This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Tyler Cowen had Dan Wang (author of Breakneck, originator of the 'China is run by engineers, US is run by lawyers' meme) on his podcast last week. IMO, Tyler's podcast is at it's best when he's debating rather than interviewing, part of why his year-end reviews are some of his best episodes. It's particularly interesting watching someone intelligent actually defend America and moreover champion causes that inevitably would code as lower-status to the intellectual class.
tl;dr, Tyler's views —
Massive quotes incoming. Skip ahead if you don't want to read Tyler's arguments:
And honestly, this seems to me to be the revealed preferences of most people. Europeans and Chinese who move to the US largely move to the burbs and buy the big car even while (at least the former) tut-tutting about how barbaric it all is. People, at least once they hit a certain age, want the SFH and the big yard with the fence and the space to raise their children.
On the pandemic and vaccines:
And yet. And yet! At one point we have this brief exchange:
I can buy some of Tyler's takes, and as I mentioned it's refreshing to see an actual contrarian take about the competence of America. But at some point, it just transcends a contrarian take into cope territory. Why are we complacently accepting that China is going to be the global center for auto manufacturing on top of drones and everything else? Life might be good now, but if China is just 1950s America, and 1950s America was just 19th century Britain, aren't we headed for the same stagnation and broad irrelevance of the UK today?
Maybe some of the catastrophizing about China is overwrought and some of America's apparent weaknesses are just the invisible hand of the market moving in mysterious ways, while the gleaming bridges and HSR to nowhere are albatross projects and a drag on growth. Maybe our apparent decadence and vice are really just the product of a system optimized for giving it's people a good life, while Chinese grind 996 work weeks for shit wages to stroke Xi Jinping's ego. But man, I don't want to get hit with the rare earth metals stick whenever the POTUS doesn't kowtow to the emperor. I'm still torn between whether the economists should be running the show or whether we should keep them as far away from the levers of power as possible.
Make some actual tariffs that bite and laws that promote onshoring; and if consumers don't even notice an increase in prices it ain't working. If your argument is that we can't match the Chinese in whatever way, deregulate or bring Chinese companies here so we can learn from them or do whatever it takes to compete. Instead, we just decided to sell them H200s and erode one of our few remaining advantages (maybe someone more plugged in can comment on how significant this is?).
Focusing on just the cars & suburbs bit:
This doesn't necessarily mean that suburbs & cars are the best way to do things. First, there may be selection bias -- people who don't want suburbs and cars probably have a higher tendency to stay in the urban environments in their home countries, and not migrate to the US at all. Secondly, we do have somewhat of a subsidy on this kind of lifestyle, with a lot of tax money going to roads rather than public transit, and cars have substantial unpriced externalities, compared to other kinds of transit. So it's not surprising that with the incentives in place, a lot of people will choose this lifestyle. A supermarket with a loss-leader of roast chicken is going to sell a lot of roast chickens.
Cowen says:
Not every European city used to be the way that it is now. Some of them bought part-way into car culture, then changed plans after realizing the enormous cost (Amsterdam, for example). And there are American cities that have made some great changes in this direction too. It doesn't have to happen overnight.
And as for "just get [almost] everyone a car"... There are adolescents, elderly, visually impaired or otherwise disabled people who can't drive, and are often mostly locked out of participation in society if they don't have someone who can drive them around. To be fair, telecommuting has partially alleviated this for some people.
For everyone who can drive, cars are really not cheap to own or run, even discounting all the aforementioned externalities. While Americans tend to have higher income, I think a big part of why life is decent in many European countries for the average person is that you don't have this essentially mandated cost of car ownership.
Well, having just visited Amsterdam, I was super impressed - until I realized that the population of Amsterdam is less than a million people. That's shockingly tiny! I'm not sure that the bike culture scales beyond that.
But overall I agree that IF you pair more mass transit with infill higher-density housing, you can definitely make portions of American cities into European-like ones. And then you can connect higher-density areas with something like, I dunno, BART or something. Critically, you still need to do the infill housing bit to make it work, though.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
China has a lot of the makings of a superpower. They’re going to win a manufacturing simply because that’s where the factories are for the most part. We still have some factories, but nothing near what China has. Secondly, China (and most of East Asia in general) have prioritized education and particularly science, mathematics, engineering, and related subjects. And they are oriented towards getting the best and brightest the best education they possibly can. Americans make little mouth-noises about education and STEM, but really, they don’t care about education that much. We are much more concerned about leaving behind a kid who doesn’t or can’t read or write or do math because we prioritize his feelings (actually more than likely his mother’s feelings) than we do about getting the rest of the kids to read and write and do math to the best of their abilities. Culturally, we don’t care about education much either. We want our kids to attend college and get a diploma, but no parents ever care much about whether or not they’re getting a real education. In fact Theres a lot of ADA based cheating in schools where kids get diagnosed with various things so they can get grades they don’t deserve because they have extra time, or help with reading the test, or whatever else. Kids go to college needing remedial education and increasingly having never read a single full book either fiction or nonfiction.
If I’m betting, im choosing the civilization that graduates millions of engineers and scientists and mathematicians every year ready to build the future over a civilization that graduates millions of people with literature, psychology, marketing, and law degrees. I’m betting on the one who teaches kids to study hard and learn the material without coddling them over the civilization that cheats kids through to prevent hard feelings and teaches kids to slack off.
More options
Context Copy link
I find this topic very irksome, for reasons that can be gleaned from some jingoistic comments below. "Breakneck" is also an annoying gimmick. They're not engineers. They've got a ton of engineers but the CPC is still heavy on lawyers and straight up apparatchiks.
China is completely non-mysterious. Any specific domain, like HSR, is pointlessly nitpicked at and debated but matters little in isolation, and the big picture is very straightforward and expressed in their official messaging. Maybe the thickest layer of obscurity is official translation. For example: «中华人民共和国». «People's Republic of China». Character by character: something like "The Middle Splendid Land's People's Common-Harmony State". That's what they intend to be.
It is a modern (as opposed to postmodern) state, with Leninist ideology, built on top of Chinese Confucian civilization, with enormous, high-IQ population, led by a man who's passed through hardship and one of the most competitive and cutthroat filters in any system ever, a product of Party-arranged marriage between two other Communist zealots. I think Xi's character is actually misunderstood and important, especially given what the Superpower Number One has got. To get a feel for it, I recommend reading this interview (1, 2) on a book about his father Xi Zhongxun (btw, he's the guy who invented Special Economic Zones among other things). An excerpt:
Basically, to understand China the easiest strategy is to stop coping, take them at their word about what they are and what they're doing, and watch as things become predictable. How cutting-edge capabilities are deployed faster and at larger scale, how air is getting cleaner, how problems just get solved (except profound structural ones no society knows how to solve – like fertility or real estate bubble, which they are deflating), how in 7 years of «slowing down» or «collapsing» they go from taking American export controls lying down to retaliating so severely that Trump is pressed to concede. How we go from «haha Huawei will die» to «please buy H200s». These are a people and a system that is very good at completing tasks. It's how a state should be. Its values may be alien, but operationally, all serious modern states were similar. Some mix of dirigisme and free market, competent leadership with skin in the game, investment into human capital, infrastructure buildout. The US was this. "Datacenter buildout" is not this. Does anyone seriously think they will have trouble building sheds with lots of cooling and grid connection. They have the world's best HVDC system, they ate several major markets in the last 5 years, their heavy machinery is penetrating German/Japanese markets already. They'll be fine.
What merits explanation is not China but the dysfunction of Western societies, the decline of civilization really.
There is a lot of a cope. But there's also a lot of reflexive anti-jingoism where America default bad. I confess, I don't know whether to trust the economists or not.
I'll read it and get back to you.
Out of curiosity, do you speak/read Mandarin?
I'm not really interested in arguing with you on the subject and I'm not even sure I disagree, but on this point that you might find amusing - the dim sum place near my house is also called 'peaceful mountain dumpling shop' (obscured for opsec reasons) and I can tell you it's anything but. I'm reminded of the Chinese copypastas from World of Warcraft:
patchwerk fat american 胖胖美国人angered hits on armored men对装甲兵的怒吼intentional pain river keeps others safe故意痛苦的河流使他人安全medics focus those who eat fists医务人员将重点放在那些吃拳头的人身上
邪恶的骑士 Evil horseriders 一起站 Stand together for falling sky 带走武器 Steal weapon 避免黑洞 Avoid pancake of darkness 圣光波 Change position often
They're funnier if you've actually played the game...
Thanks - I'll try a book about Xi and/or his father.
The point of that argument is not that China is incapable of building datacenters, but that America hasn't lost it's ability to build - it's just very focused on profit.
Cope? Maybe. Like I said, I don't know if I should trust the economists the way I trust psychologists and social science majors, the way I trust engineers or somewhere in between.
Again, I think Tyler's point is that a lot of what looks like dysfunction is actually function downstream of people's revealed preferences.
I'm honestly 100% uncertain on whether China wins, America wins, or both muddle along on roughly equal terms for the rest of my lifetime. I'm still skeptical of your apparent certainty, but I guess we'll see.
I don't. I'm trying to learn though. The point isn't that it literally describes a nation as it is. The point (more than a bit sentimental one) is that the ambition is deeper and more interesting than "Warsaw Pact shithole, Asia, really big", and openly stated across infinity of Party Nomenklatura documents that ≈nobody is willing to read seriously. My proposal to look at the literal characters is an attempt to break through the cognitive barrier this negative charisma duckspeak creates.
The Chinese are mostly petty men and women, like elsewhere (arguably more than elsewhere). That's fine. They have a (compelled) respect for hierarchy, and enough thinkers with enough influence, who can make meaningful nudges. It's hard to notice for cultural reasons, and the Chinese themselves are very cynical about what they're doing. But the CPC, at least in some eras including Xi's one, is a sincere ideological-civilizational project with unironic Chinese characteristics.
I recommend reading this, was pretty surprising to me. https://x.com/kyleichan/status/1992405985626124744
To restate my point, I think «lost ability to build» is melodramatic, but what is definitely true is that even «datacenters» are not a very impressive building project by Chinese standards, even adjusted for population. China could do that trivially but mom won't let them have the chips. It's ≈assembly and construction, Chinese «building» is at this point profoundly wider and deeper, they run VAST supply chains from mines to refineries/smelters to factories to shipyards. Americans are already running into constraints like having to ship transformers (physical parts, not LLMs) for their coveted Manhattan Project datacenters (eg Stargate) from China. The grid upgrade is a horrible slog. You are probably well aware of the REE context by now (read this for more if you haven't https://www.notboring.co/p/the-electric-slide).
Americans are good at building McMansions and installing HVACs, they have the workforce for that and in theory it's fungible. It remains to be seen if they can do better.
I would say that some economists are very correct but even they can be frustratingly dogmatic or outright deceptive, which nudges me towards «social science» field. For example here https://research.gavekal.com/article/unraveling-chinas-productivity-paradox/ a very fair argument is being made, except the point about FGMs is false and I bought it at face value. Lost face, very sad. Popular Total Factor Productivity stats are just gibberish. And so on. You have to scrutinize everything.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'd broadly agree with this. China isn't doing anything especially secretive or complicated but in the meantime the West is exuberantly actively working to derail functional society it feels.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
While there is a population difference, I think the primary reason China is so much more capable than the west isn't cultural but economic. They have a much more potent economic model than the (more or less) free market capitalism that exists in the west. They limit the places their citizens can store money to largely just banks and real estate. They then hyper focus that pooled capital towards very unprofitable ventures in order to super charge industries. While this model is not particularly pleasant for the individuals involved, it is highly competitive on the national scale. The west, with its focus on individual rights, just can't compete.
I think a lot of the cope on this comes from people that have internalized the whole "capitalism is optimized asset allocation" thing. I don't see why that's necessarily the case. Clearly it outperforms feudalism or true centralized command communism, but why should we believe that it's the best possible economic system with so few data points. It seems to me like the Chinese have threaded the needle between communism and capitalism and created something better. Is it sustainable? Who knows. Centralizing economic authority can lead to some catastrophic failures when that authority becomes incompetent. But for now, being able to focus a country's pooled resources into any industry looks a hell of a lot better than the western economic model, where our best and brightest are incentivized to spend their prime years shuffling assets from one pile to another to make a buck.
I disagree on the Chinese model. China wins by not allowing foreign companies to compete in its markets, stealing everything in sight, and subsidizing industry well below cost to purposefully drive under international competition (dumping). The rest of the world could win too, if it did that.
Which is why VW makes 60% of their profits in China (they're so cooked) and the Western world has 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs right?
The CEO of Ford, Chris Farley, who I find quite insightful, will tell basically anyone with a podcast mic that western car manufacturers are about to get absolutely fucked if they don't get their shit together, or in his words, "we're facing a fitness test"
That there are some exceptions does not disprove the point that China places heavy restrictions on foreign businesses operating there.
Yeah they also do this, however to dismiss them outright because "muh restrictions, muh IP theft" is very stupid
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'd argue that China wins first by having a lot of resources, cheap labor, and a government that is, all commentary aside, stable. They were willing to accept large amounts of pollution to establish themselves. Western stockholders were happy to kill their golden goose to get their money this quarter.
More options
Context Copy link
No, the rest of the world could not win by selling massive amounts of cheap products at a loss.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Define "potent"? GDP growth? Per Capita / PPP? If we're talking economics, your terms should be defined and quantitative.
So they're more "potent" (however that is defined) by generating a negative return on investment? That doesn't make any sense. To be as charitable as possible, perhaps you mean the investments are high CAPEX and have long cycles towards net ROI benefit? If they are by definition unprofitable, they are by definition bad investments that will guarantee that the given industry fails.
You have to mean international scale, right?
This post is so poorly written and argument by assertion that I debated even posting a reply. But, I think the spirit of the Motte is often best exemplified by being hyper charitable to the other side, steelmaning poor arguments, and then presenting the opposite view.
My argument against China is the theses in The Great Demographic Reversal combined with an obvious failure mode of the Chinese tech innovation system.
The TLDR, for brevity:
China's demographics SUCK. They're going to have more olds than they know what to do with. The one child policy was a disaster. People aren't having children together now. And there's a semi-nomadic horde of about 50 - 100 million men who work seasonal migrant jobs from place to place. Their middle class isn't nearly large enough.
This means that China has no choice but to rigidly control their population. But at their scale, that's incredibly expensive to do. The social credit score system is an experiment; can we pay one half of our population to spy on the other half, and then use computers to spy on the first half? In a perverse irony, China, that does not have nearly the same social security safety net that the US does, is perhaps (the budgets are secret) spending more to not have one!
Technology wise, the Chinese model has been to find / steal western tech, reverse engineer it to the best of their ability, and re-deploy. People can quibble over if this is real innovation or not, the extent to which China has produced any new and meaningful "inventions" but it doesn't matter. This style of technological management eschews what has been the real engine of tech development over millenia; lots of compounding, happy accidents shared across a large population. An interesting quirk of history is that from about 800 - 1200, the Muslim world of MENA was the most scientifically advanced on the planet. But they fell behind technologically; they knew how stuffed worked and were very smart, but lacked the infrastructure to actually build and disperse scientific knowledge into material things that normies could use to improve their life. Starting at about 1200, Europe starts to overtake in both science and tech because they deploy tech more broadly, and science and tech have a mutually re-inforcing feedback structure.
Chinese GDP per capita is about $15k. Even with the CCP trying to shit out new tech as fast as it can, most of their own people can't really afford it. Secondly, most of their people don't have a cultural aptitude for tinkering, exploring, developing in a truly creative sense. When the high esteem strategy in life is to grind 996, be an excellent bureaucrat, and a cold bug person, you're not going to get weirdo genius inventors and you're especially not going to get weird genuis asshole corporate leaders --- Jobs, Musk, Bezos, Gates et al would've been hammered into shit in childhood in China because they're non-conformity is off the charts. Jack Ma is the only homegrown Chinese "visionary" who didn't leave, and he was either some sort of plant by the CCP or became a permanent political prisoner because he did a good job and built a compelling tech company.
The tension at the core of all Chinese history is balancing a pathological need for control of a giant population and a giant geography against the economic growth potential of ceding some control. If the CCP let their people just do their thing, I would be a lot more worried about a Chinese Century because of the sheer numbers. But the CCP has not only chosen, but accelerated toward clamping down harder and "controlling" more.
As promised, I'm responding in more detail. Much of the below I could nitpick at myself, but I'll leave you the pleasure. My confidence in being directionally right is underpinned by having been optimistic about Chinese trajectory for years of seeing «Xi bad» and «China collapse» narrative. I was even right in expecting their failures – such as no EUV breakthrough or quick solutions to fertility and real estate problems. I was, however, wrong in predicting a stronger American showing in response to their success.
Disclaimer: the load-bearing phrase in your spiel is «cold bug person». Your perception of China is downstream of finding Han Chinese people, politely, uncharismatic, and bluntly – not hot, in terms of a vibe rather than mere looks. You are inclined to believe that «not hot» people are categorically lesser than hot ones, incapable of True Creativity/Courage/Honesty/Ambition/Valor/Decisiveness etc., and unconsciously reason backwards from that about object-level evidence. This is compounded by the historical and contemporary distortion that the Chinese themselves have done to their image, like painting a 1.9m tall cannibal commander from that famous "decisive Tang strategic victory" meme as a pompous literati with long nails, and today taking advantage of leftist grievance narratives. A PLA soldier can point a Dongfeng DF-17 missile in your face, and you'll laugh about how it's filled with water and compensating for something, Bugs Bunny style. It's similar to the blindspot the Kzinti had for human females. More controversially, this is a common bias that I think is genetically hardwired in peoples of Northwestern European extraction/WEIRD cluster, due to greater historical female mate choice and thus disproportionate returns to thinking about mate value and general charisma signaling on evolutionary timescales. This being basically a misgeneralized instinct, arguing about it is a waste of time. I will argue about downstream confusions, though.
As a Russian, I don't really mind – actually, I'll welcome it – if China becomes the preeminent power of this century (which seems more likely by the day) and you guys get knocked down a peg with your flabbergasting ill-earned provincial chutzpah. Given their traditional isolationism, I estimate the damage to be mostly confined to morale. I am not cruel, however, so these cowboy jeers are worrying me, because their popularity, coupled with populist incentives and low cultural level of American officials, implies you may wade into a serious war in the South China Sea and get mauled, with massive economic devastation and losses for you, them, and everyone else. You'll directly drag other nations into it, too, it has already happened on trade, and the escalation potential is pretty much uncapped. So we can't be too cautious and I will present my attempt at dismantling this theory of Chinese doom and American exceptionalism.
What I want to accomplish, however, is not just dunking on this particular laundry list of assertions. Ideally, I want you is see how your very frame of thinking, embedded in (the quite recently established version of) your civilization, is just one of possible frames. Your notions of how to evaluate success, what is hard and what is easy, what makes nations strong or weak – those are just opinions of a 21st century American (or mental American). China doesn't think in this way, it has a compelling claim to the priority of the very different Chinese stack, and it's not some vague Orientalist wisdom but a comprehensible, pragmatic product of millennia of social evolution.
One aspect of it is the theory of Mandate of Heaven, which amounts to a claim that the source of legitimacy is neither birthright nor opinion of some constituency, but undeniable object level performance, and that the people ought to obey performant rulers but topple those who had clearly lost their touch. It has its shortcomings, of course, but I am not sure if the justifications for representative democracy with universal suffrage are stronger than the case for Mandate. Another is focus on cultivating everything under the state's control, starting with human capital, which is the only truly irreplaceable resource. Mencius, 4th century BC: «The people are the most important element in a nation; the spirits of the land and grain come next; the sovereign counts for the least.» The clearest example of this is how they played the Rare Earths card. In 1992, during his Inner Mongolia tour, Deng Xiaoping had proclaimed «The Middle East has oil. China has rare earths». This wasn't because he had stumbled on the biggest pile of REEs known to man, like Americans in Bumfuck Indiana often boast of; it was because dominating REEs required long-term grit and investment that he could expect other nations to prove deficient in. In 1995, Deng's sons-in-law bought out Magnequench from General Motors. Over the next 30 years, China has indeed invested in relevant education, capex and R&D, evolved from mucking around in toxic sludge to 6N HREE refinement, consistently forced ≈everyone else out of business, and now can make Trump play ball with a single export controls announcement, even as it's building actuators for legions of robots of all kinds (flying, wheeled, legged, seaborne, industrial…) using a late evolution of this very Magnequench technology and others. All of that has been done more or less in plain sight, documented in official 5 Year Plans of the Communist Party of China and programs like MiC 2025, inciting decades of WTO-mediated outrage, «maybe we can substitute it» procrastination and «wake-up call» rhetoric on the West, and yet nothing has been done successfully to counteract it. That's one measure of each system.
On demographics, the problem is overstated. To return to the meta level, people often assume that if the Face-Saving Paper Dragon China admits a problem that's because the situation is too catastrophic to deny. No, they simply communicate clearly to coordinate their own policies. Yes births are plummeting, population contracting, median age and dependency ratio climbing, there are miserable men etc etc. It's rough. The same and far worse is happening in Korea, which despite some efforts hadn't had a comparably strict One-Child Policy (ironically enough, TFR had never reached 1.0 during 1CP, and only reached it once Xi abolished all limits and turned pro-natalist) and has no plausible policy response either, same as everyone else sans Israel. China is de facto running a massive research program, in parallel across provinces, counties and towns, with some promising results, so if anyone figures it out, I reckon it'll likely be them. But any success will take 20+ years to manifest so it's probably irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. And in the grand scheme of things they're retiring peasants and construction workers who've seen Cultural Revolution, and graduating more STEM cadres than the rest of the world combined, so even with the unfortunate pyramid shape the total productivity is expected to grow. The Party itself is becoming a hive of Tsinghua STEM Ph.Ds who (just a guess) might become even better technocrats than the current set of boomers in control, nevermind boomer lawyers or the US.
More to the point, the median age of a White American is ≈44 years vs 40 for a Han Chinese in the PRC, White American TFR too is well below replacement, and the population contraction has been offset via immigration, largely of people who aren't doing that well on MSAT and often don't speak English well. Around the time when average ages are projected to converge (2040s, age 49-51), non-Hispanic Whites will have become a minority at home, and equal to roughly 1/7th of the PRC's population. This community knows well what Trump thinks about such a strategy, and many agree. (Btw, contra racist stereotypes, South American fertility is in free fall and I expect Mexico to join soon, so this gig isn't going to work forever anyway). Given such factors as a) poverty level pensions for rural citizens of the PRC (citizens who were largely excluded from the 1CP, had TFR ≈2.5 in the 80s, and so actually have > 1 children today, unlike urbanites and party members – there's a fascinating aspect of an accidental inter-class contract), b) retirement age only ≈60 in the PRC, and c) 17% youth unemployment at 5% economic growth… I'd say they have plenty of gas left in the tank, are more demographically robust than the West and even the US specifically, and Zeihan-level doomposting is simply innumerate.
One last note on this. India also tried to implement population control, psyoped by the same Limits To Growth style western concern trolling, but India doesn't have Chinese state capacity, so after an atrocious sterilization campaign they gave up and now they're the most populous nation. They're also probably the only nation in modernity that has seen height decline without ethnic mix change, because they're unable to feed themselves and now their children are fucking stunted, exactly as had been predicted by the big bad Ehrlich; and now young Han Chinese men are like 10 cm taller than young Indian men, which no doubt adds to the cross-border seethe. On the economic growth side, both nations having started from subsistence agrarianism and Subsaharan poverty level in the 70s (with sizable Indian per capita lead), enough has been said. I am still ideologically quite disgusted by the 1CP, but like most things Chinese, it deserves deeper consideration.
Bullet point 2 is pure assertion. High tech surveillance is not very expensive when you make all the tech for it and are surveilling unarmed 40+ year old East Asians. By all accounts the primary goal is genuinely to improve public conduct and it had already been largely achieved, the people are more polite, they drive lawfully, there's less scam, corruption and squalor, and on the ground level China is looking more «Japanese» than ever since the Southern Song Dynasty probably. It's a pity that this is now mostly seen by Russians because Western tourists don't want to come after Covid. «Social credit score» as commonly imagined is a mythologization of ad hoc regional programs to do stuff like penalize public transport misbehavior (which you sorely need) and, well, actual credit scores you already have. And they do have a social safety net which is evidenced eg by virtual absence of homelessness, it's just implemented via in-kind transfers (6-7% GDP) such as community canteens, rather than direct cash redistribution, which makes sense given that they're a materially productive socialist society. It could be more robust but, again, the issue is blown out of proportion: «Social expenditures in China have more than doubled as a share of GDP since 2010 and are on par with Mexico and Turkey.»
On technology, I have pretty strong opinions. The catch-up growth with IP «theft» (overwhelmingly, not theft but joint ventures, M&A and other above-board mechanics that foreign entities myopically signed on to) is tale as old as time, from Britain-Germany to USA-Japan, only made special by their sheer scale. At this point they have everything, invention AND innovation AND tinkering. They fucking license anti-cancer drugs to you, Intel is testing their wet etch equipment, they run circles around you in hypersonic warfare and EMALS and radars and power electronics… but certainly they are doing better in the «lots of compounding, happy accidents shared across a large population» department. That's the whole story of Shenzhen – a giant singularity of small shops with narrow expertise, doing swarm process innovation. That's what they build dozens of technoparks and industrial zones for. That's why they rapidly churn through zany concepts like here– semi-autonomous truck caravans, the exact sort of product-oriented tinkering innovation Americans were doing before they had assembled their own centers of basic research (mostly from European human capital fleeing Apocalypse). Their ever-growing trade surplus, driven by expansion of exports and contraction of non-commodity imports, is not about «weak RMB» or «subsidies» (you also do subsidies, you're just bad at subsidizing structural growth factors) – it's about trivial, brutal and unceasing productivity increases. Per unit of labor, a Chinese worker produces 2-3 times as much equal quality physical output as an American one:
That's not because they're superhumans who work 996, that's decades of learning and coming up with ideas, on a level that Americans have forgotten how to think about, and now cannot even conceptualize as a dimension of innovation. You have like one guy who's thinking about this and screams DESIGN IS OVERRATED MANUFACTURING IS UNDERRATED, and half your country wants to cancel him for being an asshole. Well, Elon Musk is venerated in China, because he's the apex of what every Chinese industrialist wants to be, and there are thousands of these guys. Accordingly every Chinese EV company is now an AI company and a humanoid robotics company, and other companies try to catch up and differentiate, and XPeng IRON 2 is in my humble opinion a more impressive piece of hardware than Optimus 3 (to the extent that people were suspicious it's amputee in a suit), and UBTech will be the first company to ship thousands of factory-grade units with Walker S2 while FigureAI CEO Brett Adcock is hyping on social media and trying to deboonk their video as CGI, and so on and so forth, in every single industry. What MENA now.
On domestic market side and weak demand, this is again a problem acknowledged as a big one by the CPC (Xi's entire «dual circulation» agenda) and thus overrated as a catastrophe. They are still heavily dependent on exports but that isn't an existential problem, seeing as they've cultivated an enormous and growing market in the Global South/ASEAN, for high-margin capital goods (that these industrializing nations can't afford to tariff heavily) rather than Walmart trinkets, while the US and EU have stagnant demand for material exports, tariffs or not. They're eating up German capital goods market share even in Germany, anyway. Historically, raw superiority in productivity wins against contingent trickery, it's what defeated China the last time, shattering their self-conception as the most productive civilization (indeed the only real civilization, because for them the civilization is largely about productivity), and they have a very clear «never again» position here. As with other points, I don't seek to deny real problems, but the doom narrative gets somewhat embarrassing when put in proper context. This is what is supposed to collapse them? They're «merely» consuming about the same volume of goods as the US, while producing more electricity than the next three biggest entities combined? They're a much bigger economic power than the Soviet Union ever was, and you had a decades-long meltdown about the genuinely poor and dysfunctional Soviets, but China is a nothingburger? Sure I'll grant that us Ruskies are more charismatic. And more handsome. Gagarin, Korolev, Zhukov, Kasparov, Baryshnikov… But please, guys, that's getting weird. Be real.
On «cultural aptitude for tinkering, exploring, developing in a truly creative sense», maybe you need to install RedNote and see what they're actually doing, because they absolutely tinker like mad, as they have been tinkering for centuries, it's the same energy as young Palmer Luckey but on an incomparable scale. They are natural shape rotators and tinkerers, what they lacked was precisely systematic scientific inquiry (and risk-tolerant patient capital). Do you realize that this is the people who've developed treadmill-driven paddleships in the 5th century and mechanical landmines in 15th? That «four great inventions» is just a PR term and they had invented vastly more stuff along the way? When Meta is desperately trying to build a Superintelligence Lab at any cost, paying $100M sign-on bonuses to highest-alpha talent, this is what the list ends up looking like, 20 out of 30 «research scientists» are Han Chinese (18 of them holding PRC citizenship). VAUK is a furry weirdo who tinkered with wolf-head exosuits and now works with the PLA to build actual exoskeletons for «wolf warriors». Here's a more Reddit-coded example of their tinkering (considered lame in the Mainland because it's «not hardcore»). But more to the point, I'll just repeat what I've already quoted:
Liang Wenfeng proceeded to tinker his way to National First Prize in the Electronic Design Competition, then to tinker full stack marine navigation systems, then he tinkered away 3 years in isolation as he developed quantitative trading strategies, then he tinkered into building one of the 4 biggest quant funds in China, then he tinkered and somehow now we have DeepSeek in the open source, from their in-house file system to weights and methods published in Nature (he's on top 10 this year). All that said, Liang agrees with you that the default Chinese mindset is suboptimal:
Their slogan is «Unravel the mystery of AGI with curiosity. Answer the essential question with long-termism» and they're the highest-prestige lab in China, with 5 IOI Gold winners on a team of ≈200 and a crapload of comparable talent. Liang is a hereditary teacher and I think he'll succeed in teaching China that his way is the right way, as I've previously argued. He's already impressed Xi and Li Qiang a year ago, he's just matched GPT-5 on a shoestring budget after a year of pundits saying that 100x compute advantage will erode his competitiveness, I think that's a big part of the reason Trump has abandoned Biden era containment and greenlit H200 exports. That's a very compelling set of facts, much more compelling than Jack Ma's (btw Jack Ma was at the same meeting with Xi and he's back in control, only now Alibaba is building AGI rather than shady fintech; that said, Ant Group also has an AGI division doing DeepSeek-style MoEs) and… it's pretty clear which way the process is going.
Can the US change its process after seeing new facts? Or do you lack the self-awareness to notice its defects?
On self-awareness. I think one of the greatest Chinese strengths – in addition to their sheer intelligence, endurance, their concept of the performance-based Mandate and the legitimacy (in fact, moral imperative) of rising against a degraded power, their notion of cultivation of the realm on all scales – is simply that they're an old, continuous, cultured civilization. They're jaded. They have seen it all, usually centuries before us; before you. Military overextension, proto-capitalism, proto-fascism, proto-Nietzscheanism, currency debasement, religious zealotry, multiethnic assimilation politics, infrastructure boondoogles, whatever. They can draw on an immense wealth of examples, positive and negative, and unlike modern Americans it's not restricted to the 95th percentile of cultural elites. Along the way they have developed a language to talk practically of how societies on the scale of modern Western powers fail and collapse, what moves people, how to make them act better, what is the «superior person» and how he differs from a «thief of virtue»… They have all these terms like «mianzi» and «guanxi», and Westerners look at it with condescension, Orientalist excitement or cold zoological curiosity, not realizing that these are human univerals, that Westerners themselves are driven by fairly similar if not cruder mechanisms. From what I can tell, the US today is a lot like late Qing, and its people are trying to save face before a more productive and well-ran civilization that they have grown used to regard as a barbarian shithole (and also, as I've said – «not hot»). And there's a whole lot of Guanxi going on in this Administration, too. Trump is trying to do a Self-Strenghtening Movement. Godspeed, I guess.
P.S. On cope. One of the most popular copes about China is «we've already heard all that about Japan». To me, that alone exposes Americans as an intellectually washed people. You heard that about Japan because Japan was seriously challenging you in trade, like it had previously challenged you in the war. In both cases, Japan was doomed. It's simply too small, too resource-poor, has too few people, and after the war it was under occupation and dependent on your security umbrella. Still it became enough of a problem to prompt that unhinged prophesying of the sexy scary neon-illiminated Japan Inc. turning the US into one big Detroit, and force Congressmen to smash a Toshiba radio on the Capitol lawn, like a bunch of rabid chimps. No other nation, save the USSR, had merited the distinction of such fear. So you won again. So what? The correct takeaway is not this self-congratulatory «America fuck yeah baby, our values!» attitude, but understanding that a structurally disadvantaged nation of 120 million East Asians can push you to the ropes; that in some very relevant ways they are more productive than you. Then, you ought to have noticed that China is 12 times larger in population, 25 times larger in territory and resources, is fully sovereign, and (contrary to the very strange stereotype divorced from what we see in everyday individual performance) Chinese people are not racially inferior to the Japanese. It's more or less Japan times 12, with unsurprising extra benefits of scale, clustering and on top of that a more competent industrial policy (MIIT>METI, as evidenced by the rigid embarrassment of Basic Hydrogen Strategy vs the civilization-scale triumph of the «New Three»).
To predict that they'll somehow fizzle out before eclipsing your global power (ie, more than 25% of your «per capita power») is to assert that either you have some near-supernatural tricks up your sleeve or that they're, bluntly, subhumans. Bugmen. An euphemism like «barbarians», «commies» or something also works. You're free to say that, but I think it's a bit too bold of a strategy to bet your nation's future on.
More options
Context Copy link
I'll respond in more detail later, but for now I'll share a translation from a Zhihu post because it addresses several points here in an amusing way.
Who is Liang Wenfeng, the Founder of DeepSeek?
Qingfeng Xuezha (The Breeze Academic Underachiever) North American Computer Science Professor; Technological Innovation and Entrepreneurship; Providing Value, Emotional, and Knowledge-Based Services. Navigator Duan Xiaocao and 4173 others agree.
I've seen a lot of discussions about Liang Wenfeng online. Yesterday, I happened to have a phone call with a close friend from the same university year, and we also talked about Liang Wenfeng. So here I am, brazenly invoking my university classmate Liang Wenfeng. Some netizens want to know what Liang Wenfeng was like during his undergraduate days before he ventured into investment and the AI industry. This answer is meant to satisfy a bit of everyone's curiosity. I hope these "revelations" won't affect Liang's privacy. If they do, please remind me promptly, and I will modify or delete the answer.
The answerer and Liang Wenfeng were both in the 2002 cohort of Electronic Information Engineering at Zhejiang University (ZJU), not in the same class, but participated in the same Electronic Design Competition. Although we had some contact during the four years of university, because we weren't in the same dormitory or class, my impressions of Liang Wenfeng are limited and fragmented.
Impression 1: In our sophomore year, while we were obediently attending classes, doing homework, and preparing for exams, Liang Wenfeng was already self-studying digital circuits and analog circuits and had begun his own engineering practice. What left a deep impression was that he personally handled everything from circuit design, PCB layout, microcontroller programming, to UI design, creating something like a miniplayer software (doing Software UI in 2004 was a high-skill endeavor). He modified an ordinary guitar into an electric guitar, where the guitar's string sounds could be controlled via a UI on the computer. This project seemed incredibly impressive at the time; we all looked at it in awe. He humbly said the guitar's tuning wasn't great and it would be better if it could tune itself automatically. This can be considered a testament to the seed of his ideas about AI intelligence back then.
Impression 2: He rarely attended classes; most courses were self-taught. The answerer speculates the reason was he felt the teachers' pace was slow, a waste of time, and self-learning was faster. The downside was not following the teacher's emphasis on key points, which could hurt during exams. Liang Wenfeng's GPA in the major back then wasn't outstanding; it was upper-middle, not reaching the line for guaranteed postgraduate admission (保研线) (at ZJU back then, the proportion for guaranteed admission to the university's own postgraduate programs for ordinary majors was the top 5%). He later secured guaranteed postgraduate admission through winning the National First Prize in the Electronic Design Competition. This will be mentioned below.
Impression 3: During university, Liang Wenfeng traveled around several provinces in East China on his bicycle. Surprisingly, he often spent nights finding a spot in the wild to sleep on the ground, completing the trip without spending much money. This matter hasn't been verified; the answerer learned about it from the hot post "Liang Wenfeng, the Pride of 02 Telecommunications" on the 88 forum during graduation. The poster back then was also one of his teammates from the Electronic Design Competition, so the credibility should be quite high.
Impression 4: Liang Wenfeng and two other classmates from the same department signed up for the National Undergraduate Electronic Design Contest during the summer of their junior year. None of the three were top students in terms of academic grades, but their competition performance was outstanding. Naturally, Liang was the main force of the team. During ZJU's internal training camp, he single-handedly completed many design tasks. In the final competition, their team won first place in the province and the National First Prize. All three earned the qualification for guaranteed admission to ZJU's postgraduate programs without examination (免试推荐). However, because the national award announcement for the Electronic Design Contest that year was in October, they missed ZJU's guaranteed admission timeline for that year. Therefore, Liang could only start his postgraduate studies one year later. This explains the one-year gap between his undergraduate (2002-2006) and postgraduate (2007-2010) studies. It is said that during this gap year, he continued working on electronic sensing system design and products, something related to marine navigation, handling hardware, software, and algorithms all by himself. Every electronic system he built during his undergraduate years could easily suffice as a master's thesis for an electronics major.
Impression 5: Liang Wenfeng has always been low-key, just like he was during undergraduate days, so much so that many classmates in the same major weren't very familiar with him. Many heard of him through the National First Prize he won in his senior year. Therefore, it's not surprising to us, his university classmates, that he didn't come out to publish an article, say a word, or record a video amidst the overwhelming popularity of DeepSeek earlier. Ordinary people don't possess such composure and steadiness. (Addendum: Thinking back now, Liang Wenfeng isn't deliberately low-key; rather, his incredibly strong focus on his work makes him appear low-key - like Huang Yaoshi's final evaluation of Zhou Botong: "Old Urchin, Old Urchin, you are truly remarkable. I, Huang Laoxie, am indifferent to 'fame.' Master Yideng sees 'fame' as illusory. But you, with a mind empty and vacant, never had the notion of 'fame' in the first place, which puts you a step above us.")
Conclusion: Liang Wenfeng created his own success in his own way. He didn't live his university life according to the traditional standards of a "good student," nor did he study worldly social skills. He is a classic case of "Be Yourself" among Chinese university students and an example of contemporary intellectual youth entrepreneurship changing their own destiny (even the nation's destiny). Huanfang (幻方) was just the appetizer; DeepSeek is only the beginning. As an old classmate, I'm very happy to see him making outstanding contributions to the world's technological development and also honored to have seen the fledgling eagle before it soared across thousands of miles.
I hope the above sharing can provide some inspiration and motivation for China's tech-savvy youth. Chase your dream, and be yourself!
Yixiao Daxia (Smiling Hero) History and Current Affairs Enthusiast, Secretly Observing the World. 4358 people agree with this answer.
The answers are very fragmented. I carefully collected some information to try and organize it.
1. Birth Background and Early Experience
Liang Wenfeng was born in 1985 in Mili Ling Village, Qinba Town, Wuchuan City, Zhanjiang, Guangdong. His family circumstances were indeed ordinary; both parents were primary school Chinese language teachers, basically with no significant background. Liang Wenfeng made it mainly through studying.
Liang Wenfeng attended Meiling Primary School near his hometown in Wuchuan for elementary school. Both his junior and senior high school were at Wuchuan No.1 Middle School. He had some talent in mathematics; during junior high, he had already self-taught high school mathematics and started reading university-level math textbooks. In the 2002 college entrance exam (Gaokao), Liang Wenfeng scored 806 points, ranking first in Wuchuan No.1 Middle School, 14th in Zhanjiang City, and around 100th in Guangdong Province that year.
His first-choice application was for the Electronic Information Engineering major at Zhejiang University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 2006. The year after graduation, 2007, he entered ZJU's Communication Engineering postgraduate program, graduating with a master's degree in 2010 (if it were a continuous bachelor's-master's program, graduation should have been 2009. Whether it was because he took the exam twice or something else is currently unknown).
2. Liang Wenfeng's Stock Market Life
As mentioned above, Liang Wenfeng had some talent in mathematics, and his undergraduate major was Electronic Engineering. Combining these two, the best application field he discovered was undoubtedly stock market trading. Therefore, during university, he developed a strong interest in financial trading. In 2008, Liang Wenfeng was 23, likely in his second year of master's studies, and began experimenting with automated trading in the A-share market with a principal of 80,000 RMB.
In 2010, the year he graduated, the stock market was in a downturn. However, it is said that Liang Wenfeng, through partly automated trading strategies, made 1 million RMB, gaining significant fame at the university and being called the "Campus Stock God."
After graduation, Liang Wenfeng did not seek employment nor start a business. He remained a retail investor, tinkering in the A-share market, continuously trying to write quantitative, automated strategies, testing them in the market to see if they could generate returns. It is said he once left Hangzhou and rented a place in Chengdu, closing himself off to trade stocks for three years.
If this stock trading venture hadn't succeeded, Liang Wenfeng would have been a typical negative example criticized by many. Imagine, a graduate from a prestigious university, not pursuing a proper career, and stock trading easily criticized as having a gambling addiction.
It wasn't until 2013, presumably after making considerable money from the stock market, that he began to end his status as an unemployed retail investor and started institutionalizing himself.
That year, he and his classmate Xu Jin established Hangzhou Yakebi (雅克比) Investment Management Co., Ltd. Generally, such asset management companies issue private fund products, get registered, and then raise money for investment. However, I guess it's likely that during the Yakebi phase, Liang Wenfeng and Xu Jin were similar to their previous retail investor status, probably lacking the qualifications and fundraising ability to issue products. The difference was having a company identity; their main work still focused on continuously researching, refining, validating, and improving their quantitative trading strategies.
After two years, the Hangzhou Yakebi company might have encountered issues, or perhaps they wanted to become a sunshine private fund (阳光私募), and the company didn't meet certain requirements, so it was abandoned. In 2015, he and Xu Jin together established a new company, Huanfang (幻方) Technology, and began the process of becoming a private fund manager (奔私).
In 2015, a recruitment post by Huanfang on Tsinghua University's Shuimu Community stated that Liang Wenfeng personally grew his 80,000 RMB principal from 2008 to 100 million RMB in profits over 7 years. It's unknown if this is true. If true, that's 1250 times in 7 years, basically tying with "Beijing Trader" as one of the fastest money-makers among retail investors in A-shares, and should be the domestic stock market's return champion. If the 100 million was accumulated through profit sharing during the Yakebi phase by raising significant external funds, then it involved substantial external leverage.
The period 2015-2017 was likely the most critical phase for Liang Wenfeng's stock trading. During this stage, all the quantitative trading explorations accumulated earlier finally bore fruit, and he successfully transitioned to a private fund institution, with asset management reaching a certain scale.
In 2016, Huanfang launched its first complete AI strategy. In 2017, they fully AI-ized their investment strategies. Presumably, their high-frequency trading AI strategy fit the characteristics of the A-share market very well, performing excellently. In 2017, Huanfang Quantitative's assets under management (AUM) broke through 30 billion RMB, and in 2018, they won the Private Fund Golden Bull Award (私募金牛奖).
Then things took off uncontrollably. In 2019, their managed funds exceeded 100 billion RMB. In 2021, they broke through 1 trillion RMB. However, by the end of 2021, perhaps due to the sheer size, over 100 products under Huanfang Quantitative saw declines exceeding 10%, causing investor losses. Subsequently, Huanfang Quantitative gradually reduced its funds under management.
By the end of 2024, Huanfang Quantitative's AUM was 45 billion RMB, with 63 fund products under its umbrella. However, performance differentiation is noticeable; 29 stock quantitative long-only products mostly maintained slight profits, while all 36 quantitative hedge-type products incurred losses. Of course, this is also related to the 2024 market conditions and policies. In 2024, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) imposed significant restrictions on quantitative trading, likely preventing their high-frequency products from functioning normally.
So, here I must also advise my fellow A-share investors: you must work harder, diligently study the market every day, analyze companies, and focus on operations. Only then can you better compete on the same stage with Liang Wenfeng in the A-share market and defeat him.
3. Liang Wenfeng's AI Breakneck Advance
On October 21, 2016, Huanfang's first stock position generated by a deep learning algorithm model went live for real trading. They began using GPUs for computation. Before this, algorithms mainly relied on linear models and traditional machine learning algorithms, with model computation primarily depending on CPUs.
Since then, his breakneck advance in AI began. In 2019, Liang Wenfeng started large-scale procurement of GPUs, self-developing the Huanfang "Firefly One" (萤火一号) AI cluster, equipped with 500 graphics cards, interconnected with a 200Gbps high-speed network. In 2020, "Firefly One" had a total investment of nearly 200 million RMB, equipped with 1100 accelerator cards, and was officially put into use that year, providing computing power support for Huanfang's AI research. In 2021, presumably having really made money, Huanfang invested 1 billion RMB to build "Firefly Two" (萤火二号), equipped with about 10,000 NVIDIA A100 GPUs, breaking through the physical limits of the first phase and doubling computing capacity expansion.
After Huanfang's hardware and funding scale expanded, quantitative trading likely encountered some difficulties. Firstly, making money isn't as easy when the volume is too large. Secondly, the A-share market in 2023-2024 experienced a "Northern Myanmar"-like trend (a metaphor for a difficult/unpredictable market), with investors complaining bitterly, and regulators began supervising quantitative trading. Huanfang started reducing its funds under management from 2021, almost halving it. So, the hardware and computing power prepared for quantitative trading became idle and needed a new direction.
In 2023, Liang Wenfeng recognized the prospects in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). In July, he officially founded Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd. (深度求索), focusing on the research and development of AI large models. In less than a year, in May 2024, DeepSeek released the mixture-of-experts language model DeepSeek-V2. On December 26, they launched and open-sourced the DeepSeek-V3 model, the version most of us used during the Spring Festival. The entire training process used less than 2.8 million GPU hours, costing about 40 million RMB.
On the evening of January 20, 2025, they released DeepSeek-R1. Its performance in mathematics, coding, and natural language reasoning tasks is comparable to OpenAI's o1 official version. They simultaneously open-sourced the model weights and training techniques, causing a huge stir worldwide.
DeepSeek directly shattered the American plan to monopolize cutting-edge AI technology and computing resources because it is both free and open-source. Anyway, I just made it casually; anyone who wants to use it can take it. I'm not making money from this, just for exploration and fun.
OpenAI: I'm getting a headache. I charge $150/month, $1800/year, and you're giving it away for free. What am I supposed to do? You're not charging either; what are you after?
Liang Wenfeng: It doesn't matter if I make money or not. What's important is that you can't make money!
I await your thoughts, not a copypasta of a chinese forum.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
The truth is somewhere in the middle. What you see is a project, the same as everything else. What you don't see is also a project.
In China, while innovation has definitely gotten much better, the method of thinking and philosophy seem better suited in America, because Americans will rake themselves over broken glass for that one 0.001% of optimization. They are obsessed with it. Silicon valley breeds techbros by the boatload who want to move fast and break things so they can "disrupt the market" or optimize even the act of drinking a smoothie. And they have all the money, so there's a market and funding for these things.
On the other hand, China absolutely dominates speed of deployment and iteration. Time to market, time to launch, time to prototype. This is partly a result of having all the manufacturing clustered so tightly together, and partly a result of the wonky path of development they went through, where they skipped entire fields and built newer, different infrastructure without the problem of having to deal with creaking legacy. Greenfield will always be easier than brownfield.
The biggest problem China has is systemic corruption. The biggest problem I consider the West to have in comparison is bureaucratic apathy and a lack of political will. These manifest in different ways in the society they are in. The Chinese failure mode is naked power law; the corrupt can win every time, so you either have to be even more corrupt or even more powerful than the corrupt (this usually ends up in winner-take-all Politburo games). Smarter Chinese governments work around this by playing smaller factions against each other. The Western failure mode is abdication of responsibility; an endless chain of committees, regulation and lawsuit risk management so nobody bothers anymore, and real power isn't in the political organs so why bother? Put me in government, so I can draw a salary without governing.
Meanwhile, in China, Xi can just say "I want that mountain gone" and everyone will fall over themselves to get it done ASAP, by whatever means necessary. Blasting powder, industrial equipment, artillery, slaves with pickaxes. The method (and potential fallout) doesn't matter anywhere near as much as the result. But hey, that's the benefit of an autocratic system.
Chinese demographics really, really matter. The thing is, that problem is the same problem everyone else has, and China is unwilling to import foreigners by the boatload. The state is really concerned about the demographic problem, because it keeps them paid. My worry is that if they throw their entire state apparatus at "solving" this, I don't know what that solution looks like. I do have a sneaking suspicion that it's something nobody from the West could stomach, even if Western governments may privately wish they had the same level of power over their citizens.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, I'm not going to bite.
"But muh state capacity!" is just another variety of cope that technocrat loving Lee Kuan Yew fanboys use to hand wave away pesky little things like civil liberties, the concept of federalism, and actual free markets. "State direct capitalism can totally work, man." There's a joke in here about how just a little, teeny bit of authoritarianism will be really good for us, like a teaspoon of arsenic to boost the immune system.
I wonder if this leads to gamification of easy to quantify objectives like GDP, but fails for other things, like, I don't know, food safety.
From this article and interview:
Coordination problems! Ah, so easy to fix, those.
All
livesdemographics matter. As does geography. My geopolitical worldview and formula is pretty much demographics + geographic determinism / naval warfighting and sustainment ability. China's prospects in all three of those are ... suboptimal.Also from the article I linked to above:
200 to 300 million small scale farmers who haven't leveled up meaningfully since maybe the 1950s.
Hey, but they do have cool lookin' EVs.
This is a funny callout given the fact the PLAN is quite literally doing the part of the movie where the protagonist does a training montage to "the eye of the tiger"
What do you think about the Type 003 EMALs, the pending type 004, and the fact they're launching type 054x and type 055s at a pretty hefty clip?
Put another way, why do you think basically every INDOPACOM leader sounds like they're shitting their pants in interviews and press releases?
There's a pretty large difference between production of new combat systems and experiencing in highly complex naval operations in combat.
China hasn't done the latter since 1979. Even basic seamanship atrophies quickly without constant training and re-training. Ask the U.S. Navy's 7th fleet.
Aquilino and Paparo - both aviators, by the way - mostly make noise about the issues of sustainment in the event of a crisis with taiwan. Amateurs talk about strategy, professional talk about logistics. The biggest issue is that China is like, really far away and shit. Our sealift capabilities plus ammunition, refit, maintenance, repair in theatre isn't enough to keep pace when PLAN has all of their naval industry right there. In strict force-on-force, the US is still winning, hands down. The problem, again, is when timetables stretch.
But that's just talking about a hypothetical right off the coast of mainland China. In terms of true ocean going naval fore projection, what has China done more than park a flotilla in the Gulf of Aden (after getting lost one time, lol) and then doing weird joint floats with the Russians sorta-kinda near Japan?
Running a truly global Naval force is shit crazy expensive, hyper complex, and requires a training pipeline and practice that you have to develop through decades of trial and error. Human capital, culture, and experience still matter far more than sleek new hulls and neato weapons.
Why do you think US would win when a carrier group doesn't have enough interceptors to even get close to China?
Getting into a shootout with a small continent sized landmass isn't what a admiral is looking to do.
More options
Context Copy link
Nice to talk to someone who knows their shit!
While I agree, "X country hasn't done real combat since Y" is kind of a tired trope. The US Navy hasn't fought a peer opponent since 1945 but we all agree they could wipe the floor with any other navy, and debatably could take on a large fraction of the world simultaneously.
Experience is great, but training is so close to as good it almost doesn't matter? And basically everything I see about China is they're getting in more and more training hours, and running bigger and bigger exercises.
Yes, that's why I said it's the "training montage" part. They're not there yet, but they're fucking grinding to get there. They have a CATOBAR carrier to git gud on, they'll soon have more. Eventually they'll have nuclear powered ones so they can learn that too. There in the middle of the "decades of trial and error" part, meanwhile the US Navy is now 3/3 on failing to acquire new major surface combatants, and even if they could procure worth a damn, they barely have the shipyard capacity to make them.
I'm Canadian, I love Pax Americana, I do not want a world in which China is strong. I am scared because it seems like my team is eating crayons, going to lobbyist dinners, and laughing at the Chinese for being "IP theft bugmen who can't innovate" while the Chinese are hitting new deadlift PRs every month (still smaller than us, but growing!) and drinking a river of creatine.
Yes. But their naval exercises keep getting bigger and better. They're slowly expanding their global base network. Their recent "totally not practicing to cut Taiwan off" drills continue to expand.
Also, the unfortunate reality is that the fight, if it happens, will be in the first island chain, and maybe tickling the second (I'd imagine that would be a round #2 some years later depending on round #1).
The PLAN won't be forcing the straits of Magellan, where both navies have to bring their shit with them. It'll be in China's backyard.
Will Chinese Type 055s ever sail off the coast of LA? Absolutely not.
Is the PLAN on a trajectory that results in the US being pushed back deeper into the Pacific? It's looking increasingly likely, and I don't like it.
Okay, so we actually agree on more than we disagree on. And we're probably 99.9999% aligned on the current state of affairs.
The difference is just in the prognosis of the outcome.
I'll combine these three things from your last post:
Time and timing are the big issues here. We've all heard the 2027 deadline / prediction for shit popping off. I don't really think it matters if that's actually 2026, 2028, 2030. But I think it's true that the CCP has a closing window of opportunity before (a) They experience something live COVID again (b) Power struggle at the top after Xi dies or (c) The demographic wave breaks and they actually HARD lose for another century. Truly, I think it's no later than 2035 (that's stretching it) before CCP has to shit or get off the planet.
Will their eye of the tiger training montage be complete in that amount of time? I'd argue no. Again, multiple decades of naval experience really are necessary. Maybe you can shave it down to 20 years starting from .... 2009? 2013? But I don't think you can just fuck around and find out how to do large scale amphibious work in 5 - 10 years.
Note to the Mods (@amadan, just tagging you off the top of my head) -- can we self-submit this as a "understanding actually developed out of some initial rounds of shouting" award?
More options
Context Copy link
Americans counter that in case of Taiwan invasion they're just going to keep sinking and stealing Chinese cargo ships everywhere else and that PLAN is too small to stop them.
They're also talking about allowing privateering again.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Lots to comment on here (to start with, comparing American suburb life to anything China has to offer is a featherweight match between two very mediocre lifestyles, in a global comparison), but the thing that particularly stuck out to me is
In what sense are AI datacenters a mark of state capacity/building ability? They just take some off-the-shelf hardware (fabricated elsewhere) and stick lots of it in a room with some ventilation and power supply. China had unemployed miners do the same thing in soot-choked shacks in the desert for Bitcoin mining, and I here they do that with cellphone farms for scamming in the Cambodian jungle. In fact the scam farms are more impressive, since they usually come with some slave labourer camp/brothel/casino compound for tens of thousands of people attached and are actually just created ex nihilo in the middle of nowhere.
Those scamming datacenters are there bc Chinese cracked down inside China.
And seem to allegedly now be using the Thai army to crack down on border Casino/scam operations in Cambodia.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Data centers are far, far more complicated than setting up a desktop and WiFi in your home network times a million. To give a taste of the problems:
Power. They're incredibly power hungry. You can't just hook them up to the local grid; the local grid might not even have the capacity to support them. You've got to expand existing plants or build entirely new ones. And then how do you handle power surges? A naive approach is going to cost you tens of millions of dollars when a spike comes through and kills a thousand GPUs. Of course, you've also got to figure out how to distribute the power internally and plan for inevitable component failure at multiple layers. How do you distribute thousands of amps (safely and without melting the insulation)? And what about when the grid fails? You've got to have backup power sources ready for a day or two of unavailability. Not doing these things will make your data center uneconomic, as all that expensive capex is sitting around unused.
Heat. All this power has to go somewhere. Air conditioning and fans don't work at this scale, so you've got to use liquid cooling. But where do you get this liquid and where do you send it? And how do you pump it through hundreds of miles of plumbing? How do you minimize the rate of pipes getting clogged, and how do you handle it when pipes do get clogged? And remember: if this plumbing fails, your GPUs are going to rapidly start failing as well, to say nothing of the risk of a highly corrosive liquid being sprayed all over billions of dollars of investments.
Weight. A rack, by itself, weighs over five tons. Now add all of the equipment and liquid needed to handle 1) and 2). You've got to have a massive foundation that can support that. This isn't just a big Amazon warehouse.
Security. You've got a lot of investment here, all in one place, and quite delicate. How do you prevent a hostile actor from taking a truck or drone and destroying your investment? To say nothing of state-level actors, who absolutely are trying to break in.
Networking. You've got thousands of very chatty, data dependent GPUs coordinating in a highly choreographed dance to transmit trillions of parameters to each other. And the slowest link determines, by itself, the overall speed. When you've got thousands of nodes, that is pretty slow. Your mega ultra gaming WiFi 7 ASUS gaming router is going to have some trouble here. And that's just internally: you're receiving and transmitting massive amounts of data to the outside world. How do you prepare for a backhoe running through, or a shark chewing through, one of your fiber optic cables? Every hundred miles or so, you also need to amplify the signal, which comes with its own power, security, etc requirements. And what about truly bulk data: if you're transmitting 100Pb of data, is it better to saturate your measly 1 Pbps capacity (displacing your other network needs) for a painful amount of time, or to use trucks with hard drives to ship it cross country? And, if you have a bunch of these trucks, how do you efficiently unload them, without causing needless congestion or buffering in the physical world?
There's maybe half a dozen organizations in the world that can handle all these concerns. All of them are American.
Nobody is comparing datacenters to home networks. I don't think your points are particularly correct regarding the extraordinariness of datacenter construction, either, even though you (or your LLM? I'm getting a certain vibe) evidently put a lot of effort into them.
1/2: Bounded above by the requirements of power plants, which lots of countries build. Electric arc furnace complexes are also measured in the same hundreds of megawatts as datacenters. Also, my examples about bitcoin farms are pretty relevant here.
3: Moving heavy things on the order of "five tons" is really not impressive for modern civilisations.
4: Same for securing centralised facilities. How often do first-world countries experience break-ins in their bank vaults or even prisons?
5: This is of course a nontrivial engineering problem, but off-the-shelf solutions exist. Also, China is filtering all their incoming and outgoing traffic for content basically in real time, which is surely a harder problem.
Your conclusion is also wrong. I searched for maybe about 2 minutes to find that Meta's Prineville data center is (was at some point?) considered the biggest in the US, and it's cited as using 15000 GWh in a year. Elsewhere, Alibaba's Zhangbei data center is cited as pulling 150MW, which x 24h x 365 gives 1314GWh which is only one OOM off. Other big US data centers seem to also be moving in the 100-200MW range.
Your LLM detector is busted, I'm afraid.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's actually worse than that: you will fuck up the grid if you just naiively run jobs that cause your hundred thousand node cluster to all spike their draw in unison.
We have to smooth our consumption because otherwise it messes with generating equipment.
More options
Context Copy link
Okay you've aligned all your ducks in a row at massive expense which even that half dozen companies are more 'capable of getting financed' than outright affording and then it's being used for something that isn't even profitable at current scale.
That's a orthogonal concern as to whether it's a big infrastructure project. Maybe they're going to be giant boondoggles; maybe not. The same applies to most of China's infrastructure projects; it still represents a high level of state/social capacity.
And the biggest builder of these projects (Google) usually funds them out of cash on hand. To the extent it issues bonds for them, it's for financial engineering/tax reasons. And investors for whatever reason are desperate to buy "green bonds," and are willing to take spectacularly low rates for the chance to buy them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And more to the point... I don't think the real contention was that America CAN'T build. But between all the bureaucracy, environmentalism regs, NIMBYs, and cost disease, it just costs WAY more than it probably 'should' and thus things only get built if someone is enthusiastically willing to fund the process. Once they do, things happen very fast.
With Datacenters, we have motivated buyers utterly flush with cash so the cost obstacle is surmounted, at which point all the other steps can be done.
As I'm fond of pointing out, Florida built a high-speed rail system before California even broke ground on theirs because there were many many fewer unnecessary obstacles to doing it. Simple as.
There are three issues here - a skill level issue where the hard costs of a big project are a lot higher than they would be in a country that didn't suck, a political culture issue where either NIMBYs kill the project or soft costs explode fighting them off, and a bloat issue where projects get overspecified because it isn't anyone's job to control costs.
As regards large-scale civil engineering, the US has all three problems, such that the overall cost of new roads is 3-5x the cheapest European countries * and the cost of new rail infrastructure is 5-10x (10-20x in NYC).
With data centres, I suspect the skill level issue is mitigated because Google and suchlike can hire first-rate people to do unglamorous work in a way neither the government nor the big construction contractors can. The NIMBY issue can be managed by building in red states, or by Big Tech buying the Government of California en bloc. I suspect Google eats the bloat, and Elon personally trims bloated projects at 3am with his hands while shitposting with his feet, or some other similar feat of workaholism.
* Per Alon Levy, these are Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the less corrupt parts of Italy. France is slightly better than average, Germany slightly worse, and the UK shockingly bad when compared to anywhere except North America.
More options
Context Copy link
I think an important aspect is that those things largely don't apply to data centers in the same way they do to any public infrastructure or factories. A data center is essentially just a large building with power and network connectivity and cooling. There is no real noise or chemicals involved so safety regulations don't apply and of course it isn't a public building so the local politicians or interest groups don't get a say. It also doesn't have to be located in city center so there's no "social" aspect and in general the location is not critical so NIMBYism is much less important.
And yet you get people screaming about water and electricity usage (being fair, the latter is a concern).
They have successfully shut them down before:
https://www.kold.com/2025/12/02/county-city-leaders-amazon-pulls-out-embattled-project-blue/
https://wsbt.com/news/local/st-joseph-county-council-denies-rezoning-of-land-for-data-center-votes-7-2-marathon-meeting-hours-long-public-opinion-13-billion-dollar-project-amazon-new-carlisle-approval-process-plan-commission-st-joseph-county-indiana
https://www.fauquiernow.com/news/warrenton-town-council-passes-resolutions-to-address-legal-disputes-in-amazon-data-center-cases-halt/article_6f98e20c-d36c-11ef-885a-9bc61bdcc17c.html
I agree with your overall point, datacenters are less objectionable than average... so imagine what building anything more objectionable would take!
Let me just say for the record, I am SO glad that NASA exists simply because by building out their facilities at Cape Canaveral back when Florida was barely populated, we've got a large rocket launch complex that didn't have to be built in barely accessible mountains or something. Can you imagine the fuss residents would put up if someone suggested building 40 launchpads near a populated area?
I mean SpaceX built it's launch facility near a populated area.
I'm so glad you made that point so I can post this.
https://www.govtech.com/policy/activists-win-appeal-over-spacex-beach-closures-in-texas#:~:text=A%20coalition%20of%20environmental%20and%20Native%20American,State%20Highway%204%20for%20space%20flight%20launches**
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/spacex-launch-site-boca-chica-texas-60-minutes-plus/
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eenews/2024/12/19/groups-take-aim-at-spacex-water-pollution-00195356
Granted these are more a shakedown attempt than a true attempt to stop the process.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't want to go too far into China stronk memes. But a lot of this does seem like a bit of cope the HSR to nowhere certainly feels so as most of the Subway stations to nowhere now have bustling new development around them and most of the ghost citeies have filled up. HSR isn't profitable but neither are American freeways. And China built a whole network of them too.
In general Chinese factory jobs suck but pay decent wages for Chinese standards. Chinese factory workers are not destitute child slaves but people working shit jobs to save money. Like the equivalent of oilfield workers. They can blow that on booze and hookers and many do. But many also use the decent wage and shitty dorm to save money and go back to their hometowns to buy a house and get married after 5/10 years of working.
Living in China feels to me what I imagine life in the 50s was like in the US with new prosperity industrialization . It's definitely not perfect but looking around at my surroundings I just don't think the China doomers have the right of it. The Party fucked up a bunch of shit during COVID but the post COVID norm seems to be a return to reasonably competent government and corruption has significantly declined since Xi took power.
The difference is that freeways are reasonably versatile. You can have passenger cars, busses, and eighteen wheelers on them. HSR is stuck in its particular niche.
I think mass transit stans, despite sharing some sympathies that we could actually build better public transit, really tend to miss that (paved) roads are a really configurable system. Roads are switched packet networks to the broad/multicast media of rail and such. I can drive point-to-point at a time of my choosing (or stream a TV episode) rather than wait for sufficient demand to justify a bus and professional driver (or watch new episodes Wednesdays at 7:00 Eastern! But I'm busy then!). And this is from someone that generally hates driving. The same network delivers all but the heaviest freight to nearly anywhere and is relatively cheap to build and maintain (rail is much more specific about grade requirements, for example).
And this is the whole point. Privately-owned cars just work better than any kind of scheduled or on-demand transit at low enough population densities, or at off-peak times (noting that in a major city, only the middle of the night is off-peak). But something like London's Victoria Line or Paris's Metro 1 have enough demand to justify a train and professional driver every two minutes and then some, from 6am to after midnight. Roads for private cars don't scale to that level of demand. Autonomous cars help a little bit (because of faster reaction times) but not enough to turn London, Paris or Manhattan into DFW or Atlanta. Centrally co-ordinated autonomous cars can do a lot better, but the kind of person who really wants to live a car-based lifestyle is exactly the kind of person who doesn't want their car controlled by someone else's computer.
That's still enough to suck. I recently got stuck in Philly after missing the last train after a concert because I didn't realize there was a last train. Luckily I had a nightowl friend who answered an SOS and picked me up... in his car. And then drove me to my car, parked at a transit station outside the city, where I drove home. Sure as hell beat sleeping at the train station with the fent zombies.
I've never missed the last train while sober enough to drive.
More options
Context Copy link
I have jogged miles through Shanghai late at night because I missed the last train. Eventually came across a taxi and the smoking teenager driving it who was not the guy on the taxi license took me the rest of the way to the hotel.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Source (approximately 22:30 to 5:30)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There is a difference between within city transit and between city transit. There have been tons of railway overbuilds historically but within city public transit is rarely meaningfully overbuilt. The economic case for between city HSR is generally very poor, there just isn't enough potential transit to justify the massive costs.
Between city travel should generally either be slower trains, cars or air traffic. It isn't that transit or even rail transit is bad, it's just that the economic case for HSR in particular is very narrow.
I'd agree if the rail was constructed solely to serve an area that doesn't currently pencil out. But in my experience HSR serving less populated areas are simply stops between the densely populated areas. The present-day cost is the capital outlay for a small station and an additional few minutes for the trains that stop there. And then you've given some amount of people easier access to the bigger cities for things like jobs, medical care, kids coming home to visit parents, etc.
Keep in mind that tier three cities in China are still millions of people.
That's a very large cost for a successful HSR route. You are potentially delaying 1000 people by 4 minutes (for a Shinkansen) or 6-8 minutes (for a TGV, which has worse acceleration) to allow a single digit number of people to get on or off.
To get full benefit, you also have to route the high-speed line through the intermediate city you want to stop at, which adds a lot of construction cost and NIMBY-aggravation. There is a reason why the TGV tends to make intermediate stops at out-of-town park-and-ride stations.
More options
Context Copy link
Those are good arguments for expanded road, rail and air access, not HSR.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah it's not perfect but there's a sense of optimization and that things are being built towards some sort of developed future. Plus cost of living's reasonable and there's recent memory of things being much much worse in most of those regions.
I'd much rather be born in a Chinese low-tier city than like Detroit or Hull, more chance of upward mobility.
Chinese low tier cities are actually really bad. All the young people are leaving for the big cities and there are blighted and abandoned neighborhoods as well. The biggest difference is the lack of a racially distinct criminal underclass that completely ruins places like detroit.
I mean this plus lack of drugs/homeless plus actual occasional infrastructure investment plus a sense from the government that the local variety of underclass isn't totally subordinate to the economic hack of importing in new underclasses plus manufacturing roles plus affordable cost of living.
I'm not gonna pretend I've been through every part of China and personally inspected the most remote parts but I've been through sub top-100 cities in China and they tend to be generally fine.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I worked in China a bit. I have visited a number of times. As best as I can tell, none of my Chinese in laws work 996 and certainly none of my coworkers did. I worked more hours than the Chinese engineers.
Google tells me Chinese people are working longer hours in the past few years. Around 48 hours per week. That's certainly not taking it easy. But not greater than typical hours in my current and former American offices.
Yeah 996 is more a tech/crunch time thing it's more a tech thing and a crunch time thing.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah as far as I understand 996 is more about crunch/certain prestige roles as opposed to being a universal expectation of labor, also having done early-days startup grind in Australia and put in 80-hour weeks before it happens everywhere occasionally. Hell, I even know consulting friends who do it regularly despite minimal actual upside and eroding their hourly wages to something horrible.
Didn't know we were buddies!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean at the end of the day, the US is going to lose slower than China. The population is declining slower, it has far more fossil wealth to live on, there's more natural resources making purchasing power/GDP disconnects easier to weather, and if you think US foreign policy is disastrous- wait until you see China's. The US native white population has a pretty decent fertility rate by first world standards and the core red tribe is actually replacing itself.
More options
Context Copy link
Bizarre question by Cowen
Cowen retroactively defines an attractive suburb as a sprawling American suburb. No wonder Wang is confused.
American suburbs are the result of uniquely American circumstances from the mid/late 20th century: white flight, stranger danger, infinite money, fertile population, car lobbies & cheap gas. China has little to do with these circumstances and therefore, little to do with the American suburb.
Agreed. The whole "suburb" thing as defined here in uniquely American. Here in the UK we also have homes with a yard and a dog and a car (though some of the most expensive properties in central London won't have an exclusive yard and potentially not even off street parking given that they literally share walls with their neighboring super expensive properties (they are terraced, not detached). They are amazing places to live (hence the prices) but Cowen's phrasing would put them as not "attractive".
Plus the whole controlling your school district is a very American thing as well, it just seems quaint and weird in the UK: schooling should be run by professionals, not the whims of a bunch of parents who don't know shit about pedagogy. As we move to a more and more multi polar world US citizens need to realize that the rest of the world doesn't think like them and while in the past they had the luxury of being able to ignore what we said without much consequence this is fast dissipating and they will now need to learn some cultural sensitivity like the rest of us.
In a better world yes. Unfortunately some of our professionals like to ban teaching phonics and think Gender Queer is good content for 8 year olds. I like having a democratic veto over these people. If the school board goes looney enough then they can be voted out. As a taxpaying voter I get a say.
You're referring to American schools here, so clearly Tyler's whole "we control the schools thing" isn't going so well lol
There are a number of options here, assuming that government schools exist. ("Every school a charter school" type approaches are clearly possible, but they don't have a particularly good record in practice) In order of desirability I would put them as:
In the UK, (1) got us acceptable outcomes under Blair's rotation of education secretaries, and very good outcomes under Gove, (2) got us okay outcomes for most kids but some schools decided not to teach the kids to read, (3) got us "The perfect Ofsted lesson - how to impress school inspectors by never, ever teaching the kids anything" and (4) is outside the Overton window.
I suspect most Motteposters would disagree with me and rate (4) above (3). They may be right in a US context.
More options
Context Copy link
hmm? school boards across the country were deposed and much of this stuff was stopped in localities across the country, including my locality
the "professional experts" were booted over their political insanity and covid insanity and now not a single one has a seat anymore and the explicit progressive politics has ended with teachers being sanctioned and punished for attempting to push it
what are you talking about?
I'm trying to imagine this scenario except instead "the whims of a bunch of parents who don't know shit about pedagogy" have no power and their only option is a march through institutions to retake the professional expert class (sacrificing a few generations in the meantime) or just move away to some other place?
unless you're claiming the progressive politics rearing its face in gender politics and racial politics in education generally or of children is some uniquely American thing, which is hard to swallow, I'm trying to craft a decent point out of this
even if it's true, like every one else who swims in the American empire's culture, when it's happening here you can look forward to it happening in your county as well (BLM protests coming to a town near you!) and then you can tell us your surefire effective way to depose an entrenched professional class
I know it's easy for euros to feel they know quite a bit about America, American politics, and Americans, because they're steeped in our culture and read discussion of our politics on the American internet, but it's important to remember their understanding and knowledge is quite limited and heinously manipulated. Being American and not blue-tribe, living in Western Europe and watching the media the Europeans consume there is quite eye opening. The whole continent's (or at least the Western part of it) accurate understanding of America is a casualty of American media's attack on typical Americans.
Mostly just being snarky.
My point was that this ideal of the best way to run schools "parents in the suburbs control it" has resulted in (edit) mediocre educational outcomes in the western world, and generally a system full of absolute fucking insanity like gender and racial politics. Maybe having technocrats would be even worse, but the status quo is extremely far from "good".
I'm Canadian, it's too late for us, we went full retard a while ago. I'm not actually sure what the most effective way to depose an entrenched professional class is, maybe american suburban parents are the dominant strategy. Given their efficacy however, we might be fucked if they are.
adjusting for demographics, the US school system is one of the best in the world as measured by proxies like PISA, with the school systems with the most involved parents, i.e., suburbs, scoring near the top
homeschoolers do even better than that
to be fair, I think this is despite the school systems and not because of them; what made you think US primary schools were "some of the worst educational outcomes in the western world"?
racial and gender politics were imposed from above and through institutional capture; it was never imposed because parents wanted it or through parental control
parental control was the check and moderation on each of the "professional educators" newest idiocy from abandoning phonics to gender politics to common-core
I was being too snarky, I amended to "mediocre"
Middle of the pack in achievement
Pretty expensive but again, with middling outcomes.
I would posit that having massive demographic achievement gaps is a failure state.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Now imagine how poorly American pedagogists would behave if they could run wild and never answer to voters or parents. Which is my response to BurdensomeCount rather than Tyler.
I'm deeply skeptical of would-be technocrats. Self appointed "experts" aspiring to shape society free from petty concerns like consent from the governed so consistently go against my preferences. This happens to be a good example of the "experts" not clearly aligning with broader societal preferences, expectations or goals. Maybe American school administrators are especially unaligned with any positive societal outcomes and BurdensomeCount is fairly pointing out how British schooling is well managed by competent professionals. That's certainly not a point in America's favor given how school administrators seemingly run rampant. But that is especially not an argument for why they should be freed from the last bit of voter influence over them.
Fair point!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Government should be run by the people it governs, as close as possible to reality and as decentralized as possible. That goes double for public schooling.
Oh believe me, I know. We're a thousand years into a project that other races simply can't accomplish, and wouldn't try anyway.
Should an asylum be run by its inmates?
As so many Boomer Republicans (still) like to say, "we don't live in a 'democracy,' we live in a representative republic." (Setting aside the quibble about how they here define "democracy…) Well, what does it mean to be a good "representative"?
How does a parent or guardian properly "represent" a small child?
How does someone with power of attorney "represent" a senile elder?
How does a relative "represent" a hospitalized schizophrenia patient who keeps trying to cut himself open to remove the chip the CIA implanted to control him?
Why not? There's nothing pejorative about an asylum institution, unless you're trying to smuggle in the connotation of an insane asylum in particular. But if you have to have insane inmates as analogous to the citizenry of a country for that analogy to hold as a pejorative, it can be trivially dismissed as a false analogy, or just as trivially inverted to say that the government officials are the incompetent crazy people who really shouldn't be in charge of things.
I was riffing on the classic metaphorical statement "the inmates are running the asylum" where the context is indeed an insane asylum. Thus, I didn't think it needed said explicitly
And if I say, no it can't? If I say that just like children, the senile, and the insane, the common masses don't know what's good for them, and that they need wiser heads ruling over them, what then?
Then I'll say who watches the watchers? Who keeps them from abusing their "wisdom" to benefit themselves, at the cost of those who cannot defend themselves? During COVID, our health minister issued shutdown orders that closed off many of the competitors to her winery, but mysteriously left her own business open. She was renowned as an expert, despite literally penning a pandemic preparedness plan that specifically recommended against lockdowns and masks (in fact, she testified as an expert witness on behalf of nurses previously who did not want to wear masks on shift).
The demand for "experts" far exceeds the supply.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Hobbes talks about this, and it's one of the basic foundations of Enlightenment republican thought, that no man knows the business of another so well that he can reliably claim the right of rule over him just by superior knowledge. It was only in the 20th Century that intellectuals became so detached and naïve that they thought, for instance, that they knew farming better than farmers, and, to be fair, only a few million had to die before experts settled on "let's give them better technology, educate them on techniques, and let them make the decisions on how to implement it." But the generations rotate, the lessons of common sense are forgotten, and now the experts are sure that they know best again.
I accept the point against democracy in general, but, if we are to have a democracy, better the ordinary people than the official class that democracy creates.
Where does Rousseau, and his distinction between the "general will" and the "popular will" fit into "Enlightenment republican thought"? Because I generally see people class him as a major figure of the "Enlightenment" alongside Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu; and because I've read an argument about how that concept means that real democracy is when a self-selected vanguard party of intellectual elites take uncontested charge of the state, and that giving the voters what they vote for is instead "populism," which is the greatest threat to Our Democracy.
So, I never liked the Social Contract, I think it's largely motivated by Rousseau coping about getting kicked out of Geneva, but the "General Will" was wildly misinterpreted by his revolutionary followers. The General Will can only legislate general laws, based on the idea that the population as a whole will come to the best solutions if it isn't tempted by faction, but is forced to consider full collective self-interest. In that respect, the General Will is entirely compatible with the American idea that the Constitution and Constitutional procedure is the essence of legitimate governance, in that, even with full popular sovereignty, whatever is done under the Constitution must be done according to general laws (e.g. the Amendments clause). The General Will is not a blank check for elites, but something closer to Kant's Categorical Imperative, that one should "act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law".
More generally, scholars of both the left and right radically overstate how much Rousseau broke with previous traditions. The Emile is an extraordinarily Classicizing, even reactionary text; he says that man in the state of nature is little different from an ape; amour-propre is a prototype of the Anglo concept of enlightened self-interest. Both leftist and conservative modern readings of Rousseau are understandable, given the abuse of Rousseau in the Revolution, but about as accurate as talking about Nietzsche endorsing the Aryan Race.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Or else what, exactly?
Or else you continued to get laughed at and have power moved away from you because the rest of the (western at least) world stops accepting you as the primus inter pares and then lose the exorbitant privilege of running 6% yearly deficits because you have the world's reserve currency and can freely export away your inflation. If the UK tried the level of profligacy which has become standard in the US we'd end up under an IMF programme in 2 years.
The levels of contempt I am hearing against the US and Americans in my personal circle are basically the highest they have ever been. This isn't just a me thing, there was a recent piece in the FT how the appropriate response for the EU now given the US reducing its support for Ukraine is to hit back hard on US tech with tariffs rather than the "roll over and take it" with the 15% tariffs they accepted earlier this year. It's now becoming fairly standard that when I meet someone new from the US they'll volunteer by themselves unprompted within the first few minutes that they "are one of the good ones"...
While I am 80% with BurdensomeCount on this point, the cultural sensitivity is a furphy. The Americans don't do cultural sensitivity, they have been powerful enough not to need to since the 1920's, and the rest of the pro-American world is used to dealing with that.
The point is that the American-led system used to be (by design) win-win for the countries participating in it - very much including the US. The EU and first-world Asia don't pay directly for US military protection, but the willingness to trade goods and services for portraits of Benjamin Franklin is part of the package deal. This would all be clearer if the BEP put Nuclear Gandhi* on the forthcoming $200 bill instead of Donald Trump.
Trump doesn't like win-win arrangements (and nor do his dumber supporters in the country), and wants to replace the status quo with a setup where the US wins and the EU and first-world Asia lose. The danger is that he blows up a system which (and I am pulling numbers out of my ass here) generates 6% of GDP in net benefits in order to extract 1.5% of GDP in tribute.
There is a separate issue that including Red China in the system has turned out to probably be a mistake, because the CCP was talking about win-win outcomes while seeking win-lose ones quietly. But Trump isn't trying to kick the Chinese out - China gets a better deal than traditional US allies do.
Looking at dysfunction in domestic politics, America is less governable than any other large democracy except France - even with a trifecta, neither party can pass a deficit-reducing budget. The cost is eaten by UST holders accepting a lousy return. You could try to replace that with actual extractive imperialism, but @BurdensomeCount and I come from a culture that had some idea how to do that right (and how and why it ceased to be profitable in the first half of the twentieth century), and you don't. The skill level issues America experiences when it tries to do imperialism are well-known.
* The adoptive child of Sid Meier, born at Microprose HQ, and therefore American under the 14th amendment. Dead in later versions of Civ, and therefore eligible to be on a banknote.
I think you are modelling Trump wrong. I think he's fine with win-win between equals. To me his actions make most sense if you model him as viscerally attracted to strength and repelled by weakness.
From this perspective China is strong, it builds stuff, it's worthy of respect; maybe you've got to tariff them a bit to stop them leeching off you and to remind them that, hey, you're no slouch yourself, but generally they're cool people. Likewise, Russia is pretty impressive. Not nice, and failing to take Ukraine was a bit lame, but they stuck two fingers up at everyone and they've mostly backed it up.
Britain and the EU on the other hand are very lame. Lots of puffing themselves up, lots of trying to look down their noses at the real players like a little man wearing platform soles, but then they break and beg for help. They have some influence (EU regulation for example) but it's a pathetic, crawling, sneaking sort of power. It's not just that the NATO countries are expensive to defend, they're sad and they make America sad by association. Likewise Palestine, the Middle East, Africa.
Ukraine and Israel are in this weird halfway place where they're quite strong and defended themselves pretty impressively, but (Ukraine especially) can only do it if they're on America's apron strings. They're not bad guys but they do have to sit down and listen when Daddy talks and they don't come to the White House and posture like America's doing them a favour.
I can't say I agree with your specific interpretation of Trump regarding China. Trump has been pretty insistent that having a trade deficit is bad and wanting to use tariffs as a way to bring manufacturing back. He's been pretty aggressive in trying to tariff China until China flexes that they have similar leverage on us.
More options
Context Copy link
The way my model of Trump thinks about dealmaking is that if the weaker party walks away smiling, the stronger party has screwed up.
This is a phenomenological model based on looking at his behaviour across four careers - I don't have a strong theory about what psychological traits make him think this way, so I doubt we have a real difference of opinion here. I see "Trump is viscerally attracted to strength and repelled by weakness" as a (probably correct) mechanistic explanation for why he behaves in the way predicted by my phenomenological model, not a rival model.
Fred Trump's money and connections meant that Donald has always had the option of refusing to play if he isn't the biggest dick in the game. Negotiations with China are the first time he has had no choice but to enter a negotiation where pointing his finger and saying "You're Fired" isn't an option, and he got a lousy deal in his first term and appears to be surrendering like a Frenchman in his second term.
What about, say, that famous meeting with North Korea? Where Trump got a lot of flack b/c Kim Jong Un looked entirely too smiling and chummy with him. Same with Putin.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Oh no, the United States has earned the contempt of David Aaronovitch, Anatole Kaletsky, Caitlin Moran, your friends, maybe even Zanny or Xanny or whatever her name is. The Brit chattering classes are talking tough because their pride, what's left of it, has been deeply wounded, but more in the manner of a scrawny kid who just got wedgied/swirlied/etc. by the jock twice his size. Oh he's gonna kick his ass someday, he's gonna go all out, he did karate lessons! The reality is, there is no pares going on. There's a financial sector that could always evaporate overnight, hooked up to an economy about as dynamic as East Germany, with an ever-shrinking military who, by the way, are starting to despise the London types. The French have a claim to freedom of action, Germany had one until recently, but the only way the UK can stay relevant is clinging to America. Hence the equivocation between "Brits are malding" and "the EU should do something".
If you are in the UK, and want to do something that matters to thumb your nose at the US, volunteer for Democrats Abroad or donate to some outlet like the Guardian that Democratic voters read. Seething from the cuck chair of history isn't going to get you anywhere.
You're not wrong, but neither is he
The UK does seethe in the cuck chair of history (LMAO), but a world in which the USA loses the mandate of free market heaven is a world that's much shittier for the USA.
And the way the USA loses said mandate is by doing exactly what is happening, generally being an irrational and chaotic actor who insists on shooting itself in the foot a lot, and then making fun of the people going "hey maybe stop doing that?".
Nothing crazy has happened yet, and maybe nothing will. But the tiny dominos are starting to shift, and they could get bigger. A non exhaustive list:
Some Saudi oil and natgas trades are now settled in RMB.
Some Russian bonds are now denominated in RMB.
SWIFT is absolutely garbage technologically but the USA laughs at anyone who points this out and China is grinding hard to set up an alternative.
BRICS is looking into using a basket of currencies to settle trades. You may say "hah who the fuck cares about BRICS" which is fair. But if BRICS is looking to get away from you, and then you also alienate the EU (and make no mistake, regardless of the cuck chair, the vibes are shifting) you have actually lost your dominant position over the vast majority of humanity
As someone who greatly benefits from Pax Americana, please wake the fuck up and avoid this obvious fail state
It doesn't matter which currency is used to conduct/settle trades: totally economically meaningless, because currencies are freely swappable for any of the buyers & sellers (before and after the settlement). So the only thing that slightly matters in this realm is what currency anyone chooses to save in.
So in this regard (of the US getting some free benefit from being the big dog), the 'dominos starting to fall' would look like the US trade deficit shrinking, as past savers start trying to spend down their USD reserves instead of amassing them. But we're currently in an environment where trump and some of his people are trying their damnedest to intentionally reduce the US trade deficit... So it's muddy, with various winners & losers there, and probably better to look at more solid economic indicators entirely (for any story of the world getting shittier for the US).
As for the prior comment about "the exorbitant privilege of running 6% yearly deficits", it simultaneously seems like a pretty big burden (requiring correct macroeconomic management). Because decade-after-decade, century-after-century, new people continually come along with an incorrect gut-notion understanding of money, freak out about government deficits and debt, and try to wreck the economy in their misunderstanding. So if foreign & domestic people/firms/governments stopped having such a desire to increase their USD savings, and the US government no longer needed to run as large of a deficit to supply those desired savings, quite a lot of people would be even happier & content with that state of affairs (even if it meant taxes were relatively a bit higher compared to spending).
I gesture to those as indicators of shifting sentiment and soft power. You're right, but the journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step, and those are steps. They might stall, I hope they do, but dismissing everything outright is how you eventually get clapped.
I agree with the entirety of the middle of your comment. I was recently exposed to the idea that the CCP would start increasing the strength of the RMB to promote domestic consumption, which I thought was interesting. I think it would both lower the US trade defect and increase desire to save in RMB, especially if it was telegraphed as a long term trend. That being said, the CCP is so locked in on export dominance I'm not sure if they want to (or can). But an interesting thought.
Lol, lmao even. There is nothing people love more than gibs, and nothing they'll irrationally oppose more than taxes. There is no world in which that is politically tenable or happiness increasing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I agree. But note that nothing you have said has anything to do with UK elites (who all hate and fear the free market except insofar as it brings foreign capital into London).
I guess my point was they're a canary in the proverbial coal mine, sure maybe they're idiots to laugh at, but eventually once you've bucketed the majority of human beings and economic activity into the "idiots to laugh at" bucket, you might actually be the idiot being laughed at
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Europe is the proverbial toxic parent who can not accept that their children are grown, that they've moved out, they've gotten married, and they have bills and kids of their own to deal with. They keep trying to play the "So long as you live under my roof you need to shut up and do as I say" card, but that's just the thing. We haven't lived under your roof in years.
If Europe wants to laugh at us and and hold us in contempt, I say let them. Call me when they put a man on the Moon.
If Europe wants to align itself with Asia and the Subcontinent that's fine. They're adults and it's their choice. But by the same token they won't have any grounds to complain when the kids decline to visit, or refuse to pay for their nursing home.
Take your troops home like Soviets did, close down your bases, rebuild Nordstream or pay for it, everyone is going to be happy.
It's really simple!
The US has proposed doing just that on multiple occasions (most recently in March/April of this year) and the response from both the German and UK establishment has always been overwhelming opposition.
German establishment is selected to be submissive due to the influence of lobbying and pressure organisations. Certain prominent media corps (Axel-Springer )officially endorse German submission to American interests.
E.g. check the member list
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantik-Br%C3%BCcke
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Aw jeez, and you're saying this won't happen if we show some cultural sensitivity? Liberal Europe can be as indignant as it wants while it finishes crawling into the grave, but why should anyone really care? No soothing they find acceptable would matter to the people they're busy handing their countries off to anyway.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Also as somebody who lives in Asia/wander aimlessly around China fairly frequently the attraction of the Pod apartment is higher when you've got a genuine 15 minute city. I've spent time staying over in friends' HDBs in Singapore and whilst there's no personal yard, there's good access to shared utilities & minimal nonsense from apartment neighbors compared to when I've lived in the West and had to deal with potential homeless/drug encounters
I once lived in a neighborhood that had practically 0 yard-space but 5 different parks/playgrounds within a 5-10 minute walk. It still wasn't "city living" since the nearest grocery store was still a good distance away, but I would take that over the 1/4 acre typical American suburb.
Yeah I mean the main barrier to this stuff in the West at this point is keeping the homeless/drug enthusiasts out of the shared communal greenspaces which a lot of Asian countries are more willing to actually attempt.
They managed to keep out the riff raff with few strategies:
0 parking. No street parking, no parking lots, you needed to park on your own driveway and walk to the parks.
0 bathrooms. Kind of inconvenient when you have a potty-training child, but maybe a potty-training child is one of the riff raff they want to keep out.
0 public transportation routes nearby.
The three combined guaranteed that everyone at the parks was a neighbor.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I've lived in a big apartment block which had exactly 0 year space and the nearest grocery store was literally on our ground floor (though it was more expensive than the supermarket 5 minutes walk away). And yeah I had access to a well maintained very large green space two minutes from the apartment lobby much bigger than the yard even massive detached houses have.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Are Chinese cities 15 minute ones? My impression is that, outside of the big metropolises, you just have a bunch of high-rises surrounded by 4-lane roads. Like the worst of Asian high-rise living combined with the worst of American car culture.
Genuinely kind of impressive how awful these look on YouTube.
"Okay so you know how people love gated communities right? And also how people love living in small spaces? What if, hear me out, we combined those, and also put them in the middle of fucking nowhere. There's literally no issues with my plan at all, pass the opium"
More options
Context Copy link
Your impression is correct, that is what you will see if you drive an hour out from the city center of Beijing in any direction.
More options
Context Copy link
In the third tier city where I've spent the most time the high rise compounds have retail on the bottom of the buildings that face the roads, similar to a strip mall. You'll usually have a bodega-ish grocer in one of those, a small medical clinic, restaurants, hairdressers, etc. Day-to-day needs often don't necessitate a trip elsewhere.
If you do want a bigger grocer you'll usually find one in nearby shopping malls, they're comparable to American grocery stores. The hospital is where you'll go for things that can't be handled by the small clinic.
Mass transit in the city is just buses, but I've only taken the bus once. Didi (Chinese Uber) is plentiful and cheap. It's a few American dollars to go pretty much anywhere in a small city.
More options
Context Copy link
I haven't been to low-tier Chinese cities for the most part but in my experience even the suburbs of the 1st & second-tier have a lot of redundancy and buildout even into the suburbs. Plus the insane scale of Chinese Ecommerce means that access to big box stores is probably less important than it is in most of the West.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah in China you live in a tiny pod no matter how far from the city center you live. The pods are just cheaper (not even bigger) if the commute is longer.
Suburbs aren't even uniquely American at all. Britain invented single family homes for commuters quite a long time ago. Pretty much every country in the English speaking world (and Japan of course) understands the concept at the very least.
Our version of single family home in Britain is a bit different from that in the US. This picture from your link shows a nice symmetrical structure in the middle which Americans might think is a single house for a single family. In reality it's two houses (semi detached) for two different families which share a central wall.
Fully detached houses etc. do exist but they are very much an exception and even then we don't have "suburbia" in the sense the US does, you'll often find such fully detached houses a short walk away from a 6 storey tall council estate and a commercial area a few minutes away too. There is very little "this is where houses are, full stop.".
The US has duplexes as well. They used to be more popular... when the US was much poorer, like in the first half of the 20th century.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Landed houses do exist in China but they're fairly rare. I've seen enough random townhouse developments from the train even on the edge of big metros (though I assume the cost of entry would be pretty insane)
It depends. Some of the older ones in my wife’s tier three city are very attainable, but it seems a lot of people just don’t like the idea. Either you live in an older low rise or a newer high rise compound. Townhomes are odd.
Yeah I'm basing this on ones I saw in the midst of the greater Guangzhou area and the sheer congregation of wealth there surely means you'd be paying a lot for the rare landed places.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
a yard, a car and a dog doesn't a suburb make.
To most, a suburb is best understood as a quiet and safe residential neighborhood away from the downtown core. It has limited through traffic, has easy access to the city and prioritizes families.
I had linked to Google maps of cities (domestic and international) that satisfy these requirements. Then I lost the comment. But, most don't look like sprawling suburbs. They were neighborhoods near Boston (Brookline, Somerville, Cambridge), Brooklyn (Bay ridge, Windsor terrace), SF (Noe valley, Sunset), Seattle (Wallingford, Westlake) and so on.
The impulse to move away from the chaos of a downtown core is understandable. That the alternative must look like a Midwestern suburb is where the rub is.
The United Nations uses the following general definitions:
Urban: At least
5000<ins>1500</ins>people per km2 (13,000<ins>3900</ins>per mi2)Suburban: At least 300 people per km2 (780 per mi2), but fewer than
5000<ins>1500</ins>(13,000<ins>3900</ins>)Rural: Fewer than 300 people per km2 (780 per mi2)
The linked page also includes an interactive map of the world and more detailed documentation.
Sweet, by that definition Stockholm city (not the urban or metropolitan area which are not as dense) is suburban.
Sorry, I misread the relevant page. The UN's actual definition of "urban" is 1500 people per km2 (3900 per mi2).
This page provides writeups for specific cities.
Stockholm
Philadelphia
Washington
New York
Chicago
Miami
@DirtyWaterHotDog @BreakerofHorsesandMen
ah, that makes more sense. I should've known better than to latch onto a number that suited my biases.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Fascinating. The closest city to me is entirely suburban, by that definition.
DC - 4,355.4 km^2Philadelphia - 4,608.9 km^2Chicago - 4,656.3 km^2Miami - 4,743.6 km^2By city boundaries, only NYC, SF and Boston qualify. (and their city extensions - Jersey City, Daly City and Cambridge).Guess I intuitively knew this because they're the only 3 US cities I can see myself living in, in the long term.More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
One thing I will say is China has safe calm neighborhoods in the downtown core and everywhere is safe. Houses are seen as for villagers or rich people. Most middleclass apartments have a central park area that mimics a suburb for families.
More options
Context Copy link
I'd add another requirement: the suburb must still be dependent on the city for many, if not most, infrastructure and amenities. A suburb has some schools and maybe a grocery store - but not much more. Otherwise, its not a suburb but a small town.
This is also what make suburbs so distinctly American. For historical reasons, most settlements in the old world - and many on the east coast - have their single family residential neighborhoods around town centers that provide many services you would never see in a suburb out west.
This doesn't really work in a fair number of places. There are a lot of places where the suburb is neither self-sufficient nor dependent on the city; instead it's dependent on other suburbs for some things.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The one thing Burgerland has going for it is that it’s BIG. Big land area, large population, lots of natural resources, large nuclear stockpile. Britain’s problem is that once you lose the empire all you are left with is a barren island the size of California with about 60 million people. Barring complete Balkanization and civil war, I think America can at the very least look forward to being a gas station with nukes like Russia.
More options
Context Copy link
How much of this is a factor of American suburbs being preferable to American cities, vs American suburbs being preferable to what cities could be, eg more like Tokyo or Bergen or Reykjavik or etc?
Yep, equivalently US citizens who move to Europe largely move to big cities and live in apartments.
More options
Context Copy link
People the world over copy suburbia when they get the chance- that's part of the impetus behind Israeli settlement, for example. Obviously someone likes them.
Many Israeli settlements ironically, from looking at pictures of them a whole ago, actually are a beautiful example of "missing middle" or "gentle density" that would make any lib urbanist soy face with joy
It actually cracks me up a bit given the context
God these midrises are sexy
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e57daf0af85443d6803fd19/747e2076-2f75-4a38-bad6-ef69393f6b80/jerusalem-5787806+low+res.jpg
More options
Context Copy link
That’s an odd example because of the elephantine alternative explanation as to why there are settlements built in that particular country. Is there another example?
There are suburbs for upper-middle class and wealthy people across the developing world, from Peru to Nigeria to Kenya to the UAE to Malaysia to China, that explicitly model themselves on American suburbs, at least aesthetically, and often copy even semi-distinctive McMansion elements from the aforementioned. They are usually gated communities and are often still denser than American suburbs (so they look more like communities of townhomes do in the US) but that is the intention.
The difference is that in many of these places there are also a lot of wealthy people of all ages who live in apartments, which is rare in the US outside of NYC. In Indianapolis or Omaha or even Los Angeles you might find young high earning people who live in downtown apartment buildings, but very few families do. In China, like in Paris, Munich and São Paulo, you find many families who still live in apartment buildings even when suburbs are an option.
Yes - there is unmet demand for non-shit urban living in the US, which is why the places with less-shit urban living (like Manhattan, downtown Brooklyn, the bits of SF with no shit) command such a large price premium relative to upper-middle-class suburbs. Some of the families living in McMansions in the Woodlands would choose to live in 1300 sq ft 3-bed apartments in a neighborhood like Neuilly or Holland Park if the option existed.
In contrast, the UK has unmet demand for American-style areas where even the urban core is auto-orientated and you never need to get out of your car except to walk across a parking lot, so Milton Keynes commands a significant price premium even though it is a miserable soulless commuter town. If someone built Indianapolis in a green field in the English Midlands, it would fill up quickly.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Looking round Israeli settlements on Google Street View shows a lot more multifamily buildings than would be allowed in US suburbia. Israel proper has a housing crisis due to rapid population growth and entrenched NIMBYs in the Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem suburbs, so the settler demand is for any family-sized housing (including multi-bedroom flats), not for American-style suburbia.
The Israeli crisis is due to NIMBYs and planning laws, not lack of space though. The settlements are ideological, there is plenty of land within even 1948 Israel for suburban development. I don’t mean deep in the Negev either.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Japanese people by and large live in single family homes and reject the pod. Look at the commuter towns around Tokyo and you'll see fields of single family houses with admittedly tiny yards.
It’s still a far cry from an American suburb. They can walk 5-15 minutes and find a restaurant, subway, pleasant bench near a Shinto shrine, etc. In much of suburbia you can’t do that.
More options
Context Copy link
I was surprised when I visited that there are single family houses within a mile or so of the densest parts of downtown Tokyo. They are packed close, and might qualify as a "tiny house" in other parts of the West, but they exist.
Also that the Tokyo subways (multiple systems!) are privately run.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The competition with China is asinine. It really is time for the West to look inward, abandon Asia to the Chinese (not even really that, given so many in the region have their own severe differences with them, including most of their neighbors - the Russia truces are only ever temporary, the India tensions will continue indefinitely) and resolve the ongoing demographic and political crisis, which feeds into so many other economic and social issues.
China is pretty nice now in the tier 1 cities. Sure, the Chinese work long hours, but so do many Americans (you know who works the ‘996’? New York investment bankers, hotshot corporate lawyers and apparently Silicon Valley AI startup engineers). The food is good, the societies are clean and safe. You can’t be too nasty about state policy, but the same applies in much of Europe, and even in the US you still “just” get your life ruined and yourself cancelled depending on what you said and who is in power.
In 50 years, will Britain still be British? Will Germany still be German? Will America - the America of the prosperous and peaceful time still within living memory - still be America? Trump (or Miller, I guess) was right about this. Countries aren’t soil, they’re people. The people in China 50 years from now will be the descendants of the people in China 50 years ago (by and large). Can the same be said for Europeans, in Europe or in North America?
Forget about Chinese cars and datacenters; the Chinese have rarely dreamed of world domination, they are content in their backyard and with the occasional moment of international abuse around fishing fleets and ripping off poor countries with expensive development loans (many of which backfire on them anyway). Whether America rules the world or not is irrelevant to most of its people - at the height of the British Empire, the greatest in world history, the people of the metropole worked in squalid Victorian factories and lived in disgusting, fetid tenements. Even today material conditions are much better. Plenty of small countries do just fine.
And it really is important to emphasize just how bad the demographic transition is. I would rather live under the Chinese thumb in Hong Kong than “free” in Rio de Janeiro. I would rather live pretty much anywhere in China than in Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan, Niger, much of Central America, Eritrea, Haiti. And yet this is what Western lands are becoming. Better to submit to Xi Jinping than suffer Houellebecq’s Submission, although in many ways even that text is far, far too optimistic about what awaits us.
I thought to meself, "I kmow that name..." Turns out I have Platform on my bookshelf, lo these past 15 or more years. I think I started to read it and had the same visceral rejection that I experienced reading Portnoy's Complaint and simply put it down. Maybe it's worth another spin on the Houellebecq tilt-a-whirl if this Submission book is any good.
Submission is a good book, but just as horny as Platform (as is almost all of Houellebecq's work).
It is amazing how many literary novels include literature professors having sex with hot coeds.
To be fair, that was the main reason to become a literature professor up until the current year (which may have something to do with the current state of literature professors).
Just like salary, bonus, health insurance, and a 401(k) match, getting to be an authority figure in an environment full of young women in their prime beauty is part of the compensation package.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Xi Jinping doesn't particularly want submission. He wants the disputed islands and Taiwan. Fears about China taking over the world are extremely overblown they don't care that Mongolia an extremely weak country on their is a democracy after all. Global intervention is seen as a failure of the Mao era. See the Syrian civil war which involved every powerful and some less powerful countries but not China.
That doesn't quite square with their militarization of Antarctica, claims on Korean research outposts in the Yellow Sea, opposition to THAAD in South Korea, and aggression towards India and Bhutan. Not to mention how expansive those "disputed islands" are. Most of them are geographically closer to the Philippines. The "nine-dash line" lies 30 km off the Palawan coast.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Particularly as Putin welcomes millions of Indians to Russia too. Scary is the future ahead.
Could you elaborate on this scary future? I'm getting sick of Indians being portrayed as an amorphous pestilence. Like a brown mongol horde dipped in shit that's about to destroy western civilizations.
Clearly you (or people who make such comments) find something about the character of Indians to be revolting.
What's the source of it ? Is it lived experience ? Is it that they are Pagans ? Is it the state of their nation ? Is it a feeling of being threatened ? Is it something else ?
I can easily pass off as 'one of the good ones' so I am not too bothered. But, I've realized that my calibration of how a section of American society viewed Indians was off by a wild margin. I am trying to re-calibrate, so an honest answer would be appreciated. Don't hold back.
edit: I am reading all of the replies. Will try to find a common theme to consolidate this over the weekend.
You really should be. No Edict of Expulsion ever included an "except the good ones" clause, and even if it did it's unlikely you'd be treated nearly as well as you are now.
I see this phenomenon in dissident spaces a lot, where non-whites underestimate the threat that HBD/racialism actually poses to them personally. There's this deflection away from taking it too seriously, in the mold of "they don't care where you're from as long as you're racist", but at a certain point, you have to assume that people actually mean what they say. If you don't believe present rhetoric is particularly worrying, you can also extrapolate beyond the current horizon; personally, if Total Chud Victory is to pass, I'd put 40-50% probability on turnabout becoming fair play, in the "Make India Aryan Again" sense.
More options
Context Copy link
Don’t worry bro, it’s just the Great American Hazing Ritual in action. In fifty years, your Catholic half-Hispanic grandchildren will be bitching and moaning about how we shouldn’t be letting in infinity Congolese.
More options
Context Copy link
Every IT worker I know IRL hates them due to past experience.
Generally incompetent, deflect, don't do their job , needy. Sure there are exceptions but they noted no other foreigners are like that.
Most groups they cooperate with abroad are 20% crap, on Indians are 80% crappy.
More options
Context Copy link
Nobody else mentioned it, but as best as I can tell 100% of the attempts to scam friends and family have been from subcontinentals. They stole my friend's elderly mother's savings, without remorse. Kitboga alone has probably done massive reputational damage.
More options
Context Copy link
Stuff like the cow shit bathing festival. I know, know, it's just one village but there's no other country in the world, that isn't a failed state, where that would be allowed to continue. The rest of the country would think "this reflects bad on us, it needs to end". But indians are probably thinking "oh, those are just untouchables or something, it doesn't matter what they do, I am better".
The social inequality is its own turn-off, I feel like. There are countries that haven't figured out civilization or outhouses, and there are countries that have figured out both (or at least the outhouses). But India's the only one with the reputation of being the country where the upper social classes simply DGAF about what the poor are doing in any way.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's a lot of things, but the paganism and the volume is what exacerbates the rest. By paganism, I mean it literally, as well as just the strong cultural distance. These are volumes of folks with a foreign cultural and religious foundation, flooding the middle class, and the effect is visible.
Contrast with Hispanic immigration, where, while still not highly appreciated by the same demographic, are working lower class jobs, and are still firmly shaped by hundreds of years of Western / Christian culture.
Watching housing prices go up and tech jobs disappear to very obviously culturally foreign population is different than sharing a pew with laborers. In fact, if we were better at vetting, more serious about stopping drugs and forcing English, I think most anti-immigration Americans would be fine with a pretty large stream of legal Hispanic immigration. It is more akin to previous waves of European immigrants.
Is the paganism really a problem or the specific Paganism at play here, or possibly the people being pagan.
Are the Muslim subcontinentals less of an issue to you? Are east Asian pagans as much of an issue?
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.
More options
Context Copy link
like I said it's the paganism + the volume. and again I'm using pagan for coming from a nonwestern Christian context. Everything about westernism, even aggressively secular westernism is a conversation with Christianity in very Christian language, which developed in conversation with Classical paganism.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Working class Americans don't like Indians because snooty brahmins treat them like shit, and Americans are used to more... nice class relations. It's not 100% of them but it's enough to develop a reputation. Add the paganism(which the average American probably doesn't see as an ultimate sin that invites vengeance on the community but does see as savagery we moved past thousands of years ago) and cultural oddities and the highly visible middleman minority status and it doesn't really help. The stories out of Canada(which many people might not realize are from Canada) probably make it worse. Tech workers complaining about H1B's are more a thing in higher social classes.
Ah, the old Canadian Internet Theory.
That said, when the tariffs first hit I was surprised at how many angry Canadians who'd otherwise pass I saw in the comment section of (EDIT: American) right wing youtubers.
Trump managed to lose Canadians who would naturally be MCGA Conservatives by shitposting about invading. That is why Carney beat Poilievre.
While binge-watching Canadian anti-Trump Youtube videos one dull evening, I was surprised that most of them were on channels that had previously been posting right-coded patriotic content up to and including British Empire nostalgia.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
For me it is a result of experience with Roma/Gypsies who came from around northern-central India. Despite six hundred years of presence in Europe, they still form permanent underclass of people living in the most filthy and disgusting conditions imaginable. When I see documentaries from India with rivers of trash, it is indistinguishable from our gypsy slums in Slovakia like Lunik IX, despite chasm of thousands of miles and hundreds of years. There were considerable migrations into Europe from all around the place - including nomadic barbarians like Bulgars or Hungarians etc. with strange customs and religions. But none of them live like that now. I do not know why gypsies are like that, but it is what it is.
I find it fascinating that western countries are willingly importing this population from country of origin, just to appease some sort of savior complex.
More options
Context Copy link
You've already got like a hundred responses, but none point out the obvious:
the problem is that Indians are poor, and there are more than a billion of them. When poor immigrants come to western countries, there is like a 1 in 2 chance that they will be Indian.
There's nothing particularly unique to India that makes them unpleasant that other immigrant nations lack. They are just the most populous by far.
More options
Context Copy link
Lived experience
Bangalore - the road turns into dirt road to cross a creek
Bangalore - next to the creek there is a holy cow in such a pathetic state that you want to euthanize the poor animal
Bangalore - in the same creek a person is shitting in the creek, a person 10 meter downstream is washing his face
Bangalore - it stinks everywhere
Bangalore - our parktronic is beeping constantly because we move so slow that the poor car is thinking we are parking and there is a torrent of scooters passing by
Bangalore - no one even admits that such things as traffic laws even exist
Bangalore - when you go to the toilet in the business center you take a pee. After flushing the water color doesn't change
Bangalore - where the water bottles have warning - please crush before throwing.
Bangalore - where the contractor team is giving us a solution to the problem that is so offensively unworkable and stupid that it is literally insulting our intelligence
And from what I have heard Bengaluru is among the better parts of india on any metric.
I can tell similar stories about Pakistan (like the guy that took a shit on the street next to the fucking Centaurus Mall) and Bangladesh too.
London - just the night before the demo the Indian subcontractor living in Zurich arrives and the demo is not even started to be implemented. We ask why - well what do you expect for X pounds? But you said X pounds - well you wouldn't have given me the project otherwise.
UK - where every eastern european I know comes home to get medical treatment (and our healthcare is on the bad side), than take a chance with subcontinent personnel filled NHS
Bangladesh, Pakistan and India are the places where any person even with tiniest authority I have met is treating everyone above them with daily rimjob (figuratively, I hope) and everyone below them as subhuman cattle Eastern Europe - where the second generation Pakistani medical students from UK are mostly know for their willingness to bribe on any exam than study. Yeah - honest advice - if you need to ever be treated by brown skinned doctor that got its diploma in Eastern Europe - just run away.
The subcontinent has some serious cultural issues that will prevent it from becoming the next china. Being poor and being a shithole are different things - India will stop being poor eventually. But being a shithole is choice.
There seems to be only two ways to make sure Indians don't enshittify your country - highly selective with human rights or mass migration under the heavy yoke - like in the gulf.
Do I want to say that all of India is terrible and so are the people there - no - I haven't traveled there too much. And well - in a nation of 1.5B - there will be a lot of decent people. Probably more than all the whites combined. But I am absolutely certain that separating the good from the bad is not worth the effort for mass influx of Indians. Kris Rock had an amazing segment on the topic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niggas_vs._Black_People
The buttlicking superiors and lording over subordinates is really pernicious because whites hire them (especially the competent ones) and are impressed by how energetic and agreeable they are. But beneath them is a very different experience. People who buttlick expect the same from their subordinates and when they don't get this they are not pleased.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I was going to add some observations but they've already been pretty well made by others.
What I would say is, if freedom of association was real, what is the tax you would pay to work in an organisation without Indians? 5% of salary feels too low. 10% feels slightly high. But if the choice was an organisation with 100% Northern Europeans and one 50/50 Indians and Europeans, I'd take the 10% hit in a heartbeat.
Immigration is interesting because when you have a few token people from different countries, especially if well selected, it is very interesting. But as soon as you have lots of them it is shit. Really is a dose makes the poison.
My very spicy take on immigration is that it is basically "retard colonialism" where you take the people but not the land.
I'm still always shocked that libs didn't go the opposite way on immigration. Brain draining the 3rd world.of their best and brightest, which frankly the 3rd world needs much more than we do, is so unfair. It's literally just another form of colonial value extraction.
We made our countries rich off their backs, and then compound that wealth by vacuuming up their best people, which further propels us AND keeps them down. Oops!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Off-the-cuff non-rigorous stream-of-consciousness take:
Their increased numbers mean assimilation has slowed and they remain foreign instead of assimilating. They have started tapping into the vicitimhood politics despite being recent arrivals who often do quite well for themselves which people see as hypocritical. They are displacing white collar workers who have rarely felt the effects of mass immigration this directly before and are thus shocked and outraged that this could happen to them. Those same white collar "chattering class" workers have a much bigger megaphone than the blue collar, so we are hearing a lot more about their grievances. Rural Indians have a third world mindset (clannishness, petty scams, lying to save face, deference to authority, cruelty to underlings, hygiene differences, etc) that is not unique to India but is nonetheless very alien and uncouth to middle class Americans. Also, honestly, there seems to be a small(?) minority who are hardcore ethnoreligious chauvinists who truly look down on their host countries. For example, I think erecting a 90-foot pagan monkey god statue in notoriously conservative Texas is a really bad PR move for an immigrant minority which is (presumably) seeking acceptance if not assimilation, but the attitude from that minority seems to be "tf Timmy gon do?", unfortunately, that colors people's opinions of all Indian immigrants.
I actually feel pretty bad for the Indians who were living quietly in Western countries, working hard, learning the language, trying to get naturalized, and otherwise being model citizens before the current immigration wave. I worked closely with two 2nd genration Indian-Americans who were basically indistinguishable from Euro-Americans besides their skin color and they were both great guys. I feel sorry that they are probably dealing with the fallout from all of these recent developments that occurred outside their control. They're not even immigrants, they're US citizens.
More options
Context Copy link
People deeply dislike Indian culture. The more they are exposed the less they like it.
When Indians came in small highly selected numbers then it was fine, they both contributed and assimilated. Then they started coming in greater numbers and lower quality.
These are issues that to some extent exists with pretty much all immigration but here they are worse because Indian culture genuinely is worse than most others, the median Indian is worse than most other groups (which when selection decreases leads to worse outcomes than for other groups), they interact with white collar people and ruin their environments as opposed to those of the working class.
Much of this is down to the scale of the immigration. When it reaches critical mass of sustained immigration then people no longer need to integrate and when the culture is deeply unpleasant and unadmirable to the host nation then the problem magnifies.
I have heard variations of '[X group] is the worst, and the more people are exposed the more they agree' of just about every variation of [X group] that has been a critical mass growing minority elsewhere.
The process of being distinct and displacing the familiar is itself what is unpleasant and unadmirable to many host nations, regardless of what continent the arrival comes from.
I mean it definitely doesn't seem to have been true of Mexicans. Even in the early 2000's when 'immigration' was a euphemism for 'Mexicans' people mostly didn't seem to have big problems with Mexican culture- maybe some griping they didn't learn English fast enough, but people thought they were mostly normal blue collar guys who worked hard and liked beer and sports.
There was a point in time, after the Mexican-American war where Mexican lynchings were greater than black lynchings in some Western states. The relative peacefulness we see now took a long time to generate.
More options
Context Copy link
Mexicans sit in a weird niche where they've technically been present much, much longer than alot of other ethnic groups(since atleast the 1800s) while simultaneously having a local source right next to America that provides a constant stream of 'fresh off the boat'(unlike other groups).
And, despite being around for so long, there was still a large action to deport illegals in the 1950s.
More options
Context Copy link
An addendum:
White, appalachian young men and women date, have children, and even sometimes marry latino / black spouses with enough regularity that nobody outside of the deepest hollers really cares (although, strangely, they'll still use racial slurs).
This is not the case with Indians. Furthermore, this isn't just an availability bias. The small cities on the edges of Appalachia are starting to see Indian transplants.
I don’t know about Appalachians specifically but whites and Hispanics intermarry regularly- especially white man/hispanic woman. I can’t say anyone would care if it was white/black instead but it’s considerably less common.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think there's truth to both of these points. The displacement in my area is real. The further south I go in my city, the more like Mexico it becomes. Some houses that used to have one family now hold 2 or 3, or even 4. My kid's school is probably 50% Hispanic, and every time I go to a parent-teacher meeting I hear teachers speaking Spanish to the students.
Now, when it comes to displacement, a change in language and pop-up vendors all over the place isn't exactly terrible. Mexicans do seem to share a lot of cultural similarities. That being said, the less tangible but very real feeling of being minoritized in the place you and your parents grew up is constantly increasing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As I said, the dynamic isn't unique but it also doesn't mean that the relative badness and the particular dynamics of the changing immigration of a specific group leads to a worsening impression of the specific group.
Also, there are tons of groups that caused very limited friction when they immigrated and it has limited correlation with how "familiar" the group is.
There are cultures that are bad and my contention is that subcontinental culture (I should have said that originally instead of Indian because much of the same issues exists for Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Indians, and often regardless of religion) is both worse and that immigration from the subcontinent scales worse than from other relevant immigration sources, especially for white collar labour.
Over here in Sweden subcontinentals aren't a very big group but despite this they're still easily the most disliked and made fun of group in workplace environments.
I'd have said MENA Muslims are more disliked.
In general absolutely, but not in the workplace.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Which, in turn, is sidestepping the point of 'critical mass' and 'displacing local culture with their own.'
The uncanny valley effect applies as much to cultural trappings as human faces. An english-speaker in a city full of english-language signs can feel comfortable, even if there are the occasional oddities of atypical roofings or words. An english-speaker in a city of completely unfamiliar languages may not feel completely at home, but accept it as categorically foreign. It is when the city is in the process of the halfway transition between one or the other, and particularly when moving from the familiar to the alien, that unease rises.
In Sweden, in 1980 7% of the population was foreign-born. In 2000, it was about 11%. In 2020, it is roughly 20%. It is historical circumstance that that later growth was more from sub-continentals than less familiar continentals. Unease and opposition to the foreigner would still be on the rise if it was Russians or French driving that demographic change.
You don't even have to reach into alternate history to find examples of dislike of French or Russian culture following from the French or Russian leaving their borders into others and their new hosts having to deal with it.
Except of course that there aren't many subcontinentals coming here and they're still disliked... People aren't complaining about subcontinentals due to displacement but because they dislike them. The situation is different from the Anglophone world.
Just because displacement is a cause for animosity doesn't mean that there aren't other causes and that different groups are perceived differently relative to each other.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As far as I can tell, the rise in anti-Indian sentiment is a Canadian phenomenon (due to their own particular failures in immigration and housing policy) that has metastasized within the online right but not within the wider American public, which still has about the same opinion of Indians (tech nerds who smell funny) as it has for the past several decades. I've spent plenty of time around 1st and 2nd generation Indian immigrants and had very few bad experiences, at least of the sort worth generalizing. There are perhaps some ways in which they are less assimilated to American culture than other immigrant groups e.g. wedding traditions, but that's about it.
Uh, blue collar Americans dislike Indians more than they dislike other middleman minorities(Lebanese, Koreans, Albanians, etc) for being rude to their workers. This is not a highly visible complaint, but it primes the ground for other complaints.
Do you have a link to polling showing that Americans generally dislike Indians? I know Indian immigrants in the UK (who are highly selected and are the highest-earning, best-educated ethnic group as a result) poll net-positive but when I try to find US polls Google keeps sending me polls of Indian-Americans rather than polls about them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think the Indian discourse has really taken off due to increasing exposure to Indians in the workplace for white-collar workers (both through H1-Bs and outsourced teams), combined with increased abuse of visa systems that allows for lower-quality migrants to enter western countries. There is an entire industry built around facilitating Indian access to Western labor markets, often through dubious or outright fraudulent means. For example Canada rejected 74% of Indian student visa applicants in a recent crackdown on rampant visa fraud, and significantly reduced its student visa caps, particularly for low-quality degree mills that were being used as a backdoor immigration route.
The main issue I have seen in the workplace and academia is a high-trust vs. low-trust culture clash, combined with pretty blatant ethnic nepotism. To be clear, this problem is most acute among those born and educated in India. Second-generation Indian immigrants tend to have fewer of these issues, in my experience.
Grad school was an eye-opening experience. I flagged a number of cases of pretty blatant plagiarism while marking computer science work, which disproportionately involved Indian students. Most of those cases just resulted in a warning or a slap on the wrist, despite the academic integrity code proscribing significantly harsher penalties. We also had a case where an Indian student in my department likely faked a result for a paper in a pretty blatant way (his code could not reproduce the results he put in his draft) and another where an Indian student working on a textbook chapter plagiarized large sections of material from existing published resources. Both were caught before publication and handled in-house, the first guy was just told that he could not publish the paper without reproducible results, and the second was sent on remedial academic integrity training after he used the "cultural differences" defense. Sure, it's a low sample size, but the number of issues from the relatively small Indian student population was pretty jarring.
This trend continued in the workforce. One of my first jobs during college was working for an IT consultancy owned by an Indian immigrant, and it was a complete shitshow of wage violations, borderline fraud, and ethical violations that made me quit after a couple of weeks. Later in my career, I briefly had the misfortune of working for a company in the process of being hollowed out by Indian outsourcing. We would send the offshore teams requirements, and they would either send back garbage that didn't work or nothing at all. The most frustrating part was that they would often not even admit it - they would just say "yes we did the needful, the code is done" and sometimes it wouldn't even compile, or it was missing half the features required. It was legitimately maddening and I found a new job as soon as possible. Of course management declared the offshoring a huge success, gave themselves all bonuses, and presumably hopped to new jobs while the company crashed and burned in the background. I have also been in the industry long enough at this point to know that an Indian management chain is a big red flag - a few Indian employees is no big deal, but if it's 100% Indian.... I have seen some absolutely comical listings for jobs that I'd be overqualified for, but they are very clearly written with the intention of excluding everyone except the visa applicant they want to hire. The "Indian exec hiring co-ethnics" bit mentioned below is absolutely true in my experience as well, that's the one thing from the "izzat" post that really matched my experience - I have seen the demographics of entire departments change with astonishing speed with just one or two Indians inserting themselves into the hiring process.
Honestly Indians in the US should be on the front lines of demanding an immigration moratorium from India and the termination of the H1-B program. The level of annoyance and exhaustion has hit critical mass and has now entered the cultural consciousness, and I doubt it's going away anytime soon unless some significant policy changes happen.
More options
Context Copy link
So from my perspective, it's not that every Indian is bad - but a lot of the bad things come from Indians.
For example, a highly publicized case (warning: CBC, little better than government propaganda) revealed that an Indian student had posted a video claiming that students could use food banks as a source of free food, rather than being for emergencies. Food banks are are very much a "high trust society" sort of thing - knowing that people who are supposed to be able to pay their own way are exploiting them is something that makes us not want to support food banks, and makes our society less high trust.
Indians are also known for being much more willing to cheat the rules, often to the detriment of their host country. For example, Navjeet Singh drove through a stop sign and killed a mother and her young daughter. Investigations suggested that he had falsified his driving record, and refused to see the police afterwards. This is not the only Indian who has killed behind the wheel. Indians are also well known for bringing their racial animus to our country.
We've also had an extremely disproportionate increase in Indians, relative to other nationalities. This means that Indians, specifically, are going to bear the brunt of our ire as immigration causes an increase in difficulties for our country (most notably, housing prices).
On a personal level; I was involved in hiring and firing at a tech company. One of the employees we hired was an Indian woman with (supposedly) over 10 years of experience. Despite numerous requests for her to do things that should be second nature to a programmer (like check in her code, etc.), she was unable to produce something that even compiled after around 4 weeks of work (despite her claiming that most of her experience was in react, and me checking in daily to see if she needed assistance, provide her with sample code, etc.). When I took over the project when we eventually fired her, it ended up being around 6 components and maybe 400 lines of code (counting CSS). The biggest problem with her was her willingness to just lie - she would assure me that things were going well, she'd show me demos that were ChatGPT'd together, but never got closer to being done, etc. The whole thing left a very sour taste in my mouth.
Edit: I do want to mention that I have worked with Indians who range from good to great too; the thing that I (and a lot of others) don't like is that there is definitely a subset (and a large enough one that we've encountered it in the wild) who are willing to lie and cheat to get ahead.
More options
Context Copy link
Indians are what convinced me that there's a genetic component to filth-tolerance that's separate from general intelligence or conscientiousness. Africans in tin shacks post videos mocking their food handling practices.
Indian food safety leaves a lot to be desired, but even Indians don't wear shoes in the house which a lot of Americans do.
I've heard the mockery about wearing shoes inside a few times now, but I don't get it. About the only time I really wear shoes inside is when I'm going in and out repeatedly. It's not really something Americans do all the time, and it's not like we stomp through mud and dog shit and then think it's perfectly fine to wear them inside.
I mean, there's still a significant fraction of Americans (maybe a third of the population and disproportionally older/rural) who always keep their shoes on indoors, and to people from certain other cultures this behavior really does feel like the equivalent of shaking someone's hand after sneezing in it or dipping it in mud, so it's not that surprising.
More options
Context Copy link
I think there's a variance in how lenient people are with shoes in the house. The other guy is telling me that it's ok because he takes his shoes off before he gets on the couch, and I've definitely been over at people's houses where they just wear shoes all the time. Not, like, getting into bed with shoes, but still.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Okay I want to pick a fight about this.
Americans view their floors differently than other countries' floors. Our floors are treated much more like the ground outside than a clean indoor surface. We don't put pillows on the floor and lay on them, we don't eat off the ground. So it's really not a big deal.
That said, we don't just track filth indoors -- we have doormats and it would be unthinkable to track mud or shit inside the house. And in practice, a lot of people do kick their shoes off when they get home, they just do it near the couch instead of the front door. I live in Japan where walking into someones house with your shoes on is a sin nearly as great as, say, whipping out your junk unprompted. And while their floors have less outside dirt and dust, they are far from clean unless swept regularly, especially if one has kids or pets. So the difference in cleanliness is also exaggerated.
Don't get me wrong, I'm firmly in the side of taking off shoes near the threshold. But this whole meme smacks of "wypipo don season dey food" or "white people are all inbred pedos," nonsense made up out of whole cloth, or very nearly.
Wearing shoes in the house is weird to me. I am wypipo.
I think a shift has occurred. When I was a kid 30 years ago everyone wore shoes in the house. A friend's mom saying "Take your shoes off at the door!" came across as a bit fussy. But these days, when in the U.S., I subconsciously note whether there's a shoe rack by the door and take my shoes off accordingly. Maybe Americans will eventually end up tabooing keeping shoes on indoors as well.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm sorry but this is somewhere between nonsense and cope.
So you admit that the floor is considered unclean in houses where people wear shoes indoors.
This is like an ancient Roman telling me that they don't just walk around with shit in their asscrack, they wipe with the communal sponge on a stick.
Any horizontal surface is going to accumulate dust and dirt, of course. But wearing shoes in the house isn't making it any better. It's simply inarguable that the sole of a shoe is dirtier than the sole of your foot.
It's got nothing to do with wypipo. There's a lot of variation in cultural norms, but basically all of Eastern Europe takes their shoes off at home (inb4 "slavs are asiatics").
The floor is considered unclean in houses where people don't wear shoes indoors. Like the one I'm living in now. It's not the big deal people make it out to be.
Unless you live in the middle of a hog farm, no, it's not like that at all. Your metaphor is really melodramatic.
Eh, but it's only slightly worse. Again, unless you live in an absolutely filthy environment, it's not really a big deal. To be fair, I would not have wanted to wear my shoes indoors when living in China because the eldritch grime and bio-filth on the streets and sidewalks was genuinely terrifying. But in Japan and the (rural) U.S. the streets are clean. The worst thing you might bring inside is a little sand or dirt, and those are easily handled with a doormat.
Sure, and that's cool. Good for Slavs for doing that if they like it, and no I don't think they're Asiatics. What I mean by that comment was that it's a minor, mostly inconsequential cultural difference that gets blown up online because a certain subset of non-Euros/non-whites/non-Americans seem desperate for "insults" that will "stick" and so they fixate on this. I honestly think it's a lot of sour grapes, tbh, just like most "Do Americans really?"-style questions.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, I have a "Mud room" by the front door, with a bench and a place to hang coats and store shoes. Unfortunately, we almost always come into the house through the garage. The first floor is basically a high-use area. With four kids, food goes on the floor, people track dirt in from the backyard to the mudroom to the garage and back. It gets swept every day, mopped and vacuumed twice a week. I wouldn't eat off the floor (though my toddler does and hasn't gotten sick yet!).
No one wears shoes on the second floor.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
For what it's worth, I have no problem with Indians and I've never known someone IRL who does. Bear in mind that this place is going to be skewed towards having spicy opinions that most people don't necessarily hold, so don't take the discourse here as representative of what Americans think.
More options
Context Copy link
Not-exactly-US, but yes, major source of attitude towards Indians is because ... Indians.
When company outsources to India: Deliverables are late or of substandard quality, code not fully functional or does nonsensical things. Any written documentation or communication has superfluously complicated ... overabundance... of text in Indian English style. Supposed to sound impressive, but devoid of content or meaning. When I complain, it's common they engage in blatant attempts at gaslighting me either about what was contracted or state of the work what was delivered.
At its worst, engaging with Indian contractors was like engaging with LLMs today before LLMs were a thing.
In comparison, when company outsources to Eastern Europe, quality sometimes suffers but usually it's like, outputs are decent, and if (when) they did it on the cheap and ran out of time, it is obvious what they didn't do because they ran out of time. It feels like I am talking with real people and can have a real conversation about remaining issues and how to resolve them.
When company does not only outsource, but hires one Indian executives, in few years major part of the company workforce are co-ethnics. Work experience rarely improves, except they are now in-house employees and there is no hope of outsourcing somewhere else.
It is one of the few cases of negative in-group ethnic stereotype I have seen unfold at the workplace. None of other out-group ethnic stereotypes or conspiracy theories hit the same, because usually interactions with people at work either are neutral, totally unexpected and unrelated to any stereotypes, or perhaps match the positive stereotypes.
More options
Context Copy link
My brother, why do you not live in India if there are no issues there? There's an infinite supply of potent human capital if only people with the drive and ability to organize and build a glittering future for the subcontinent instead of running to hang out in the West.
More options
Context Copy link
How about, you are Indian, think you are Indian, see others as Indian or not Indian, and act with indignance and arrogance at the mere suggestion that European people should not be ethnically replaced by infinity Indians.
To that extent I have no opinion of Indians other than they are not my kind. They work toward their own benefit and see themselves as worthy of whatever privilege they can find in any country they reside in. And that's enough for me to not want them. They, similar to every other ethnic group I can gripe about, have no reverence or care for preserving the native populations. To that extent, like jews being parasites that weaken it, and browns being locust that devour it, you would be a symbiote that slowly but surely outnumbers the organism you engage with until there's nothing left but you. Not overtly hostile, not overtly threatening, just a slow inevitability of numbers.
But those descriptive differences are all irrelevant to the ultimate point that none of these groups care about the existence or wellbeing of the organism they are interacting with. They, theirs and their needs always come first. There's no understanding of where the natives are coming from, no recognition of what they've done and overcome. It's just an infinite struggle session of browns fighting tooth an nail for any privilege they feel should be granted to them. With no recognition or respect for the needs of the other.
I genuinely hoped that Indians were just westerners with brown skin. That they could emotionally intuit and understand the importance of recognition and respect for the continued existence of other peoples. But no, Nationalism is for Indians. Ethnic pride is for Indians. India is for Indians and so to is every other country in the world. And if you disagree, how could you! Don't you understand the plight of Indians!
It's just wild to me. I can't imagine ethnically replacing another group of people. Yet the majority of the planet seems to think it's OK if they do it to others. There's just no thought or care.
I might let "browns being locusts" pass since DWHD did say "don't hold back," but for everyone else in the thread- no, that doesn't mean you can just let loose with your unfiltered hot takes about Indians. You, however, decided it was also an opportunity to dump on your other obsession, as if suddenly the rules about broad generalizations about your outgroup were suspended. They are not. You've been warned and banned many, many times for this. You're just a hate-poster who barely controls yourself most of the time until you can't hold back any more, and you do... this.
Your last ban was 90 days. This one will also be 90 days. Next time is probably permanent.
Modding someone who isn't a liberal/progressive? But I thought this place was a hugbox for insane rightoids! /s
Thanks for the good work.
Can you name a single progressive here? I guess magicalkitty and whatever the other person's name is (aka darwin and impassionata), although I'm not sure they count given that they've been permabanned in the past and mostly troll now. There aren't any left to mod.
On the flip side, there's nothing in the post being modded that would deserve a ban on any other topic. There's no objective rule here (however much the mods may protest to the contrary), just an arbitrary line in the sand that the local userbase happens to draw further to the right than reddit does.
To be clear, I think they're doing a good job. But the hypocrisy and chest-thumping around free speech is profoundly irritating.
I wouldn't really call myself one as progressivism progressed passed my views sometime in the 2010s but basically anyone who reliably votes Republican likely would call me one
More options
Context Copy link
He said "progressive/liberal." "Progressive" is kind of a dirty word hereabouts, basically interchangeable with "woke," but do you not consider yourself a liberal?
Really? So you think he could have said something similar about another group and not been modded? Why do you think that? Or are you agreeing with Hanik that the mods are ZOG collaborators? That would be a twist.
We aspire to consistency and objectivity and freely admit that we can achieve neither. But we generally can point to the rule that was broken and for all the times I have asked someone taking a bite out of our ankles to point to this mythical other foot on which can be found an equivalent shoe, it never ever happens. "You modded a Joo-poster for crossing a line, but you totally wouldn't do that on any other subject!" Okay, show me. Show me where someone else posted something equivalent and wasn't modded. Maybe it's happened, we do miss things. But every time I have made this request, what I get is a post that isn't equivalent and a 20-post-deep argument about why it's not. I mean, do I need to point out that in your link, @naraburns was not speaking as a mod? I am the one who posted a mod comment in that thread, and that was because @magicalkittycat was kind of pattern-matching as a Darwin-troll… it wasn't about his freedom to say what he thinks of Republicans.
"You're doing a good job and you also suck" is such a special snipe.
Thumps chest
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, no.
Yeah, yeah.
From Boasian anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis, and the Frankfurt school adjacent work on prejudice and later mass propaganda, you have the academic underpinnings of the modern anti-white paradigm. As documented in detail by Kevin MacDonald and Andrew Joyce, these were jewish intellectual movements. Their influence is not just felt in various adjacent fields but their lies are still explicitly taught as fact in many.
To make a long story short, the majority of people have no conception of where the world they live in comes from, why it exists how it does or who made it to be that way. Black people just disproportionally appear in advertisements because... They just do! It's not as if there was a giant jewish academic movement centered around deconstructing 'white prejudice' through mass propaganda. That would be insane.
Academics in social sciences think racial categorization in humans is a social construct because... They just do! It can't be that there was a giant jewish academic movement centered around deconstructing biological distinctions between humans. That would be insane.
On top of that there exist large political movements driven by jewish intellectuals on both sides of the political isle that center around either explicit or implicit jewish interests. The Civil Rights movements and Marxism on the left, and the Neoconservative movement on the right. Both sides have supported mass immigration, of course.
It's hard to argue this, as jews have a very high nose for their own excellence. Anything bad that happens as a consequence of their self centered advocacy is just collateral damage in the wake of their righteous ethnic ego. If they even dare admit as much to themselves.
I'm not sure I'd blame them if there were, given how obvious it had become that the Nations couldn't be trusted with such distinctions.
More options
Context Copy link
What planet are you living on? Affirmative Action and the pro-#representation woke block are in no way trying to hide their agenda. Landmark casting of a black Star Wars lead or whatever are inevitably cause for grand celebrations, and the political ramifications and academic justifications are outspokenly praised by the media! The politically-correct "box-ticking" phenomenon is many things, but it is not some secretive conspiracy that the Elders of Zion are gambling the public literally won't notice. Except for the word "Jewish", the overwhelming majority of the online left would happily endorse your second sentence!
(As for the Jewish angle, I think you're committing the usual anti-Semite's magic trick of blurring the distinction between "ideologies invented by people who happened to be ethnically Jewish" and "ideologies deliberately crafted to benefit the Jews as a community". The idea that Freud was playing 5D chess to undermine other races at the behest of his own is farcical if you've ever read any of his writing. He was plainly just an ordinary crank who thought he'd figured out the truth about human psychology. HBD itself, whose suppression you claim is some wicked Jewish plot, would predict that there would be a high percentage of Jewish individuals in the intellectual classes in any era, so it's not surprising that a high percentage of ideologies we inherited from 20th century intellectuals would have Jews in their family tree; you do not need to posit a secret coordinated plot to explain this observation.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Indian immigrants to the anglosphere, up until recently, were highly selected and assimilated well. In the UK it was completely taken for granted that Indians integrated well and became good citizens, and... well, you weren't allowed to talk about what Pakistanis did. Then, roughly simultaneously, the immigration gates got opened to the chandala (more in some countries than others - but Canadians post online even more than Americans per capita), extremely-online tech workers started having to deal with cheap offshore Indian teams in their companies (where you get what you pay for), the expansion of internet access in India brought a flood of obnoxious hindutva seethers onto social media, and the /int/pol/etc. style banter of the internet made hay with the worst stuff they could find from India. As far as I can tell, Indians are still viewed very positively on the ground in America, because the average American encounters highly-selected and assimilated immigrants, but the online view is seeing some serious whiplash as the most-online corners of the internet encounter the most unpleasant aspects of India all at once.
More options
Context Copy link
There's a good chance you've read this, but just in case you haven't:
Indians Are Hated Because They Are Dark and Can't Play Football
I find this almost comedic in its wrongness.
There are visceral reasons some people dislike Indians, it will rarely be their skin color, rather it is smell and fashion.
There are personality reasons why people dislike Indians. It is not lack of masculinity, although some people think it cricket is a little queer. Rather it is backstabbiness, the general grafty and scammy nature of doing business with an Indian, wherein every transaction is a negotiation. And once you thought you had a deal there is another round of negotiation. Its like going to a used car dealer, except for something as simple as fulfilling an order of widgets that is the same volume and the same widget as last month, or asking a junior associate to take on a project.
There is also, the ever present trash/littering issue as well.
More options
Context Copy link
I have.
I read it again. It's a good one. On second reading, I like how sharp and straightforward this article is. It's easy reading. Therefore it must be damn hard writing.
I agree with his theory. But I'm also a comparatively fair, sporty and charismatic Indian (if I say so myself). It places blame on India traits that my ego is shielded from.
It would be convenient for me if this theory were true. Yet, I treat it with a degree of scepticism to counter my own prioirs. But his points are all solid.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I would say that's a very specific type of people. Snooty urbanist types like myself sometimes call them "breeders." It works if youre a married couple, age 25-45, with young children and a steady long-term job. It does not work nearly so well for others.
For me, i grew up a place like that. I remember it being great as a kid because the yard was big enough for me to run, and my boomer parents could either leave me at home or easily drive me around town. The local public school was nothing special, but good enough.
When i became a teenager though, it was stifling. A suburban yard isn't nearly enough space for any real sports, so it just become a pain the ass thing to take care of. Everything is designed around driving, so i was stuck dependant on my parents for all transportation until i got old enough to drive. The local school was excruciatingly boring for a gifted kid. No one seemed to care about anything except work, grades, and sportsball. If you were caught outside "loitering," the police would come and forcibly bring you home. The "spacious" surban home still had thin walls and a bad layout, so we had no privacy. I, like many teens, started staying up late to avoid my parents.
When i go back there now as an adult, it seems creepy. An adult single male just doesnt fit in there at all. Everything is oriented around child rearing- for young children. Almost nothing is open at night. There's hardly anything in the way of aets, music, or culture. The social life all revolves around "the parents of my chikd's friends." Its just not a place someone like me can live.
GenXers like you didn't have smartphones, tablets or computers available though. I think we can assume suburban children today rarely use the yard the way you did unless their use of digital devices is strictly restricted or banned, which in most cases it isn't.
More options
Context Copy link
Not untrue, but how many years one spends as a teenager? 4 years from 14 to 18 perhaps? Substantial but a minority fraction compared to time one is a kid, and not that large fraction of human lifespan. I prefer my kids will have good childhood at cost of some boredom as teenagers (boredom is supposedly good for intellectual growth anyway). Hopefully they are ready equipped to handle some adult excitement when they are adults. Much better than living in a city where kids can be easily exposed to unsavory or dangerous side of adult excitement.
Nobody expects single adult males to move to suburbia. Lack of single adult men having fun is more of a feature, really.
14-18 is when you're supposed to transition into an adult not just bodily (that happens on its own for most), but also socially and psychologically. Seems unwise to just assume "rebellion" will do all the work here. Many anecdotes of young adults either being infantile or throwing themselves in the deep end of adulthood after being stifled during formational years.
Regarding rebellion, the whole theory of teenage rebellion as commonly understood has struck me as wrong recently. Most teens aren't universally rebellious, they copy who they are around - and if they're around peers, they will copy the most charismatic and loud of those peers, hence the whole "peer pressure" thing. Parents call it rebellion but in fact it's just a transition of primary authority.
I'd say we had a rather good discussion on this matter here. I agree with @coffee_enjoyer - teenage rebellion is very much real in the sense that when the average teenager encounters a grumpy old man or woman who wants to block him/her from pursuing sex, partying and fun in general while at the same time lacking any authority to actually control the supply of sex, alcohol and drugs, that old Boomer will only get laughed at.
More options
Context Copy link
This process is broken (particularly for boys) across the West regardless of urban form, although I agree car-dependent suburbia doesn't help. [Things would be different if a teen could run a beater car with the income from a Saturday job and some DIY shop time on Sunday afternoon - I don't know how realistic that ever was in the US, but given the cost of insurance for teen drivers it probably never should have been.]
Wasn't it standard in the US before 1990 or so for high schoolers to perform as part-time workers most of the crummy jobs that were later given to illegal immigrants?
Teens did work more, and that was a good thing in terms of the transition to adulthood. I don't think they did the jobs that are now being done by illegal immigrants. Teens couldn't do seasonal agricultural work or heavy construction unless it was in their own family or a close friend's business. The classic teen jobs in the 1990s UK I grew up in were seasonal tourism-related work, waiting tables, and retail, which AFAIK are now more likely to be done by undergraduates. Some older teens did warehouse work or entry-level office admin, but that tended to be restricted to the summer between school and university.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is a non-factor if insurance isn't mandatory, but it means the old pay higher rates to subsidize the young and not the other way around, so naturally that's a non-starter today.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
So where did I claim that "rebellion" will do any work? Scans comments I wrote. Apparently nowhere, which is good as I remember writing no such thing. I did wrote that some cultural limitations on sex and drugs puts limits and boundaries how far teenage rebellion will push them. In more concrete terms, in today's day and time and culture, teenagers are prone to experiment with premarital sex and mind-altering substances. I believe it will be a more innocuous experience in a low population density moderately high trust suburbia. Part of maintaining that includes that adults consider topics of sex and drugs uncouth instead of interesting conversation starters with random young adult males (which was the original complaint upthread).
I can agree suburbia is neither the ancestral hunter-gatherer or agricultural environment. Neither is any of available alternatives. Are megacities more conductive for social and psychological growth to adulthood? Until recently most people lived their whole lives in small rural communities with population far below Dunbar's number. Cities were not really comparable to modern cities in size, and in their modest size were disease-ridden population sinks, meaning, they were places where many people went to die childless. Fertility ratios in modern Western urbanized areas suggest cities are still population sinks when we have solved disease with indoor plumbing and antibiotics.
Suppose many kids are bit bored and more than bit sheltered in sterotypical suburbia. If they stay bored for more than one week, I'd say that betrays only emptiness of mind and lack of creativity, and I am uncertain how city life would help with it? What precious experiences are there to be found in a big city that kids will miss out on if faced with few boring teenage years in suburbia? High culture? I propose that only minuscule percentage of teenagers in places like NYC frequent or obtain value from the Met or MOMA or access to university tier libraries or any other similar venue. Perhaps some highly successful people can find a super enriching bubble for raising children in a big city, but that is very select slice of population. Hard city life? I suppose most kids can and will survive and be "hardened" through a stereotypical hard city high school experience (humans are quite adaptable and have survived in quite shitty societies). Still I'd rather avoid such environments if I can, because I do not think that is the civilization I want my kids to grow in and consider as "normal".
History of literature is full of artsy authors complaining how stifling small provincial towns and then later suburbs were for more than a century now, and yet they remain popular and sought after localities. Seems likely to that most people who seek out the artsy vibrancy are exceptional people, and very few who seek it achieve anything of note with it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's a rather important period for psychological development and social maturation though.
More options
Context Copy link
In college I noticed that my classmates who had grown up in New York were generally more responsible and less likely to get into the sorts of trouble that a naive suburbanite would. Now, it certainly had more to do with parenting style than the nature of the built environment, but the latter sort of kid was notable for their paucity of life experience and inability to deal with interpersonal conflict. Personally, I went from living in a third world country to an American exurb at age 8 and the latter was so mind-numbingly boring that I have no memory of anything that happened in my life, good or bad, between then and high school.
I don't see why it should be a selling point of inner city childhood that you "get" to become that sort of unnaive(?) hardboiled(?) person with lots of adult-tier "life experiences" before you are an adult.
I do have many things to sneer at about American parenting practices, suburban and urban alike, including ability to handle various social situations, but I am restraining myself not to rant about them as I don't see the concept of suburbia (detached houses, low population density, boring by standard of single young adults) as the culprit.
Certainly I can see it would be nice to bring up kids in a nice city with "high culture" and civilized people and such, but current available cities are bit lackluster in that regard.
I have hard time believing this lack of memories is a feature of American exurb. Perhaps it was just you?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, the literal mathematical answer would be from the second you turn 13 until just the second you turn 20. So 7 years. Almost half their life at that point, and more than half of the years they actually remember.
A less literal answer is that it's all the years when an adolescent is expected to have adult-type responsibilities, but without adult-type privileges. So roughly from age 10-18, although the exact age range depends on the person and their situation. But the exact ages don't matter, we see the same pattern play out again and again and again- an adolescent is stuck living in an environment that's profoundly bad for them. It's kind of odd to me that so many parents say "I'm moving to the suburbs for the sake of my children," but don't seem to care at all about what it does to their older children.
But hey, I'm an adult single male, so no one give a shit what I think. Let the soccer moms rule society.
I don't think there is such a thing. Normally, both privileges and responsibilities get gradually added as someone gets older. Things like having to work to pay rent are adult responsibilities, and people in that age range rarely have that responsibility. And I'm sure you can name privileges that someone just below 18 has that someone at 10 doesn't.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Small children play in the yard with their dads. By the time they're six, they're old enough to play with friends on their own. Options for autonomous play are extremely limited in suburbia which means that kids basically play in front of the house on the driveway or, if the street is quiet enough, on the street.
Kids under sixteen rely on their parents to drive them to every single activity since they have no other means of transportation. That means those activities are usually planned by the parents too. So much for intellectual growth.
It's 2025. Nobody's going to be bored, they'll just scroll tiktok if there's no point going outside except when Mom drags them to soccer practice.
This is the key problem with American suburbs. Zoning laws make it impossible to build anything other than houses in suburbs, and there's no public transport because US zoning is designed around cars.
In the UK, suburbs have pubs, shops, schools, parks, churches, and buses to get to denser areas if you want. We get most of the upsides (our houses and gardens are smaller, to be fair) and few of the downsides.
If only we could build more of them...
As someone who's pro-suburb, I like places with human-scale mini-downtowns – usually just one street – with those kinds of thing, and I would heartily support linking them with one another, nearby towns, and the city with buses. But the nearby city gets to define our mass-transit policy, and they want jobs downtown with commuter links to hollowed out bedroom communities, so that's what our mass-transit policy supports. The suburbs that maintain their own characters do so in defiance of the city and of transit.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
From what I see, options for autonomous outdoors play in a big city are not better and usually much worse. No yard either behind or front of the house. All environments are built. If you are lucky, they are managed. Street and driveway certainly are not an option for kids to hang around, usually you hang around inside. In a nice suburb you have access to some parks, playgrounds and like. (You could say you have access to parks and playgrounds and like in a city, too, but cities get the drawbacks from higher population density.)
I kind view that this structured activity craze is pushed by adult FOMO. I though myself as a bit of loner nerdy kid and yet I had spent a great deal of unplanned hanging around time in friends' places after school and during weekends, and then we got ideas. DnD campaign, transliterated some short stories to Angerthas Moria and then briefly tried to learn to speak in Sindarin, which was too much like learning languages in school, so we come up with our own language. One summer one of us got access to someones old video camcorder, so during span of two summer we made amateur home movies, with only select safe parts shown to parents (in retrospect the edgy parts were quite innocent too). Later, girls and illicit booze, but for some reason I was no longer cool for those parties. Also lot of time with nothing but books and imagination.
I see no fundamental reason why substantial part of similar class of experiences it could not be ... not exactly replicated, but have something similar in spirit. Kids have spirit of creativity if given the space and the opportunity and the means. Bookish kids will be drawn to bookish experiences. If the kids turn sportish, replace books with sports.
Regarding transportation, ideally really I'd find a bikeable neighborhood. Chances for that are better in suburbia than a city.
...I will be so disappointed if they only tiktok and don't find even a single obscure internet discussion forum teeming with political opinions I oppose. In any case, I will restrict internet access initially.
If we're cherry picking just the nice suburbs, we're gonna have to cherry pick the nice urban neighborhoods too.
In my suburban neighborhood, the nearest park is nearly a mile away and requires crossing a five lane state highway. That park is about 150 feet square.
Correct. Where do you think you find such adults? They move to the suburbs.
How old are you and where are you from? The situation is very different today. I know there are young kids on my street because I see them with their parents, but they do not play outside. My parents live in a neighborhood a few teenagers on the block and they are similarly never seen. The suburban reality today is phones and extracurriculars.
Assuming "bikeable" means that you can get somewhere you want to be, I wouldn't be so sure. The suburban housing division I grew up in was bikeable in the sense that you can bike around the subdivision and the streets are pretty quiet, but if you even wanted to get to the mall you'd have to bike on a 45MPH road without a bike lane. Urban cores don't even have roads with speed limits like that these days.
Obsessive helicopter parenting is not exclusive to the suburbs though. To the extent you see self-actualizing children unsupervised in urban areas, it's packs of young teens popping wheelies on bikes or terrorizing theater-goers. It's not like most kids growing up in the big city are spending their weekends taking the bus to the local art museum or enjoying restaurant week. They're either sitting inside on their phones or getting into the sort of trouble I doubt you really approve of.
At the same time, it's not like all suburban kids are hermetically sealed behind their parents' property line. They ride their bikes to their friends' houses, hang out at the park, explore the woods behind the housing development, etc. Living in the city isn't singificantly more stimulating than the suburbs if you don't have any money to spend on cool city things and the bulk of your leisure time rounds down to "loitering with your friends" regardless of where you live.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As an early millenial who grew up in an american-style suburb (in Canada), I didn't quite have the kind of feral childhood that boomers describe fondly, but I would usually just play in the streets around my block. I had an understanding with my parents that if I wasn't at home and I didn't tell them where I was going, I'd be somewhere around the block. This was from about 6 to 12. I had 3 friends living within seconds walking distance from me. If I wanted to go see a friend that lived further or go play at a park, or whatever, my parents would expect me to tell them where I was going, but in general it was more so that they could tell me when to come back for lunch/supper, or where to look if I wasn't back when I was expected.
I would go places by bike or rollerblade, or by walking when I had ample time (and suburban teens usually have a lot of time). By the time I finished high school, I would also start taking the local buses, which, while they were not an efficient method of transportation between two points in the suburbs (they would still work in a pinch, but in general having to go to a larger hub in between extended travel time by at least 30 minutes), did the job.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Then get married and become a normie.
Like it or not, society doesn't revolve around men having fun. You're not a kid anymore. I'm not sure why eccentrics should have a veto over societal development. The suburbs are great for most people; your disinterest in growing up into a normie probably says more about you than it does about society.
OP’s argument appears to be that American suburbia is specifically structured around the sole consideration of enabling young children to play in yards and on lawns, and that this is done at the expense of everything else (walkability, services etc.). I’d add that this consideration doesn’t even hold up, because children nowadays scarcely use their free time to play in yards instead of staring at screens, and the period in their lives when they are even interested in playing in yards at all is rather short.
More options
Context Copy link
Brutal.
This is a stage of adulthood that a lot of men have trouble with. Maybe an identity crisis over. Life isn't fun all of the time, and it gets more unfun with time. People grow old and die. First your parents and then your older siblings and cousins and then you. You may as well learn sooner, rather than later, that life is still meaningful and worth living even if it's not maximally fun.
Indeed.
More options
Context Copy link
Who are you worried about veto-ing what exactly? There's approximately 0 veto-ing that prevents new suburban development, except for the NINBYism of neighboring suburban developments lol.
Incorrect. Central planning at the state and regional level does so, through urban growth boundaries and similar growth restrictions. This isn't NIMBYs (who mostly don't want you to build halfway houses for criminals and/or the mentally ill, or dense pod housing, next to them), it's New Urbanists and similar anti-sprawl types restricting single family development.
While you're not wrong about urban boundaries, this:
Is absolutely ridiculous lmao, just blatantly not true
I can find roughly infinite examples of quite literally every built form being opposed, my buddies neighborhood Facebook group is current having a meltdown because someone wants to build an extension on the back of their SFH
More options
Context Copy link
The New Urbanists are having about as much success restricting single family development as Hamas is at destroying Israel.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST1F
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That's the sanewashed position. The reality is that NIMBYs are against duplexes and fourplexes too.
And single-family homes on small lots.
The metro areas with urban growth boundaries are the same ones that resist densification downtown because that is what blue state voters (especially blue state Republicans) vote for. Houston and Austin are sprawling at the edges and densifying in the middle simultaneously because that is what Texans (including Austin liberals) vote for.
This effect is less obvious in the UK because everywhere has local politics dominated by Boomer NIMBYs and the only solution appears to be for the working-age population to wait it out six-to-a-bedroom in our overpriced hovels chanting "They can't live forever".
Ok, minor correction- while Austin liberals are decently pro-growth, the suburban sprawl in Texas is approved by... republicans. Including in metros where the core city votes very reliably blue. The suburbs outside the city which due the sprawling are invariably republican run and republican voting, although these republicans are often moderate. In general Texas republicans want to build out and Texas democrats want to build up, and except for Fort Worth(which is run by republicans) all the major cities are run by democrats so they build apartments, and all the suburbs are run by republicans so they build vast tracts of single family homes.
The 'smaller' cities(and this means not big 6- Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso. Some of them are major cities population wise) in Texas are ruby red and mostly build out, but often build lower quality(more duplexes and stuff). If you're wondering why Texas is still red, it's mostly due to the overwhelming republican advantage in the smaller cities and their ability to keep pace in growth terms due to endless cheap suburbia.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How much actual banning of single family homes is going on? The only thing I've seen is banning "single family zoning" which doesn't ban single family houses but bans the banning of denser options.
Oregon, Washington, and Tennessee have state-mandated urban growth boundaries for all cities. California has growth boundaries in many areas. Even Florida does. Maryland has a state growth plan that prevents building in Western Maryland. Then there's things like affordable housing requirements, which mean you can't build market price SFH in any given town unless you build the requisite number of subsidized pods.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, but,
He's gay. Or using gay lingo. I don't forsee a wife and kids in his future.
Well then he should fix that.
How would you suggest he do that?
A 1972 case study suggests that it is possible to use a combination of wireheading and conditioning to treat homosexuality (h/t: The Occidental Observer), but that's probably not feasible for an individual.
I'll caveat that :
It's a pity that a) no credible research org is willing to try anything along these lines today, and b) the places that would want to try it are so sketchy, because it seems like tRMS should be a good deal more ethical and ... well, if not reversible, at least not as heavy on long-term infections and seizures. But I've got a kink for orientation play, followed a lot of bihackers in the tumblr ratsphere (and unintentional bihackers in the furry fandom), and I know more people who've ended up in relationships they can jerk off over but not consistently consummate than who've gotten it to work out well. Maybe they're just missing something -- I'm convinced that a lot of the 'physical' problems are downstream of scent and texture, which neither the Tulane study nor modern efforts generally train around -- but it might well be something deeper that only a small fraction of the populace can train.
On the gripping hand, if you just want a wife and kids, a gay guy doesn't really have to go that far. Beards are not new technology; post-nut clarity isn't gonna make a vial of your swimmers stop working; fujoshi are not unobtanium. Which points to the broader issue. Despite the perceptions, gay guys are looking for more than a hole (or pole) to pump and ignore until the next time they get horny.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's not a defect, unless you consider him to be a means to an end rather than an end in himself.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Nope. Utterly, totally fucking wrong. A big part of why I like cities, as a straight man, is that the dating scene is better. Good luck with your OLD apps in the exurbs though.
Okay. "Breeders" is a gay term for straight people. You can borrow gay language. People reading it will think you are gay.
Not clear what old apps are. Dating apps? I have never used a dating app. This is actually confusing since the same apps are inside and outside city limits. Some other meaning of "apps" I'm not getting?
Pretty sure OLD = Online Dating
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ironically, i need to first move to a city to find a wife. Only then can i move to a suburb to spawn and become a normie. That's the American cycle of life.
I don't agree with the "just find a wife bro" that you're responding to, but this isn't true either. You can in fact find a nice girl (or boy) whether you live in the city center, in the suburbs, or in BFE nowhere. People do it all the time.
How do you find a potential wife who is presumably outside your social circle in a US suburb?
That is very much outside the scope of my expertise. I met my wife through online dating, so there's that. But otherwise I don't know how people are meeting, I just know that they do as a result of seeing people's stories over time.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
(If you don't mind her weighing 250lbs)
Women in cities do tend to have better physiques than elsewhere (same with the men, of course). There's also a level of achievement in cities: you have to put up with the In This House We Believe crowd a lot more, but, absolutely and proportionately, you find more people who are deeply ambitious, agentic, and capable of making an important mark on the world. The culture of the suburbs is more just finding the joy in the day-to-day, which has its own value, but some people want something different.
Yeah, I'm biased, as someone deeply attracted to a will to power in women, but that's the next level up of concern. I can't imagine settling for a femoid whose dream in life is to trade in wall-to-wall beige carpets for grey walls and lighter-grey floorboards.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You say this as if it is a choice.
I'd also ask to consider what's the point of being a normie in a decadent, degenerate society.
I think raising kids gives people immense satisfaction; and you can live in a decadent degenerate society and NOT be decadent or degenerate.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
People would probably respond better to this sort of pro-suburban stuff if it was ever written as a paean to the sublime joys of seeing your children and caring for them and making that sacrifice, instead of longhouse hectoring because "you just have to, ok?! And if you don't, I'll tell the HOA!" Urbanists and suburbanists appear to be in some kind of competition to see who can me more off-putting to onlookers.
Those joys are unfortunately not very describable.
I have plenty of friends who do a pretty good job of it. Just got to overcome the instinctive negativity bias the internet gives people.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Depends on what you value. Arts, music, and culture can all be readily found on the internet. If you want to go experience it in person, it's typically a 20-30 minute drive away from the suburb. You can easily manage that a night or two a week.
I accept your critique as stifling a teenager, though I don't think that's a bad thing. What exactly is the problem as an adult male?
But you're supposed to be doing all that socially, with other like-minded peers.
More options
Context Copy link
You will live in the suburb, you will consume essential human experiences via a screen, you will be happy
lol, lmao even
More options
Context Copy link
I'd say its a vibe more than anything specific, which makes it hard to put into words. Almost everyone i meet there is married , has kids, and moved there intentionally to raise their kids. They live in a world of Disney movies and Youtube Kids. Talking about sex, drugs, or anything "weird" is verboten.
And yeah, there's the internet... but I feel like the internet is getting worse every year. And driving 30 minutes for real life culture is highly optimistic. I don't just want to stare at some paintings, i want to be part of a community that looks at paintings, do you feel me?
Why this is a problem?
Since this is Themotte, the main factor I'd definitely bring up is that the US suburb is a heavily blue-pilling environment.
More options
Context Copy link
thinking bit more, my first reply above was too flippant.
More charitable version: vibe of no sex and drugs is exactly the main feature. And frankly: when I was kid, there was some amount of sex and drugs^1 and rock'n'roll behind the curtains. Anti-signalling is there to establish safe limits for teenagers to rebel against, to keep it at manageable levels, because is is frickin bad sign to have that stuff overtly around when you are raising kids.
I view that there is a purpose for having different urban environments for different stages of life. Single adults are more than welcome to leave suburbia, try adult life in college towns or artsy parts of big cities or spend few years as vagabonds (and ultimately see it for its emptiness in comparison to simple joys of love, marriage and family, and see the benefits of suburban environ).
^1 mostly pot and alcohol
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Move to Europe.
More options
Context Copy link
What's interesting is that most highly-cultured tier-1-city people live around 30 minutes by public transit from their local art museum, symphony orchestra, etc., but that doesn't stop them. I suspect it's partly a question of driving having a higher activation energy and commitment than public transit, and partly that, realistically, your suburb's city is unlikely to actually have good enough culture to sustain a feeling of culturedness.
Other public transit pros:
Generally the density of places with it means I can add a second or third destination after the primary museum, gallery, glory hole, restaurant on a whim
If your social sphere lives in the same area, it's much easier to meet up with people while doing any of this
You can read or do other stuff while you travel, no attention required
I can get drunk or high at the destination without coordinating a DD
Edit: I realize this is mildly uncouth but I'd like to offer an open mic to anyone drive-by downvoting this comment, why? Do you think my 'pros" here are stupid? Do you dislike public transit? I'm genuinely curious what motivates someone to look at the comment and go "I dislike this" but then also not articulate their thoughts at all. Let's chat
If everyone else drives to a destination neighbourhood, then once you get there the place is necessarily dominated by parking so you can't walk from the theatre to the restaurant to the bar. There are ways of fixing this problem - New Urbanists talk about "park once" districts and point out that the proof-of-concept is the mall, which forces people to get out of their cars and walk from shop to shop by putting the "street" the shops are on indoors. But it means giving up the ability to park right outside the building you are going to.
Self driving cars make this a lot easier because (even if they are privately owned, rather than robotaxis which don't park up at all) parking in a lot outside the destination neighbourhood becomes zero cost. On the other hand, they will add a whole different set of moving congestion problems that we haven't really thought about yet.
I don't really understand your point because I live in Toronto and I have never once thought to myself "damn I can't walk from the ROM to the restaurant I'm meeting my friends at because there's too many parking lots in the way". I'm also generally not suffering for parking in Toronto when I drive places, I love how much underground parking we have hidden away.
Although that was actually my experience in San Antonio, so I think the real thing here is an urban planning skill issue lol
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I live in a suburb right now and it's a 50 minute drive to the nearest proper city, where I can spend another 15 minutes looking for parking.
Looking at pics on the Internet is so far away from what any humans before the rise of the otaku would have recognized as "participating in culture" that I'm not even sure what you mean.
OP's point is that there's no benefit to living in the suburbs as a single adult male and nothing to do. Is your rebuttal "that's not true, you can drive half an hour or more to a place with something to do, what's the problem"?
This is an exurb. You live in the countryside. You might as well own a farm.
My friend, I live in a bedroom community of nearly a hundred thousand people. This is the reality of life in the bay area.
My apologies. I forget that a disproportionate share of this community hails from the most topographically inefficient metropolitan area in the country.
yeah? where do you live, where it's a 30 minute drive to the opera house, live theater, and art gallery, or any other sort of cultural scene, but you can still buy a large suburban home for cheap? are you a time traveler from the 1950s?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A large part of the problem there is not with economists but with a different E-word. Cowen mentioned building datacenters... well, look what we have here!.
The general problem of having engineers run a country is they're going to try to engineer things. And that's great for the public works department trying to build a sewer system, but sucks for an economy filled with independent agents. Central planning is terrible.
This could be read as sarcasm, since the only good Greenpeace are for is being used as human shields in mass shooting scenario.
Sex slaves for blind people?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There are many reasons for this and in my experience space is rather low on the list behind things like school zones, housing market, and local taxes/governance. Most US urban centers don't actually offer any of the features that make urban centers in other parts of the world convenient places to live (reliable and extensive public transit, housing within walkable distances to most necessities and workplaces, affordable restaurant/entertainment options bolstered by economies of scale, etc.). I can count on one hand the number of cities in the US where it's not significantly limiting to live without a car. Food options generally bifurcate into generic fast food chains on the cheap end and unaffordable fine dining on the other with a gap when it comes to places the middle class can go for non-slop on a daily basis. Why stay in a small apartment near a bus stop if I still need to own a car to get to most places anyways? Why deal with a cramped kitchen if I have to cook all of the time?
The only thing that the above reveals is that US suburbs are largely preferred to US cities (and, more specifically, by the kind of upper middle class striver who uproots from Europe/China to the US), but this does not generalize to suburbs and cities as a whole. Maintain a Singapore quality city in the US and I don't doubt many suburbanites would trade the yard and those extra beds/baths for a condo.
I've got in-laws who live in Singapore in government housing, so I've spent a week or two staying over. One main issue of the HDB setup is that it makes it very hard to have more than 2 or 3 kids (arguably part of the point of the HDB system when first imposed to stop Malays and Singaporean-Chinese defaulting to ridiculous family sizes), but yeah it's otherwise a very well-designed system of '15 minute cities' and well-maintained public goods that work pretty well for family creation.
More options
Context Copy link
It's a fair argument, but I'm not sure I buy it. Millennials revitalized city cores and gentrified the shit out of many historically run down neighborhoods. They couldn't conjure up a world class mass transit system, but most of the ones I knew lived without cars anyways. Then they all hit 30, tried to buy a house in the burbs at the same time and the housing market chaos of the early 2020s ensued.
Also, ironically, I ended up taking a ton of cabs when I was in Singapore. It was nice, but I'm not sure I'd say it was in a different class from the American cities I like.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think this is too fuzzy an analogy to be much help.
In the 1950s the United States had quite recently literally destroyed the infrastructure of its major European competitors and made sure that only plausible hostile industrial competitor was thousands of miles away and surrounded by friendly client states. Compared to America of 1950, China doesn't have such an advantage, it has a dramatically worse age pyramid, and a worse debt-to-GDP ratio to boot. In fact, this is even true of China compared to America of 2025. To the extent that "America in 1950" describes any country in 2025, it's, uhhh, well it's the United States.
...as opposed to the Germans, Russians, British, French, and other Europeans doing so with the second generation-ruining war in a lifetime?
I wouldn't say it's opposed - the Europeans started the war, the United States finished the war (in part) by strategically bombing Germany and its allies/occupied territories (including France, Italy, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Austria, the Netherlands).
The American strategic bombing campaigns in WW2 were not what destroyed the infrastructure of Russia, Britain, France, Italy, Romania, Czechoslavakia, Austria, or the Netherlands.
The American strategic bombing campaigns in WW2 didn't even destroy the German war industry, even if you ignore the British and Russian strategic bombing campaigns. Germany as a European competitor was destroyed by occupation and post-war partition, during which it was still a relatively rich and industrialized portion of both super power camps both relative to the rest of Europe and much of the world.
The vast majority of infrastructure damage in Europe during WW2 was done via land-based artillery, urban fighting, and deliberate sabotage to deny infrastructure to the enemy. Plus occupational plundering of heavy industry, which was a signature of both the Nazi and Soviet occupational forces and centralized economic planning.
This is without addressing that the US was hardly the party that finished the European war, given the roles of not only the British but particularly the Soviet Union.
Just accepting all of this for the argument instead of quibbling (and I think there's a lot of quibbling that could be done, but Second World War bombing campaigns aren't really my area of expertise, so possibly I'm just wrong) the US was still an important part of the post-war partition, and an important part of the Soviet Union's victory in the East, and an important part in the reindustrialization or, if you prefer, continued industrialization of Germany after the war through the Marshall Plan, to say nothing of the shelling, urban fighting, and sabotage that you mention (and of course removing German scientists after the war to serve the United States).
My broader point, though, is that, despite the Iron Curtain, the world was the United State's oyster in a very real way in 1950 that it is not for China in 2025.
In so much that the world was the United State's oyster, it was because the Europeans destroyed themselves and had ruined much of the world via imperialist squabblings, not because the Americans destroyed the Europeans or their spheres of interests.
This is a hyperagency versus hypoagency point of the allocation of agency and responsibility. Just because the Americans benefited from being the last economy standing does not make the Americans responsible for the various european decisions that destroyed each others economies.
I don't disagree with your point about the Europeans shooting themselves in the foot, but by the same token of agency and responsibility, the Americans of the day did not merely sit around and let their country become the last economy standing by default (even though isolationism was probably a live option); they took advantage of the situation to better their own standing (perhaps some would argue not as much as they should have due to sympathies with and penetration by the Soviets).
The Europeans did not merely shoot themselves in the foot. The Europeans shot each other in the foot, femur, stomach, gut, chest, arms, hands, necks, and face, while some Europeans made a point of double-tapping the survivors. Some of the Europeans may have done so with often American ammunition, but that was ammunition they were desperately willing to buy to fight the Europeans who were doing so to them and who would also steal any salvagable organs and giblets if they won.
A much sounder argument for American agency and responsibility for destroying European industry primarily rests in providing the British and Soviets the ammo supplies more generally to shoot the Germans and Italians, rather than letting the British and Soviet war economies grind to a halt and be unable to fight for as long as they did. In turn, and especially for the Soviets, a Nazi victory over continental Europe would have meant... industrial-scale looting (and demographic slaughter) of the continental economies and industries through the typical state-looting policies, and an incompetent grand plan for German future prosperity that would have run the long-term industry into the ground as surely as communism did.
That the Americans took advantage of the European actions that destroyed the European states and empires does not mean the Americans had the agency, responsibility, or even the ability to stop them. Attributing their loss of industry to the Americans is a wrong claim of history.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Fair. It's not a particularly sophisticated model, but then, I'm neither a historian nor an economist. It seems to be the playbook the CCP believes in, though.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
USA, Japan and Europe can make cars 90% as good for 110% the price. If protectionism is heaped on, then consumers really won't notice much difference in being denied Chinese cars. But if the floodgates are opened then there's going to be a bloodbath in domestic manufacturing. Who is gonna pay slightly more for a slightly worse car? It seems like Europe is ready to accept the deluge of Chinese cars and just let VW friends keel over and die.
With labor relations in the west as well as a smaller market (meaning smaller economies of scale) it's unlikely for westerners to actually beat the Chinese automakers outright.
I can't speak for the US, but in the UK the Chinese manufacturers appear to be treating the market as very much a cash cow and not at all going for price competition. Their models are like 2-3x the Chinese price for the same cars.
They are putting out sub £10k garbage for £30k prices
More options
Context Copy link
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.
My understanding is that China heavily subsidizes their auto industry. I don't know that this is necessarily a bad thing, particularly if you are getting something off of the ground, but it's not necessarily clear to me that Chinese cars will be able to compete at this level long-term. The strategy here is perhaps similar to that once practiced in the US by monopolies: undercut hostile industry to kill it, then raise prices to whatever you want.
Noted, although do forgive me if I forget (I don't always track usernames well...)
Yes, I do think this is a huge problem. But it's not unique to the West and it's not clear to me that China's coherent planning is actually going to be a win for them over the medium and long term.
More options
Context Copy link
Absolutely not even close. Spend a week daily driving a Chinese car and you'll see every corner they cut. Standard features in the west like vents in the back, digital climate control and lock/unlock buttons on every door aren't even standard on luxury cars in China like Audi and Mercedes, let alone Chinese brands. Even the shittiest car sold new in the US has all these features.
Of course the top tier Chinese cars can compete with western cars, but in absolutely no way are the cheap ass basic Chinese cars better than western cars.
Yeah but you can buy a BYD for 18k USD that has all those features and is fully gas and fully electric (not a hybrid). Has stuff like auto parking and a remote app interface. No US manufacture can provide that quality at that price. I've owned it for two years now and it's definitely not the cut corner shit box you describe.
Those do exist but American companies also can't provide a cut cornered shitbox for $7000.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
People forget that Europe is 16% of global GDP and that the rest of the world is most of it. A huge portion of the global economy is outside the west.
Europe can either go down the war path and ban Chinese cars from the European market and risk losing Chinese parts making the price of European cars skyrocket or accept competition. Drivers in Indonesia, Bahrain or Mexico aren't going to buy a Renault with every component made outside of China that will cost far more than a current Renault when they can buy a BYD. The middle east is heavily car dependent. Losing a Chinese supply chain means European companies would be shooting themselves in the foot.
Do European cars actually have a huge Chinese supply chain? I thought most of the parts were made domestically.
More options
Context Copy link
Are you familiar with the Nexperia affair that is currently taking place?
More options
Context Copy link
The EU exports about 5 million cars a year and imports 4 million. Tariffs can be adjusted and are unlikely to provoke some kind of Chinese ban on…Chinese exporters selling car components (the recent Dutch case was very different). The manufacturing workforce in places like Germany is also ageing rapidly. The car industry is just a very emotive thing. There are other far larger problems with the European economy, but they won’t be solved until either the EU falls apart or the Germans naturally reassert themselves once more.
Could you describe the problems with the European economy? And how would Germany reasserting itself or the EU breaking apart solve them?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link