just wildly misunderstood[1] my point and think I (or rather my company) am too lazy to understand basic metrics. I am saying that OER is bad and not correlated to actual housing costs. Neither mortgage and insurance payments nor differences in total purchasing vs. rental costs are captured (depending on the geography, renting can be twice or half as much as buying). BLS lags and assumes price increases are gradual such that the sampled month only shows 1/6 of the change but rental prices do not go up a few dollars per month but have big, occasional changes based on new tenants etc. (Yes, this should be smoothed and averaged out but... I am arguing that's not what's done here.) To be clear, I don't think housing is currently a big inflation driver e.g. the New Tenant index showed a much faster decline.
[1] fair, not like I effort post or think about word choice. I e.g. don't know why I focused on CPI vs. the others which I also have problems with. CPE's the only one with fed targets...
Of course! I've lazy posted about this for years. Obviously, the basket of goods a person uses has gone up wildly more than the official numbers suggest - just compare the prices of food now and in your childhood. When you normalize different categories or baskets with wage increases, hours worked and labor productivity, it gets especially bad. We have also had wildly inflationary policy for decades now, which must increase to service debt while we're in a commodity supercycle where molecules matter again.
FrankishKnight
3d ago
Big topic, little time:
- cost increases are the main driver; there are less goods and things being done in America, they're just expensive
- at work we remove whole categories like government spending, legal, advertising and medicine (this is debatable, but important to normalize things later) which has long precedent in different systems of national accounting and, both from Socialist countries and libertarian analysts like Gavekal
You could have a society with lower GDP but higher real-world prosperity
We have plenty such examples today!
FrankishKnight
7d ago
I've been trying to find a nice take down of "out of Africa" I placed into my notes. It was basically just an argument that Africans and everyone else are quite divergent evolutionarily.
FrankishKnight
7d ago
Not much to say. I can't effort post but here's some rambling:
I don't know much math (and learned most in the last couple years) but architecting nice trade execution lets you do a lot of things; a good trade or correct insider knowledge is meaningless if you don't know how to isolate the opportunity from risks unrelated to what you want exposure to.
The systems themselves had a lot of inline assembly. Lisps all have some disasm function giving a function's assembly, which you can improve and inline for easy high performance (or e.g. dynamically change). The architecture's were all OOP (i.e. moving hashmaps of data and assembly functions). In the same way a class can remove a level of if nesting, looking up particular fields in the object/map like "exit-inventory-below-optimal" or "exit-inventory-above-optimal" saves time, and those are all precalculated. They all used event sampling instead of time sampling. There were different models according to situation e.g. news can push the market to bimodal distributions around a new level, which governed particular data representation - laid out to encode decisions. Linear trend channels, vol compression breakout, support/resistance breakouts and trend change when linear trend channels break were insightful. I learned to write trading agents for each strategy (with an agent for each slight change e.g. for every .1% difference in stop loss) and all agents issuing internal orders, combined (e.g. some agents sell and others buy, canceling out) and then executed (Alan Dunne talks about "ensembles"). (I now only make a few trades a year with 2-5 year time horizons, so the agents' "votes" are weighted by success in the current and various other regimes, and they're working on various valuation schemes. Also log scale helps, because markets move return space.)
Sampling is hard and important, since you need to choose data representations/current distributions/regimes etc. I like additive swarm systems. There was cool signal processing stuff for feedback control which I didn't understand, but which govern when to turn off (groups of) agents according to market stress and risk exposure. If you structure everything right, you'd have most computational power constantly rebuilding 100gb of hash maps and while the main loop does 2-3 look ups per agent on an event, everything on some group of correlated assets (like 5 gold mining companies in the same geography). (N.b. ensembles decorrelate things, different agents just with different stop losses have distinct return profiles even if only trading Brent.) Event sampling means if 20 things happen in an hour, but then 40 happen in 5 mins, and you're sampling every 10th thing... You'll have a lot going on during a little clock time on the spikes, hence precomputing things. Systemic indicators are driven by moving "windows" of data, whose updates are all recursively adjusted in the agent swarm. Remember, missing trades is fine but making bad ones is bad - so you'd have a more dedicated update loop for positions you're holding.
But everyone improved order execution, some HFT firms like Virtu shifted to providing order execution as a service. This is why IEX remains a small player.
Nowadays, off exchange trading/dark pools have similar volume to exchanges and while they're actually valuing assets, most can't see those transactions, which reduces overall price discovery. Far worse, passive inflows into indexes make up most exchange volume, which kills price discovery. You can do really nice things looking at the many thousands of stocks which have literally no analysts looking. (The investable world has really shrunk since the 70s, less quality markets (e.g. African and South American governments undertook awful policy so everyone left) and less publicly traded companies) but even the S&P 600 barely gets attention.)
Munger: "Investing is the only profession where inactivity is a competitive advantage."
FrankishKnight
8d ago
For the past decade, everyone I know (e.g. my grandma) only gets recommended videos of guys in trucks talking about race realism etc. even though they're generic liberals and just try to watch craft videos. I was annoyed by it until I "converted". Overall quality's pretty low, but it's often fairly solid. Lately my grandpa was directed to this gem.
FrankishKnight
8d ago
I've seen him mentioned a few times (including here iirc) but his work seemed to disjointed and slop-y, so I stopped quickly.
algorithms have a left wing bias and that dissident voices are difficult to find
They've been boosting dissident voices for a decade bar the topic of covid, in my experience.
FrankishKnight
8d ago
At least today, LLMs can't produce anything which runs in any of the languages I use at work or leisure. An AI should be able to reason from a spec etc. but they're currently slaves to training data alone.
viable option for anything that even vaguely cares about performance
There have been plenty of hard real time systems and operating systems using GC.
Common Lisp can dominate benchmarks (over C and Fortran) but often gets kicked out, because they say e.g. in-lining assembly doesn't count even though the CL programmer generates and optimizes that assembly from the REPL (emitting it via compile time macros or such). I've worked on CL HFT systems (n.b. since ~2017 the field's not looked anything like the popular world things, because of regulatory and policy changes.)
APL or BQN are also great and can write compilers at competitive performance.
Various Forths offer different memory management paradigms to C with more safety and reliability (e.g. the ALOT word). Indeed, the preferred way is for everything to run on the stack alone.
There has been better than C for longer than we've lived. That e.g. Lisp required a dozen mb of ram caused cost issues some decades ago, but now that it's cheap...
Anyway, modern C++ memory management's closer to Rust than C, Swift has some nice innovations too. Many things can be done - the OS could even manage it for the program. Research has shown how GC can theoretically surpass manual memory management - and today GCs are faster already, just look at runtime and wall clock time. The developer today chooses when to trade latency for throughput and wall clock speed.
FrankishKnight
8d ago
Most mines are deployed by gun, rocket or helicopter e.g. FASCAM or butterfly mines.
there is not a need to transfer large sums of money to the elderly
Pensions are old men cutting trees down.
In general, the social state is fundamentally corrupt, divorcing people from their action's consequences. (Alas, we don't have to imagine the block voting to increase their privileges... We're already stuck in a doom loop.)
FrankishKnight
8d ago
FrankishKnight
8d ago
To state it more clearly, man cannot build and maintain civilization leaching from others - civilization must prosper and multiply.
FrankishKnight
16d ago
I didn't praise state capacity once but argued the opposite: China is not state directed like you describe.
GDP blabla
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.
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.
FrankishKnight
16d 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.
FrankishKnight
16d 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
FrankishKnight
17d 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.
And precisely this mindset's why the US, yea West is decaying - instead of infinite striving for excellence, those raised here sit on past laurels and cope away anything better. Living without curiosity is comfortable lest you learn something new and convert everything around you into tech debt to work on - yet that comfort's disappeared, hence our entire community, formed around discussions of cost disease and cultural decline.
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