sohois
1d ago
I'm not sure South Africa is the best comparison point or example for "Anglo democracies", given the unique historical factors that drive its current malaise. South Africa's democratic situation is closer to a nation like Japan, where they are essentially a one-party democracy, never deviating even in the face of catastrophe.
Plenty will argue that South Africa represents the likely future for the UK and Canada as they increasingly fracture upon ethnic lines, but there is another anglo country with massive levels of low skill ethnic minorities that is an even closer comparison - the United States. The US, not long after its inception, imported a permanent underclass that still numbers around 15% of the population, and for the past 50 years, they've had a constant influx of illegal immigration. In comparison to the rest of the anglosphere, they have a much lower % of white Europeans. Nonetheless, the US is much, much richer.
While concerns around immigration, integration, and crime are not going to be solved by money alone, South Africa's issues are clearly heavily economic in nature. The breakdown of their society is heavily influenced by the rampant corruption, the collapse of their infrastructure, and, as you say, the anaemic growth and mass joblessness. For the UK, I'd go so far as to say that the combined vote % for Reform, Restore and the Greens would be <10% if they had even kept close to the US over the past 20 years.
Both the US and Apartheid South Africa demonstrate that the economic conditions of a country are largely detached from immigration/demographics. In right-wing UK circles, I see a lot of "cope" around the plans of Reform/Restore, in which the major factor for productivity collapse is entirely low skilled immigration, and once they are kicked out companies will be forced to pay much higher wages. It's an oddly left-wing viewpoint, one in which greedy companies are keeping all the money for themselves, and you just have to force them in order to get that money to the wider public.
The reality is that the UK's pathetic productivity has been decades in the making. Clamping down on immigration levels might collapse Deliveroo and numerous Turkish barbershops, but it will not suddenly unlock hidden growth.
Most of the replies below are skeptical of saving the UK via democracy, because, I assume, they don't think that [Reform will be elected/they will try to cut immigration/they will successfully cut immigration]. I think this is the wrong viewpoint when it comes to decay or recovery. What will push UK towards South African outcomes is their complete failure to build infrastructure. It's the dead cities and towns and villages outside of London. Its the unending growth of the housing market to the exclusion of all else. It's the most expensive business energy rates in the world. And its the wages and jobs that will soon pay less than even the former communist bloc in Eastern Europe, if they exist at all.
There's not a single party that even thinks about these issues. Sure, you can find MPs and advisors that at least understand the economic woes and can propose ideas - like Danny Kruger for Reform - but even Labour and the Tories have some individuals who get it. None of them are at the centre of power, and there is such structural rot that even if they were, it would take a Herculean effort to turn things around.
So no, I don't think the UK is going to recover.
Will it decay? I'm not sure this is the truth either, more like just stagnation. There are a few bright spots for the UK: the brain drain which smashed SA is restricted for the UK. Europe is just as fucked, and so the only escape route is America. But the US has its own immigration issues, and they make it very difficult for the ~top 20-2 percentile to move there. A US that threw open the borders to white Europeans could instantly decimate most of Europe.
More than anything though, I think timescales are long enough that AI is going to render this entire conversation moot, one way or the other
sohois
3d ago
I'd say the first Opium War is easy to defend. For all that Britain wanted to force open China for trade, they had genuine grievances over treatment in Canton by the time the attack began.
But you can barely describe it as a "war". Britain peeled off a small expeditionary force from India, essentially to seek redress, probably expecting that a small show of force would be enough to bring proper negotiators to the table, instead of the belligerents that were positioned in Canton.
It turned out that the Chinese empire was in such disarray that this relatively tiny force was enough to basically sweep through the entire nation. They didn't particularly aim to cause major damage, inflict casualties, or loot the Chinese, unlike the second opium war.
sohois
4d ago
Realistically, you could go to China on a tourist visa, speak no Mandarin, and still have no trouble finding a girl that will marry you within a month outside of the tier 1 cities
sohois
4d ago
Time for another dating market piece
From a non-Western angle this time. I enjoyed* this article on the Chinese dating market and its increasing level of dysfunction
*which is to say, I liked the information I gained. I did not at all enjoy reading it as it has the most irritating style known to man, a turbo Linkedin style piece by someone who thinks they are vastly more profound than they actually are. Do not read it. I have excerpted the interesting bits below:
Here’s a translated message from a Chinese woman to a man who confessed his feelings for her, sent via WeChat, which you should read as the mission statement for everything that follows:
“You chose me because of my appearance. I can also reject you because of your appearance. I’m telling you honestly, I’ve never been pursued by someone as ugly as you in my entire life. This isn’t just venting; it’s my genuine feeling, from the bottom of my heart. Ever since you confessed to me, I’ve felt incredibly inferior every day. Do you think Liu Yifei or Fan Bingbing would be pursued by someone like you? You wouldn’t pursue them, because you know those beauties wouldn’t be interested in you. But you’re pursuing me, which means that in your eyes, I’m a match for your looks. My God, just thinking about it gives me a vague urge to kill someone. I beg you to stop liking me. Your pursuit has deeply hurt my self-esteem.”
In 2010, a 22-year-old model named Ma Nuo appeared on If You Are the One (非诚勿扰), China’s most-watched dating show: fifty million viewers per episode, second only to the state news broadcast in ratings. An unemployed male contestant asked if she’d ride bicycles with him. She replied, with a small giggle that would become the most replayed giggle in Chinese internet history, that she’d rather cry in a BMW than laugh on the back of a bicycle.
The country detonated. Government censors ordered the show reformatted. The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television issued regulations. A dating show required state intervention in the way that famines and insurrections require state intervention, because it was threatening social stability in exactly the same way.
Ma Nuo later revealed that the contestant wasn’t actually poor. He was a wealthy second-generation student studying abroad. The production crew had asked her to reject him. The BMW line was a joke she’d read online
In Zhengzhou, a Foxconn worker told a researcher: “The groom’s family is expected to provide a car and a new apartment. That’s more than 200,000 yuan. Our average farming income is 5,000 yuan a year.” He paused. “Having two sons,” he said, “is considered bad luck. It means you have to provide two apartments.”
The caili (彩礼), the betrothal gift, was originally symbolic: a gesture of respect to the bride’s family. Red envelopes. Dried fruits. Perhaps a pig
By 2023, the national average caili had risen to 69,000 RMB ($9,500). In Zhejiang province: 183,000 RMB. In rural Jiangxi: 380,000 RMB, not including the apartment, not including the car.
The state tried to intervene. Jiangsu capped caili at 50,000 RMB. Gansu tried similar limits. One county in Jiangxi tied caili compliance to school enrollment priority for your children, meaning if you paid too much bride price, your kids might not get into the right school. The state was literally bribing (blackmailing) families to accept smaller bribes for their daughters.
The sociologist Hu Hsien-chin made a distinction between two kinds of face: mianzi (social prestige from visible achievement and display) and lian (moral standing granted by others for your character). You can have high mianzi and no lian, everyone can see your Porsche and also know you’re a fraud. The marriage market optimizes for mianzi because mianzi is legible. Lian is subjective
Xiao Tao (“Little Peach”) streams from 8pm to midnight. She does not take her clothes off. She talks. She plays mobile games while talking. She reads comments aloud and responds to them. She calls her regulars da ge (“big brother”). When a da ge sends a virtual gift, she reacts with what appears to be genuine delight. When a big gift arrives, the animated cruise ship, the rocket, the supercar she gasps and says the sender’s username and thanks them by name, and 200,000 viewers see this, and the man who sent the gift receives, in exchange for 3,000 RMB, approximately forty seconds of being known .
The state has started cracking down on “excessive virtual gifting” as a social stability concern. Platforms are now required to cap daily gifting limits. This is not a coincidence. The state understands, even if it won’t say so, that the livestream economy is what happens when you price 30 million men out of the marriage market. They don’t riot. They buy virtual cruise ships for women in Chengdu.
A 2010 census showed 82.44% of Chinese men aged 20-29 had never married, fifteen percentage points above women in the same bracket. Demographers projected 29-33 million surplus males in the coming decades.
Historical records on what happens to surplus male populations are consistent and not reassuring. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, bare branches “tended to drift from their hometowns and form brotherhoods, secret societies, bandit gangs, and military groups.” In extreme cases they toppled dynasties.
There are men who have been publicly shamed on Weibo for insufficient gift-giving. Birthday posts where the gifts are deemed, in comments, to be “not even trying.” Proposals live-streamed to followers where the ring is evaluated in real time. One man proposed in a restaurant while his girlfriend’s phone filmed it for her followers. The comments started arriving before he’d finished the sentence. The comments were not all positive. He could see them arriving on the phone screen while he was still on one knee.
This is cuihun (催婚). Relentless familial pressure to marry. It arrives with seasonal regularity, like the flu, and with roughly similar symptoms.
On Taobao, you can rent a boyfriend or girlfriend. Prices: 50 RMB per hour to watch a movie together. 100 RMB if it’s a horror film, because physical contact is implied and must be priced in. 3,000-plus yuan per day for the full meet-the-parents package. During Spring Festival, prices surge to 10,000 yuan per day.
In 2007, the All-China Women’s Federation, a state agency ostensibly created to advance women’s rights (and fully nails the aesthetic of the ‘The Supreme People's Assembly’ in North Korea), officially classified unmarried women over 27 as “sheng nu” (剩女): leftover women. The Ministry of Education added the term to the official lexicon.
The Federation then published taxonomies:
Ages 25-27: “Leftover fighters” (they still have courage!)
Ages 28-30: “The ones who must triumph” (this is a pun on Pizza Hut’s Chinese name, because what Chinese feminist propaganda needs is more fast food wordplay)
Ages 31-35: “Advanced leftover”
Ages 35+: “Master class of leftover women” (a reference to the Monkey King, which is definitely not insulting)
In 2011, the Women’s Federation published “Leftover Women Do Not Deserve Our Sympathy.” It included this sentence: “Pretty girls do not need a lot of education to marry into a rich and powerful family. But girls with an average or ugly appearance will find it difficult. These girls hope to further their education in order to increase their competitiveness.”
A state agency for women’s rights published that. In 2011. Not 1951.
Marriage registrations fell to 6.1 million in 2024, down a fifth year-over-year. Births fell to 7.92 million in 2025 as deaths rose to 11.31 million. China’s population is now actively shrinking. The fertility rate is 1.0 and falling. The women called “leftover” turned out to be the ones who could afford to say no.
China is no longer poor. But it behaves, in the intimate sphere, like a country that expects the famine to return. Houses are hoarded like grain. Children are invested in like they’re the last crop before winter. Partners are evaluated like wartime rations. The marriage market runs on the logic of scarcity even amid abundance, because the nervous system was built during scarcity and nervous systems don’t update when the spreadsheet does.
Speaking from my own experience, the article is a touch overwrought. I'm in a major bubble - I haven't lived there for years, I was a foreigner, and all the expats I know now are successful families with children the same age as ours - but so is the person who uses anecdotes from TV shows and marriage markets. Nonetheless, there is some obvious truth here, given the collapse in marriage and fertility rates in the country.
There does seem to be an inherent contradiction in streaming, with the author assuming the government are both using it as a substitute for human affection, while also trying to crack down on gifting and parasocial relationships. Which is it? Perhaps this is a flaw of the CCP themselves, pulling in multiple directions and unable to find a fix for their country's broken dating market.
sohois
6d ago
You have it backwards. People were in favor of lockdowns, because they came in and persisted.
Maybe. Status quo is a powerful thing. But at the same time, now that lockdowns have been used, it's always going to be a tool people think about whenever there is some crisis. In the UK, for example, there has been a small outbreak of meningitis cases at a University. It's not remotely hard to find people calling for lockdowns. And polling exposed a huge chunk of the population who love being petty tyrants, even today you'll find something like 25% support for closing nightclubs forever.
sohois
6d ago
Your hatred of being "lumped in" with them is misplaced
I don't have any issue with being lumped in with other people, it's a very common method of trying to discredit an argument.
But like I said to KMC above, if you actually want to win the argument and prevent lockdowns next time, you need to stop very easy wins for the other side like being tied to extremely dumb conspiracy theories.
sohois
6d ago
To be honest, I just don't believe you.
But more importantly, your thinking seems extremely blinkered, like you can't see the wood for the trees.
Covid was a very infectious disease, hence why even very strict lockdowns were mostly useless. Across the world a very large number of people died and probably a significant majority of the population was exposed to it.
How many people do you think died because of improper medical care from ventilators (keeping in mind the counterfactual where they might die anyway without any intervention)? What was the death rate or side effect rate from vaccines? It's not going to be even 6 figures. It's a fraction of a fraction.
sohois
7d ago
I suppose I understand this, but I don't care, and I can't see how anyone with any integrity can care so much about the opinions of others. The weirdos were right, and that made the respectable people uncomfortable. That's what integrity means, that's what it's for. If your rubric stops at "what other people will think" then I don't want you making decisions of any importance.
Lockdowns came in, and persisted, because ultimately the public in most countries were in favour of them.
If you want to stop them next time, then you need to get the average person on side - and for the average person, being associated with "5G causes cancer" is enough for an instant dismissal. Even today, you won't find that many people who really understand how incredibly damaging lockdowns were. You can't win a political argument just by being right
sohois
7d ago
This comment reminds me of why arguments about lockdowns became so difficult, because the public forum was so often being poisoned with nonsense.
I think lockdowns are the greatest crime inflicted upon modern humanity outside of war. I strongly believe that those who supported and facilitated them should be at the very least imprisoned, if not far worse.
Nonetheless, I would never make a ridiculous claim to support my position like admissions being down, or ventilators killing more people, or vaccines being worse than the disease. Covid obviously was a pandemic. It, like the similar pandemics of the 50s and 60s, had a fatality rate of 0.1 - 0.3, and made a huge number of people very ill.
Lockdowns were a disaster not because Covid was all fake, but because the costs vastly outweighed the benefits. You don't need to lie or believe ridiculous things to understand that.
However, as soon as you start arguing about lockdowns, you are immediately lumped in with the 5G nutters, the anti-vaxxers, the china hoaxers, and so on. It was incredibly difficult to talk about it with normal people because, no matter how correct you are, being supported by masses of conspiracy nuts is an extremely difficult barrier to overcome.
sohois
22d ago
A business I make use of in my business was acquired by private capital
PE/VCs are yet another category we could make in our list of the super rich; I don't know but I'd assume the majority of PE founders are going to be the multi-millionaires, apart from the very successful few like Blackrock and KKR.
There's a whole 'nother load of misconceptions about PE that could form a topic on their own, but rest assured that the stories of leveraged buyouts leading to rapid bankruptcy are almost always disasters for the PE investors.
That's what I mean about consequences I guess; in china it's at least theoretically possible that if you damage production or distribution in a way that pisses lots of people off and materialy damages the economy but isn't illegal, the big hand of the state might come down out of the sky and slap your wrist
As for this, I have a few Chinese bridges to sell to you.
Back in the day one of my first Chinese employers was this sociopathic woman who somehow took an ironclad business and pissed away a ton of money and goodwill, seriously enraging all our customers and partners. And these were some wealthy and powerful people, but did it matter?
Of course not, because she was even more powerful. Her dad was a major player in Anhui's CCP, so she was essentially untouchable.
Some of other posts made essentially this point below. China does not remove billionaires/the elite from their system, they simply trade an untouchable business elite for an untouchable political elite
sohois
25d ago
I feel like you're confusing different categories of people here, which is a common failure mode when it comes to discussions on "billionaires". A lot of generic dislike for both capitalism and rich people (not necessarily billionaires) gets swept up with talk of Musk, Gates, et al., and it seems like it would be useful to break down what we're talking about. Even if you really do mean only billionaires, you're still talking about both the mega successful Musks with dozens of hundreds of billions, local oligarchs and royalty, your mostly unknown investors, and even apex celebrities and sports people.
And then you've got:
Anyone who imposes consequences on or limits the behaviors of the managing class
Billionaires are largely not the managerial class. Even within the managerial class, it's worth splitting up your C-level and CEOs with the PMC that are much more middle and upper middle class
So when it comes to your overall complaints, who do you actually dislike?
-
Billionaire 'founders': Musk, Bezos, Ellison, Gates, etc. The richest of billionaires, but with most of their wealth tied up in the businesses they created and still run. Typically very high profile.
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Investors: Buffet, Larry Fink, Carl Icahn, etc. Those who largely made their income from hedge funds, PE, and other market moves. They can be further split between the activist investors like Fink and Icahn, and the passive like Jim Simons and John Bogle
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Old money: Royalty, Rothschilds, etc. Now we're getting into a group which doesn't comprise that many billionaires anymore. I'm tempted to put in second and third generation families here as well like the Walton family, although most wouldn't use old money in that sense.
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Oligarchs: I'm counting any of the third/second world mega-rich here, the people that essentially just stole their country's wealth. Your emirs and sultans, as well as more typical corruption.
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Apex celebrities: Swift, Jay-z, Michael Jordan, Ronaldo, etc. The very top of the sports and art worlds, the vast majority of celebs are only multimillionaires and even the richest are <$5bn
-CEO billionaires: Tim Cook, Nadella, Pichai, etc. The very top of the greasy pole, the execs who didn't build anything but are at such large companies they've still reached the billion mark thanks to stock options.
- The rest? The other thousand+ who have 1-10bn, probably from a business. A ton of people no one has ever heard of and who probably don't have much influence on anything.
Then there are the many who aren't billionaires at all:
- HNWI, the 1%, the "elite": Basically everyone who has a few million+ in liquid assets, a vastly larger group than the billionaires. At this point you're picking up successful upper middle class professionals even.
And the "managerial classes"
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C-level execs: All of the other business leaders, from enterprise down to SMEs.
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The Professional managerial class: The millions of senior management roles that make the vast majority of day-to-day decisions in big business.
When most people complain about billionaires, I think they really mean the 'founder' category, the handful of tech founders with the highest profile. When pushed they'll probably complain about Joe Business who made 2Bn from his real estate company, but they never actually think about that kind of person.
When I read your complaint about the managing class, I feel like you mostly mean the PMCs and C-level people, many of whom won't even be millionaires. And perhaps some of the activist investors?
sohois
28d ago
Buy a place and rent it out. Or airbnb if it's suitably central
edit: actually if I'm giving serious advice, use some of the money as a deposit to buy a place and use the interest to pay down the principal, and put the rest into other investments
sohois
28d ago
When you control land, that's your prerogative to let in whomever you wish.
If Palestine were in control then they could have an immigration policy as open as they wanted.
sohois
29d ago
I'm sure this discussion came up a few months ago in a motte thread.
I'm not sure there's a suitable definition of cocktail that doesn't expose you to Diogenes. If it's just "two ingredients" then every random mixer and liquor is a cocktail. Adding a lemon wedge to a beer bottle is a cocktail.
Make it three and you're excluding things like Martinis. You could say at least two ingredients and a recognised cocktail name, but then you're getting all the edge cases which aren't cocktails, like Screwdrivers and Cuba Libres.
To be clear, I don't actually disagree that access to low skilled labour can suppress business investment. It's more the specific idea that this access is the biggest factor in low productivity or wage growth which I find absurd. I would be surprised if was even one of the top 5 most important factors.
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