aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
20hr ago
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.
It's getting a little late on a Sunday to go point by point again but if memory serves correct, I briefly looked for the post can couldn't find it, 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. And I just don't really see that as very likely. If AI doesn't get all that much better than it is now then I foresee china having another decade, maybe fifteen years of exceptional output before a lot of trouble handling a rapidly shrinking population. If AI does take off in a big way I think the couple years head start on chips will be pivotal and giving that up would be foolish. I can't really think of any reason to expect we'd fall between those two points.
aqouta
23hr ago
I believe the current US policy will end up making everyone poorer and American global standing lesser
Certainly we can agree trade restrictions as an end result make everyone poorer. My position is that these are like trade restrictions on nuclear missiles or military drones where there is special interest to weigh against efficient markets.
in the long term it will guarantee a separate technological civilization existing and building in and around China.
This is just kind of silly to me. It's like a concern that opposing arms exports to a rival nation might mean they might adopt a gun with a different caliber and that'll make sales in the future more complicated. Except GPUs are even more interchangeable than other weapons systems. China isn't making chips out of Gallium or something exotic. They're using slightly more primitive DUV tech instead of EUV similar to the direction intel went down. They're not exactly hot swappable but this system lock in concern just doesn't appear to be real. These are pieces of specialized hardware that do linear algebra. The american domestic market leaders in AI don't even all use nvdia hardware to run inference. Openai uses nvdia, Google has their TPUs and anthropic uses Amazon Trainium.
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".
For strategic initiatives? Yes, obviously the CCP is interested in accelerating this development and would be whether or not they had access to nvdia chips. 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. Like criticizing America for banning tik tok, which is hasn't actually even managed to do, from a country that bans all American social media companies. I don't mean to go total whataboutism but at some point if you trade extensively with an entity doing industrial policy you're effective just accepting the inverse of their policy.
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.
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 while being this confident that allowing Nvdia chips in will be able to suppress that development enough to give America a permanent foothold into the market. It's not going to happen, china is not going to play fair with their internal market and will crush out the foreign competition if able.
No developers, no users, no network effects, no future.
If the united states demanded every fortune 500 company issue windows phones then the demand would be induced and the app ecosystem would have come into existence. This would have made everyone poorer of course, but the CCP often has autarkic goals over pure pie growing. Incidentally I actually owned a windows phone my senior year of high school, it was pretty near, had a slide out keyboard but the lack of apps was a killer.
One of those "billions" is in China, can you really take credit for it?
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. Of course some nations like India made worse use of it but even India has improved under the regime if less starkly than China.
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.
This is an ironically Trumpist take on things for as much as you rightly excoriate his team's perspectives elsewhere. America has moved and focuses on services, research, design ect. It's a transition China would quite like to make. Even NVDIA doesn't actually produce the physical chips itself. Demand is also a pretty important part of this all as well as much as people like to denigrate it, China does suffer for a lack of domestic demand.
after which they've consistently had the highest growth rate of all major economies.
Growthrate is great and all but it's a bit cooked in favor of starting from behind. But this whole topic is a different rabbit hole than what we were talking about.
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.
Really depends on how transformative you think AI is going to be. multipolarity doesn't seem very stable in any case.
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.
NVDIA uses things like ChipNeMo which is only going to get better. The whole point of AI is to eventually accelerate all labor efforts and chip manufacturing is no different except that is has recursive returns. That's the kind of thing that keeps you permanently ahead.
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.
Then I return to being very confused as to why we're going to regret this. The argument about whether we should want to weaken a geopolitical rival or whether we should even have geopolitical rivals is complicated and has some merit but this certain does hurt our geopolitical rivals.
aqouta
1d ago
Why do you imagine they would hurt themselves like that?
You'd have to ask Jensen Huang why he's so hungry for demand despite not saturating the domestic market. The traitor, the treasonous little worm, is fighting bills that merely demand he offer the chips to domestic buyers for the same price. His public logic is the same short sighted nonsense of a "toehold" that you propose. This is a man who lies through his teeth at every opportunity. He claims that selling chips to China won't reduce chips available for western markets, this is a lie, in his earning report he very clearly says they already sell out of the chips.
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.
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.
Can you spell it out?
Specifics could shake out a number of ways depending on where, whether and how you think AI will Plateau. In all cases besides it basically capping out at gpt-5 level dominance in this field is critical. If it is powerful enough to actually do high level engineering work then it instantly obviates China's other major advantage in having a big workforce. If it scales all the way to AGI then forget about it, winning that race is all that matters.
Winner gets to be the center of commerce and yes some latitude that comes along with having the most powerful military. These things come with social and political influence. Social and political influence that I think is better in the hands of democratic powers, as flawed as they are, than the autocratic CCP. We know what PAX Americana looks like and it looks pretty good actually. Billions rising up out of poverty. General spread of democratic institutions. And we know who Xi is allied with, nations like North Korea and Russia.
I'm happy that the Chinese people are prospering. I certainly don't want to take that away from them. 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. It's not a regime I would like to see replicated and given strength and more than Soviet Russia was a regime I would have liked to see replicated and given strength. 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.
in the long run end up poorer and have a smaller slice of the global market.
China will take the chips, use them to accelerate their position, including in advancing their own semiconductor industry. I don't know how you could actually believe giving them the chips now would actually guarantee a slice of this market. As soon as China has even slightly competitive chips they will crumple up NVDIA and toss it out like so much garbage. It's what happens with every firm that tries to compete in China.
aqouta
2d ago
Do I really need some kind of special reasoning to oppose sending scarce resource that already sells out in western markets to a geopolitical rival to not only not direct gain but very straightforward direct losses to domestic firms? To sell our opposition the rope it needs to hang us is something a particularly short sighted firm might advocate for, but to do so below market rate? This is madness.
This lock-in effect is just nonsense and has not worked for literally a single firm that has sold out to china. China is not going to forego building their own echo-system and hasn't for any other sector they've found strategically important.
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?
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?
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.
This has always been the goal and the chips would only be used to push towards this goal faster. 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 then I just don't buy this fantasy that selling out now is going to give us a better seat in the future.
aqouta
2d ago
Yes, they continue to try and play catch up, what I'm definitely not seeing is the regret for making them do that rather than just giving them the more powerful chips. Lack of access to nvidia chips is demonstrably slowing down their AI progress.
aqouta
2d ago
much like how they are now regretting limiting Nvidia sales to China forcing them to build their own homegrown system.
What? This is not happening unless there is very new news. China's home grown system is still much worse.
aqouta
3d ago
Sure thing, by the way we taxed the billionaires which didn't turn out to be enough so we've been printing a lot of money, so your double espresso extra tallow shot is going to be $47
aqouta
3d ago
Israel is violently hated by every single one of its regional neighbours that isn't ruled by an Israeli client regime.
Maybe I'm the streets in a kind of lab Arab patriotism sense, but the surrounding leaders would probably breath a sigh of relief to be rid of hamas as a hub for the Islamic brotherhood. Your whole post hinges on a kind of pan Arab support that just doesn't seem to exist.
Just look at what Israel has done in the region. When you blow up a bunch of children's hands with your cool pager stunt, do you think those children are going to grow up and be strong supporters of your government?
I think it would be hard to estimate what percentage of the Arab world ultimately would support VS oppose attacks on hezbollah. Certainly the coming Syrian regime will have no love lost for them backing Nashar. They've been behind the killing of hundred of thousands of Arabs themselves, does that not create martyrs against them or does only Israel make its enemies stronger when it kills them? Their number one supporter isn't even Arab, it's Iran and Iran is responsible for more Arab deaths than Israel by a very wide margin.
Of course, that's leaving aside the geopolitical aspects - Israel is an outpost of the US empire, an empire which is currently failing and losing its ability to exert control over the rest of the world. Why would China and Russia, when given the chance, not turn Israel into a gigantic blood-and-treasure hole for the US empire (more than it already is) at the cost of giving the arabs a bunch of weapons?
Is Israel somehow not being sent food and weapon shipments from the US while also being drained financially to do so?
I imagine that as long as they weren't active participants in ethnic cleansing or had a demonstrated record of opposition to it (like those who refused to join the IDF) they'd be welcomed with open arms. But you are right - a lot of them wouldn't be accepted as refugees, especially those who enthusiastically supported crimes against humanity or shot children for trying to retrieve the corpses of their family members. This would be a big problem, and I'm honestly not sure there's a happy outcome for anybody involved. The organisations that would be the Nazi-hunters of this future are making lists and recording details right now, like the Hind Rajab foundation - which is already responsible for many nations being incredibly unwelcome to IDF soldiers.
OK yes, so the plan is that the Israelis are getting genocide one way or the other, got it. Yeah, I gotta be honest, I think almost all of them are going to hunker down in their nuclear state and play North Korea "we have the bomb and nothing left to lose" politics and probably come out of it fine. North Korea even gets food aid for its trouble.
But then really I think your whole premise is just flawed in thinking being a pariah state means you can trade for weapons and supplies. Israel managed to get enough weapons to win the six days war by trading with post soviet nations without any super power support. It's not like other genocidal nations struggle to find trading partners, turkey is in nato, Russia even finds trading partners in Europe as it invades one of their neighbors. Half the middle Eastern nations have committed at least an ethnic cleansing.
aqouta
3d ago
Ah I see, then @FirmWeird, no I just read almost every post
aqouta
3d ago
I think the equilibrium would be found where the things being said by the populist side would be so obviously stupid and ruinous that even the median voting American would be like "uh, I dunno, all the state run raw milk distribution centers are losing money, do we really want to nationalize coffee shops?"
aqouta
3d ago
Have you been reading the thread or did you just come in midway because you got asked to moderate a post?
I am not a moderator.
This conversation was taking place in a hypothetical future where Israel is cut off from international trade and aid due to their genocide of the Palestinians - there wouldn't be any Gazans left to celebrate. We're discussing a worst case scenario, because my original point was that committing acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing is a terrible idea for Israel because it doesn't have the geography or natural resources in order to survive a future where it has lost the support of the US and other western allies.
Oh, I had not realized you meant genocide for real and not the way it's usually used in relation to Israel to describe a situation where populations don't actually ever decrease. This is often the problem with this expansion of terms. Although this is confusing because before you've alluded to Israel still being at war with some entity as their military protectionism being cut off was stated as some important thing. Is the west bank still in its current formation after this or are we imagining every Palestinian was genocided? Because it doesn't really seem lie any of Israel's other neighbors are exactly excited to get into a conflict with her. Are we proposing that like Arabs are blood lusted for the destruction of Israel like in those threads on super hero power scaling?
Frothing genocide? I'm not proposing any kind of genocide at all - I'm saying that Israel would fall apart if it became a pariah state, which is very different.
You're proposing the rest of the world commit a genocide by your own definition of blockading food imports. Or do you think what Israel is accused of doing doesn't count?
Moreover, as mentioned previously, a lot of the Israelis would simply just leave because grinding poverty in the desert is not a particularly tempting option when you have a passport that will take you to the first world
Up to half, almost certainly much fewer, could leave to the EU, although it's a weird kind of pariah state that you'd blockade food imports to but issue their citizens citizenship. but why would anyone accept refugees from this pariah state?
Also, you seem remarkably hostile here - I'm not trying to score points, but it seems like you're getting unreasonably angry about this topic.
I'm not angry really. Maybe I've misread you but this all pattern matches to a frustrating trope of implying that those jews should just fuck back off to Europe which is a microcosm of a kind of third worldist flavored grievance politic that I find incredibly distasteful. Wakanda wish casting.
aqouta
3d ago
Just give the money to everyone! The trump stimmy checks were the right idea
The Trump Stimmy checks were in fact not universal.
aqouta
3d ago
Sanders is a populist grievance mongerer similar to Trump so it's not too surprising there is across appeal. I have a theory that's been kicking around in my head for a bit that the parties seem to be realigning as a low information populist Republican party and an establishment technocratic Democrat party. People willing to sling conspiracy theories about how the jews, elites, billionaires or whomever with very little actual support have long been able to garner some support but in the social media age now that the lowest common denominator is able to have their voices amplified it seems inevitable that this is catered to. I may be coping in my hope that only one party falls to this type of rhetoric.
aqouta
4d ago
Are all the Gazans also getting sentenced to death in the Hague for supporting their own genocidal government that commits war crimes in this fantasy of yours? Maybe we could take out two birds with one stone and just glass the whole region to satisfy your bloodlust.
This isn't actually a statistic that's relevant at all by itself. If you're the descendant of someone from an EU country, you're able to get an EU passport
Less than half the jews in Israel are even European descendent. So your frothing genocide is still killing ~5 million people even assuming every European descendended jew is eligible.
ethnostate
Ah yes, the first ethnostste in the middle east. Curious that an ethnic state would have 20% of its population be Arab. What level of diversity do you expect to be present in the territory after you finish your retributive genocide?
aqouta
4d ago
The world was willing to execute Nazis after the holocaust even though their crime was executing jews. Any Israelis who did not voluntarily leave the country and renounce Zionism would be regarded the same as the nazis who didn't give up after the war was los
This is a plain fantasy, has the world decided that everyone involved in October 8th should be executed in the Hague or that the population they ruled over should be starved to death as a result? Your entire premise defeats itself, it's ridiculous. A world that would turn on Israel for imposing these conditions would not impose these conditions on Israel lest it must turn on itself.
they're actively committed to the project and voluntarily taking on responsibility for what Zionism did.
Somewhere north of 70% of Israelis were born in Israel. I know there is a false meme that the whole population are recent European immigrants but it's simply not true. There is no where for them to go any more than there is for the Palestinians.
aqouta
4d ago
I vaguely think the parties are going to realign as populist and establishment and then rapidly collapse when it becomes clear that these lowest common denominator populist solutions to problems don't work and the establishment gets blamed for being wreckers.
aqouta
4d ago
This is actually not true. There are real limits to the amount of food that can be imported to Israel due to their security situation - and remember that in this case we're talking about an Israel several years into the future from now, where their reputation has been torched and nobody is willing to support or trade with them. No more US money to Egypt and the other nations around them means no more land trade. The US giving up (well more than they have already) at dealing with the houthis means there's no more shipping, either. How does Israel import the materiel and energy required to exist without US support? This is a serious logistical question, and as far as I can tell the answer is that there's no way for them to do so once the US teat is removed.
If you are right and all this comes to pass then at worst they're in the state the Palestinians are in and the Palestinians get food. You even support their own genocidal government and oppose them not being given food aid. You can't actually think the world would be willing to starve Israelis to death for the crime of starving Palestinians.
aqouta
5d ago
The design of this particular rally is that you're meant to debate him so his ideological opposition had some grounds to attend.
aqouta
5d ago
There are some really obvious selection effects going on at a political rally.
aqouta
6d ago
All the Irish had to do was make it infeasible to continue occupying Ireland.
What exactly do you think the stable equilibrium in Palestine that is analogous to this looks like? Please make sure it's one the Palestinian people themselves would accept.
aqouta
8d ago
This view seems very suspiciously convenient to justify the thing you wanted to do for other reasons.
aqouta
8d ago
If such naked hypocrisy is not convincing to our fellow citizens then democracy is impossible and I'm not ready to give that up.
aqouta
8d ago
They're not so much contradictory as in conflict. all values held are naturally in conflict whenever a trade off is introduced.
aqouta
8d ago
It's important to note on the prayer thing that it was called for literally seconds after they had just finished a moment of silence for Kirk. The whole thing was performative, they could have prayed during the moment of silence if they wanted to. I half expect if the prayer motion went through they'd then call for a brief poem in his honor and escalated until someone objected so they could get this type of headline.
What would possess Egypt to attack Israel exactly? Desperate need for more land that was offered and rejected because they didn't want more Palestinians to deal with themselves? Egypt is quite large, what doe sit want a slice of worthless desert far from its population centers for?
A couple dozen to hundreds of people who were family members to people that were already sworn enemies of Israel just isn't a serious concern. This is like saying America could never be friendly with Japan because of all the family members of dead service members but instead of more than a hundred thousand dead service members it's 39. Give me a break.
Common on dude, you can't be saying things like this if you expect me to treat this like a dispassionate hypothetical, you're getting every possible jab in.
You know and I know that service in the Israeli military is compulsory. Who precisely isn't getting genocided in this scenario?
You're proposing a pretty divergent middle easy equilibrium so it's hard know exactly how things shake out. I don't really see the Saudis and Iran getting along regardless of how Israel is seen by the US so presumably Israel will look to join one of those two factions. What's the US's relation to Saudi Arabia in this hypothetical?
Can we be specific about which countries are going in for this land grab? I've been over Egypt, Syria seems pretty preoccupied. Lebanon? Jordan? 6 days war take two? This isn't going to happen, even if Israel wasn't a nuclear power but especially because it is. Exactly zero neighboring nation is going to take the "maybe get turned to glass in order to conquer worthless deserts at at best a port" proposition.
Why would that be? India successfully plays America and Russia off each other, they have a lot of agriculture that they subsidize, if Israel needs food who exactly is going to stop them? You're very quickly getting out of the pariah state and into the war against the rest of the world state. And yeah, I don't think Israel would win a war against the entire rest of the world blood lusted against them, but no one thinks they would so this hypothetical becomes very boring.
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