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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   22223 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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It's not a glamorous beat, but another CW news follow-up.

Last week Judge Hannah Dugan of Milwaukee County Circuit Court was found guilty of felony obstruction by a jury. This was the judge who assisted an immigrant's attempt to evade arrest by ICE. The Wisconsin Examiner published what looks like excellent coverage of the trial and verdict.

Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, Mexican national, was arrested in March of 2025. Milwaukee ICE cross-referenced his fingerprints where they found a match with a previous 2013 deportation by US Border Patrol. ICE then decided to conjure up an administrative warrant, gather a smorgasbord of federal agents, and they hatched a plan to apprehend Flores-Ruiz after his court appearance.

At the courthouse, with the agents presence known, Judge Dugan and a Judge Cervera approached them in the hallway. At the end of this interaction Judge Cervera left with the agents to go to the chief judge's office. According to the agents and Judge Cervera's testimony that was where they were told to go to hash out the legitimacy of their presence, warrant, and the planned apprehension. According to Dugan's defense, that conversation never occurred, though from the reporting alone I do not know what they offered as an alternative except that Dugan did not personally review the warrant.

What I do know is Judge Dugan returned to her courtroom where she rearranged the docket to move Flores-Ruiz's case to the top. She told him and his attorney that their next hearing could be held via Zoom, then she "led Flores-Ruiz and his attorney, Mercedes de la Rosa, to a non-public door to exit" the courtroom. Instead of making an escape, Flores-Ruiz and his attorney stumbled into the public hallway which eventually led to his arrest-- an agent had remained behind with eyes on that exit. It's interesting his attorney did not prevent this navigation error despite having knowledge of building. According to the Examiner she was portrayed as a "naive" stooge by the prosecutors. This suggests to me she sensed a measure of impropriety, if not outright criminal potential as this was ongoing. Judge Cervera, who accompanied the agents in the halls, testified at trial and did not run cover for Dugan.

Jurors were played mute security camera video and asked to decide whether they believe Cervera that Dugan told the agents three times that they needed a judicial warrant, something that didn’t appear to happen in the video. “Judge Cervera is wrong,” said Luczak. “I don’t know if she’s lying, but I could think of some reasons why.” Cervera, the attorney argued, was trying to save herself by throwing Dugan under the bus.

It's safe to assume the water cooler talks have become more awkward in Milwaukee County. Other judges and lawyers testified for the defense. Even a former mayor came out to testify as a character witness.

[Judge] Gramling-Perez reviewed emails on the stand that said “the historic protocols are now shifting quickly,” and explaining that although state and local law enforcement have conducted arrests around the court in the past, those activities were always guided by clear policies or practices which were respected by law enforcement... Prosecutors repeatedly attempted to get Gramling-Perez to say that ICE arrests were allowed in public hallways, per the “key takeaways” that she outlined in her email to Dugan and other judges. Gramling-Perez, however, didn’t budge. When prosecutors showed her images of documents they claimed were part of her presentation, she said she’d never seen them before...

That last sentence doesn't sound great, does it? The merry mix-up argument says policy was confused and the law unclear, but for questions of intent this recording couldn't have helped:

to "buttress their argument prosecutors played courtroom audio that captured Dugan talking with court reporter Joan Butz and saying “down the stairs” as well as Dugan saying, “I’ll do it…I’ll take the heat,” and Butz responding, “I’d rather get in trouble.”

The jury's verdict -- guilty on obstruction but not guilty on misdemeanor concealment -- is arguable. Dugan's lead attorney "told reporters that he was disappointed with the ruling and didn’t understand how the jury could have reached a split verdict since the elements of both charges were virtually the same." A compromise verdict does make sense in the jury sense-making sense. Most average joes aren't going to relish sending a judge to prison especially when the former mayor comes out to vouch for her.

During testimony earlier this week, federal agents told jurors they notified court personnel of their plans to arrest Flores-Ruiz. The agents also said they told court personnel they planned to carry out the arrest in the courthouse hallway once Flores-Ruiz’s hearing had concluded. Prosecutors showed jurors an email that Ashley sent to his colleagues on April 4, about two weeks before the incident that led to Dugan’s legal troubles. That email came after two other ICE arrests at the courthouse earlier that spring. In the email, Ashley said he was gathering more information, but suggested that ICE arrests could likely be prohibited within private courtrooms.

I have doubts that Dugan will end up serving a real sentence in prison. She's a 66 year old judge who the mayor testified for. I suspect they'll work something out even without consideration of an appeal. Who did she risk her freedom for?

Eduardo Flores-Ruiz was scheduled to appear for domestic violence and battery charges. Those charges come from a complaint by an unnamed roommate who texted Flores-Ruiz about loud music in their shared apartment. Flores-Ruiz confronted the roommate about this text and began pummeling him. This victim was punched in the face at least "30 times." The roommate's girlfriend made an attempt to intervene which resulted in a second pummeling. All pummeled out, the assailant turned his attention back to the male roommate and began choking him. A third individual, a cousin of the girlfriend, appeared on the scene, avoided a pummeling, and ended the altercation.

Flores-Ruiz reportedly uttered something in the realm of this isn't over before the couple went to the hospital to receive treatment. They filed a report which led to the Mexican national's arrest and his eventual deportation. I believe these two were present in the Dugan's courtroom on the day in question.

Anyone surprised by the verdict? Not surprised? Is this a signal received for #resistance in the justice system? A clear line drawn on what the public and feds will tolerate. Or, is the lesson a more practical? More quiet, sophisticated acts are required to protect democracy with celebration for a new martyr on the right side of history. ICE agents lingering outside courtrooms does step on a predictable boundary. If the autonomy of a judge's courtroom justifiably extends into the hallways, then where should it end?

I am a bit surprised by the verdict - mostly because I figured this would be swept under the rug in some sort of deal before it ever went to trial. The fundamental problem here is that a judge asserted her authority well beyond her remit, and the golden rule of power grabs is that you shouldn't make a push unless you're certain that it will work.

Did this judge think she was safe? If so, was it because "everyone does it", or was she so high on #resisting that she was thought there was no world where someone would actually punish her?

The feds had supposedly been offering a plea bargain for a while, though the details haven't been made public. If the bargain was just felony-with-no-jail, she had a lot of reason to reject it even if a conviction was likely; if it was a misdemeanor, she was making a pretty high-stakes bet.

Part of her decision-making was probably resistance huffing, but there's also a lot of long-standing norm about treating various protections around judicial office-holders very expansively, both to avoid complex legal situations and with the tacit understanding that prosecutors that didn't would find judges suddenly less charitable to their position. That equilibrium became a lot less stable since Dugan's initial behavior.

I'm not surprised it went to trial, my bet is that it came down to the issue of Dugan continuing to serve as a judge and the two sides could not reach an agreement on that point. If the prosecution's offer was Dugan resigns and pleads to a misdemeanor, she really did not have that much to lose. She is retirement age and the only real impact of the felony conviction will be to force her to step down or get impeached. For a first time non-violent offense, she will almost certainly get no jail time, plus now she will get to do a #resistance martyrdom tour, and quite possibly get a pardon in three years.

She won't be allowed to own firearms though, and my experience (with several friends and family that work as prosecutors and defense attorneys) is that criminal law judges and attorneys have a lot of angry people who would like to kill them.

Apparently there have only been 54 recorded homicides of US judges since the 1800s, and that includes homicides that were not work-related. Also I really doubt an elderly liberal lady in Milwaukee owns firearms in the first place, just based on gun ownership demographics.

But those are incompetent people and this woman is obviously blue tribe enough that 'guns' aren't the default answer to personal security questions.

I would think there would be fewer issues of upset equilibrium (and reduced political deference) in this case since she's a county judge and it's a federal prosecution. I'm certain if it was state or local law enforcement she was screwing with, nothing would have happened.

Did this judge think she was safe?

Probably yes, at least before she was arrested. Judges are given quite a bit of slack. Even now, she can be pretty confident that (1) she won't get any jail time; (2) the next Democratic administration will pardon her; and (3) she will have a nice soft landing teaching at a law school or working for a Soros-funded NGO.

I'm surprised because I thought ICE's deportation orders are not the big swinging dicks of arrest warrants, which is why they say stuff like don't answer the door for them if they knock and they can't deport you. If an illegal alien's roommate can refuse to let ICE in and it is not obstruction, then why is what this judge did obstruction?

I think it is distasteful for the judge to interfere in a law enforcement activity to be clear, just not sure how they found her guilty.

They don't have to be the "big swinging dicks" to be covered under the charge. 18 USC 1071 states

Whoever harbors or conceals any person for whose arrest a warrant or process has been issued under the provisions of any law of the United States, so as to prevent his discovery and arrest, after notice or knowledge of the fact that a warrant or process has been issued for the apprehension of such person, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; except that if the warrant or process issued on a charge of felony, or after conviction of such person of any offense, the punishment shall be a fine under this title, or imprisonment for not more than five years, or both.

The Justice Department helpfully lays out the elements:

Under 18 U.S.C. § 1071, the government must establish the following four essential elements: (1) a federal warrant has been issued for the fugitive's arrest; (2) the defendant had knowledge that a warrant had been issued for the fugitive's arrest; (3) the defendant actually harbored or concealed the fugitive; and (4) the defendant intended to prevent the fugitive's discovery or arrest. United States v. Silva, 745 F.2d 840, 848 (4th Cir. 1984), cert. denied, 470 U.S. 1031 (1985). Accord, United States v. Udey, 748 F.2d 1231, 1235-36 (8th Cir. 1984), cert. denied, 472 U.S. 1017 (1985); United States v. Bissonette, 586 F.2d 73, 77 (8th Cir. 1978).

But I think she was convicted on the other charge, 18 USC 1505, which fits rather less well. It fits about as well as the obstruction charges from Sarbanes-Oxley fit the J6 cases; it has one section specifically concerned with obstructing the Antitrust Civil Process Act, and the second is

Whoever corruptly, or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication influences, obstructs, or impedes or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede the due and proper administration of the law under which any pending proceeding is being had before any department or agency of the United States, or the due and proper exercise of the power of inquiry under which any inquiry or investigation is being had by either House, or any committee of either House or any joint committee of the Congress—

Seems to me under the J6 precedent, this should be thrown out. This is not the kind of obstruction 18 USC 1505 was meant for.

I'm surprised because I thought ICE's deportation orders are not the big swinging dicks of arrest warrants, which is why they say stuff like don't answer the door for them if they knock and they can't deport you. If an illegal alien's roommate can refuse to let ICE in and it is not obstruction, then why is what this judge did obstruction?

If the roommate refused to let ICE in, and ICE only has an administrative warrant, then it's not obstruction because ICE didn't have the authority to go inside in the first place. An ICE warrant (and the warrant in question here) is generally an administrative warrant. It is filled out and signed by an ICE agent. It lets ICE arrest people, but only in public places they have permission to be. Courtroom hallways are public, courtrooms and houses are not.

An ICE admin warrant does not let ICE do things that the police would generally need a warrant signed by a judge do. It does not let ICE ignore the 4th amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, so if ICE wants to go into someone's house they need permission or a warrant approved by a judge.

but only in public

I assume you mean only in places they have permission to be. Which is always in public, but might also be private places they are invited into.

only in places they have permission to be.

That is a more accurate characterization, yes.

Yeah, she thought he would get out of the building and no one would be any the wiser.

Is this a common thing?

IIRC a judge in Massachusetts tried to do similar in Trump's first term, but it looks like that case was settled (not sure if by previous administration) for merely a public reprimand.

It was settled under Biden.

Eduardo was appearing for domestic violence and battery charges. (PDF) The story inside the complaint is that one of Flores-Ruiz's roommates/associates texted Ruiz about his loud music in their shared apartment. Flores-Ruiz confronted the roommate which escalated to Eduardo pummeling the roommate in the face at least "30 times." The roommate's girlfriend attempted to intervene and Flores-Ruiz beat her. After he was satisfied with the girlfriend he turned his attention back to the roommate who he began choking. A cousin of the girlfriend appeared and successfully broke up the fight/beating. In the complaint the couple alleged Flores-Ruiz said a this isn't over type statement. The couple went to the hospital where, I'm guessing, they filed a report that led to Eduardo's arrest. I believe these two were present in the Dugan's courtroom on the day in question.

While alternating between the suspects first and last name makes the text less repetitive, this makes it also harder for anyone who has a context window too short to still contain the full name (which you mentioned a few paragraphs earlier) to understand what is going on. "Well, it seems like the Eduardo and Flores-Ruiz guys are both equally at fault here" instead of "per your summary of the charges, that Eduardo Flores-Ruiz guy really seems to be a piece of work".

Agreed. Hyphenated name felt bad to repeat, but adding in "Eduardo" there was lazy. There were options: X individual, Mexican national (established above), assailant. I consider it improved now.

Dugan's lead attorney "told reporters that he was disappointed with the ruling and didn’t understand how the jury could have reached a split verdict since the elements of both charges were virtually the same." A compromise verdict does make sense in the jury sense-making sense.

I knew a clerk who once told me of a case where a jury found a man on tried on drug charges to be guilty "possession with intent to distribute", but not guilty of "possession". I assume that sort of thing is reasonably common for legal purposes, but that attorneys will of course point to how nonsensical it is as a way to support their client.

As an outsider the whole edifice confuses me quite a bit. They'll charge someone with ten crimes, when only one thing is the really bad one and the other 9 were all part of the commission of the 10th crime. And then they might not even have consecutive sentences for the crimes, but concurrent ones which means all the court time and effort on the lesser charges is pure waste.

As a juror I can imagine going ya he is guilty of the worst one, but it feels like legal BS to double charge him with a lesser crime that is the same thing.

As a juror I can imagine going ya he is guilty of the worst one, but it feels like legal BS to double charge him with a lesser crime that is the same thing.

The double jeopardy clause causes some strange things with regards to lesser-included offenses, and often times a defense attorney will want that lesser-included charge on the indictment to argue that the jury should convict on it instead of the greater charge. Sometimes prosecutors will keep the lesser-included because they're afraid of the jury acquitting if the only option is the greater charge.

On the other hand, the prosecution will also want to avoid jurors anchoring on a mid-severe charge.

For example, I would imagine that if you charged a defendant with 1st degree murder, 2nd degree murder and manslaughter, and the case was less than 100% obvious, then the jury would be likely to compromise on the 2nd degree charge. So if you have a good case it might make sense to only charge 1st degree and only leave the options 'convict' or 'acquit' to the jury.

Judges and jury duty as a concept was thought of by mutant deontologists (the English) for a race of mutant deontologists, which humans are not.

As a juror I can imagine going ya he is guilty of the worst one, but it feels like legal BS to double charge him with a lesser crime that is the same thing.

It is -- the double jeopardy clause prevents double charging where the elements of one charge a proper subset of the other one. That's not a question for a jury tho.

Clearly it's possible to charge for both. Lesser included offences absolutely are a thing. You just can't convict for both, as I understand it (and I see a couple other posters who seem to have relevant backgrounds are agreeing with this interpretation).

That's correct, the jury is told they cannot convict for both before their deliberation.

Which I think undermines the idea that the jury is gonna be mad about charging both, because it's not framed as two separate convictions that might both be applied, but two possible convictions of which at most one will be applied.

That really seems silly. Presumably you guys have something like rules for the competition of criminal norms, and how acts which violate different norms should be punished. If A shoots B, you might sentence them for first degree murder, instead of adding murder 1, murder 2, manslaughter, assault with a dangerous weapon, assault, property damage, reckless discharge of a firearm, and noise disturbance.

I suppose that the only reason why a prosecutor would charge two different crimes where one encompasses the other would be that they were unsure if they could get a conviction on the more serious offense. "We are not sure if we can convince the jury of intent to distribute, so let's add simple possession just so we get something."

OTOH, reaching a common verdict may more be about everyone saving face than the verdict making any sense. If juror A insists on intent and juror B insists on acquittal on something and you have no (possibly mildly autistic) juror C who insists on the verdict being self-consistent, it seems like a way to make everyone happy.

Replying to this comment, but I am also addressing @cjet79 's post below because they are similar and my answer should either answer both, or at least open the door for more precise questions.

The answer as to why multiple charges are filed is both for proof reasons and for plea reasons.

As you speculated, if a man shoots another man the prosecutor will charge Murder, Manslaughter, Aggravated Batter/Assault with a Firearm, Agg Discharge (probably not reckless discharge because at least in midwest states those laws wouldn't apply to an intentional discharge at a person and charging both can be self defeating), etc. In fact, there will typically be dozens of charges of murder alone because some will contain enhanced sentencing language, and some will contain different theories of mens rea such as knowingly vs. purposely vs. indifferently etc.

But also those are included for plea reasons. Lets say your top charge is Murder 1st Degree, by discharge of a firearm. Where I live, the minimum sentence would be 45 years with 10 additional years of whats called MSR, which is just super fancy strict parole. But, you would also include a regular 1st degree murder charge which has a minimum of 20 years. Now, if you are in a courtroom in Chicago, you realistically as a prosecutor have to pick which murder hills to die on. Getting a conviction on a plea to 30 years on the 1st Degree Murder charge without the gun enhancements is a nice thing to do once in a while, because otherwise you are constantly picking murder juries and then putting on week-long murder trials. And, thats just the murders, you have no time for the armed robbers, hijackers, sex crimes, etc. Not to mention your thieves, drug dealers, drug users, etc.

This pattern is particularly useful for some sorts of crimes where a gun or other weapon is not actually recovered, but is alleged to be used in a crime, like a Carjacking. Carjacking with a gun in IL is a Class X felony carrying 6-30 years. But, you can't always prove it was a real gun, right? Well Carjacking where you indicate you were armed is a Class 1 which is 4-15. If there is a jury trial you present both charges and say, "hey if you think the carjacking happened like our witness says, he's guilty, but if you don't think our witness has proved beyond reasonable doubt that the gun wasn't a painted toy, he's still guilty, just of a lesser, but still quite serious, offense."

As for other posters speculating about double jeopardy with multiplicative charging, I have never heard of that argument getting close to winning at any significant appeals court in any state. It simply is a profoundly silly argument. There won't be two juries and two judges hearing each charge. Its one jury and one judge hearing one trial. And if convicted the cumulative convictions out of a single act are served concurrently, so its not like if you shoot a guy and are convicted of all 10 murder counts alleged that you now are a 10x convicted murderer and serve 10 sentences. You are just sentenced on the most serious charge and all the others follow (of course this is different if you kill 2 people at once, or as some felons like to do, were caught with 2 illegal firearms, those can often times be sentenced consecutively as they are separate offenses).

I will say, however, that everything I wrote only really applies to state and local prosecutors offices, which do handle the majority of crimes committed. The feds get to pick their cases and spend more time on a single fraud case than most state prosecutors would on multiple murder or sex crimes cases (which are typically the longest trials in state courts). So overcharging does happen much more often with that level of prosecution. But for some prosecutors in Chicago or Milwaukee or Indianapolis? Haha no, they charge what they think fits, and then the defendant often gets a very generous deal on one of the lesser included offenses. Its more like undercharging, if we are being pedantic. But to change that reality you would need to double the size of every PD, triple the number of prosecutors, and triple the number of judges, while also tripling the jury duty burden on your citizens.

TLDR? I guess its that multiple charges for one crime typically makes a lot of sense.

As for other posters speculating about double jeopardy with multiplicative charging, I have never heard of that argument getting close to winning at any significant appeals court in any state. It simply is a profoundly silly argument. There won't be two juries and two judges hearing each charge. Its one jury and one judge hearing one trial. And if convicted the cumulative convictions out of a single act are served concurrently, so its not like if you shoot a guy and are convicted of all 10 murder counts alleged that you now are a 10x convicted murderer and serve 10 sentences.

The double jeopardy clause has protections that apply even within a single prosecution, namely the third one listed here:

"That guarantee has been said to consist of three separate constitutional protections. It protects against a second prosecution for the same offense after acquittal. It protects against a second prosecution for the same offense after conviction. And it protects against multiple punishments for the same offense.” North Carolina v. Pearce, 395 U.S. 711 (1969)

The "same offense" protection applies when dealing with greater- and lesser-included offenses.

“The greater offense is therefore by definition the "same" for purposes of double jeopardy as any lesser offense included in it.” Brown v. Ohio, 432 U.S. 161, 168-9 (1977)

The classic examples are things like Robbery/Theft, Possession with Intent to Sell/Possession, and Vehicle Theft/Theft.

If there is a conviction for the greater and lesser simultaneously, then the conviction on the lesser must be vacated. Running it concurrently does not suffice as

"[t]he separate conviction, apart from the concurrent sentence, has potential adverse collateral consequences that may not be ignored." Ball v. United States, 470 U.S. 856, 865 (1985)

Even in my prosecution-friendly state, it's a reversible error if the court fails to give a jury instruction and verdict form on a lesser-included offense if requested by either side. Should the prosecution succeed in a conviction on both the greater and lesser, then the lesser conviction is vacated.

Getting a conviction is a little surprising, if only because of the extremes of jury nullification we've seen in other cases. The split verdict is weirder and might help the inevitable (and quixotic) appeal, but there's probably going to be more mileage in hammering on the edges of the sentencing guidelines to avoid a prison sentence and pulling the next Dem president for a pardon.

I'm not sure if it says anything too big. The behavior here was especially brazen, the immigrant unusually unsympathetic, the arguments about primacy of criminal cases particularly unbelievable, Dugan's unwillingness to testify on her own behalf technically can't be used against her but definitely didn't help, and the feds were able to get a relatively friendly (or at least not-actively-unfriendly) jury pool.

It's information when you're not surprised, but it's not that strong a signal.

There's also a bit of messiness about the actual judicial seat. She's been suspended since April, but still is technically a judge. The state has previously argued that a felon has to resign from office at the time of conviction, not sentencing, but there's not really a direct enforcement mechanism and if there were it'd be run by the largely-sympathetic-to-Dugan judicial office. She could be impeached, but it takes two-thirds of the state Senate to do it, and while Republicans are a majority, they're only a slight majority. Especially if Dugan pushes appeals, she could end up keeping her seat til 2027 or even 2028.

primacy of criminal cases particularly unbelievable

That domestic violence received all that attention for fundraisers, charity, and politicking while also receiving "non-violent" mitigation cover is indeed maddening. It's easy for me to say that a murderer should serve his sentence before we extradite, deport, and pass him along. It's more difficult to say we can't suspend a guy's sentence of a few weeks to get him out of here while we have him. We could even use that space to jail more domestic violent non-violent domestic abusers!

She's been suspended since April, but still is technically a judge.

The "You Know Who is a felon in office" snark writes itself. Maybe the right school will send the right offer to teach law from house arrest and all can be forgiven.

from the reporting alone

The judicial documents are available here.

The University of Oklahoma has reached a resolution regarding a student's claim of religious discrimination. University of Oklahoma junior Samantha Fulnecky received a 0/25 on a psychology essay in which she responded to an assigned article about gender norms with arguments based largely on her Christian beliefs and references to the Bible. Her trans instructor said the paper failed to meet the assignment criteria, did not engage with the source material or empirical evidence, and described parts of it as offensive. Fulnecky filed an appeal and a complaint claiming religious discrimination.

A post about the situation was made here a few weeks ago.

OU conducted a review and concluded the grading was “arbitrary.” They ruled that the failing grade would not count toward Fulnecky’s final course grade and the graduate instructor who graded the paper was placed on administrative leave and removed from instructional duties. This claim was also reviewed by the Provost who agreed with the ruling.

The online reaction isn't surprising, and it serves as another example of a litmus test that the progressive left has failed. I will say in the reactionaries' defense that the paper is not well-written, so at first glance anyone who reads it will think, "Yeah, that's a shit paper and a zero is well deserved." Once you dig beneath the surface though, that explanation collapses. It looks more like poorly written papers were routinely given full credit throughout the semester, which establishes that writing quality was not exactly being enforced as a decisive standard. Multiple Reddit threads are slamming OUs integrity or making comments about how they shouldcrowd fund attorneys. Of course almost all of them intentionally avoid the central point which is that the grading was clearly inconsistent. Once that's established, the additional CW context becomes relevant. A trans instructor giving a zero grade to a paper critical of gender ideology doesn’t prove bias, but let's be real here.

The online reaction isn't surprising, and it serves as another example of a litmus test that the progressive left has failed.

Failed? This is but a small hiccup amidst decades of winning. I suppose when we're so accustomed to one side winning, even a minor stumble can feel like a crushing defeat.

It reminds me of sports highlight shitposts. "Progressives SCRAMBLE to inbound the ball after Conservatives sink a DAGGER two to cut the lead to 36!"

This is hardly "problem solved" for conservatives, anymore than killing one bed bug means you've solved your infestation problem. One such instructor down, who knows how many to go.

However, the outcome aligns well with what I wrote in that linked thread. Fulnecky's assignment submission was hardly some stroke of genius, but was far from deserving of a 0 given typical OU-tier university grading standards, especially in those types of courses, especially for those types of assignments. Someone whose grading rubric consists of idpol and feelings should not be grading at all.

This is hardly "problem solved" for conservatives, anymore than killing one bed bug means you've solved your infestation problem. One such instructor down, who knows how many to go.

Sadly, I tend to agree with this. Going forward, who will have more fear in their hearts: (1) College students who wish to write papers criticizing progressive gender ideology; or (2) instructors who wish to give failing grades to such papers?

Seems to me it's pretty likely that this instructor will enjoy an improved chances of being given full time tenure track employment by some other university. Or will end up in some cushy research job at a Soros-funded NGO.

At the same time, most conservative college students will correctly realize that this student got very lucky by (1) having an instructor who was stupid enough to retaliate without a fig leaf of plausible deniability; and (2) having a university administration which was willing to be fair-minded about the situation.

A small hiccup with far reaching implications. The side that claims to be more objective and evidence based can't even adhere to its own standard.

Fulnecky isn't a genius, and I've never claimed she is. She's just an ordinary, average girl in an environment that now lends itself to these sorts of situations. It's an environment that now exposes how ideology quietly fills the space where consistent enforcement is supposed to be, and people don't like the current ideology that fills those spaces.

This whole thing is depressing. Writing like that should practically get you removed from a liberal arts course. The student admitted in interviews that she never read the article.

None of that matters to any outcomes here and it's depressing. The University can't, in good faith, defend giving a zero to a paper that deserves a "come see me in office hours."

This is the best evidence I've seen so far that the University system needs to be torn down.

This whole thing is depressing. Writing like that should practically get you removed from a liberal arts course. The student admitted in interviews that she never read the article.

The issue is that this is the level of the writing that other students have successfully coerced universities into giving high grades to over the last 30 years. If she had just done a woke AI slop essay with no citations she gets a solid 9/10 or whatever. So the "standards" argument is completely specious.

It's amazing university endured for any length of time as a useful signal in the first place.

If you told me your business was to give paying customers certificates for good grades that they need to get good jobs and denying these certificates for bad grades causes paying customers to get mad, well we all know what's going to happen.

If running universities as businesses creates problematic incentives, maybe it could be a good idea not to run universities as businesses. I'm not super familiar with the history of how universities are organised, but universities are older than capitalism, so at least at some point they must have been run in a different fashion.

The oldest institutions that are currently universities were originally founded by churches (many by the Roman Catholic church, but others also). But aside from the regalia they mostly don't actually resemble the way they looked then.

There are a few very old Islamic universities who are a lot closer to what they looked like in the past. but probably not a useful model for western reformers. Although they haven't learned standards because their goal is to turn out learned Islamic scholars rather than provide consumers a degree. So maybe there is a lesson there.

The fact that it's specious is what makes the whole affair depressing.

Eh, you're hypothetically in a liberal arts course to learn how to write better.

Seems to me that the paper deserved a D (it engaged at least tangentially with the idea of the assignment, and she didn't turn in a drool stained piece of A2...) I really do think that if the TA had indeed given it a 60 and a "see me after class" Fulnecky wouldn't have had a leg to stand on .

Very much agreed with your latter point, it would've saved everyone involved a whole lot of trouble.

As the OP from last time, I think after all the discussion my view has settled alongside yours. This case represents a failure on multiple levels and puts serious egg on OUs face. I don't blame them for acting swiftly and I think canning the instructor, while perhaps disproportionate, was advantageous for them optics-wise instead of admitting their academic standards have withered into dust. Especially as their funding is controlled by a Red legislature and Red constituents.

It goes without saying that Fulnecky is not a figure that I think should be venerated in any regard, much less as a martyr. As you said, recent interviews have been quite revealing. She happened to submit a garbage paper to an overzealous instructor and capitalized as she saw fit.

It is depressing. The student really does need a rap over the knuckles for "the assignment was read the paper, you never read the paper". But giving zero for a topic that is relevant to the tutor/TA/whatever the position, is also going to look like bias. If, as claimed, other students have turned in equally crappy papers and not gotten zero grades, then it is unjustified. But I do think the student wants to be a martyr and now she has achieved her fifteen minutes of fame for "they persecuted me for being a Christian".

But to quote St. Clement of Alexandria, rashly running out to be persecuted is not true martyrdom, it is vainglory:

Now we, too, say that those who have rushed on death (for there are some, not belonging to us, but sharing the name merely, who are in haste to give themselves up, the poor wretches dying through hatred to the Creator )— these, we say, banish themselves without being martyrs, even though they are punished publicly. For they do not preserve the characteristic mark of believing martyrdom, inasmuch as they have not known the only true God, but give themselves up to a vain death, as the Gymnosophists of the Indians to useless fire.

...When, again, He says, When they persecute you in this city, flee to the other, He does not advise flight, as if persecution were an evil thing; nor does He enjoin them by flight to avoid death, as if in dread of it, but wishes us neither to be the authors nor abettors of any evil to any one, either to ourselves or the persecutor and murderer. For He, in a way, bids us take care of ourselves. But he who disobeys is rash and foolhardy. If he who kills a man of God sins against God, he also who presents himself before the judgment-seat becomes guilty of his death. And such is also the case with him who does not avoid persecution, but out of daring presents himself for capture. Such a one, as far as in him lies, becomes an accomplice in the crime of the persecutor. And if he also uses provocation, he is wholly guilty, challenging the wild beast. And similarly, if he afford any cause for conflict or punishment, or retribution or enmity, he gives occasion for persecution. Wherefore, then, we are enjoined not to cling to anything that belongs to this life; but to him that takes our cloak to give our coat, not only that we may continue destitute of inordinate affection, but that we may not by retaliating make our persecutors savage against ourselves, and stir them up to blaspheme the name.

So, deliberately provoking the university authorities is not standing up for your principles, it is causing them to offend.

She didn't want to be a martyr, the whole thing is a staged political stunt to get the TPUSA more influence. I daresay I have a better insight into the priorities of the politically active core red tribe in the south central United States than the average motteizean; the TPUSA is a big part of their 'theory of victory' and this kind of stunt is exactly what somebody trying to exploit it would dream up- and some state legislators were peripherally involved, but involved enough to be an implied threat.

Her mother is Kristi Fulnecky, a former (municipal) politician, and a lawyer in activist circles. And, IIRC from the Blocked and Reported episode on this, the student said her mother told her who to contact regarding getting a resolution, and it wasn’t just the official channels within the University. I believe it was her mother that looped in the state legislators.

The online reaction isn't surprising, and it serves as another example of a litmus test that the progressive left has failed.

Once again I’m reminding you that this is the university of Oklahoma and the student in question is backed by the local TPUSA chapter.

Could you elaborate?

The university was well aware of the implied political pressure on them to be maximally accommodating to conservative Christians. They might not want to, but they're run by the state government of the reddest state in the country, and they know it. Oklahoma is the US capital of social conservatism in actual legislation, and OU isn't exactly a tier one research school(although it's a football powerhouse) so the consequences for 'not rolling over' are being forced to anyways. This isn't the university of Texas where legitimate academic programs are strongly valued by major private industries over competitors or a UC school where the state government wants them to do this- they have no protection.

This just makes the university appear less competent than they already did. IF the university was aware of the political pressure they would've presumably passed that down to their TAs and/or kept their TAs on a shorter leash which they clearly did not.

Whether OU is a tier 1 research institution or a tier 9 is not relevant to the matter at hand.

OU isn't exactly a tier one research school(although it's a football powerhouse)

What's this "research" you speak of? Is it some niche sport colleges play in between the football and basketball seasons?

Some truth is said in jest—for better or worse, I'm actually not convinced research output matters as much as sportsball-prestige when it comes to a university's political bargaining power.

Basketball is, in Oklahoma, a sport considered roughly as important as curling, and which exists largely to pass the time between the superbowl and the beginning of baseball season. The core red tribe thinks of basketball as an amateur game and does not follow the NBA, sometimes with an excuse of 'too many games'- seeing college basketball as akin to track and field or archery or something- a sport which nobody actually cares about, but which a respectable athletics program will maintain anyways just for the sake of it.

The existence of highly ranked research departments gives the university of Texas- and a small number of other red state universities- some insulation from political pressure to the extent that that research(mostly geology in the case of the university of Texas, for obvious reasons) is extremely valuable to private sector industry.

Occasionally I'm reminded that so much of the red tribe anthropology on here has the quality of European explorers confidently reporting the customs of Amazon tribes.

This isn't new- see 'Body Ritual of the Nacirema'.

I think the claim here is that red state public universities might lean left, but they're ultimately responsible to red state government in ways that prevent them from going full blue partisan, lest the legislature take away their toys funding, or the governor replace their board of trustees. Just because this could happen in Oklahoma doesn't mean the vibe in, say, UC schools or the Ivy League has changed.

Samantha Fulnecky could be supported by the Nazi party and it wouldn't change the facts surrounding the issue. The online crowd would focus on the Nazi part to gloss over the fact that their side is biased too.

The humanities are inherently biased. The instructor needs discretion to assign whatever grade they see fit on an assignment. Maybe other people submitted bad papers, but in that TA's estimation, those papers weren't as bad as the one that got a zero. Which makes sense, if they thought the paper was both low quality and morally reprehensible. If a Muslim student submitted a paper arguing for all infidels to be unalived, the grader should be allowed to be morally outraged and give a 0%. That's free speech for both parties - the student is allowed to say whatever they want in their paper, and the TA is free to evaluate the paper honestly.

  • -15

Even then, it deserves a 40% for having been turned in.

If a Muslim student submitted a paper arguing for all infidels to be unalived, the grader should be allowed to be morally outraged and give a 0%.

But that isn't the equivalent of what she wrote. She expressed a moral disagreement. She rejected the framing. There are no calls for violence. If expressing the belief that “society pushes a lie that harms children” is grounds for moral outrage and a zero, then a huge portion of the country (including many professors and TAs) are equally guilty for regularly and openly expressing the inverse belief that people who hold conservative views are inherently harmful. That opinion has been tolerated, and quite frankly promoted, in academics for years.

That's free speech for both parties - the student is allowed to say whatever they want in their paper, and the TA is free to evaluate the paper honestly.

Yeah, the TA isn't going to go to jail. They're just going to be removed from their position for inconsistent grading practices.

I don't really want to tone police and maybe this fails the building consensus rule but for the love of god can we avoid writing "unalived" and "graped" like tiktok retards?

Freedom of speech means that the government can't put you in jail for your speech. It doesn't mean your employer can't fire you if the speech you make while representing them as part of your job is damaging to the institution.

If a PR spokesperson for a grocery store dropped an N-bomb on national TV and triggered a political backlash, their employer would have every right to fire them on the spot, freedom of speech or no. Freedom of speech is not the right to keep your job in spite of gross incompetence.

Small quibble. Freedom of speech is indeed the right to keep your job in spite of your speech. The first amendment just doesn't guarantee that right. Freedom of speech is an ideal that needs to be balanced with other ideals, in this case freedom of association. If freedom of speech was our only master we would indeed insist that no one be fired for what they say on the job. I only say this because people tend to conflate freedom of speech with the first amendment. 1A is about the government and free speech is a larger idea than just your relationship with the state. When a platform like reddit or twitter bans you they are actually meaningfully reducing your ability to speak freely in violation of freedom of speech without violating 1A at all.

Your employer firing you because of your speech may very well be unobjectionable and on the net good, but it does violate freedom of speech.

No, the "1st Amendment" means the government can't put you in jail for what you say, but your employer can fire you. "Freedom of Speech" very much does mean that it's wrong for your employer to fire you for what you say, except in very narrow circumstances where it's clear you're attempting to speak on behalf of the company as a whole and your employer would rather you not.

I agree, but I'd argue that in this particular instance the instructor was speaking on behalf of the institution; grades are, after all, the university's official opinion of a student's work, and the instructor was being paid (among other things) to give them in a manner the university would agree with (that the university agrees with the marks is a necessity to make degrees actually mean something). This wasn't a case of a random shitpost on social media outside office hours.

"You can fire people for saying X if you hired them to say Y" is a small-enough impingement on free speech, and enough of a necessity, that I'm not really objecting on those grounds; I might or might not disagree on the object-level if I cared enough to dig into the case, but not on the meta-level.

Maybe you are of a liberal persuasion, but it is very funny seeing the siren song/rallying cry of cancel culture

"Erm, freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences sweaty 💅"

Is wokeness really retreating from nerd culture? The political winds may be shifting in the west, but our cultural institutions are still run by woke activists.

Tomb Raider Catalyst looks "safe horny", the new Star Wars game is apparently another female lead.

Witcher 4 is going all in on feminism vs patriarchy, which was already a central theme in the previous titles and books (conveniently ignored by nostalgic "chuds").

Expedition 33 is touted as an industry rebel and yet, suspiciously, it sold 2 million copies in 2 weeks, was hyped up across games journalism, astroturfed online AND locked in a Hollywood film deal before it even launched.... all the makings of an industry plant, funded by an "indie publisher" with a paltry $120M investment from Netease, by a studio of teams and partners from diverse backgrounds, cultures and perspectives, that "suddenly" went woke with the sequel like the bait and switch Sony catalogues.

Where Winds Meet's character creation gives you "body types" in English, but the Chinese version says male and female.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 was going to be the chud GOTY made by a pro-GG studio lead, yet it pinkwashes its two male leads and crowbarred an ahistorical Malian man into the main campaign.

GTA 6 is already putting the female lead front and centre, while the male lead looks like the sub. His writing and appearance is oriented to the female gaze, he looks like a billboard model unlike the "average looking" male leads of previous titles.

There's been a concerted effort to create a female fandom for all the male oriented IPs to expand their TAM, especially in gaming where the average budgets keep ballooning every year. The rationale is that male gamers (existing fandom) will remain loyal to the IP and get incalculated into feminism. But females need to be interested. So do away with the fratboy culture! Let HR screen the environment, kick out the milquetoast Gen X techbros and onboard woke millennial women. Accommodate all of their favourite social justice causes (BLM, LGBTQ). Fight the male gaze!

But men consistently remain gaming's biggest consumers. Despite the marketing push for the female leads in RPGs like AC Odyssey, Mass Effect and Cyberpunk heavily pushing the female leads into the marketing, the actual buyer demographic heavily prefer the male lead in all the games. Yet, people's tolerance levels keep going up as games get increasingly woke. In other words, some "tepidly woke" themes are ok because even "beloved classics" like Cyberpunk featured LGBT themes. Anti woke influencers and "trusted friends" promise up and down that condescending Malian and ahistorical synagogue in 15th century Bohemia was totally a creative decision, not ideological corruption. In 20 years, they'll be telling us that black Samurai lead in Japan is also perfectly acceptable.

The structural nature of the industry and investors expectations necessitates an indefinitely expanding fanbase. And the so called anti-wokes silently gaslight themselves so studios realised they can just make them happy by grifting away like Daniel Vavra.

In fact, I believe wokeness had its antecedents decades ago. I'm watching Star Trek DS9 right now. And when it's good, which is far from always, it's not good because it's racially diverse. If Sisko was white, it would not make the show any worse. In fact it would probably save you from bad preachy episodes like "Far Beyond The Stars". Set aside the nostalgia and compare it to the "woke" standards of the time, the "woke" creators of yesteryear fully back the "woke" creators of today.

We might be at least 40 years too late to expect a return to form (whatever that is). Maybe we'll simply just live with it like an amputated limb, occasionally recalling the good old times.

PS: Apologies if my post reads like a brain dump, I'm returning to TheMotte after a long hiatus.

Not at all a gamer, but I am an avid reader. And contemporary literature has many of the same issues (with different inflections) as video games.

My solution: exit. For the past year, I've only read books written in the 20th century, and it's been such a breath of fresh air. Instead of endless variations of progressive morality tales adapted to different settings, you get genuine variety of perspectives. Mentioning this elsewhere, the usual response is "oh, so you're just reading dead white men instead," but it's not at all that. You get writers of both sexes and all races bringing new perspectives to the table. Currently I'm reading an excellent memoir by a bisexual, Jewish, female software engineer, and you get none of the drivel that would be put to the page today.

This may have limited applicability to gamers: games are more social, require a much greater investment to produce, and the average game in 2025 is better (I assume) than the average game in 1995, despite wokeness. Which points to the problem for people wanting better video games today. So long as people are buying the ones produced, that's what you're stuck with, and there's not much you can do besides quit altogether.

My solution: exit. For the past year, I've only read books written in the 20th century, and it's been such a breath of fresh air.

Exit has been my solution as well. Hollywood/Netflix/tv wants to serve nothing but slop? The NFL has all the aesthetics of a rap video? Guess I'll pass on all of it.

Mentioning this elsewhere, the usual response is "oh, so you're just reading dead white men instead,"

And the correct answer is yeschad. They were the good writers.

And the correct answer is yeschad. They were the good writers.

They are disproportionately the best writers: e.g. no writers really compare with McCarthy or Pynchon IMO. But it's a continuum, and there are non white male writers who are genuinely great. E.g. Didion, O'Connor. Still absolutely worth setting aside a couple hours for (and worth your time far more than another round of Netflix slop or shit posting).

Although, I appreciate the idea of saying "fuck you" to people who say I'm morally flawed unless I implement affirmative action in my reading choices.

Currently I'm reading an excellent memoir by a bisexual, Jewish, female software engineer, and you get none of the drivel that would be put to the page today.

Can you name it? This sounds interesting.

Close to the Machine, by Ellen Ullman.

There's been a concerted effort to create a female fandom for all the male oriented IPs to expand their TAM, especially in gaming where the average budgets keep ballooning every year. The rationale is that male gamers (existing fandom) will remain loyal to the IP and get incalculated into feminism. But females need to be interested. So do away with the fratboy culture! Let HR screen the environment, kick out the milquetoast Gen X techbros and onboard woke millennial women. Accommodate all of their favourite social justice causes (BLM, LGBTQ). Fight the male gaze!

This is not a rationale; this is a rationalization for what they wanted to do anyway. The idea of "let's alienate our existing customers because they'll buy anyway, so we can just cater to the new customers we want at no cost" is pants-on-head stupid to begin with. It'd be like cigarette companies trying to cater to the health-nut demographic... by removing the nicotine. When they do it and it DOESN'T WORK and they keep doing it, the already transparent rationalization just falls apart.

This is not a rationale; this is a rationalization for what they wanted to do anyway. The idea of "let's alienate our existing customers because they'll buy anyway, so we can just cater to the new customers we want at no cost" is pants-on-head stupid to begin with. It'd be like cigarette companies trying to cater to the health-nut demographic... by removing the nicotine. When they do it and it DOESN'T WORK and they keep doing it, the already transparent rationalization just falls apart.

Agreed. Also, they generally don't take female oriented IPs and change them to make them more attractive to a male audience.

Also, they generally don't take female oriented IPs and change them to make them more attractive to a male audience.

I know you said "generally", but I seem to remember reading (probably here) that the My Little Pony phenomenon was due to them doing exactly that. I vaguely recall reading something that basically said that the way they'd designed it to appeal to young boys was by including a lot more adventure/hero's journey elements than are usually present in girl's media, and I explicitly remember them mentioning something along the lines of "we know boys won't go out of their way to watch it, but if it's on because their sister is watching it, we want them to watch it too."

Which plays a lot more into @The_Nybbler's point - it is definitely possible to make media that is intended for men, and extend the appeal to women as well without compromising what men like about it. Which implies that they are making it woke because that's what they want to do, not to expand their audience.

Right. "We can add female-friendly elements without scaring the dudes" isn't a pants-on-head stupid plan. It might be hard and it might not work, but the idea isn't categorically dumb. "We can completely aim for a female audience and the dudes will have no choice but to stay and we'll get the women too" IS pants-on-head stupid.

Right. "We can add female-friendly elements without scaring the dudes" isn't a pants-on-head stupid plan. It might be hard and it might not work, but the idea isn't categorically dumb. "We can completely aim for a female audience and the dudes will have no choice but to stay and we'll get the women too" IS pants-on-head stupid.

I agree, but I would add that they don't even necessarily aim for a female audience. For example, consider the uglification of female characters in video games. Your average woman is okay with (and sometimes prefers) female characters who are physically attractive. Maybe she is not excited about a female character who is close to completely naked most of the time (although even with that a lot of women don't mind), but a female character who is beautiful, sexy, and tastefully dressed is, generally speaking, a positive for female gamers. And yet there has been a trend of making video games with female characters who are downright ugly.

Wasn't this the same plan behind the Pearl Harbor movie?

I know you said "generally", but I seem to remember reading (probably here) that the My Little Pony phenomenon was due to them doing exactly that. I vaguely recall reading something that basically said that the way they'd designed it to appeal to young boys was by including a lot more adventure/hero's journey elements than are usually present in girl's media, and I explicitly remember them mentioning something along the lines of "we know boys won't go out of their way to watch it, but if it's on because there sister is watching it, we want them to watch it too."

Thanks for posting this. If true, that's fascinating.

Which plays a lot more into @The_Nybbler's point - it is definitely possible to make media that is intended for men, and extend the appeal to women as well without compromising what men like about it. Which implies that they are making it woke because that's what they want to do, not to expand their audience.

I guess the most charitable interpretation is that they have a poor mental model of the typical male viewer.

Found the link, if you're curious:

https://www.themotte.org/post/2732/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/358520?context=8#context

The quote I was thinking of:

Boys (believe it or not): They won't admit it, but they'll watch. When their sister’s watching it, they'll balk and act like it’s dumb, then they'll sit down and watch it. For the same reason Moms will find My Little Pony interesting enough to happily share with their daughters, the compelling conflicts, the strong characterizations, the silly humor and (most importantly for boys) the ADVENTURE, the boys will watch, too. Really

Yes; the usual way to attract female costumers into a male IP is to toss in a romance subplot, such as Han/Leia in Star Wars. Putting a chick in it and making her gay and lame attracts nobody, as has been empirically proven. The reason they keep doing it is because modern games and movies are made by people who hate the IP, and hate its fans.

Yeah and when it DOES work, I suspect it's usually more MEN bought the game than usual, rather than increased female gamers. I still stand by my point though. I would suspect corporate push to get young boys to play with dolls has a similar angle. But there probably are heaps of people in marketing who do believe gendered preferences are a matter of "socialising".

Just to add to that list, I was fairly excited for IT: Welcome to Derry because the IT TV special is one of my favorite horror movies, but Welcome to Derry is the most abysmal woke slop you could imagine. The theme of the show is that racism is scarier than Pennywise. We know this is the theme because the Rabbi told his son in the first episode- reality is scarier than fantasy and Jews know better than anyone the horror of reality, with the reality anecdote used by the father to demonstrate "reality as scarier than fantasy" to his son ironically being the lie that Jews were turned into lampshades at Buchenwald- pretty ironic the writers chose a fantasy and huge lie to drive home the theme of reality being scarier than fantasy. Then that night his son gets attacked by Pennywise in the form of a human-skin lampshade.

That just set the stage though- at least half the cast is black, and of course they are all the noble, intelligent, upstanding characters while all the white characters are evil, bumbling, and dysfunctional. The most unforgiveable part is that most of the drama is dedicated to rehashing "Black experience in American South" but just Copy + Pasting it to Derry Maine with all the memes, featuring a black woman with a heavy southern accent as the hero fighting Racism in Derry with absolutely no new angle or artistic interpretation.

What to make of it? Woke isn't dead because Hollywood changed its mind, it's dead because the spell was broken among a critical mass of the laity. So either Hollywood and gaming will change, or they won't change and there will just be this persistent conflict that ruins everything. I read the Reddit reviews of different episodes to get a feeling for how far off my take on the show is from the average Redditor, and it's miles away. Obviously there's a selection bias but the median redditor still eats this slop up- "omg I loved the scene where the Cuban kid played drums in the happy Black jazz club, it really set the stage for next episode when the white people come and kill them all."

Edit: Expedition 33 was not woke at all though. The cast featured a diverse crew, and then 99% of the diversity was killed off at the very beginning of the first act, and virtually the entire cast is white and the story centers on familial relations within an unambiguously ethnically French family, with sympathetic interpretations of each character and there is just no wokeness at all. And people loved it.

Yeah "Welcome to Derry" was awful. The military subplot was a narrative stop sign, the Indians were a time-consuming macguffin factory, we don't need another story based around horcruxes I mean infinity stones I mean magic shards or whatever dumb crap that was, completely unneccessary to the plot, there was like thirty characters too many, the monster was weirdly focused on horrific simulated childbirth scenes (somebody's fetish, obv). Just a disaster on every level.

I've heard that of Expedition 33, but I'm very vary of the sequel syndrome which most "unwoke" western IPs end up becoming. Everyone's excited for Blood of Dawnwalker, which is going to be a saga, and that alone has killed off most of my hope for it.

I was curious about Expedition 33, and watched a few Vtubers playing it, and I have no problems admitting that my interest in purchasing said game was killed when I saw the random black guy pop up out of nowhere.

Hearing that he gets killed off... Well, I dunno. Maybe I'll pick it up on a 90% off sale or something down the road in a few years.

It's a funny bait and switch. They check off the "diversity" box in the Prologue and pay it no mind whatsoever in the entire story itself. The story is about a white family and it's actually interesting.

FWIW, blacks in Paris aren't exactly unheard of.

"Who was in Paris, Senpai?"

2025 has actually proved to be the year I stopped playing video games entirely, and it's basically directly because of this. I haven't logged into Steam since last spring. It's "exit vs. voice" again: if you can't change it, you have to leave it. If other people create things and I don't like them, my recourse is to avoid them. We can only control things we create ourselves.

It's not that I don't object to this situation - of course it's depressing and I wish it weren't this way; but on the other hand, nerd culture basically kicking me out has freed me up to do so many other things with my time. If video games had remained everything I wanted them to be, I don't know that that would actually be a good thing for my life. I honestly don't miss it anymore. For every hour I spent marveling at an incredible story, there were probably 100 hours of hacking my brain with the simulated feeling of achievement.

It's generally a good decision to stop playing video games, especially if you're pursuing more productive or healthy hobbies, like carpentry or backpacking. That said, I pretty much only play a handful of simulations which hardly have any ideological elements in them, let alone characters or a story, e.g. Factorio, Stationeers, Captain of Industry, etc.

Conversely, people are taking note of this.

If you go by Steam, people just find the newest stuff rather lackluster. How the market adapts to this - if ever - will be interesting to play out. It's not as if it would be the first Video Game market crash we've seen...

All the occupations required to work on game dev, or media, are overwhelmingly liberal or progressive. Even software engineers are only 16-27% conservative. They might not be on board with some of the woke extremes - same way not every conservative is an ethno-nationalist - but they’ll still support LGBT rights, and diversity initiatives. I would think that conservative software engineers are less likely to work in game development as well - why not work at Anduril where you get paid more and you don’t have to hide your political views?

Richard Hanania’s article on Why is Everything Liberal still applies. There’s no talent pool to make “non-woke” games. Plus, I never got the feeling that the market actually penalised wokeness at any point - my impression was that wokeness was used to shield mediocre work of criticism, or to excuse its underperformance.

I'm baffled by the concept of a game studio where the coding-level devs make decisions on the overall direction and themes of the game. Surely there are producers and executives analogous to movie productions with hire/fire power who set the parameters of the artistic output, no?

There is very much a talent pool for making non-woke media: it's called the country of Japan. Just because the West is incapable of making anything other than woke agitprop doesn't mean nobody else is.

To add on to @gattsuru's reply, it's much more an issue of networking and reputation than any commitment to wokeness. The Warhorse community mod claimed the MC was straight in KCD1 due to resource constraints. Then Vavra himself admitted they "avoided accusations of sexism" by having the gay scenes, despite posturing as a lifelong chudler himself. But taken into full context, you get a clear picture: not a single creator, even the most accomplished, most influential ones on the planet can escape it anymore. You either pander to the woke, or you don't get to make big budget entertainment. You also get blacklisted from casting agencies, performance capture facilities, award shows, voice acting guilds, and get dropped by your publisher. Not to mention bogus allegations (see Chris Avellone, Alex Afriasiabi, Alec Holowka, Ashraf Ismail, etc etc). All this matters a lot. Above a certain project size, they made sure you can't do woke-free games in the west anymore. Only games developed and/or published by eastern companies can afford it these days. I'm curious to see how the Yakuza 3 Teruyuki Kagawa controversy pans out, the loudest calls for his removal seem to come from the west mostly.

That's a good argument about game media erring on the liberal side, but it's still weird how "woke" AAA games are, rather than borrowing from the broader liberal ethos. Not just in extremes, or some post-hoc sharpshooter's definition, but in what's being done specifically.

"Safe horny", as much as it gets smudged with tumblr associations, isn't actually a good representation of the (even post-Yahoo) tumblr ethos. Hell, I'm not even sure the Type I/Type II body thing is more compatible with trans thought than "masculine"/"feminine": you'd know better than I, but both the clean and smut-focused indie works I follow with trans readerships (and a few cases authorships) don't take that tack. Or for a non-video game example, compare Dungeons and Dragons to Super Lesbian Animal Adventure. The latter is much more left-wing and probably more offensive to soccons, but the former's got a lot more wokisms.

I mean, everything you mentioned would have been in development in 2024, when it was not known that Trump would be President and wokeness would be on the back foot.

My suspicion is that a ton of stuff being released this year was literally produced with the assumption that a Democrat would still be President.

The one that doesn't really have that excuse is South Park, since their episodes are, notoriously, very quick to produce and thus can reflect current events pretty readily.

I'd expect 2026 to show the first batch of media products that was created after it became clear that audiences were actually rejecting the excessive messaging and that there was a real demand for red-tribe (not necessarily right-wing) content.

One big sign of this is Taylor Sheridan's singlehanded dominance of TV right now, where he produces red-coded, masculine-heavy content that is wildly popular.

Another sign is the apparent collapse in the popularity of Hip-Hop and the return of Country music with a vengeance.

Another sign is the apparent collapse in the popularity of Hip-Hop and the return of Country music with a vengeance.

Thing is that hip hop is an incredibly "unwoke" genre in content if not allegiance. If these battles are no longer being fought it's cause the wokes accepted only a partial victory: rampant misogyny, actual toxic masculinity in gangster rap and barely-even-coded homophobia but the top talent are expected to toe the line if they want to go really mainstream. But the low end, especially the regional drill scenes? Can be functionally amoral.

I would think it's female pop stars like Beyonce that would be benefitting from consumption as a sign of loyalty and who you'd expect to drop off if we're past peak woke.

I do think most mainstream media is still very woke. The battle for the media apparatus has just begun.

Also welcome back!

I think the issue is that making games- especially big, prizewinning, AAA games- is inherently an artistic endeavor. And that attracts artist-types who are the most likely to be woke. Sure, the coders, testers, QA folks, etc might be chuds, but the ones making the creative decisions are highly susceptible to wokeness. It's not even about making money, they're just doing what they think is right. It's the same reason that Hollywood movies are so woke.

On the other hand, it kind of doesn't matter. There's so many games already made that no human can play them all in a lifetime. The technology has plateued so that new ones aren't any better than old ones- in fact with the RAM and GPU shortage, newer computers might actually be worse than old ones. We can easily immerse ourselves in old chud-made entertainment forever.

On the other hand, it kind of doesn't matter. There's so many games already made that no human can play them all in a lifetime.

And it kind of does, because the big budget games with the best graphics etc are the ones who don't dare to break with wokeism. If you have an absurdly expensive GPU, you want the most demanding games to be satisfying, to justify your purchase. Sure, there are more games than you could ever finish, but most of them aren't AAA.

I think that this sort of person- "I spent the maximum money for the latest and greatest GPU, and therefore I will buy the latest AAA games, regardless of how stupid they are-" is going to becoming a vanishingly rare part of the market. See also: "Guy who buys a new car every year" and "Guy who goes to Vegas every year."

It certainly used to be true that a better gaming system improved the quality of the rendered image, or improved frame rates to give a marginal competitive advantage (tried playing PowerPoint Quake? It's hard to hit enemies playing a slide show).

That said, I think the days of marginal GPU improvements improving the experience ended at least a decade ago. Yes, real-time ray tracing looks amazing, but honestly modern games aren't limited by graphics, but by mechanics and storytelling. Nintendo has known this for a while. My favorite games are ones that maximize novel, fun gameplay, not push triangles (Factorio, for example). But maybe there's a factor of me getting older and having nostalgia for older sorts of games. Heck, Roller Coaster Tycoon still manages to be a classic, despite being written in x86 assembly for a machine that probably underperforms some toasters today.

Honestly I think Hollywood has a version of the same pox: modern VFX makes it possible to realistically show pretty much anything. Effects alone no longer sell movies, and that puts more focus on the writing and directing.

You need a very good GPU to run new, graphically intensive games at the display's native 4K resolution (and higher). My next monitor will be a 5k2k one (11 million pixels whereas 4k is 8.3 million pixels).

Maybe it's that I still have older hardware, but the step change from 1080p to 4k seems a lot smaller than the previous generation jump from TV or DVD resolutions to 1080p. Do you find that playing at 4k native resolution dramatically improves the gaming experience? Again, it might be a selection bias that I've been playing fewer cutting-edge games.

Do you mind if I ask what titles you're playing?

A 1440p monitor was a massive QoL improvement, both in gaming for a nice crispy UI, and for general productivity

Now I'm on a 38 inch ultrawide 3840*1600 and holy shit it's a massive upgrade in every way, it's glorious.

This man could afford a newish GPU!

I got an inkling you were a 1080p antiquarian when I read your first post. :P

Yes, there's a massive difference between 1080p and 4K. It's 4x the number of pixels. 8.3M vs 2.07M. Even going from 1080p to 1440p is a noticable upgrade in terms of monitors.

You're right that the jump from DVD (480p for NTSC, 576p for PAL) to 1080p was an even bigger change, at around 6x and 5x increases, respectively. And it's true that some people who have weak eyesight and/or sit very far from their TVs struggle to see much benefit from going further up in resolution. However, when you sit less than 15-20 feet from the TV and you have decent eyesight and you want to fill a let's say 65" TV with pixels, you will prefer 4K after seeing it in action, whether simply for displaying Windows programs or playing games or watching movies (beware that quite a few '4k releases' of movies are simply poor quality upscales from 1080p, false advertisements that will not reveal the true increase in quality that 4k can bring).

Framerates are another matter where the old implementation might still look okay to your perception, until you get used to something better, at which point you'll never want to go back. 60 hz looks very choppy to me now after using 120 and 144 hz for a few years. Playing a game at 24 fps would be totally absurd for me at this point. There's a bit of hedonic adaptation though. If saving on costs is your only priority, you might not want to try the upgraded alternatives, lest you lock yourself into a costlier habit. I deem that life is short and we only live once so why settle for staying with mediocrity.

What titles I play isn't all that relevant tbh, what matters is that I need to fill big displays (my ultrawide monitor or my TV) with the output from the GPU.

Despite the marketing push for the female leads in RPGs like AC Odyssey, Mass Effect and Cyberpunk heavily pushing the female leads into the marketing, the actual buyer demographic heavily prefer the male lead in all the games.

As a straight, cis-by-default guy, I have a mild preference for female characters. Not sure if that makes me crypto-trans or something. Here is my reasoning:

  • For 3rd person view games: if I have to stare at the ass of my PC for 80 hours, I prefer staring at a female backside.
  • Romance-option wise, I am fine with lesbian content, but don't care for gay content. For straight content, I mildly prefer my character being the guy, but for example in BG3 'PC vs NPC party member' is pretty much a distinction without a difference. (Of course, I played a female Lolthsworn Dark Urge necromancer, which is fairly far from my real world persona. The class turned out to be a mistake, I was under the impression that I would get Finger of Death (& WotB) eventually. In 2nd and 3rd ed these were actually useful.)
  • I guess my PC gender preference inverts if there is a lot promiscuity going on, for example in Witcher 1, I would prefer playing a slutty Gerald who gets a lot of pussy to a hypothetical slutty Geraldine who gets a ton of cock, possibly with a collection of risque cards of all the guys my PC has fucked. Outside of Witcher 1 and straightforward porn games, this is rarely a dominating concern.

I think that for mainstream games like ME or Cyberpunk, there is enough demand for female main characters that it makes sense to provide both options, even if you have to cast some lines with two sets of pronouns.

I agree with your points on story-writing, though. A thinly veiled allegory for whatever the cause of the day is (no matter the political leaning) rarely makes for an engaging story.

Just sounds like you're a straight man tbh. And I've yet to be persuaded that "cis-by-default" means anything.

"Cis-by-default" is trying to motion toward the difference between the sort of straight guy who'd react to a Ranma'ing by poking his own breasts and giggling for three hours straight, and the sort who'd immediately douse their head in boiling water. (To turn back into a man, right?)

Ozy originally had a poll from somewhere saying some sizable number of men in that situation claimed that they'd go full suicidal, but I can't find it or any real references to it, so I can't look back at how well-designed it was, and even the summary had a lot of questions unanswered about how performative that claim was. But from a revealed preferences sense, you do get a lot of similar outputs: most obvious in smut where some fraction of guys get really uncomfortable with (especially but not only VR) female protagonist games even in F/F-only contexts, but also more subtly the difference between guys that are bored by and those that are outraged by having to learn about woman-specific things like traditional makeup use.

That said, yeah, I agree quiet_NaN doesn't seem crypto-trans. I've clocked people wrong before, but at minimum I'd expect a crypto-trans person to either really like the gay romance option or at least mention the lesbian option for an alternate universe Witcher 1, even crypto-trans people that don't fit Blanchard's typology.

The point of "cis-by-default" is that most people don't have a "gender identity" in the sense that transactivists use the term. (Google AI provides the definition "Gender identity is a person's internal, deeply felt sense of being a man, woman, both, neither, or another gender..." which I think is consistent with transactivist use). I don't have an internal, deeply felt sense of being a man - I just am one. The question of "how would you feel if you woke up in a female body?" doesn't make sense - I am my body as well as my brain, and the person who had a female body (complete with different musculature, menstruation, gonads that secrete oestrogen etc.) would be a different person.

I think the concept of gender identity is incoherent and nobody has a gender identity - some people have preferred gender roles that don't match their biological sex, and some people have fetishes which mean they can get off by performing a gender role that doesn't match their biological sex. But if tomboys and femme queens think they "really are" the other sex it is because transactivists tell them to, not because they have an "internal, deeply felt sense of being..."

The thing with Cis-by-default is that the whole point of a default is that you don‘t need to describe it. You can save those bits of information. If you refer to someone as a man, all the default qualities are implied – het, ‚cis‘, normal in every way - unless otherwise specified. Queer theory and the trans movement produce verbal pollution, forcing people to specify useless information we leave out/imply („my pronouns are he/him“). Because they‘re autists who have a hard time with implicit clues. Instead of brave rebels asking questions no one dared to, they force people to repeat answers everyone already knew.

This isn't really what the meaning of cis by default is. It's the trans attempt to square the circle that a lot of people, when asked how they'd feel if they had the body of the opposite sex to make them empathize with the trans discomfort, just shrug their shoulders because besides logistics it just wouldn't be that big of a deal

The original essay is available online. I get that you're trying to reject its assumptions, but I don't think you're really succeeding at it so much as arguing over definitions.

If we replace the Ranma or Ozy's thought experiment instead with "how would you react if a mad-but-exceptionally-skilled plastic surgeon kidnapped you and gave you the exact outside appearance and vocal patterns of the opposite gender, without messing with your gonads, menses, yada yada; we'll call the population that had this done to them momen and sound like a bad scifi flick, they're tots not women-in-your-specific-sense", and one half of the subject population immediately slit their own throat, and the other half got slightly annoyed about having to replace their wardrobe and learn how bras work, it'd be compatible with your claim and Ozy's.

arguing over definitions.

Guilty as charged. Fundamental to my position on trans issues is that the concept of a "gender identity" as used by transactivists is probably incoherent, and if coherent does not describe a real thing. That requires trying to clarify the definition of a concept whose authors made it deliberately slippery in order to support motte-and-bailey arguments.

There is a much saner argument you can have about trans issues if you conduct the argument in terms of generally accepted concepts. Some men want to live as women (and vice versa), and potentially take drugs and have cosmetic surgeries to allow them to do so more effectively. Should adults be allowed to do this? (Default answer given the basic assumptions of Western liberal society is "yes" on the usual liberal grounds) Should children? (Head exploding issue in western society - there is a vast class of issues about how the State as parens patriae and the actual parents share authority over and responsibility for children who are too young to effectively exercise their own freedom and we don't have satisfactory answers.) Should people who do this be protected by anti-discrimination laws? (marginal - it's about as strong a case for the T as for the LGB)

But that isn't the argument that the trans movement want to have. I'm not the one who made this about the meaning of words - it started when a powerful political movement tried to make the meaning of the word "woman" a central political issue.

"how would you react if a mad-but-exceptionally-skilled plastic surgeon kidnapped you and gave you the exact outside appearance and vocal patterns of the opposite gender, without messing with your gonads, menses, yada yada; we'll call the population that had this done to them momen and sound like a bad scifi flick, they're tots not women-in-your-specific-sense"

Eh, this doesn't quite fit because I'd be going from it being easy to play my biological role to it being difficult to play my biological role. You really can't dispense with the fully functional for phenotypical sex shift, that's load bearing.

This is probably something that's just inaccessible to me, but would that really solve that many people's discomfort? If biological role means reproduction, I can give examples of people who'd be happier if they could knock someone else up by scissoring hard enough, but the latter is one of the rarest kinks I've ever seen. Guys who'd want female reproductive organs and get knocked up are more common... and still one of the central examples of kinks most straight guys are extremely uncomfortable with.

If it's something about muscles or hunter/gatherer breakdown, that seems less likely to directly squick, but more likely to just not have a lot of people care and a few people really care.

This is probably something that's just inaccessible to me, but would that really solve that many people's discomfort?

It being inaccessible is I guess the point, but yeah, I'd much rather become fully female than stuck in between, which is one of the things that horrifies me about the whole 'transition as medicine' because it really can't deliver. Being stuck between would mostly distress me because I'd have a broken body that can't really do either gender role, it would be like finding myself crippled. It's not even just strictly the whole form baby thing, although that alone would be huge, but it would make all sorts of relationships more strange.

The whole thing about being cis by default is that you can offload a lot of whatever it is trans people claim to feel about their social dissonance onto just following these really straightforward scripts. I'm a guy, I can wear the normal guy clothes, go to the gym and follow a bro split to get moderately good results, and a thousand other things that pretty much just work. If I'm stuck in between then I'm in the wilderness. Nothing is designed for you, even if you pass then there is a surprise penis you need to explain to perspective partners.

That may all seem pretty trivial to someone with a strong sense of gender, and it all really is logistics, but hopefully it serves to highlight that it isn't the girlness or boyness that bothers me, it is the logistics and a full transition just has intrinsically better logistics. I think this reflects the intent behind the original cis by default concept because it avoids the whole being crippled thing and tests only if you care a lot about the girlness or boyness.

The question of "how would you feel if you woke up in a female body?" doesn't make sense - I am my body as well as my brain, and the person who had a female body (complete with different musculature, menstruation, gonads that secrete oestrogen etc.) would be a different person.

You can imagine a sci-fi scenario where your brain is transplanted into a female body. You’d still be you. Exposure to oestrogen would change your personality to an extent, but it wouldn’t be instantaneous, and it would be a lot more limited than if you had been exposed to it in the womb or during childhood.

Now of course brain transplants are currently purely theoretical but cross-sex hormone therapy isn’t. Cis men who have taken oestrogen (more common in the past to treat testicular or prostate cancer) report higher incidences of depression, anxiety, body image issues from feminisation, loss of libido and sexual dysfunction, and emotional volatility.

Meanwhile trans women usually report the opposite and their mental health is improved from the exact same hormones. Weirder anecdotal reports are cis men complaining of brain fog from taking oestrogen, while trans women saying the hormones actually lifted their brain fog.

You’d still be you.

It's actually very much in doubt to what extent "you" resides in your brain specifically -- the nervous system is much more complicated than that.

Cis men who have taken oestrogen (more common in the past to treat testicular or prostate cancer)

You don't think that those symptoms could be related to, y'know -- having cancer at all?

Meanwhile trans women usually report the opposite and their mental health is improved from the exact same hormones. Weirder anecdotal reports are cis men complaining of brain fog from taking oestrogen, while trans women saying the hormones actually lifted their brain fog.

Would you mind providing a link to this study? I've heard the opposite from the recent controversy over the "mermaids" charity and Cass review, so I'd be interested to see the other perspective on it.

Yeah I'd suspect most people who play female characters are straight men as well. The actual "female gamer" demographic is likely much smaller than most would admit.

if I have to stare at the ass of my PC for 80 hours, I prefer staring at a female backside.

The Mass Effect 2 character has a phenomenal ass. It was the first time I picked a girl character and it was a great call

... because even "beloved classics" like Cyberpunk featured LGBT themes.

Okay, this is a nitpick.

There was the MtF bartender at the Afterlife with the street racing line of sidequests, and that did feel preachy. And there were the gay romance options. Did I miss anything else?

On the other hand, you have Fingers, the ripperdoc who has made himself androgynous and is unambiguously a villain, in a way clearly tied to his sexuality, in a major quest. I was pretty surprised they'd go there. I felt like they did a good job of preserving the setting's themes even when they were in tension with the mores of the current year.

Arguably the racial updates, making the setting less white, were more progressive. They were in line with the tech updates, though, splitting the difference between retro-future and future-future. So I have mixed feelings.

The way they handled religion was pretty bad in general, but I can only speculate as to motives there.

The LGBT stuff wasn't more than I would expect from a cyberpunk open world game. Probably a bit less than expected? In fact if you gave your male character no dick he could never have sex with any character, IIRC. Bold!

Also whenever you played as Johnny Silverhand (Keanu Reeves) you were always doing straight sex/straight womanizing. I wonder if he specifically refused to do queer stuff or they just didn't want to go there since he's supposed to be a macho anarchist punk rocker.

OTOH the sheer volume of badass girlbosses and best hackers/netrunners being girls was quite overwrought.

Silverhand is canonically a practicing bisexual, but it only comes up if you go into a gay bar to start with. Reeves has worked that sorta blue more overtly in the past, with My Own Private Idaho, but he's also played a lot of bi-or-gay-in-other-media characters that dropped the theme in translation, most notoriously with the in-name-only Constantine film.

I stand corrected!

Arguably the racial updates, making the setting less white, were more progressive. They were in line with the tech updates, though, splitting the difference between retro-future and future-future. So I have mixed feelings.

I still think the most preposterous and unbelievable parts of the game are not the wokeness or girlbosses or most of the tech, or that huge parts of SF have become the Tenderloin, but that SF has significantly more mega skyscrapers by 2077.

IIRC wasn't Cyberpunk the first RPG to do the body type shtick? The Chromebooks do mention that tech is fully capable of swapping out male and female sexual organs, but the intent behind that line was to demonstrate the ascent of body mod technology rather than an LGBT allegory. Sure you could rationalise this as appropriate for the setting, but this still reflects real world 21st century politics which was absent in older cyberpunk literature. Now every RPG has done away with male/female binaries.

Re religion, again I agree but honestly, not surprised. Most modern media have been repeating the same screeds about the "evils of religion" for decades. It's a high schooler's understanding of depth. Deus Ex was much more cerebral IMO.

Going OT I don't know if you've heard of the standalone Forgotten City or the Skyrim mod, but I was similarly asking myself how THIS could've won writer's guild awards? It was literally just Dark City. I suspect the social justice rhetoric crowbarred into the dialogues played no small part in that.

IIRC wasn't Cyberpunk the first RPG to do the body type shtick?

Fair! I don’t know if it was first, but it was definitely early. I can’t believe I forgot that.

There’s a conspiracy theory going around that Jason from GTA VI was going to be killed off in the first hour or so of the game, and the only playable character was the Latina gangbanger. Then the woke stuff started to recede, and Rockstar had to delay the game for two years in order to actually add him in as a playable character.

That’s insane when the leaks from like 5+ years ago that correctly named Jason and Lucia said they would be dual protagonists.

What the woke in charge (brilliantly parodied with - put a chick in it and make it gay) don't understand is that execution matter. Problem is not that we have female leads, but that we don't have another Kate Archer or Bayonetta. Not that we have gay characters, but that we don't have Zevran or Leliana. Hades both 1 and 2 are woke as fuck and nobody cares. The problem is not that we have black lead assasins creed in japan. Problem is that the game is shit. And so on. No one wants ugly women - except the ugly women in charge of the projects.

These aren't disconnected phenomena, though: the reason people who suck at making games are in charge of making games is because they are there on woke credentials, making content you're supposed to be morally obligated to say you like.

You see a similar phenomena with Christian media. It's typically poor quality and watched by few because the people in charge of making it aren't there because they're good at their jobs; they're there because of their ideological commitment.

In both cases, the root of the problem is it's socially unacceptable to boot someone who is simply bad at their job for being bad at their job. You have to respect their moral commitment over their competence.

It's the same in politics, too. Bring your country to its knees with wasteful spending and idiotic policy? Not an issue worthy of dismissal. But touch someone's butt once in a bar in the '80s? Now that's the sort of person we cannot tolerate being in charge of anything important!

But touch someone's butt once in a bar in the '80s?

Obviously, that's why Trudeau was kicked out of office for wearing blackface and for groping a reporter.

It's all who/whom.

It's not really kto/kogo, it's more that when those who really run the show decide you need to go, these sorts of accusations magically become headshots instead of ricochets.

When the people actually running the show want you in power, you can be all over the Epstein files and nobody cares (or, rather, their caring is meaningless).

My point is just that nobody's ever removed for doing a terrible job. There's always a moral justification. The moral justification isn't the actual reason, of course: it's the pretense.

Fair enough, I'd agree with that.

Trudeau wasn't kicked out for the same reason Trump wasn't for so many things: he was ultimately answerable to the public.

Most cancellations would probably be short circuited if there was a public vote on them.

There's a small faction that just dislikes the mere possibility, even in good games, often to completely inconsistent ends. It's funny that they end up the dark mirror to Saarkesian complaining about Bayonetta's lollypops without recognizing how much that parodied a Devil May Cry protagonist, but they still real. But they're also a small, if vocal, minority-of-a-minority.

A decent game buys a lot of patience. Hell, even games that are bad, but at least have some signs of passion going into them, get a lot of forbearance (example gratia: rayon spelled out that Palworld does Type 1 / Type 2 bodies, and no one cared).

What matters to the woke execs is that the game is fun to play so it sells. If it's so woke it's bad then that's going to be an issue now that the economy is tough, but as long as it doesn't affect the core gameplay and the aesthetic toooo much, then it's gonna be woke all the way.

I think wokeness is the current name for a phenomenon which has infested Western culture for thousands of years.

So for example, consider biblical accounts of Jesus, who supposedly stood up for prostitutes and adulteresses. And proclaimed the poor are blessed, for theirs is the holy kingdom. While at the same time, stating that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

In other words, the idea of revering and exalting low status, marginalized groups while dunking on the (perceived) elites -- as a way of virtue signalling -- is an old idea. it's difficult to see it going away any time soon.

Jesus, who supposedly stood up for prostitutes and adulteresses

"Go now, and sin no more." Does everyone forget that part?

Sounds like "amnesty for current immigrants, but then we will totally enforce the border, this time for real" to me, so forgetting it seems appropriate.

They do. And they turn "her sins are forgiven because she loved much" into "see guys, she wasn't really a sex worker (though there's nothing wrong with that!), she just had a lot of boyfriends whom she really loved, so Jesus says sleeping around is fine so long as you love the guy".

"Go now, and sin no more."

Sin no more, but if we do catch you sinning again probably nothing will happen. Not unless you push a random person off a subway platform.

If you're looking for the wokes in the Bible, I think you must examine the Pharisees, most of all. They're the moralistic, hypocritical wokescolds of the time and place, afaik.

If you're looking for the wokes in the Bible, I think you must examine the Pharisees, most of all.

I'm not familiar with the Pharisees so I can't really comment on this.

They're the moralistic, hypocritical wokescolds of the time and place, afaik.

Generally speaking, what did they do or say?

I haven't read much of the Bible myself, only seen and heard excerpts.

But the Pharisees were performative purity spiralers who tried to cancel Jesus. They followed the letter of the law and not the spirit of it. When Jesus went to heal a sick man on the Sabbath, they wanted to get him for this, because he 'worked on the day of rest'. They were all about strict external conformity rather than the individual inner journey towards divinity.

They showed no mercy towards the unclean or rule-breakers, while Jesus did, such as eating with prostittues, tax-collectors, sinners.

They had Jesus marked as an enemy and tried to trip him up with impossible questions that would make him unpopular, like whether Roman taxation was right or not, which if you say yes you get the Jewish nationalists against you and if you say no you are guilty of sedition, so Jesus just said renter unto Caesaer that which is Caesar's and render unto God that which is God's.

Jesus said to them: You create your "whitewashed tombs", beautiful outside but filled with dead bones on the inside.

Simply criticizing the powerful or standing up for the weak is not what's wrong with wokeism. Far from it. That's not even what they really do.

But the Pharisees were performative purity spiralers who tried to cancel Jesus. They followed the letter of the law and not the spirit of it. When Jesus went to heal a sick man on the Sabbath, they wanted to get him for this, because he 'worked on the day of rest'. They were all about strict external conformity rather than the individual inner journey towards divinity.

I wouldn't call that "woke" in the way the word is normally used.

They showed no mercy towards the unclean or rule-breakers, while Jesus did, such as eating with prostittues, tax-collectors, sinners.

I wouldn't call that "woke" in the way the word is normally used.

Simply criticizing the powerful or standing up for the weak is not what's wrong with wokeism

Agreed. But doing so in a manner that is unfair, dishonest, and performative -- that's the very essence of wokism. The wokie claims to be "punching up" as he slanders and abuses his victims.

The New Testament isn't really woke. It endorses man-woman marriage, especially monogamy, as the correct sexual paradigm, and condemns promiscuity and homosexuality. Even in the passage in John with the woman taken in adultery, it's true Jesus doesn't advocate for stoning her, but he also says, "Go and sin no more." The most dubious sexual thing I can think of in the New Testament is that it, with the Old Testament, explicitly upholds Lot as a righteous man, despite the fact that he's documented as getting drunk and having sex with his daughter (after he was rescued from Sodom!). And if once wasn't enough, he does it again with the other daughter. In any case, whatever difficulty (I love this term by theologians lol) one has with the Lot passages, this isn't the sort of sexual activity wokesters are advocating anyway. Woke advocates for the sexual activities that are explicitly condemned, not the behaviors righteous Lot was engaged in. Further, the New Testament is very patriarchal: it forbids female ministers, and in fact, says women shouldn't talk in church at all (which Christians women don't seem to take very seriously), and says women should not have authority over men. That's really, really not woke!

Now, on the financial side of things, I think the woke people have a lot more textual evidence to work with. But the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, is all over the place on this. On the one hand, many if not a majority of the good guys are wealthy. On the other hand, there are repeated condemnations of the wealthy, even in the Old Testament. Progressives' favorite passage from Ezekiel says: "Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy." Christians get very upset about this, but frankly, the progressives are correct: Ezekiel highlights the prideful disregard of the poor, and doesn't even bother mentioning what Christians today often call Sodomy.

So, to the extent that the Bible is financially woke, it's not really a New Testament thing: i.e., it's not part of a mind virus concocted by the apostles to infect Rome and drive its fall, as seems to be the thesis on the Nazi right.

The New Testament isn't really woke.

That may very well but I wasn't claiming that the Christian Bible is woke. Rather, my position is that (1) modern wokeness is a manifestation of a more general phenomenon; and (2) that phenomenon has been around for a long time as evidenced by ideas contained in early Christianity.

As far as the question of whether the Christian Bible is woke or not goes, the answer turns on (1) how to define wokeness; and (2) how many woke elements must be included in a work before it should be considered woke overall.

If you define "be kind to those less fortunate" as woke, sure, Christianity is woke. But I think that's a very dubious definition of woke. I'm not aware of any successful real-world culture that has the smoothbrained barbaric machismo that the dissident right seems to think is the essence of real civilization.

The same culture that brought you the Nanjing Massacre has this guy as a legendary ninja hero.

Christianity goes a lot further than "be kind to the less fortunate," though. The last shall be first, the meek will inherit the Earth, God chose the weak things to shame the strong, etc. That does seem like a radical change from, well, the history of the universe, and it doesn't seem crazy to see a connection between that and Wokeness.

the meek will inherit the Earth

I mean, this is basically "them darn thespians and homo sapiens." The word "meek" is is πραΰς, which as you can see on the Wiki, is more like gentle, related to the root for likeable/well-disposed. Heck, the example usage there is from the Victory Odes: "the king who rules Syracuse, gentle to his citizens"

As for the first being last and the last being first, well... I present to you the word gentleman.

Christianity goes a lot further than "be kind to the less fortunate," though.

FWIW "be kind to the less fortunate" seems like a motte to me. In the same way that a modern day wokie would claim that they are just trying to help disadvantaged people a bit, but they would never ever hire an unqualified person and they are absolutely not trying to replace white people.

Are you familiar with Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals? He criticizes Christianity for being a morality for slaves, of sour grapes insisting that being poor, meek, weak and passive was actually good, and that being strong, rich, mighty and proud was bad. The notion certainly rhymes with how woke oppressed/oppressor dynamics and the oppression Olympics plays out.

I'm familiar with his thesis. I'm just saying Christianity only fits his narrative when you pick and choose certain aspects of it. Which, to be fair, is what Christians typically do lol

But to be even more fair: the parts they selectively choose to ignore are often the parts most aligned with Nietzsche's thesis. Paul says don't rebel against the government (and he's under the Roman government! Not a fairly reasonable government like Britain's!)? Can't hear you over my #1776, baby! Christians, if anything, are the most celebratory of the colonial rebellion of all America's demographics.

Woke isn't strictly oppression olympics, that would imply they have equitable empathy for all subaltern classes. It's specifically about furthering the interests of women, blacks, muslims and LGBT, at the expense of the male, white, straight, Christian demographics. The "oppression" bit is just a moral cover. Things like sexism and bigotry garner more engagement than the far more impactful class politics. Woke will always favour an upper class black girl over a homeless white man.

If you define "be kind to those less fortunate" as woke, sure,

I imagine that wokies themselves would define wokeness along these lines.

But I think that's a very dubious definition of woke.

Well, I think that "being kind to the unfortunate" is often present, but it's a kind of camouflage for attacks on the perceived elite / outgroup. Implying that it's essentially impossible for wealthy people to be good people -- that's something I would say is pretty woke by any reasonable definition.

By the way, I'm not claiming that Christianity is woke, just that it has woke elements, if "woke" is broadly defined.

Slave morality.

If Sisko was white, it would not make the show any worse.

Ummmm, ackshually, this is demonstrably untrue for at least the episode Q-Less. Q was accustomed to pasty ass Starfleet officers like Picard. He was not prepared for fisticuffs with a real one.

Edit:

In 20 years, they'll be telling us that black Samurai lead in Japan is also perfectly acceptable.

Games, like movies, are a combination of creative / cultural and economic objects. Whether something is acceptable is entirely down to individual preference.

I'm a huge fan of intentionally inserting minorities incongruously in historical adjacent works if there's even a fig leaf. Overlord (2018) is not historically accurate - the Nazis did not have a zombie program to the best of my childhood History Channel viewing knowledge. And there weren't black paratroopers at D-Day either. Cultural works, unless specifically designated, are not historical fact. Provided that the actual facts are widely available to anyone who has any interest, is there some deep wound you're inflicting on the now dead white paratroopers by pretending that black people weren't legally discriminated against through WW2?

The only way to determine whether something a game/movie has done is "acceptable" is tracking sales.

Q: You hit me! Picard never hit me.

SISKO: I'm not Picard.

Q: Indeed not. You're much easier to provoke. How fortunate for me.

People always gloss over that follow up.

Eh, Picard was just older. We saw in "Tapestry" that young Picard was the kind of guy who would have totally decked Q.

Yeah, but Q never came back, did he?

I get the impression Siskso bored him. He never stopped by to pester because there wasn't any sport in it.

If Sisko was white, it would not make the show any worse.

Ummmm, ackshually, this is demonstrably untrue for at least the episode Q-Less. Q was accustomed to pasty ass Starfleet officers like Picard. He was not prepared for fisticuffs with a real one.

Kirk would have totally punched Q, too. It's not a race thing, it's a Picard thing; he is insufficiently aggressive for a military officer (in the show, anyway; movie!Picard is almost a completely different character).

Wasn't that the first episode (or at least one of the first)? Also... the first time Q met humanity, he put it on trial for being a violent and savage race. When he met Sisko he got clocked in the face... do you really want to say "only a black man could have done this"?

Q was trolling them; calling them violent and savage would get under their skin the most. He's plainly not against violence, he's against boredom.

Minor update on the US-PRC tech competition.

Culture war significance: it matters for the grand strategy understanding and the narrative of the US as the Main Character of History. Personally, I had stopped regularly engaging on this forum when it became clear that the US is, in fact, not such a Main Character (at least for the moment), but just a great power with massive momentum and cultural influence. Not being American, I mainly only care about American cultural affairs insofar as they have global spillover effects. Local legislation news and woke-MAGA strife are overwhelmingly noise for the world, unless they reach some critical volume like peak woke or BLM did. Some American tech, and related politics, is very much not noise. The chip war in particular is very high-signal, so I follow it closely.

It seems something happened behind the scenes after those events in October, when the US Department of Commerce went with the Affiliate Rule, China retaliated with REE+ export controls, and soon enough, by November 1, we've got the usual Trump style Deal. (There's also a subplot with Nexperia/Wingtech, that demonstrates Chinese supply chain power and European ineptitude again, with a similar outcome of the Western actor retreating). Suddenly, on Dec 8, we get the news about Trump permitting the sales of H200 to China (context and understandable rationalist perspective here). China reacts somewhat paradoxically, if your theory of their mind is just «they're desperate for our chips» – as per the FT, «Companies seeking to purchase the H200 would need to submit a request explaining why they cannot use domestically produced chips and undergo an approval process», in continuation of their earlier scrutiny, rejections and negative publicity directed at H20s.

10 days later Reuters breaks the news – which were not quite news for those in the know – about Chinese successes with their EUV effort. The article is somewhat confused, as almost all reporting on Chinese AI and IC tech is; from my private sources, the situation has already moved further on multiple components, like optics and metrology.

What I want to emphasize here is that it's not just trivial «industrial espionage» or IP theft. Their light source project is led by former ASML head of light source technology and «Light source competence owner for metrology in ASML research» Lin Nan. I think that he returned not just for money, nationalism or career opportunities, but because China offered him a more ambitious challenge – he seems interested in solid state lasers, which ASML, constrained by market incentives more than strategic considerations, gave up on. For sure, straightforward IP theft also happens - CXMT's DRAM/HBM progress is apparently propped up by Samsung IP which was, well, illicitly transfered by former employees. And there's very substantial domestic talent pipeline, though people are prone to dismiss their patent/paper counts; they lack brand power, «Changchun Institute of Optics» doesn't have the same zing to it as Zeiss, though you may see it in the news soon.

All in all, China is moving far faster than even I imagined. Now we get reports – straining my credulity, to be honest – that ByteDance doesn't expect Nvidia to sell move than a few hundred thousand cards in China, not because of any trade barriers from either side, but because adequate domestic competition will come online in mid-2026 already. Almost certainly it'll be worse and less power-efficient, at least. But clusters with Chinese hardware are eligible for electricity subsidies, and that may be enough to tip the scales? This logic is corroborated by the surprisingly low leaked price of H200s – just $200.000 for an 8-card module (not sure if that's before of after 25% Trump Tax, but in any case very low, maybe lower than in the US proper, at least pre-tax). Meanwhile that's 5 times more bang for the buck than H20s offered. On the other hand, for now Nvidia is selling old stock; new production is being discussed, but at this rate I don't expect the price to increase. One can reasonably ask if this makes any sense, given that the demand in the US outstrips supply. I think it does, both for complex strategic reasons (mainly ecosystem lock-in, which is in fact a big deal, as I explain here) and simply because the US AI market is becoming a very convoluted circular Ponzi scheme where Nvidia de facto subsidizes companies to buy Nvidia wares. That's more of a potential market meltdown recipe than a revenue source. H200 sales to China, for what it's worth, unambiguously pull in dollars, and both Jensen's fudiciary duty and Trump's deficit-slashing mandate (and to be blunt, likely Trump's corruption) create a strong incentive to greenlight them.

Anyway, what looked like Chinese bluffing and negging at the time the sale of H20s was debated looks more and more like genuine, coherent industrial policy. China is pretty sure it'll have sovereignty in the entire stack of AI development, soon enough, that it will even be capable enough to export its AI hardware products, and the US is acting as if that is likely true – as if the competition is about market share and revenue. They are obviously compute-constrained right now, so DeepSeek V3.2 only catches up to around GPT-5 level, with the usual complaints in the paper. They don't appear to mind this enough to bow and scrape for more American chips at any cost. A large component here is that what they need, they can often rent overseas openly –

a data center near Osaka, operated by Japanese marketing solutions firm Data Section, is effectively dedicated to Tencent. This data center houses 15,000 of Nvidia’s Blackwell (B200) GPUs. Tencent secured access to these GPUs for three years through a $1.2 billion (approximately 1.8 trillion Korean won) contract with Data Section via a third-party entity. Data Section plans to establish additional data centers in Sydney, Australia, with over 100,000 Nvidia GPUs, also primarily serving Tencent.

– but I think it's primarily about confidence in the domestic supply chain.

Long before all these events, in September, we had a debate with @aquota here, when the topic was selling China relatively worthless H20s. (For my previous take on H20s specifically see here).

He argued:

This lock-in effect is just nonsense and has not worked for literally a single firm that has sold out to china. China is not going to forego building their own echo-system and hasn't for any other sector they've found strategically important. […] Our one chance at dominance in this sector is remaining ahead in AI and reaping compound interest on that lead whether it's AGI or simply accelerated AI and chip development. If it's not enough then I just don't buy this fantasy that selling out now is going to give us a better seat in the future.

To which I've replied:

As I've said before, "China" is not omnipotent and cannot create an ecosystem solely through political will and subsidies, they've been trying for decades and it hasn't been working so long as Nvidia was the obvious superior choice. Even now, nobody wants to use CANN if afforded the chance. I think this is how Jensen views this: he's straightforwardly fighting as the CEO of American company Nvidia, not just for line going up in quarterly reports but for enduring global dominance of his stack.

… personally, I believe this [AI race theory] is all deluded and very much in the spirit of last days of Nazi Germany. Both sides will have adequate AI to increase productivity, both will have "AGI" at around the same time, you're not going to have some dramatic inflection point, you will not leave them in the dust as a military or economic power, you'll just slow down global economic growth somewhat, and in the long run end up poorer and have a smaller slice of the global market. That's all.

[…] I guess this is the crux. In your world, where unipolarity is the default trajectory, it makes perfect sense to cling to Pax Americana and play negative-sum games hoping to outlast the opposition. Like, what is the alternative, capitulation, suicide? In my world, China is basically guaranteed to not only exist in 30 years but have comprehensively stronger economy than the US plus closest allies, no matter what you sell or don't sell, buy or don't buy. And the US will have to figure out how to exist, and exist well, without boons of global strategic superiority, in a bipolar world, and hopefully remaining a hegemon in its own backyard. That figuring out has got to begin now.

It seems to me that my read on the situation from back then, both the big picture and its implications for compute strategy, is now shared by both the USG and the CPC. The former is trying to regain its position and revenue in the Chinese GPU market and slow down Huawei/Cambricon/Kunlun/etc. ecosystem development by flooding the zone with mature Nvidia chips that will be adopted by all frontier players (eg DeepSeek again – they have a deep bench of Nvidia-specific talent and aren't willing to switch to half-baked Ascend CANN). The latter is more worried about preventing the US from doing that than about gaining moar FLOPS in the short run.

In conclusion, I want to congratulate Americans again with having found a true peer, for the first time since the decline of the British empire. Germans, Japanese and my own people had failed to provide enough stimulation, so Americans have grown lonely and fat at the top.

Aquota said:

surely you understand the "equals across the sea" isn't an option on the table. That isn't what is in store if we give up all our advantages in this sector.

I do not, in fact, "understand" this. Like, that may be the case and we'll just have Pax Sinica. I'm okay with it but I'm not Sinophilic enough to expect it. Even reduced to "just a great power", the US is poised to remain a historical force.

For now the loss of the indisputable Main Character status is being processed traumatically, with anger, denial and exaggeration of the costs of that loss if it were to really happen. But as its reality sinks in, this trauma may become fertile grounds for some cultural Renaissance in the United States. Less capeshit, more self-awareness. I may even come to care about it for reasons aside from global consequences.

…Of course, we can still entertain the hypothesis that all of the above is some interesting ephemera and this final dash of the Chosen Nation towards AGI-powered Rapture and completion of history is the real story of the times. I won't completely discount it, we shall see.

One of the unique realities of both British and American imperialism is that Empire was and is not central to the national identity of either people.

British Imperial identity was, as many historians have relatively well argued, invented wholesale in the last thirty years of Empire. In fact, the greatest and only real grand celebrations of Empire occurred between 1918 and the Second World War, when Britain’s relative global power had been in decline for more than fifty years. At the true height of Empire in the mid-19th century, identity was more English than Imperial, and international competition was more focused on the French than anyone else (even as the opium wars raged, as the scramble for Africa slowly began, as British money surged into South and Central America, as settlement in Australia grew rapidly etc etc etc). Pomp and ceremony in the colonies, even India, was very limited until the 1920s.

Similarly, in America, most American identity has nothing to do with America’s global power or prestige. America is much larger and more geographically diverse than England, unlike that country it doesn’t really even need to trade with its regional peers. Unlike those final days of the British Empire, most American media doesn’t really reference American imperialism. Most stories are set solely domestically, while even most international ones treat the rest of the world the way a pre-imperial American might have a century and a half ago, with a certain distance, a foreignness from petty domestic conflict (see Indiana Jones versus James Bond, for example). Most Americans have no major opinions on foreign policy.

America is often called a reluctant hegemon. I disagree, it’s an incidental one. The empire is not important to the American psyche, to American identity. I won’t comment on the Russian or Soviet empires, but I get the feeling they may have meant more to their inhabitants, at least some of them, than the American Empire does. In part, this is reflected in the fact that even most Americans consider the wars in which America participates done either for moral reasons or self-interested ones. Economists say that American hegemony makes the world safe for profitable American companies, but most of these still make the vast majority of their revenue in-country. I think, on balance, this is like an Englishman in 1910 extolling the virtuous export of Britannic Civilisation, namely a very nice just-so story to explain how things came to be so.

This is true even for more politically aware, heterodox thinkers. People will say America goes to war for powerful banana companies, for oil, for revenge, because of the Jews, because of some leader’s personal grudge. An earnest interest in world domination and American political hegemony is considered laughable, even if it’s mentioned in a PNAC leaflet everybody treats it as a ruse. Nobody believes in it. “America’s mission is to export liberal democracy to the world”. No, I don’t think even Hillary Clinton believes that.

But America can cope spiritually with the collapse of its global power better than most other historical empires for one reason. Because an invasion of the homeland is so unlikely, and because the domestic market is so large, and because they have so many resources, Americans can simply stop caring about the outside world if the news gets worse.

It’s the rest of the world that will be less lucky, and which will experience radically more upheaval. The Chinese will need to solidify their offer for new vassal nations though, because currently it isn’t particularly compelling, and they have a quality around them that seems to make a lot of enemies, which means their hegemony might be resisted more than the present arrangement.

Because an invasion of the homeland is so unlikely

Our homeland, Europe has been invaded.

To what extent is there a British non-imperial identity though? I doubt one can divorce Britishness from the project of colonialism.

The Empire never came up in my schooling or childhood at all. Part of that was tact, of course, but it was also because the formative events of British identity are broadly:

  • 1066 and the Norman conquest
  • Magna Carta
  • The Hundred Years War with France.
  • The Wars of the Roses, the Tudors, the scouring of the monasteries and the creation of the Anglican Church.
  • The creation of the labour movement and the welfare state.
  • WW1 and 2.

Not only was the Empire not really considered important, but neither were Napoleon, America or the Industrial Revolution. They were just stuff that happened.

Hmm, the two major things you've missed out there that I was under the impression every schoolchild in England was taught were the English Civil War, and then the naval stuff so Trafalgar and the Spanish armada. Roundheads vs. Cavaliers featured very heavily in my education at least. Trafalgar also featured heavily as part of the post-WW2 vision of plucky old England against the tyrant of the continent. The rest of the Napoleonic wars barely featured, but Trafalgar and to an extent Waterloo definitely did.

I knew of both but was never educated on them. My education was during Blair’s tenure and lopsided towards modern (post 1900) history: heavy emphasis on the welfare state and the suffragette movement, plus the rise of Hitler and Stalin to power.

Perhaps Brown and Cameron re-emphasised the Civil War in the curriculum. I'll admit though that after the age of 14 "history" seemed to entirely consist of the 30 year span between 1914 and 1945.

Hold up. I'd argue the first four of those are formative events of English identity. British identity is something the English, Scots, Welsh and Ulster Scots can all share. And my argument is that whatever that is, it cannot be decoupled from the project that British imperialism. What else did those peoples ever do together after all?

Bugger all, but realistically I think that when people say ‘British’ what they mean is ‘English’ or at most 80% English and 20% Scottish. From the sheer proportions of population it really couldn’t be any other way.

There was a conscious attempt to make a British identity during the period of Empire but that died with Empire. The Scots and Irish hate it because it associates them with the Empire (as it ought) and nobody ever asks what the poor Welsh think about anything.

Basically the only people who use British are the English and the English-adjacent people like @2rafa, because talking about an ‘English’ identity or discussing Englishness is consciously exclusionary and raises awkward questions about how the vastly more populous part of the UK should act with the others. This is also why England is the only part of the UK not to have a devolved parliament.

I don't really understand where you think America, or any other nation, is going to fit into the picture at all if your predictions of Chinese dominance come to pass. What is China going to buy from the US in 2038 in your view? They have a long track record of having an industry come into their sphere and then replicating as much as their can of it and then push out the competitor before exporting their version to any market that will take it. What are other trade partners supposed to do with a nation that's long term goal is to not buy anything from their partners? In the mean time I understand the economist position that says this is an obvious surplus, china sends us goods for pieces of paper, why look this gift horse in the mouth? But What happens when this happens to every industry?

I don't follow Noah too closely but in this piece recently I think he's spot on.

The second problem is that Europe’s trade with China is increasingly unbalanced. Europe is not trading services for the flood of electric cars, solar panels, and so on that China is sending. Instead, Europe is writing IOUs. That’s what a trade deficit is — the writing of IOUs in exchange for imports. Robin Harding of the Financial Times recently warned about this unbalanced trade, in an eloquent article entitled “China is making trade impossible”:

There is nothing that China wants to import, nothing it does not believe it can make better and cheaper, nothing for which it wants to rely on foreigners a single day longer than it has to. For now, to be sure, China is still a customer for semiconductors, software, commercial aircraft and the most sophisticated kinds of production machinery. But it is a customer like a resident doctor is a student. China is developing all of these goods. Soon it will make them, and export them, itself…

[I]f China does not want to buy anything from us in trade, then how can we trade with China?…[W]ithout exports, we will eventually run out of ways to pay China for our imports.

With the American hegemony other nations have options. Americans are happy to let other nations lead in some industries and rely on them long term. We're happy to buy Korean appliances, Japanese cars, European fine crafted goods and Columbian cocaine. If you want to build out a niche the American empire is happy to let you have it and integrate into the global family. This is not how China acts. China doesn't tolerate this kind of interdependence. I don't really see how you think allowing them to take up the dominant position in every industry is long term sustainable. Even in your post you talk about how China is already doing industrial policy to try to make sure that nvdia's position is obsoleted as soon as possible through energy subsidies.

And I know the obvious critique. If America can't compete in semi-conductors on a level playing field or any other industry then they should lose and China should make these things cheap as the pie growing move. But this isn't a level playing field. No one does more industrial policy than China. The CCP has an autarkic goal and pursues it at the cost of many things.

They systemically suppress domestic consumption through keeping deposit rates so that households earn below inflation returns so that those savings can be pumped into industrial buildout. The Hukou system creates workforces with limited rights in their migratory cities suppressing their wages to reduce labor costs. They spend very little on social safety nets. the end result being that Chinese household consumption is something like 40% of gdp vs 65% in the states.

You can say that's just them running their economy lean and that decadent westerners should lean down their consumption to compete, but if they did then you really would run into an environment where demand is too scarce. I know you've mocked that idea in the past but it really would be a problem for industrial buildout if no one was buying the stuff China or everyone else was producing.

They spend very little on social safety nets. the end result being that Chinese household consumption is something like 40% of gdp vs 65% in the states.

I simply don't think this is even true, it's more self-serving imperial propaganda to present failures as a moral choice. Most of your consumption value is rent-seeking like high rents. Chinese consumption is not that low, read this. Even Chinese safety net is not as low as is often said, it's on par with other middle-income nations.

You're not doing anyone a favor by being corrupt.

Chinese consumption is not that low, read this.

It's paywalled. What does PPP have to do with the fraction of Chinese household income that goes to consumption?

Because those are the same issue.

In the PPP-based approach adopted, China–U.S. aggregate price differences are computed using China’s category-level shares of household cash consumption expenditure as weights. Under this weighting scheme, China’s overall price level is estimated to be approximately 66 percent lower than that of the United States.

By contrast, when China’s category-level consumption is explicitly revalued under the U.S. price system and then aggregated—as shown in Table 7—China’s per capita consumption under U.S. prices reaches USD 24,507, which is close to the earlier conservative estimate of USD 26,857. This convergence reflects substantial reweighting across consumption categories once prices are converted to the U.S. price system. For example, health is extremely expensive in the United States, and China’s health prices are approximately 94.7 percent lower. As a result, after price adjustment, China’s per capita health expenditure increases sharply from USD 340 to USD 6,443, with its expenditure share rising from 7.2 percent to 26.3 percent. A similar pattern is observed in education. In contrast, categories such as transport, clothing and footwear, and food—where China–U.S. price gaps are smaller—experience declines in their relative weights in total consumption.

In effect, if Chinese services consumed by the people provide 5-20 times more value than PPP calculations suggest, this straightforwardly means that Chinese people's "consumption" share of GDP is higher, because the volume of economic activity included in these services is larger relative to exports and government spending than it appears. We can directly estimate the value of their exports. The efficiency of their services and internally consumed goods is more opaque, so it's easy to say “oh just 2000 RMB, that's $285, adjust for PPP… $428”. It actually matters if it's more like $3000.

This feels like a misdirection. The price level of China vs the US doesn't matter for the question of how much of Chinese GDP is household consumption. In each case the ratio can be calculated in local currency without any need for PPP adjustments.

The article you linked is (apparently, based on your excerpts) discussing correct PPP factors based on household expenditures, which is really not the same question at all.

Put another way, my argument is that household consumption as % of GDP is low because a great volume of capital has been invested in making life cheap, in particular rent, healthcare, connectivity and education, via infrastructure and assorted social transfers-in-mind. The fraction of GDP that is “government spending” or “employer spending” goes towards increasing purchasing power of the average (and below-average) Chinese. Consider:

Chinese households receive benefits such as subsidised education and healthcare provided by the state. Such social transfers in kind (STIK) were about 6.2 per cent of China’s GDP in 2019 and 6.4 per cent in 2021, up from 3 per cent two decades ago.

Even so, STIK only covers the transfers and consumption provided by governments and non-profit organisations. Chinese businesses are also more likely to provide employee welfare such as subsidised lunches and staff dormitories than their foreign counterparts. These, however, count towards Chinese business expenses rather than household consumption. Thus, adding all social transfers could lift China’s consumption rate by at least 6 percentage points.

etc.

This is a separate strategy from either low-intervention market economy or “welfare socialism” with explicit gibs that boost discretionary spending. It can be criticized but it's internally coherent and it's not just “make people poor to have cheap labor to flood global markets”.

Sure, let's throw that in to the consumption number.

That brings us to 46% for China and 65% for the US based on the numbers above, once we apply the increase from the text you quoted. Still, the gap is fairly significant.

More comments

self-serving imperial propaganda

You're not doing anyone a favor by being corrupt.

Is this how you do all your argumentation?

No, as you can see mainly I rely on other means. But this Baumol-diseased "consumption" that Americans pride themselves on is indeed largely propaganda.

The US is self-sufficient in almost everything. It does not need to trade with China in order to remain a great power.

And more specifically, the US can likely maintain itself as the hegemon of the western hemisphere and remain the richest country on earth. It does not need china.

US can likely maintain itself as the hegemon of the western hemisphere

100% yes

and remain the richest country on earth. It does not need china.

How? A significant % of that wealth was built on leveraging Chinese industrial production and being the primary/a majorly significant trade partner to the rest of the world.

American consumerism is built on buying cheap Chinese stuff. China has overtaken America as the primary trade partner in a huge % of the rest of the world, and that trend isn't getting better for America, especially thanks to Trump's trade policies.

How will America be the richest country on earth when it's consumers dollars don't go as far, and a large % of the world won't buy things from there anymore.

Pivoting to buying cheap Mexican and Brazilian and Argentine stuff isn’t that hard.

That would require a level of industrialization in Latin America that seems unlikely, barring direct American conquest and economic administration (and good luck with that).

Mexico already has one of the largest industrial sectors in the world.

Here's another article to add to your arsenal and broadly echoes what you're saying: China is making trade impossible

I think this is somewhat incoherent.

Americans are happy to let other nations lead in some industries and rely on them long term. We're happy to buy Korean appliances, Japanese cars, European fine crafted goods and Columbian cocaine. If you want to build out a niche the American empire is happy to let you have it and integrate into the global family. This is not how China acts.

Your narrative is a bit out of date. How will Europeans pay for Chinese imports if China has no need of their exports (in «fine crafted goods», services or anything)? Maybe they just won't, if China can do all that fine crafting cheaper and better. But they will face the same issue with American imports, indeed already are facing:

The Trump tariffs have already hit German exporters hard: over the first nine months of the year, their US exports plunged by 7.4 per cent.

But the prospects in China are if anything even bleaker, creating a “China shock” that is now biting into the bottom lines of globally successful German companies.

Since the start of 2025, Germany is now running a trade deficit in capital goods with China over a rolling 12-month period. That is a first since records began in 2008. Chinese machinery exports to Europe roughly doubled to around €40bn in over six years and may reach €50bn this year, according to industry association VDMA.

Trump’s haphazard trade policies are hurting German industrialists much more than the 15 per cent headline tariff accepted by the EU in July suggests.

A month after the controversial deal, the US expanded an existing 50 per cent duty on metal components to more than 400 additional product categories, including motorbikes, railway cars, cranes and pumps. The charges on steel, alloy and copper come with complex disclosure rules and threats of heavy fines for incomplete declarations.

This hit German companies of many stripes. Farming equipment maker Krone Group, for example, based in Spelle in Lower Saxony, was forced to temporarily halt its US-bound production. The extra tariffs on metal were “very shocking”, recalls Bernard Krone, chair of the family firm with €2.4bn in sales. US farmers will face hefty price increases which could damp demand, he predicts.

Yet while selling goods to the US has become more difficult for German industrialists, competing with China’s rapidly ascending industrial might presents an even greater challenge.

Goods coming out of China are no longer cheaply made, lower-quality knock-offs, if they ever were. “Most of what German Mittelstand firms do these days, Chinese companies can do just as well,” says Thilo Köppe, partner at German consultancy firm Vindelici Advisors who worked in China for more than a decade.

American Hegemony is not about building some happy global family with a division of labor. From software down to extractive industries, American Empire wants to be like Emperor Qianlong said: «our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders. There was therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce». Currently, the Chinese economy is pretty export-dependent, but Xi would prefer it to be otherwise – Dual Circulation is a big pillar of his policy, and in purely thermodynamic terms, if literally everything is cheaper in China, you can ignore standard macroecon, largely eschew exports, subsidize domestic demand and make Qianlong's boast a reality.

The main difference is that China got there with industrial policy and human capital, and you're trying to get there with tariffs and coercion and a Wunderwaffe. But the end result is the same for non-live players.

Back then, I asked for what the end game of AGI race is, and you said:

If it is powerful enough to actually do high level engineering work then it instantly obviates China's other major advantage in having a big workforce. If it scales all the way to AGI then forget about it, winning that race is all that matters. Winner gets to be the center of commerce and yes some latitude that comes along with having the most powerful military.

A center of commerce in what sense? The US currently has a very low fraction of international trade in GDP – around the level of Pakistan. The US wasn't a global center of commerce during its ascent either. You pat yourselves on the back for importing some junk but it's not really spreading a lot of your wealth around, it's only large in absolute terms. China is simply already doing what you want to do once you get «AGI», and by 2038, if AGI plans pan out, your narrative will be laughably quaint.

Moreover, what's wrong with that? Both nations are large, decently situated and can, in theory, produce all goods in prolific abundance within their own borders more economically than imports would be; and China is entitled to a larger and more diverse internal market on account of population size. There are some hard natural endowments – Australia has more accessible mineral wealth, Atacama desert has excellent solar resource, I don't know – but commodities are cheap. Maybe they'll become less cheap? What remains scarce after labor and R&D are commodified? Land? Copper? Wombs? We need to think of how the world would operate when major nations are capable of industrial autarky, because modulo some Butlerian Jihad we will have to deal with it anyway.

Finally, what exactly is your concern? The US imports more than it exports not out of some moral commitment to subsidizing globalism, but just because it has very credible IOUs to sell. You basically print USD and export inflation. The EU can't do that. China can't do that. Chinese industrial competence doesn't have a direct effect on that, they cannot deny you the ability to print paper and buy Columbian cocaine. Trying to rationalize the take – you deserve hegemony because what, it'll mean unquestionable military supremacy, hard guarantee of your IOUs, and therefore indefinite ability to exchange goods for paper?

Yeah, I think it's less sustainable than «China is a very large and very productive autarkic country». They've been exactly that for centuries, and the world managed fine. In the limit of this trajectory, they will only need to export enough to cover the raw commodities imports necessary for their internal economic activity. That's not a lot, in dollar terms. The more interesting question is what else we all will be trading in 2038.

in purely thermodynamic terms, if literally everything is cheaper in China, you can ignore standard macroecon, largely eschew exports, subsidize domestic demand and make Qianlong's boast a reality.

Capital begets capital. Increased capital concentration decreases costs of production and labor requirements. Left to expand forever, no one should ever catch up - but everywhere but China (so far) the greatest capital accumulations eventually succumbed to suicidal regulation and extracting value to subsidize non-productive sectors.

A lot of your links seem to be broken and affixing themotte's url in front of them.

Your narrative is a bit out of date. How will Europeans pay for Chinese imports if China has no need of their exports (in «fine crafted goods», services or anything)? Maybe they just won't, if China can do all that fine crafting cheaper and better. But they will face the same issue with American imports, indeed already are facing:

I guess I should have noted that I oppose Trump/American Autarky designs in the strongest terms. The man is without vision or sense and deviates wildly from decades of American policy.

American Hegemony is not about building some happy global family with a division of labor. From software down to extractive industries, American Empire wants to be like Emperor Qianlong said: «our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders. There was therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce».

It should probably be noted that this policy of autarky didn't exactly turn out well for China over the following two centuries ending in their century of humiliation. The period itself was also an aberation as China was center to a vast trade network before the Qing. Do you have some theory of the recent rise of China that does not require the liberalization of its markets? Explanations for its backwardness coinciding with their close? I suppose this time could be different, China woke for a few decades, learns all the world's secrets and then returns to slumber dead to the rest of the world. But I think the Chinese are smart people, they won't repeat that mistake.

And no, the American hegemony has not historically been about autarky, We've historically traded security guarantees for access to international markets.

The main difference is that China got there with industrial policy and human capital, and you're trying to get there with tariffs and coercion and a Wunderwaffe.

Tariffs are industrial policy and of course China imposes tariffs and had before the trade war. This is simply a game of Russel conjugates. I again oppose Trump's buffoonish actions but to think the CCP doesn't employ coercive tactics in trade is pretty surprising. This is a place with a habit of outright banning outside competitors, not just tariffing them. market access for IP bargains, forced technology transfer, straight up state sponsored industrial espionage and Cyber theft(APT10, PLA Unit 61398, Equifax hack, ect). It's just not the case that China has risen in some saintly within the rules manner.

A center of commerce in what sense? The US currently has a very low fraction of international trade in GDP – around the level of Pakistan. The US wasn't a global center of commerce during its ascent either. You pat yourselves on the back for importing some junk but it's not really spreading a lot of your wealth around, it's only large in absolute terms. China is simply already doing what you want to do once you get «AGI», and by 2038, if AGI plans pan out, your narrative will be laughably quaint.

This conflates a few different worlds. My model for an ai future if ai drops marginal labor cost to the base electricity needed to complete the task(but doesn't go infinite intelligence like the yuddites expect) isn't every nation turning inwards, like civilizational wire headers. I find that a bleak image frankly but I suppose some may and China may be one that does if that comes to pass. I don't find that future particularly likely really. And if it goes all the way to AGI then all I know is I want someone with my interests to have been the one to do the alignment work.

The US currently has a very low fraction of international trade in GDP

This map just seems to be a measure of economy size relative to nearest neighbors, no? Mongolia isn't a huge player in the international trade Arena, it's just landlocked between two countries with economies that are much much larger than its.

Moreover, what's wrong with that? Both nations are large, decently situated and can, in theory, produce all goods in prolific abundance within their own borders more economically than imports would be; and China is entitled to a larger and more diverse internal market on account of population size. There are some hard natural endowments – Australia has more accessible mineral wealth, Atacama desert has excellent solar resource, I don't know – but commodities are cheap. Maybe they'll become less cheap? What remains scarce after labor and R&D are commodified? Land? Copper? Wombs? We need to think of how the world would operate when major nations are capable of industrial autarky, because modulo some Butlerian Jihad we will have to deal with it anyway.

this is an interesting point and framing, thanks. I hadn't been thinking of the precise scenario where labor costs drop to marginal much. It does seem far-fetched but we are in the time where far-fetched things happen. I still find things shaking out this way unlikely and if they do I think the world would be unstable. When labor is very cheap and raw materials, even if they can be harvested much more efficiently, are the scarce thing then what is the offense/defense equilibrium?

also replying to this comment

The CF40 piece is interesting but doesn't address my point. They're arguing PPP calculations understate Chinese purchasing power, that Chinese people get more stuff per yuan than World Bank stats suggest. I'll grant it all for the sake of argument because the PPP discussion is boring and one can look elsewhere for it. My claim was about income distribution, not purchasing power. Household consumption being 40% of GDP means households receive 40% of national income to spend. The rest goes to the state and corporate sectors, funding the investment-heavy model. Even if every yuan buys more calories than we thought, that doesn't change the share going to households versus the share going to industrial buildout.

This matters because the investment heavy model requires external demand. Household savings fund the investments through financial repression - artificially low interest rates transfer wealth from savers to state-favored borrowers. The resulting production has to go somewhere, and domestic consumers don't have the purchasing power to absorb it because their savings were the input. Rebalancing toward consumption has been official CCP policy since 2006. In that time, household consumption has moved from 35% to 38% of GDP. They know the problem. They haven't solved it because the mechanisms that suppress consumption are load-bearing for the political economy.

The man is without vision or sense and deviates wildly from decades of American policy.

He has a vision, though we can debate the merits of that vision, I agree he's a pretty vulgar individual and his execution is often appalling. But was “decades of American policy” sustainable? The permanent deficit only makes sense if you can serve the growing debt indefinitely. Why should we assume that this can hold? As I've said multiple times, Trump is correct in his diagnosis even if ham-fisted with treatment. If America becomes materially productive, it will diminish European share of the pie, you can't sustain your consumption with just soy and LNG exports, something has to give. Or what is the idea, make AGI and sell tokens instead of IOUs, in exchange for TRUMPF machines? I guess that can be argued, but far as I can see, nobody argues for this. Do you argue for this?

It should probably be noted that this policy of autarky didn't exactly turn out well for China over the following two centuries ending in their century of humiliation. The period itself was also an aberation as China was center to a vast trade network before the Qing

It wasn't so much about trade autarky as about comprehensive intellectual isolation and stagnation, the Qing did not understand the world outside China's borders and honestly bought into the idea that they'll naturally be productive enough to not worry. Qianlong still had some clue, thanks to Heshen, who was ultimately executed for vast corruption, leaving the Qing blind for decades. Then, it was too late and they grew too dysfunctional to modernize like Japan. By First Opium War, Daoguang emperor didn't know where Britain is. It was a pathological regime preoccupied with managing a quaint and unnatural arrangement of Manchu superiority. I definitely won't say their trade policies made sense but it is just a small part of overall Manchu awfulness. Though to be fair, Manchus were following the Ming with their tryhard Confucian disdain for trade. By 1736, China had mostly lost its ironworking. Insularity is the dominant Chinese policy for many centuries. We need to go back like 1000 years to see China that's even remotely as trade-oriented as the modern one. And yes, none of this is plausible in the modern world with high-density information flow.

Anyway, what does it matter? People complaining that “China is making trade impossible” don't mean anything like Ming-style ban of maritime commerce. They mean precisely the opposite, that Chinese exports are too cheap and abundant, and call it unfair. What exactly do you want them to do? Enforce the internal demand for more expensive foreign goods, such as subsidizing private consumption of Macbooks? Get worse at manufacturing? Make their subsidies as ineffectual as European ones? Focus on welfare spending, until they get old, slow down their value-add climb, and fall behind far enough to balance trade? It's just hopeless demands to change their value system, they won't change it. Keep raising tariffs if you don't want to compete on prices. 100% on EVs, 200% or whatever on solar panels, outright ban on Huawei… seems to work, keep going. American deficit with China is already shrinking.

American hegemony has not historically been about autarky, We've historically traded security guarantees for access to international markets.

American hegemony itself is a very recent phenomenon, and may have run its course. America was a relatively prosperous and absolutely powerful nation before it became “a hegemon” and so massively involved itself in Old World affairs, for intrinsic reasons of having a large internal market, little red tape, and good geography.

Your security guarantees don't look very credible and monetizable now.

This is a place with a habit of outright banning outside competitors, not just tariffing them.

I don't oppose any of that, it's fair game so long as it works. By coercion I mean buffoonery like forcing allies to invest in American production or Lutnick's machinations around TSMC (again, “security guarantees” come into play). China simply can't do any of that, irrespective of morals. It can only offer terms of the deal and expect consent. JVs were not coercion. Expropriation of Trina Solar, meanwhile, is coercion with extra steps. But whatever, this is sliding into moralism, everyone will price in those tactics and act rationally.

This map just seems to be a measure of economy size relative to nearest neighbors, no?

Pretty much, but that doesn't change the conclusion. The US is a vast economy. China is becoming comparably vast (or is already bigger depending on how you count), and specifically on goods production it's just no contest. Such economies gravitate towards autarky, both for security and macroeconomic reasons and because of basic logistics.

Household consumption being 40% of GDP means households receive 40% of national income to spend. The rest goes to the state and corporate sectors, funding the investment-heavy model.

I repeat that Chinese household consumption is underrated due to in-kind transfers (such as all this public infrastructure), while American consumption is overrated due to Baumol disease. CF40 doesn't just argue that they're even richer than PPP suggests, and consume on par with developed economies (just not the US). It argues that they spend 20 times less on healthcare and get comparable outcomes. Americans cannot not consume some of these items, their floor for cost of living is just too high, you physically cannot survive in a modern city for $137 a month for two people over 3 years, and for the Chinese the ability to do that is subsidized by in-kind transfers. There can be a spirited defense of American consumption pattern, about allocation efficiency or whatever, but the crux is that while the Chinese are directly extracted from to build up physical capital and trade competitiveness, Americans are indirectly extracted from to make pharma/hospital/insurance company etc. stonk go up, charitably – fund R&D and reinvest into tech. The latter is accounted for as “consumer spending”, the former is not, both are effectively non-optional capital transfer from civilians to the national backbone, largely physical in their case and largely financial in yours. I think that when all is considered fairly, both nations have about 50% “real consumption” share of GDP.

My model for an ai future if ai drops marginal labor cost to the base electricity needed to complete the task(but doesn't go infinite intelligence like the yuddites expect) isn't every nation turning inwards, like civilizational wire headers. I find that a bleak image frankly but I suppose some may and China may be one that does if that comes to pass

When labor is very cheap and raw materials, even if they can be harvested much more efficiently, are the scarce thing then what is the offense/defense equilibrium?

Right. That's the big question, isn't it.

He has a vision, though we can debate the merits of that vision, I agree he's a pretty vulgar individual and his execution is often appalling. But was “decades of American policy” sustainable? The permanent deficit only makes sense if you can serve the growing debt indefinitely. Why should we assume that this can hold?

I could go on at length about my problems with Trump but at the hope of not starting too many skirmishes with this forum I'll limit myself to saying that Trump's gift is identifying an aggrieved feeling in his base and validating/stoking it. If that means vanquishing woke, which I mostly agree with, he will try to do that. If that means striking at China who much of his base holds responsible for decaying rust belt towns then he'll do that. He is not setting out to balance our budget or deal with the infinite deficit, he has increased the deficit. Long term sustainability is not something he cares about, part of his appeal that got him elected was dumping the idea of sustainability by breaking the GOP on Medicare's obvious unsustainability. He's a slop populist that refuses to acknowledge trade offs, a national embarrassment. Perhaps the only thing worse than him being in charge is the Bernie wing of the democratic party that looks to Europe's fat decay into a retirement home with envious eyes and wants to squash our attempt at relevance through ai dominance with pure stupid ludditism.

As I've said multiple times, Trump is correct in his diagnosis even if ham-fisted with treatment.

If you've said Trump is right in his diagnosis of the American sickness multiple times then you've been wrong multiple times, Trump doesn't know about or even think about the American sickness. He has diagnosed the ugly populist urgings of his base and as people are often mad about real problems sometimes strikes out at those problems in total ignorance of their structure. Our problem has something to do with trade so he strikes out against trade, broadly, untargeted and with great zeal.

If America becomes materially productive, it will diminish European share of the pie, you can't sustain your consumption with just soy and LNG exports, something has to give.

well no, it's your model that we should be trying to sustain our consumption with just Soy and LNG exports, the raw commodities while every nation does their own production. I think we should continue to try and dominate in aerospace, tech, entertainment and other industries. We should happily let ASML dominate in fab design, TSMC dominate in fab execution(although China hungrily eyeing their island for conquest does justify some industrial policy to move that particular industry into safer territory), Samsung dominate in RAM and maybe we could encourage some home grown competition but integrate with the partners without like, doing state sponsored spying on their designs to that end.

Qianlong still had some clue, thanks to Heshen, who was ultimately executed for vast corruption, leaving the Qing blind for decades. Then, it was too late and they grew too dysfunctional to modernize like Japan.

I have to point out that China is led by an aging dictator who has progressively isolated himself from the type of people who would bring him bad news. The whole autarkic emperor blinded to their weaknesses and his subjects being afraid to tell him he's wrong seems to me at least as good of an explanation for denial of NVDIA imports as some pending competitive domestic chip manufacturing that you seem to think is likely. And it parallels nicely with your history lesson, which I do genuinely appreciate. I try to not let my bias for democracy show too prominently in my analysis, but it seems important to point out the downsides here and also that it's not clear how succession after Xi is done is supposed to work smoothly.

They mean precisely the opposite, that Chinese exports are too cheap and abundant, and call it unfair. What exactly do you want them to do? Enforce the internal demand for more expensive foreign goods, such as subsidizing private consumption of Macbooks? Get worse at manufacturing? Make their subsidies as ineffectual as European ones? Focus on welfare spending, until they get old, slow down their value-add climb, and fall behind far enough to balance trade?

What I'd like is kind of like an onion, we've got a few layers here.

At first are the demands I have for my own government that started our back and forth a while back. I want to not surrender our advantage for no real gain. You seem to oscillate between claiming NVDIA is going to establish some kind of vendor lock in while also celebrating an impending Chinese internal semiconductor champion that will make refusing to export toothless anyways. Either lock in is real or it isn't. If it's real then surely China's efforts won't mean much if they can't even get their national champion to use their home grown chips. If it's not, and this is my position, then we should under no circumstances allow NVDIA to export our most powerful chips to China. And I don't want to hear any free trade paeans on this, China wipes its ass with free trade.

As for what I want China to do. Well I do have family there now, they're more privileged than most Chinese people so the reforms I'd like aren't exactly for maximizing their benefits, but I'd like China to shift its focus from out competing the world and territorial conquest to getting its internal household consumption up. I'd like further Hukou reforms so there are fewer second and third class Chinese citizens. I want to see more of the returns from China's growth go to improving the quality of life of Chinese people rather than Xi's vanity in needing to dominate every market that exists. Step away from autarky. Perhaps geopolitically untenable but I'd also like to see them stop aiding Putin in his horrific war in Ukraine. Of course this is a bit of the awkwardness that I've just listed a bunch of things in the "what if we pretend AI is a mundane technology" world. What I want China to do if AI is a pivotal technology is to lose to America in a race to develop it, I would understand if Xi declined, but he doesn't seem particularly AI pilled honestly.

Your security guarantees don't look very credible and monetizable now.

which ones don't? Yes, Trump is a bully to our allies in an embarrassing and disgusting way, but the line people are fighting over right now is how much we should be materially supporting people who aren't even our allies and just have implicit value to people that are our allies to prop up.

I don't oppose any of that, it's fair game so long as it works. By coercion I mean buffoonery like forcing allies to invest in American production

I'll continue to not want to defend Trump policies but will point out that this is similar in effect to Chinese Market access for IP and tech transfer policies where China gets a substantial amount of the return on foreign investment and then forces the foreign competitor out once it can replicate the production anyways. At least Japan would get some lasting equity in this deal formulation. China's high-speed rail program was built on technology transferred from Siemens, Kawasaki, Bombardier, and Alstom. Do those companies or their home countries enjoy any stake in CRRC's international expansion?

Pretty much, but that doesn't change the conclusion. The US is a vast economy. China is becoming comparably vast (or is already bigger depending on how you count), and specifically on goods production it's just no contest. Such economies gravitate towards autarky, both for security and macroeconomic reasons and because of basic logistics.

There's a big difference between aggressively pursuing autarky and just the natural internal trade that exists because you're a big country and most of the things you buy aren't hyper specialized products. I keep hammering this because it's important. America doesn't, or at least didn't, see it as a problem that its most advanced chip products are the result of cooperation between firms for dozens of countries. Yes, if you're buying groceries in the US then naturally they will be sourced relatively locally and generally the most common things a person consumes are commodity and service products that don't gain much by having a long supply chain. Every local area is probably going to need to answer the "where do we get milk from?" question in their own way. Not every local area should try to answer "how do we design cell phones?" for themselves. If they have a competitive advantage in cell phone design, or some step of the process, then sure go ahead, but autarky is the madness that has Trumpists trying to figure out how they're going to produce coffee beans in the contiguous united states hundreds of miles from where they can grow effectively.

I repeat that Chinese household consumption is underrated due to in-kind transfers (such as all this public infrastructure)

well, kind of. The high speed rail buildout you may have a point. But the excess industrial buildout? That's going into exports. It's the Americans and Europeans enjoying discounted goods that is enjoying the surplus here. At least the American excess spending is circulating among American Doctors and Pharma companies, which yes are actually making miraculous drugs.

American consumption is overrated due to Baumol disease.

Baumol's applies to all sectors, household, state and industrial at least equally, probably more to state, so this can't explain inflated household consumption as a percent of gdp. It's the same factor in all sectors, it cancels out.

Normally if a point isn't responded to I don't insist on bringing it back up but I need to make an exception here. It's really important that the whole Chinese industrial production system relies on exports and the CCP has been unable to change that fact despite ticking past two five year plans of it being a goal. It just is the case that Chinese people enjoy less of the fruit of their labor than Americans do.

Right. That's the big question, isn't it.

It certainly seems like a question central to the world of inward facing nations you're putting forward. How is China getting the 70+% of its oil imports in this future? The iron ore? The soy beans? Surely they have resources but this seems a hollow sort of autarky.

trump bad

OK, but how does this make the previous system sustainable? You consume more than you produce, and you cover the delta with IOUs. It's a time bomb, people just got accustomed to the explosion being repeatedly postponed, developed a mindset that American “reserve currency” grift is so strong that this is no biggie. I think they're wrong.

it's your model that we should be trying to sustain our consumption with just Soy and LNG exports

Unfair. As you can see I'm arguing in favor of selling high-end GPUs, where you actually dominate. Soy and LNG obsession was Trump (before recent course adjustment).

I think we should continue to try and dominate in aerospace, tech, entertainment and other industries. We should happily let ASML dominate in fab design, TSMC dominate in fab execution(although China hungrily eyeing their island for conquest does justify some industrial policy to move that particular industry into safer territory), Samsung dominate in RAM

You currently can't “not let” them dominate there, they are simply dominant, like you are in aerospace, so it's not exactly a choice. And in your own logic, all of that “let” becomes effectively charity soon after you have AGI (unfortunately, a necessary evil to fight Red Chyna!). It's just a question of maximizing comparative advantage by tolerating division of labor, while you complete the Total Labor Eraser Machine 9000; in fact a continuation of the earlier mustache-twirling “let the broke ass yellow bugmen assemble our gadgets for pennies, while we deepen our design and basic research dominance” strategy, justified by the Smiling Curve logic. Sorry, one doesn't have to be Xi to see how it works.
And of course, your personal distaste for Trump won't change the reality of him forcing allies to rebuild their core industries in the US. This is American policy for the foreseeable future and I don't think it'll be rejected by the next admin, like Biden didn't reject and only reinforced core pillars of Trump's China policy.

I have to point out that China is led by an aging dictator who has progressively isolated himself from the type of people who would bring him bad news.

Xi was born in 1953. He's 72. Trump was born in 1946, like George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. I get the “leaders are like underpants” logic but humans are not really underpants, which quickly get dirty but do not appreciably age in storage; and I wonder if a well-functioning autocrat really is worse than a structural inability to elect people born after 1946 AD (Biden dates back to 1942, of course). Xi's father lived to 89, after 16 years of persecution. A very interesting man. Xi's mother is apparently still alive at 99 years of age. I think Xi is pretty damn lucid and will remain so for another decade, and the “progressively isolated from bearers of bad news” bit sounds like a lazy trope. Maybe Zero COVID applies but that was more about excessive paranoia than desire for good news. He's quite obsessed with calamity consciousness and “preparing for danger in times of peace”. Xi's China has systematically derisked its position, to the extent that when Trump ranted “the U.S. has Monopoly positions also, much stronger and more far reaching than China's. I have just not chosen to use them, there was never a reason for me to do so — UNTIL NOW! … For every Element that they have been able to monopolize, we have two.” – it was hot air.

Apparently you think that the reason China could only take export controls on the chin 6-2 years ago, and can clap back and force US concessions now, is just that Trump is a venal corrupt moron and in fact he did have those two elements. The fact of the matter is that he used to have them but does not anymore, because Xi is not like Trump, nor like Putin. In 2018, when Trump cut ZTE off from US kit, Chinese state newspaper “Science and Technology Daily” published a series of 35 articles “What Are Our Chokepoints? Core Technologies We Urgently Await Breakthroughs In”, obviously building on Xi's rhetoric. I recommend reading it in detail. Xi kept scolding everyone for not doing enough – in 2020, in 2024. As of now, at least 30 out of 35 items are deemed solved. We know very much about their efforts to break all such chokepoints, they are in fact increasingly well organized, the graft of Big Fund I was eliminated. This is not the behavior of a delusional autocrat in an echo chamber. Your whole society looks more like an echo chamber, given how shell-shocked DC China Watchers were after Oct 9, how they kept saying that Xi miscalculated, overplayed his hand or whatever. He clearly did not.

But I don't expect to convince you. “Arrogant power-hungry strongman kills goons who report bad news” is a staple of your scholarship, a justification of your system, and a powerful trope of your media culture. After all, Free American Men do not need to stoop so low as to seriously scrutinize the policies or behavioral profile of some bugman chief (who wasn't even born in 1946 AD). It's not like there can be any consequences of being wrong.

The whole autarkic emperor blinded to their weaknesses and his subjects being afraid to tell him he's wrong seems to me at least as good of an explanation for denial of NVDIA imports

I think they're much more afraid of lying than of any demotion for underperformance, because being implicated in some graft gets you expelled from the party, jailed or executed, and the CPC is designed with good incentives for mutual surveillance. Of course there's the American trope/cope that corruption investigations are just selectively applied for “purging rivals”, everyone is corrupt and corruption adds no risk. We'll see. For now, you can be thankful to Xi for doing USG's proper job of not letting advanced chips into China.

You seem to oscillate between claiming NVDIA is going to establish some kind of vendor lock in while also celebrating an impending Chinese internal semiconductor champion that will make refusing to export toothless anyways. Either lock in is real or it isn't. If it's real then surely China's efforts won't mean much if they can't even get their national champion to use their home grown chips.

I don't oscillate, those processes are just in tension. Liang Wenfeng said: “NVIDIA’s dominance isn’t just its effort—it’s the result of Western tech ecosystems collaborating on roadmaps for next-gen tech. China needs similar ecosystems. Many domestic chips fail because they lack supportive tech communities and rely on secondhand insights. Someone must step onto the frontier.” And yet even DeepSeek has not yet trained anything on Ascends. You need usable chips and frontier AI talent, working together. Frontier talent has options – go to the US, work with domestic chips under duress, work with Nvidia chips in the PRC (but those were becoming scarce), work with domestic chips because they literally are the only thing they can get, and so on. Nvidia can create a vendor lock, not unbreakable in principle, but sufficient to slow down their ecosystem and prolong the vulnerability to export controls. Domestic chips will have both low utility and slower hardware progress if domestic software has no adoption at the frontier. China ultimately wants good AI and less talent flight (that is a thing, you realize) and so won't meddle egregiously in frontier roadmaps.

Their plan seems to be letting Tier A labs do what they want with their own money, subsidizing power for domestic compute, forcing Tier B to match procurement of Nvidia/AMD with domestic compute, and building public datacenters with domestic compute. In time, this will result in an okay-ish domestic ecosystem and wider adoption of those chips, after which they may require, incentivize or naturally get some frontier training runs. But the end goal is to downgrade Nvidia from a chokepoint to basically another commodity, not ban it. They can ban commodities in retaliation, as with soy, but it's not about a commitment to never buy American produce. So long as they have security and optionality and it makes basic economic sense, they don't mind importing soy, or LNG, or chips, or airplanes, or anything.

I want to see more of the returns from China's growth go to improving the quality of life of Chinese people rather than Xi's vanity in needing to dominate every market that exists What I want China to do if AI is a pivotal technology is to lose to America in a race to develop it, I would understand if Xi declined

indeed. Except, “every market that exists” is the same issue as a singular pivotal technology. The simple fact is that either you move up the value chain relentlessly, or you get some sort of “lost decades” or “middle income trap” and then you're American chewing toy. When you actually have the potential to be a great power and not just some cute intermediate supplier with no security like the Netherlands, Americans will chew on you until you have no potential. China is not special, it's just the only remaining contender after Europe and Japan were done with. Clearly an American can have Chinese family and remain committed to the hegemonic project. All you can offer to the weak is to be in your orbit, sell cocaine or cheeses or whatnot; all you can offer to the strong is defeat. That's normal realpolitik. I just want you to acknowledge that the noise about “quality of life of Chinese people” is disingenous.

China's high-speed rail program was built on technology transferred from Siemens, Kawasaki, Bombardier, and Alstom.

Bought and paid for, minor (yes, minor) extralegal fraction aside. Unlike Japan, these nations were not forced to transfer technology under duress, as China does not control their security.

There's a big difference between aggressively pursuing autarky and just the natural internal trade

There's also a big difference between being on the giving or receiving side of export controls and Wassenaar Arrangement. This isn't about Xi bad, Americans have been working to keep China non-competitive in the semiconductor segment for at least over three decades: “We found that the executive branch practice was aimed at keeping China two generations behind the U.S. semiconductor manufacturing industry. On March 1, 2001, the under secretary for export administration (a policy-level official), described this practice and reconfirmed it in a follow-up January 2002 meeting with GAO after he left office”. That's “Jiang Zemin good” era, growth, engagement, all that soapy bullshit. Meanwhile, your semiconductor industry is heavily dependent on Chinese brains. I won't moralize on the hypocrisy and laughable entitlement, obviously you feel entitled to allocating progress conditional on how much you like a given regime. After all, “if we weren't worthy, they wouldn't have come”. The point is that even modulo their autarkic preferences, proactive derisking – for every industry with a chokehold – makes perfect sense.

Not every local area should try to answer "how do we design cell phones?" for themselves. If they have a competitive advantage in cell phone design, or some step of the process, then sure go ahead

Speaking of local cell phones. I loved Nokia. Very cute story of plucky little Finland doing well in tech, connecting people, all those 3310 memes. The era before total Chimerica dominance. Was pretty sad when it got killed. I recall @Stefferi even speculated that it led to the decline in birth rates. I suspect Elop did that intentionally, though he just wanted to deliver fresh game to Microsoft and fumbled the company altogether. Now it's either iPhone or Chinese phones, and you tried to kill Huawei too.

But the excess industrial buildout? That's going into exports. It's the Americans and Europeans enjoying discounted goods that is enjoying the surplus here.

This is partially fair. There are two components to this. One is subsidizing the base undifferentiated layer of economy - energy and raw materials, agriculture, infrastructure, “wasteful SOEs”. This makes it possible to not just produce anything effectively but discover new physical products faster, without the pathologies of American financialization. Another is provincial competition with duplicate companies and “involution”, spurred on by national plans like MIC 2025. Not even Xi likes involution, but they seem to be unwilling to tackle it, because it also produces very fit companies. Overall, I think that in the long run this strategy works fine as it makes goods cheaper very quickly at the cost of slower growth in nominal consumption.

At least the American excess spending is circulating among American Doctors and Pharma companies, which yes are actually making miraculous drugs.

Well, it's fueling Chinese pharma companies too, and now they're licensing miraculous drugs to you, and you buy the end product at 30-fold markups. “In China, a single-dose vial costs US$280 but in the US it will have a wholesale price of US$8,892”. Though the US distributor, Coherus, classified as a manufacturer, captures 80% of this markup, on merit of its role in dealing with the FDA. Who knows where we'd be if the Chinese could rip you off directly. Maybe all cancer would've been solved already, and your healthcare would've been cheaper too.

Baumol's applies to all sectors, household, state and industrial at least equally, probably more to state

Maybe but that's a quantitative question, I think rent+health+education are uniquely Baumoled in the US relative to China (which subsidizes them), constitute non-optional spending, and cover a large fraction of the gap. The accounting of US consumption is pretty different from Chinese approach too, as @FrankishKnight explains here. Anyway, as I've said, low Chinese household consumption is not more anomalous than high American one. Nations have all kinds of ratios, and the US ratio is not characteristic of a prosperous state.

How is China getting the 70+% of its oil imports in this future? The iron ore? The soy beans?

Those are worth peanuts in comparison to their current trade volume and surplus. They'll be fine, at least it won't be their biggest problem. If the world stops buying their ships, they also won't need quite so much iron.

trump bad

Trump is indeed importantly bad. It's important for me to lay out why I think Trump is bad because, as you know because you keep deploying "what about what trump is doing" as counters to my arguments, much of what makes him bad is that he's doing things China has been doing for a while now. And you also use his stance on chips as a major line of support for your triumphalism of Chinese chip production. Our models of him diverge on this subject in ways that are important to the discussion.

OK, but how does this make the previous system sustainable? You consume more than you produce, and you cover the delta with IOUs. It's a time bomb, people just got accustomed to the explosion being repeatedly postponed, developed a mindset that American “reserve currency” grift is so strong that this is no biggie. I think they're wrong.

There's some nuance I could edge at here, China itself runs deficits both at the national level and massively at the local government levels so this is hardly just a problem for the US. But I don't fundamentally disagree that the debt spending is unsustainable and should be curbed. My point was that Trump is not doing this, his "vision" does not include doing this and he makes even less convincing noises about doing it than previous administrations that did not do it either even if he sometimes burbles up some incoherent thoughts about how the tariffs will pay down the debt right before promising to instead give that money out in checks.

You currently can't “not let” them dominate there, they are simply dominant, like you are in aerospace, so it's not exactly a choice.

Well no, there are other options. If we behaved like China then we would deploy state espionage to steal their trade secrets, establish national champions to feed those trade secrets to and subsidize those champions while pushing our other industries to favorably use them. There is an important difference in how the two nations behave when they rely on an outside actor in their supply chain, this is core to the question of autarky.

while you complete the Total Labor Eraser Machine 9000;

In the earlier post you quoted I gave you three levels of AI plateauing that seem extremely plausible to me, although the first and third seem like more likely states if I'm honest. The fact that the middle level erased much of China's biggest advantage in number of engineers was more of a side point than the whole thrust of my argument but you seem really fixated on that possibility. You've thought about that potential world more than I did and found some interesting features of it that I thank you for sharing. It really is a world worth thinking about. But I don't think it's the more likely world.

Xi was born in 1953. He's 72. Trump was born in 1946, like George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. I get the “leaders are like underpants” logic but humans are not really underpants, which quickly get dirty but do not appreciably age in storage; and I wonder if a well-functioning autocrat really is worse than a structural inability to elect people born after 1946 AD (Biden dates back to 1942, of course).

Yes, it is bad that we've been dominated by the boomers for so long and have elected so many elderly candidates in the past decade or so. Fortunately we'll have an opportunity to correct this in a few years, when will China's next chance to relatively smoothly change its leader be? Can some other entity make the call to push him out without fear of retaliation if he declines but refuses to accept it? These are civilizationally important questions.

I think Xi is pretty damn lucid and will remain so for another decade, and the “progressively isolated from bearers of bad news” bit sounds like a lazy trope. Maybe Zero COVID applies but that was more about excessive paranoia than desire for good news.

I suppose it depends on how you define good news whether zero covid being possible was the good news or was it bad news that stoked his paranoia that he favored. The point is isolation from alternative viewpoints that he himself doesn't actively seek out.

And maybe another of his biases is this belief in the importance of autarky. As you go on to say he espoused autarkic rhetoric of the importance to have no "choke points" and that desire was processed by the state media apparatus into a report about where those "choke points" are and then the state apparatus set about alleviating them and succeeded in that goal, well it succeeded in it as far as that very same state apparatuses measurements are concerned. But this is all downstream of his view that it's very important to be entirely self sufficient and autarkic. That isn't a fact of the universe, it's a bias in Xi's head that the state apparatus confirmed and attempted to address. Other nations do not attempt to be free of any foreign dependencies and it's not a costless goal to pursue.

Maybe further economic independence is a good thing, maybe it's not, but either way China will pursue it because it's what Xi thinks is right and it would pursue it into ruin if that's where it leads. I doubt the autarky demand will lead China to doom, but there are policies and biases that could. Maybe Xi gets a militant edge and goes after Taiwan too early or too late or gets it too easily and then pushes too far for other islands. There's a lot running on one guy who may live another twenty years but for how much longer will he remain as sharp as he was in 2020? senility sure hit Biden pretty fast.

For now, you can be thankful to Xi for doing USG's proper job of not letting advanced chips into China.

I am indeed very thankful that both of our out of touch leader's terrible decisions cancel out.

And yet even DeepSeek has not yet trained anything on Ascends. You need usable chips and frontier AI talent, working together. Frontier talent has options – go to the US, work with domestic chips under duress, work with Nvidia chips in the PRC (but those were becoming scarce), work with domestic chips because they literally are the only thing they can get, and so on.

You're telling me refusing China State of the Art chips might get more of the most talented researchers to come to the US and this somehow forms itself into an argument to send them the chips because as a second order effect the talent remaining there will demand to use our chips? I think the first order effect swamps here and is an incredibly good argument for not sending them our chips. I think a job offer at our frontier labs should in fact come with a free golden Trump citizenship card stapled to an H200.

prolong the vulnerability to export controls.

Turning off export controls to prolong export controls is a little too big brained for me. I could grant some small, measured in weeks to months, "lock in" effect for releasing export controls if that's what you want to call Chinese chip makers getting slightly less feedback from the frontier labs. But at the cost of our largest advantage in the race this is silly.

Bought and paid for, minor (yes, minor) extralegal fraction aside. Unlike Japan, these nations were not forced to transfer technology under duress, as China does not control their security.

With the benefit of a new night's sleep and a reread through this thread I think we can cease the back and forth on this topic, Trump era American international trade policy is so bad that it has become as nakedly extractive as Chinese international trade practices have been for decades. Going back and forth on examples is not productive. It seems we agree that nations today will act in their economic self interest. My point is that America has an economic self interest in using its trade policy to remain ahead in AI and we discuss this elsewhere.

Meanwhile, your semiconductor industry is heavily dependent on Chinese brains.

These are American brains. We claim those. It's one of our things. Homogenous nations get an easier time remaining high trust and unified, us mutt nations get to claim all the output done in our name, that's only fair.

Now it's either iPhone or Chinese phones, and you tried to kill Huawei too.

Looking at Samsung printed on the back of my phone "Are you Chinese?". I dispute this dichotomy.

Though the US distributor, Coherus, classified as a manufacturer, captures 80% of this markup, on merit of its role in dealing with the FDA. Who knows where we'd be if the Chinese could rip you off directly. Maybe all cancer would've been solved already, and your healthcare would've been cheaper too.

Well yeah, that's the very expensive part. We can argue, and I largely agree, that the FDA should have lower standards; but providing proof that a drug is safe and effective to a very high standard is not pure rent seeking. There's genuine economic value there that the rest of the world often freeloads on, even if rationally we might prefer a lower but less expensive standard.

Maybe but that's a quantitative question, I think rent+health+education are uniquely Baumoled in the US relative to China (which subsidizes them), constitute non-optional spending, and cover a large fraction of the gap. The accounting of US consumption is pretty different from Chinese approach too, as @FrankishKnight explains here. Anyway, as I've said, low Chinese household consumption is not more anomalous than high American one. Nations have all kinds of ratios, and the US ratio is not characteristic of a prosperous state.

Sure, we can quibble around on the accounting, but China's household consumption as a percent of GDP isn't just low compared to the US, it's low compared to basically all developed economies. The EU runs around 52% without the US healthcare peculiarities.

But more importantly you haven't addressed the demand problem. Chinese industrial capacity is built to and relies on exporting to function. It's not an accounting artifact. It's clear in the trade surplus and it's been a priority to fix for over a decade now with little to no progress. If trading partners want to behave like China and cut their imports then this whole system falls apart. The companies reliant on exports fail systematically. The savings of the Chinese citizen dry up. The debt of the local governments turns acidic and the whole thing seizes. Economies are complex systems, it's not enough to be obsessed with minimizing the inputs, you need to ensure the outputs work too.

I know you're skeptical of the importance of demand. Maybe this will make more sense if we swap the sides. Why were American businesses so willing to risk such high demands to gain access to the Chinese internal market? More demand is good right? It's good for companies when they find lots of new customers? What happens to a company if it suddenly loses 90% of its customers? What happens to a country if all of its companies suddenly lose 90% of their customers? From a god's eye naive view you might look down at this country and say "what's the big deal? There are lots of people in that country that could use new cars or widgets, this seems like a win, we don't have to send the cars and widgets to foreigners, just give those people the products. But those products were produced with debt on the assumption of payment that the country's people can't provide. The production was all forward shifted before the payment and now the payment isn't coming.

Those are worth peanuts in comparison to their current trade volume and surplus. They'll be fine, at least it won't be their biggest problem. If the world stops buying their ships, they also won't need quite so much iron.

Well wait, this is a bit of a dodge. Are these other nations not getting access to the labor erasers?

let the broke ass yellow bugmen assemble our gadgets for pennies, while we deepen our design and basic research dominance ... after all, Free American Men do not need to stoop so low as to seriously scrutinize the policies or behavioral profile of some bugman chief

This bulverism is beneath you and something you seem to always return to. These beliefs are neither in my heart nor on my lips. So frequently you accuse interlocutors of believing in vile orcs or subhuman bugmen. Give me a break man.

China itself runs deficits both at the national level and massively at the local government levels

There is, of course, a difference between sovereign debt, which China has (though the ratio to GDP is exaggerated, because GDP is underrated), and external debt, which in China's case is minuscule. But okay.

If we behaved like China then we would deploy state espionage to steal their trade secrets, establish national champions to feed those trade secrets to and subsidize those champions while pushing our other industries to favorably use them

You are indeed pondering the use of fairly underhanded means, except you don't need to steal «secrets» because most of that is your own IP, the main problem is skills. I think the gap is near entirely due to stronger US position in established technology (real and, even more so, arrogantly perceived), not any moral preference.

The fact that the middle level erased much of China's biggest advantage in number of engineers was more of a side point than the whole thrust of my argument but you seem really fixated on that possibility

I'm really not, I'm talking about third parties, mainly the EU, but extremely high levels of automation on some timeline <20 years seem to be the modal scenario for me.

Fortunately we'll have an opportunity to correct this in a few years, when will China's next chance to relatively smoothly change its leader be?

When Xi grows tired and steps down, like Deng did (Deng, importantly, kept manipulating his successors). Personally I think he'll nominate Ding Xuexiang on merit of overseeing the EUV project, assuming that it succeeds. Ding doesn't have the required track record of governance, but Xi broke rules himself, and this is more important than boosting KPIs in some province.

I suppose it depends on how you define good news whether zero covid being possible was the good news or was it bad news that stoked his paranoia that he favored. The point is isolation from alternative viewpoints that he himself doesn't actively seek out.

I think the good news was about the technical possibility of zero Covid, or at least drastic slowdown of the spread with full lockdown and tracking measures. The bad «news» was overestimation of potential costs of Covid, and once we reached Omicron, it took too long for Xi to notice both failure and good news of Omicron's relative mildness.

I think you're failing to model him. This boilerplate grasping autocrat theory is about as lazy as your theory of Huang, too. More generally I guess you're biased against and uncharitable towards «rulers», both CEOs and personalist dictators, they must be irrational, petty, and shooting themselves in the foot. Because otherwise it's not clear if «uh, but we'll stop electing boomers one day» suffices as a defense of a structurally compromised, easily corruptible universal suffrage 2-party democracy. I seriously believe that your succession system is straight up inferior to the CPC's one, both morally and technically. You impose no filter besides "graduated from a good school", you ask for no virtues except popularity and political instinct, your checks and balances and «institutions» are revealed to be hot air, you reward clientelism, and so on it goes. It's a very good system for ensuring non-violent successions and popular buy-in, but that's all it has going for it – insurance for elites who want to play the game of power without skin in the game. It's a complete profanation of the idea of democracy, which was designed for a different people, of different class, in a different context. Chinese system was at least designed for modern-ish China.

Other nations do not attempt to be free of any foreign dependencies and it's not a costless goal to pursue

Other nations can't, at least not yet. Only China and the US have a serious shot. It's a very valuable goal when you have a powerful enemy that wants you to be technologically behind and vulnerable to trade disruptions because it considers your self-directed development morally wrong, or inherently a threat.
I tire of this debate about autarky. It's a somewhat recent discovery for the Western public that China is doing that, overwhelmingly the complaints were about gross trade imbalance, IP theft, «military applications» and sectoral competition, you're one of the few who's talking about autarky as a problematic philosophical position. Though notably, Neal Stephenson predicted this dynamics in Diamond Age, see Seed vs Feed (no relation to Sneed).

You're telling me refusing China State of the Art chips might get more of the most talented researchers to come to the US … I think a job offer at our frontier labs should in fact come with a free golden Trump citizenship card stapled to an H200.

No, that's not the argument. I'm just listing their options. On the margins, yes, total compute denial might drain some more brains. I think that your bias is preventing you from noticing that they're not desperate like Indians, they're already pretty nationalist, and such blatantly hostile effort may backfire. I know that some OpenAI folks proposed stalling Chinese AGI project by granting O1s to top DeepSeek researchers, who privately said they are not interested in this garbage (several of them are returnees, and I guarantee you that they can easily 5x their income anytime by switching sides again).
Your society is just increasingly losing attractiveness. There are costs to vice, to dysfunction, to casual racism, to smug forgiveness of your every demerit, and to antagonism. There are also costs to having low sexual market value, frankly. How much is it worth in $$$ or H200s for a 20 year old nerd with 3400 CodeForces ranking to justify living in a place where you get Chinese women, rather than in Hangzhou? I think this detail is often underrated in analyzing people's choices.

Anyway, the argument was more about the difference between freely working on the best hardware they can get, and working in a shitty Soviet-style sharashka with a commissar. If the latter is implemented, the US does win on freedoms, values etc. Xi does not want to fold frontier private companies into a SOE and destroy them, in AI and otherwise. So he's navigating a fine line here in permitting Nvidia with caveats.

This may seem naive and romantic to you, but that's my view. They are invested in their research projects, their companies, their mission, their nation, these companies are currently culturally healthier than American ones. You can't change that with some bans, but Xi can, and he has to weigh the costs.

I could grant some small, measured in weeks to months, "lock in" effect for releasing export controls if that's what you want to call Chinese chip makers getting slightly less feedback from the frontier labs

my 95% interval is 1 to 5 years. You really overrate how plug and play it is. It's comparable to the problem of chips as such. They were designing chips on par with Nvidia back in 2019, they still don't have an equivalent to CUDA. In 2026 they'll tape out chips on par with Nvidia from 2022, and still won't have an equivalent to CUDA. I'll change my mind if I see any non-garbage model trained on Ascends, there's definitely more than enough raw compute for that already. Last time Huawei tried, it was an obfuscated DeepSeek V3 with a switched tokenizer.

These are American brains. We claim those. It's one of our things.

Well, that's the spirit. But there's a difference between being a heroic man at home and a brainy bugman in a foreign land. You've got to offer better deals if you want to keep them, because some top performers are going back. This guy, for example. New top performers are often skipping the US stage altogether. I see 5 IOI Gold winners on DeepSeek team. Graduated PKU and went straight for <$200K compensations at home. I think Zuck would be eager to pay multiples of that.

Chinese industrial capacity is built to and relies on exporting to function. It's not an accounting artifact. It's clear in the trade surplus and it's been a priority to fix for over a decade now with little to no progress. If trading partners want to behave like China and cut their imports then this whole system falls apart. The companies reliant on exports fail systematically. The savings of the Chinese citizen dry up.

That's a fair concern, and yes of course the Party shares it. I don't think it's an existential concern, because thermodynamics is more important than financial flows. If you really can produce everything cheaply in terms of energy and labor, you can lose 90% of your trade surplus and pivot to subsidizing demand, it'll be a politically costly but technologically straightforward adjustment, and yes you can survive an implosion of your companies. If you cannot produce much of anything cheaply, you can try to subsidize supply but you'll probably be flailing for years. And speaking of debt, you can do the arithmetic here. Even their most involuted industries are not in such a gutter.

China cannot fully implement Dual Circulation. That's largely a failure. That's also largely a product of tradeoffs that make sense under their assumptions about long term competitiveness and security, which I believe are not paranoid and in fact more rational than American assumptions were and are. Too many of their exported goods cannot be replaced in the short term, so they can currently afford this model. Notice, for instance, how they've shrugged off the decline of exports to the US market, fully offsetting it with Asia. The developing world has much need of cheap high quality goods, particularly capital goods, and will have for a while yet.

Going forward, we'll see.

Are these other nations not getting access to the labor erasers?

Are they? My impression is that the US intends to monopolize the top-tier product for national security purposes. They'll get open source Chinese versions or some nerfed American stuff.

But that's my idea of how your AGI race narrative would actually develop. Personally I think that everyone gets their sovereign AGI, sooner or later, so we'll indeed see a large reduction in non-commodities trade, shoring up of critical industries, and have to live with that.

Give me a break man.

I believe in individual responsibility for shared delusions, and I do think that your analysis is strongly influenced by an implicit belief in racial hierarchy, which is why you are not curious to learn more than tropes and some macroecon about this system your nation is in competition with. But fine, I won't insist.

I suspect Elop did that intentionally, though he just wanted to deliver fresh game to Microsoft and fumbled the company altogether. Now it's either iPhone or Chinese phones, and you tried to kill Huawei too.

This is a pretty common theory in Finland. After some Googling I found a translation of a book attempting to deboonk it, though I haven't read it myself.

Household consumption being 40% of GDP means households receive 40% of national income to spend. The rest goes to the state and corporate sectors, funding the investment-heavy model. Even if every yuan buys more calories than we thought, that doesn't change the share going to households versus the share going to industrial buildout.

Not so fast, different systems of national accounting and different relative prices complicate matters.

Chinese housing area/person roughly equals Germany's and energy consumption is nearly there, yet constitutes 25% of Geman PPP GDP per capita, with about 12.5k rent/utilities. Would both use similar systems, China's would be about 10k PPP, while lised PPP GDP/capita is... about 25k. Yet Chinese don't spend 40% on housing and energy, indeed housing's only a few percent of Chinese GDP (this is the imputed rent issue I harp on about). Remember, this is all PPP - supposedly adjusted...

Where US retail sales are 7.3T and Chinese 6.6T, US HFCE is 20T or 2.8x retail sales, while Chinese's is about 6.8T or 1x retail sales? (Then consider changing exchange rates when making the dollar numbers.) How can you compare US and Chinese numbers when the US' includes education, healthcare, travel, imputed rent and China's is just retail sales? @sarker

How is China getting the 70+% of its oil imports in this future?

Oil demand is decreasing if still slowly. Gasoline use is down. Last year, heavy vehicle use made up half of Chinese LNG consumption, which would look like substitution - but LNG demand is decreasing faster and faster. Huge solar and nuclear build outs are taking over (coal consumption is also dropping due to rapid construction of more efficient plants) and today, 22% of new heavy trucks there are electric. China is also building out synthetic natural gas plants enabled by cheap solar creating an effective price ceiling at $80 BOE.

We need to think of how the world would operate when major nations are capable of industrial autarky, because modulo some Butlerian Jihad we will have to deal with it anyway.

Any theories, here? Does every country decide to just sit back, possibly import raw commodities and energy that aren't otherwise attainable, and live in blissful abundance?

The second problem is that Europe’s trade with China is increasingly unbalanced. Europe is not trading services for the flood of electric cars, solar panels, and so on that China is sending. Instead, Europe is writing IOUs. That’s what a trade deficit is — the writing of IOUs in exchange for imports. Robin Harding of the Financial Times recently warned about this unbalanced trade, in an eloquent article entitled “China is making trade impossible”:

Huh? Isn't that the supposedly pea-brained Austrian Economist take? Why are neolibs copying other people's homework now?

When you're trading with an actor with ulterior motives free trade assumptions break down, even neoliberals know that you ought not actually sell the rope that will be used to hang you.

Depending on how you define “neoliberal”, not necessarily! As always the devil is in the details—I’m sure some self-described neoliberals would advocate for a measure of protectionism in industries relevant to defense and national security, for instance—but one plausible neoliberal response to a foreign country engaging in so-called anti-competitive trade practices (e.g. dumping) would be “Keep the goods flowing; why should we say no to their foreign aid?”

Depending on how you define “neoliberal”

This is of course always the rub.

“Keep the goods flowing; why should we say no to their foreign aid?”

I think this is best described as just the classical naive econ model. As far as models go this is at the very least middling, with most popular variations from it being the result of poorly thought out motivated reasoning for doing things that people want to do for other reasons. Still, one should not rely on game theory to keep the scorpion from jabbing you to death or however that fable goes.

It’s a mercantilist take; as far as I know, the Austrian school has nothing against trade deficits and indeed would support even unilateral free trade.

Kinda. Yes, Austrians are in favor of free trade, and tend to say deficits are just a natural part of trade, but they're quick to note that this is only the case under something like a gold standard, which has built-in balancing mechanisms, and that under fiat you can have perpetual deficits, which aren't good for you in the long run. Peter Schiff in particular had entire hours of rants about how the US is printing IOUs to buy consumer goods from Asia. The sentence I quoted from Noah Smith is literally indistinguishable from the kind of stuff he used to say (and probably still is).

You should wait to post this until it actually happens. China might get nearly equivalent chips in bulk by mid 2026, but it's a tough problem and things could easily go wrong. Doing a victory lap based on industry rumors is premature. This reminds me of the perennial Wunderwaffe posts we get from pro-Russian accounts on here, where this new missile or drone is just totally going to swamp Ukraine and this whole slow warfare will turn into a blitzkrieg. And then... that doesn't happen.

It seems to me that my read on the situation from back then, both the big picture and its implications for compute strategy, is now shared by both the USG and the CPC. The former is trying to regain its position and revenue in the Chinese GPU market and slow down Huawei/Cambricon/Kunlun/etc. ecosystem development by flooding the zone with mature Nvidia chips that will be adopted by all frontier players (eg DeepSeek again – they have a deep bench of Nvidia-specific talent and aren't willing to switch to half-baked Ascend CANN).

Alternative explanation: Jensen Huang won the game of "be the last person to talk to Trump", since he knows Trump is a waffling buffoon and Huang just wants to maximize Nvidia's stock, US security concerns be damned. Then on the Chinese side, the CCP doesn't really care about this CUDA vs CANN stuff nearly as much as it cares about its industrial policy of "make EVERYTHING in China", and a wave of Nvidia chips could disrupt that beyond concerns about ecosystems.

For now the loss of the indisputable Main Character status is being processed traumatically, with anger, denial

Oh good heavens. No, you don't have to be a traumatized, angry denialist to understand that maybe it's a bad thing for the US to give an extremely bottlenecked resource to its main geopolitical rival.

That's a funny perspective to me. Russians have negligible industrial base, atrophied Soviet military-industrial complex, and mainly export stuff like oil, gas, grain and fertilizers. We also simply don't have many smart people remaining, and instead have a population of jingoistic TV-watching cattle that needs steady supply of copium in the face of a protracted war that's going badly. Of course we have televised fantasies about Wunderwaffes. The US is, for all its grandeur, similarly a corrupt Soy and Gas Empire that struggles with building physical things relative to its consumption and ambition, we see whining about the Rust Belt, Powerpoints with 6th gen fighter jets and «Trump class battleships», and the whole AGI project is supposed to restore the claim to primacy. And even in Ukraine, Americans heroically grappled with the costs of exporting this or that long range wundermissile or Smart Shell, and thought that their Wunderwaffes like HIMARS, or Palmer Luckey's gadgets, will make more of a difference than commodity drone parts from Aliexpress procured by both sides. They did not.

China is the factory of the world and the source of almost all new process innovation and, say, the bulk of Californian top patent holders. The Chinese are not advertising their ion implantation techniques, procurement plans, fabs, they are quietly doing business and actively avoid international publicity on these matters. No, I don't think this is a Wunderwaffe. Yes, we'll see what they can actually produce in 2026.

Alternative explanation: Jensen Huang won the game of "be the last person to talk to Trump", since he knows Trump is a waffling buffoon and Huang just wants to maximize Nvidia's stock, US security concerns be damned.

This is still denialism of the erosion of fundamentals, I think. Classic stabbed-in-the-back-by-Jews [of Asia] doctrine. Huang founded Nvidia over 30 years ago, I don't believe he's a petty merchant optimizing for quarterly reports.

This is still denialism of the erosion of fundamentals, I think. Classic stabbed-in-the-back-by-Jews [of Asia] doctrine. Huang founded Nvidia over 30 years ago, I don't believe he's a petty merchant optimizing for quarterly reports.

Classic stabbed-in-the-back-by-Jews [of Asia]

Good grief x2.

The goal of the CEO of any American company is implicitly if not explicitly the maximization of shareholder value. Selling chips to China is just how Jensen Huang can achieve that better. The idea that Huang is doing it as some grand geopolitical play (and where his company's bottom line is a secondary concern) is a bit hard to take seriously. Like, he might be doing that, but you'd want to have a decent amount of evidence to convince people that it's not just the cynical moneygrubbing play.

No, we do not need allusions to Nazi conspiracies of the Jews to say "the CEO is probably just trying to make more profit".

The goal of the CEO of any American company is implicitly if not explicitly the maximization of shareholder value

You're so confident. On what time horizon? One quarter? One year? Decades? As long as the company gets to exist? Do you realize that Jensen is a founder, and founders are not equal to board-appointed CEOs?

The idea that Huang is doing it as some grand geopolitical play (and where his company's bottom line is a secondary concern) is a bit hard to take seriously.

If the only way you can think of this is myopic mercantilism, then you are indeed culturally and civilizationally inferior to the Chinese and deserve to lose, get dunked on and consigned to the dustbin of history. You're inferior people, xiaoren. The Teacher had said:

The nature of the noble man is like the wind, the nature of the inferior man is like the grass. When the wind blows over the grass, it always bends.

Get bent already.

…But I think people like Jensen and Elon — tellingly, not Americans, but those who have adopted the nobler American ideal — are different. Jensen says:

First, in order to have a race to do well in a race, you have to understand the race and you have to understand the resources that you’re working with, the assets that you have, the assets you don’t have, your advantages and your disadvantages. And some of the things to realize is that AI is fundamentally at its core level. And going back to the three levels that we’re talking about, at each level we have to make sure that we understand the game.

And this game isn’t. There’s no 60 minute clock on this thing. This is an infinite game. And so most people aren’t very good at playing infinite games. You know, Nvidia is now 33 years old. We’ve been through three computer revolutions, from the PC revolution to the Internet to mobile, and now we’re in AI. And so you have to, in order to thrive across all of these different changes in the environment, you have to understand how to play games.

And so the things that I just described, understanding the game, understanding the assets, you have really important at the first layer, at the technology layer, the most important thing to understand is that the intellectual capital, and remember, 50% of the world’s AI researchers are Chinese. First, just take a step back and recognize that that important factor has to play into how we think about the game.

The next is AI factories. In order to do well there, you need to have energy. Because fundamentally we transfer, we transform electricity into digital tokens. Just as the last industrial revolution transformed atoms through energy into, you know, steel things and physical things that we know cars and things like that, buildings and things like that. And the generation before that, we gave it water into a machine called the dynamo. And what came out was electricity. And so now we have electricity go in and tokens come out. So the next layer requires energy.

The layer above that is just happening now. And it’s really, really important that we understand that ultimately the winners of the last industrial revolution wasn’t the country that invented it, it was the country that applied it. And the United States applied. Applied steel, applied energy faster than any country. Everybody else was worried about things like labor and, you know, horses being replaced by cars and, you know, those kind of matters. But the United States just. We just took it and ran with it.

And so the infrastructural layer above that is about the application of the technology. It’s about not being afraid of it, wanting to engage it, reskilling. Reskilling our workforce so that we’re able to apply it, encouraging people to adopt it. And so when you look at the, when you look at AI through the lens that I just described to the framework I just described, each one of the layers has its own, if you will, challenges and opportunities, and the game’s a little different in each one.

I don't think Jensen wants to sell out to China to make line go up. He wants to keep playing the infinite game.

But inferior men can only interpret a superior man's vision in terms of profit.

Be less antagonistic. You write a lot of AAQCs, but you also have a real problem with not being a dick when arguing with people you want to talk down to. You are not a put-upon genius forced to interact with fools. Stop acting like you are.

If I have a problem, it's with exasperated, condescending and low-effort dismissals of good faith arguments, with eyerolls, smirks, chuckles and other juvenile garbage.

Good grief x2.

What the fuck is the appropriate response to this?

If you think something is not worth responding to, don't respond.

Everyone who responds by being antagonistic says (and believes) that they were provoked. You are still responsible for your response.

Jensen speaking here is mostly just CEO boilerplate. Obviously they'll say "oh yeah, we're in for the long haul", but that's not much in the way of evidence. I'll grant that founders have a bit more of a tendency towards pie-in-the-sky goals like 20 year plans and maybe geopolitical stuff, but Huang is still subject to the whims of shareholders. He doesn't even have extra insulation like Zuckerberg with a screwy voting shares system. And Elon makes plenty of boneheaded short-term decisions.

If the only way you can think of this is myopic mercantilism

Get bent already.

But inferior men can only interpret a superior man's vision in terms of profit.

Can you stop it with this nonsense please?

Can you stop with this nonsense please? He founded Nvidia, he navigated it strategically through every industry transition, proactively shaping them, he made a gamer hardware shop into the most valuable company on Earth and the kingmaker in the AGI race, he clearly intends to keep it in the running through all future transitions, and he understands Chinese competition very well. He knows that they're in a tough spot and Mellanox is not an adequate counter to Huawei's networking. He's trying to save not just his company but your asses, because he's existentially invested in them.

When he says that he's playing an infinite game rather than just chasing a quick buck that'd leave his headquarters irrelevant in under 20 years, this deserves infinitely more faith than your jaded dismissals of “CEO boilerplate”. You need to acknowledge that your standards of judgement and your theory of incentives are only fit for business done by inferior men. People are not created equal, opinions of people are not of equal worth, Jensen's opinion >>>>> median American's opinion.

Oh the high and mighty. The dude ran a company making hardware for gamers and crypto miners and got lucky that it ended up being civilizational important and that they bet on EUV big. He is by all measures obviously an excellent business man, impressively ahead of the game on this latest DRAM shortage. But none of that is evidence of some kind of long term view. Spare us the Ubermench talk, I thought we were supposed to be the nazis in decline.

It's impressive how you can make a $4.6T business in the US just being a lucky huckster, huh. Just like you can dance into becoming the president of a superpower while being a bumbling TV personality, rather than claw your way up over decades, starting from the flea-infested cave in Shaanxi. Blessed land, Manifest Destiny, a people chosen by Providence itself. I guess any mediocrity ought to feel invested in protecting it, then. Where else do you play and win in such lotteries.

But I don't share this theory. I don't think the US allows you to play on God Mode, and I think Jensen is not just an excellent businessman, and certainly not a “treasonous worm”. He is an industrial titan like Rockefeller or Carnegie, he genuinely has a long-term vision, and he demonstrably executes on it. America was made great by such men, and if it declines, it will be over forgetting their value.

Nazis were wrong about innate racial superiority. Most people are mediocre, whether Aryan or not. This doesn't mean that Nietzsche or Confucius were wrong about the existence of specific superior individuals.

I still don't understand how exporting chips to China is supposed to help the US in the long run when the Chinese long run plan is to not import chips.

How is it not supposed to help? Money is good, market share is good. It reduces US trade deficit, providing funds for more useful things. Just 1 million chips is $25B, it's equal to the annual worth of those soy exports Trump frets so much about, it's like 5 times more than the much-hyped LNG boom. It derisks the circular investment bubble with NVidia as the nexus that's now a large part of US economy, and extends the timeline on which China stops importing them (ie the moment where domestic computing platforms are adopted by their top labs and shutting Nvidia out is not disruptive to DeepSeek V5 or Doubao-Seed 3 or whatever).
In a more relaxed geopolitical environment, they may not even stop 100%, just like they're still buying high-end Western CNC machines, despite being able to make functionally similar ones now. Nvidia will still have better yields, lower unit prices, higher power efficiency, more polished software, likely for decades. It's not like they have a philosophical commitment to not buy at all, they are simply focused on becoming strategically invulnerable to export controls after years of American gloating about how they'll fall behind and die, starting with Huawei.

The main argument against this has nothing to do with Chinese plans to stop buying chips later, it's just that they'll develop and deploy stronger AI at larger scale and secure some advantages in the short term, in the limit literally ASI. An auxiliary argument is that they will use extra compute to speed up the necessary research. That can be debated and weighed against standard economic arguments.

How is it not supposed to help? Money is good, market share is good.

We were just discussing long vs short term thinking. Money and market share are the short term returns, the question is about the long term.

In a more relaxed geopolitical environment, they may not even stop 100%, just like they're still buying high-end Western CNC machines, despite being able to make functionally similar ones now. Nvidia will still have better yields, lower unit prices, higher power efficiency, more polished software, likely for decades. It's not like they have a philosophical commitment to not buy at all, they are simply focused on becoming strategically invulnerable to export controls after years of American gloating about how they'll fall behind and die, starting with Huawei.

We're not in a more relaxed geopolitical environment. We're in an environment where China is doing everything it can to stimulate domestic chip production including by banning imports of certain chips in the first place, which sounds like a philosophical commitment to not buying at all to me.

If you believe that China is interested in being invulnerable to export controls and you believe that Nvidia use can lead to lock-in, it follows that China's strategy would be to avoid the lock-in in the first place, which means that there is no long term market for Nvidia chips in China.

The main argument against this has nothing to do with Chinese plans to stop buying chips later

Correct. I brought up the other argument in a previous thread where you responded with a non-sequitur about orange man having bad trade policy. Here I'm limiting myself strictly to your claim that chip exports would be beneficial in the long run for Nvidia.

Money and market share are the short term returns, the question is about the long term.

I have the exact opposite view on this. Market share is the long term play – maybe 30 years. Your “long term” AGI supremacy play is a no-term Hail Mary premised on some dubious assumptions and, frankly, low IQ racism about Chinese capacity for independent R&D.

including by banning imports of certain chips in the first place, which sounds like a philosophical commitment to not buying at all to me.

It's a philosophical commitment to independence. They enact protectionist measures for fledgling industries, and scale them down after achieving competitiveness, like they cut subsidies for EVs or batteries.

As I've repeatedly said, current Chinese AI software has low adoption, especially by talented collectives, and thus low development velocity; so long as it doesn't get adoption it doesn't matter if they can physically make good chips, they'll remain vulnerable to export controls and will have to do another multi-year moonshot after the next Democrat opportunistically cuts them off. H20 and RTX Pro 6000D are just not providing enough value to justify further software stagnation (not to mention reduced revenues to domestic manufacturers). H200, because it is both a powerful GPU and scales to large training clusters, seems to be marginally valuable enough so we see more nuanced regulation. After domestic chips become better than H200 (or rather, domestic systems + power subsidy become competitive with Nvidia clusters) and there's wide adoption of Huawei CANN and Cambricon NeuWare, I predict that they will relax controls on imported chips, maybe replacing it with a simple tariff. Your model suggests that they will tighten controls. It's an empirical matter, we will see in a matter of 2 years, most likely.

it follows that China's strategy would be to avoid the lock-in in the first place, which means that there is no long term market for Nvidia chips in China

As explained above, it does not follow and you're refusing to understand what they're doing.

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This reminds me of the perennial Wunderwaffe posts we get from pro-Russian accounts on here, where this new missile or drone is just totally going to swamp Ukraine and this whole slow warfare will turn into a blitzkrieg.

Umm... it is the Ukrainan side that relies on wunderwaffes - like the mythical flamingos - that are dirt cheap, produced at large scale and supiciously missing on the battlefield. I don't think someone here has praised russian weaponry. What they have is cheap-ish stuff produced in masse. The pro-ru people here generally underestimate the ability of ukraine to kinda hold together.

If Britain and Argentina are two bald men fighting over a comb, then Russia and Ukraine are two butch lesbians fighting over a condom.

I don't think the situations are comparable here. For Britain, beating up Argentina and keeping whatever they kept, nobody cares by now what it is anyway, was pointless and meaningless. Britain is not an Empire anymore and has no desire or capability of being one. Heck, they aren't sure they want to be Britain anymore - displaying a national flag is officially deemed to be an offense.

For Russia, however, at least in the concept Putin sees the future of Russia, conquering Ukraine is an absolutely key part. You can not have a Russian Empire without having it's historical core - the three Russias, Great, Small and White. While Belorussia is formally independent, Putin has enough control over it to consider it his. The control of Malorossia is absolutely vital, without it the whole project of recovering the past glory has no sense. It doesn't have to be officially part of Russia, at least not yet, but it has to be under the Moscow heel, otherwise you just can't pretend you are doing anything to recover Russian Empire. Within this concept, the war makes total sense for Russia. So comparing it to British-Argentinian war is not proper, it's very different. It may be meaningless for the US, as a tiny Russian Empire - at least for now - changes little to the US for now - but it is very meaningful for both Russia and Ukraine.

I don't think the situations are comparable here. For Britain, beating up Argentina and keeping whatever they kept, nobody cares by now what it is anyway, was pointless and meaningless.

The Falkland Islands, and Argentina very much still cares.

OK, I stand corrected, nobody but Argentina (which I am sure prefers Malvinas) cares.

Indeed they do prefer Malvinas. I suppose the 3700 people on the Falklands care too, though the half-million sheep and million penguins likely do not.

Another important difference is that Britain could kick Argentinian ass very easily, whereas Russia has navigated itself into an existential war. I think on the balance Falklands war made more sense for the respective Empire.

On one hand, you are right, that Russia got in deeper than they planned to. On the other hand, I don't think Putin minds too much - the expenses of the war are quite tolerable so far, the final power consolidation, which otherwise may or may not have been smooth, went without a hitch, he got rid of pretty much all opposition and a lot on undesirables, and has a mandate to do pretty much anything he wants without any internal opposition. He can maintain it like this for many years. Maybe taking over Donbass will take another three years instead of original three days, who cares? These three years he is an unquestioned war leader, whose victorious army is conquering enemy lands. The economy has not collapsed, the people are not starving. No significant riots or disturbances. As Russian rulers go, it's not a bad showing at all. So I don't think they have a reason to see it as any problem right now.

Russia and Ukraine are two butch lesbians fighting over a condom

Time for a new flair, methinks.

Of course, my anime waifu that exists only to flatter me.

I don’t have the knowledge or experience to refute much of this but do that consider China has not found some new, incredible system of economics. They’re massively tilting their economy and investment towards things like this to the detriment of their consumers and other sectors of the economy. It is an inefficient economy that needs strong reforms that will likely never happen. The main character argument seems like some self fulfilling prophecy you believe in. Whatever happens, I’d probably rather be in the shoes of the US than China in the next 50 years.

I don’t underestimate their ability to innovate but I don’t believe in their ability to produce strong thinkers and leaders that come from out of nowhere. There’s some appropriate panic about their progress in many areas, but I just don’t believe in ‘capitalism with socialist Chinese characteristics’. The idea that they will just steamroll the world is far fetched imo.

Thats what gets me. The dream for some Chinese seems to be for their children to leave China, how many of them want their child to go to Harvard? And some of the Chinese here in America have relatives sending them money to invest in oppurtunities not available to those living in China.

There are a lot of Chinese. A tiny fraction of them could be dreaming of leaving (smaller than the "move to Canada"/"move to Russia" faction of Americans?) and there would still be enough that it would feel like a huge phenomenon in the target country.

(Also, how up-to-date is the perception that it is common?)

My impression is that in recent years the relative status of top American and Chinese universities has flipped in elite Chinese circles, such that someone who went to Harvard is seen as a slacker who ran away because they didn't do well enough on the Gaokao to make it to Tsinghua.

I think that’s mostly cope from people who can’t get into Tsinghua or Harvard. I think people do rightfully see things like "Columbia master’s students in biostatistics" or overseas student from anywhere else that's not Ivy as slackers since many of those degrees are essentially bought, but that criticism doesn’t really extend to most other Ivy programs. Among well-educated people, these schools are seen as more or less equivalent, though choosing Tsinghua versus Harvard does signal your political preferences to some extent.

They’re massively tilting their economy and investment towards things like this to the detriment of their consumers and other sectors of the economy.

You say this like the US isn't massively tilting their economy in even worse and more unsustainable directions. The US has been privileging financial fraud, outsourcing, private equity vulture capitalism and a whole host of other social ills. The USA would unironically be better off if they directed all the investment currently being placed into gambling, sports betting and outsourcing into high tech manufacturing and research.

Come on this is farcical and focuses on an absolutely tiny part of the US economy. Sports betting is annoying and predatory but it was happening off shore until recently. There are always going to be money grubbing industries in good times. The pump and dump stuff in crypto is probably a more reasonable thing to think would have downstream effects.

The main thing is the US is a consumer and services dominated economy, which is what happens when an advanced economy is capable of circulating money back to households to sustain demand. China is depressing this part of their economy and has huge overcapacity as a result. More than that, they’re so focused on production that other countries are frustrated that they do not import goods and services. As people are saying in this thread, the US is the biggest consumer market in the world.

They have a ton of EV companies, of which like 5 will make it to 2030. This strategy of focused investment might look good for industry but it is not good for the ‘quality growth’ they apparently are after. I do not believe this is a sustainable strategy and does not position them well to rival the US.

Yeah. Atleast China curates things on plausible social utility

If I understand @DaseindustriesLtd correctly, he's not saying that China will steamroll the world, he's saying that the US will lose its position of clear dominance.

I don’t believe in their ability to produce strong thinkers and leaders that come from out of nowhere

It doesn't come out of nowhere, it's called education, competition and meritocracy, and they clearly have strong leaders and thinkers already. You're just in a bubble.

And precisely this mindset's why the US, yea West is decaying - instead of infinite striving for excellence, those raised here sit on past laurels and cope away anything better. Living without curiosity is comfortable lest you learn something new and convert everything around you into tech debt to work on - yet that comfort's disappeared, hence our entire community, formed around discussions of cost disease and cultural decline.

More glib, is America, are Americans really just better because of superior protestant-frontier culture - even though they lost their mandate and lack children to be replaced? What distinguishes Chinese in America from those in the PRC, home grown communists from foreign infiltrators, pedophiles from the heartland like Hastert and Foley from Afghan bachah-lovers and Pakistani groomers? REV Group closed factories and quintupled prices so an (inferior!) American firetruck costs a magnitude more than Chinese or even German vehicles, which our communities must pay for, our world is on fire, and you say nothing's wrong.

I don't understand your point here.

You're complaining about Americans being glib but your comment is one of the worst offenders I've seen in a while.

I think his point is that many Americans are watching China build an extremely impressive society almost from nothing and searching for excuses to explain Chinese achievement away rather than deciding they could learn a thing or two.

(It’s not ‘real’ growth, Chinese can only imitate, what about the consumer sector, etc.)

It is conceivable (though not certain) that the achievements of the West are not a reflection of a better philosophy or system of government but merely a temporary reflection of weakness in our competitors plus luck for us (finding a new continent, the renaissance, etc.). If so, if so, it would behoove us to get our act together and drop our certainty in our own systems ASAP.

It is also conceivable, and indeed quite certain, that civilizations can rise and decline, and this is only partially about essential qualities of the people, because genetics doesn't in fact explain 100% of the outcomes. That culture itself can rot. The West, I think, is genuinely an exceptional civilization, with very strong fundamentals. So was China, at one point of time. But China declined through unforced errors. So can the West. It's important to internalize just how advanced they were, and how far they have fallen.

From The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers:

Of all the civilizations of premodern times, none appeared more advanced, none felt more superior, than that of China. Its considerable population, 100-130 million compared with Europe's 50-55 million in the fifteenth century; its remarkable culture; its exceedingly fertile and irrigated plains, linked by a splendid canal system since the eleventh century; and its unified, hierarchic administration run by a well-educated Confucian bureaucracy had given a coherence and sophistication to Chinese society which was the envy of foreign visitors. True, that civilization had been subjected to severe disruption from the Mongol hordes, and to domination after the invasions of Kublai Khan. But China had a habit of changing its conquerors much more than it was changed by them, and when the Ming dynasty emerged in 1368 to reunite the empire and finally defeat the Mongols, much of the old order and learning remained.

To readers brought up to respect "western" science, the most striking feature of Chinese civilization must be its technological precocity. Huge libraries existed from early on. Printing by movable type had already appeared in eleventh-century China, and soon large numbers of books were in existence. Trade and industry, stimulated by the canal-building and population pressures, were equally sophisticated. Chinese cities were much larger than their equivalents in medieval Europe, and Chinese trade routes as extensive. Paper money had earlier expedited the flow of commerce and the growth of markets. By the later decades of the eleventh century there existed an enormous iron industry in north China, producing around 125,000 tons per annum, chiefly for military and governmental use—the army of over a million men was, for example, an enormous market for iron goods. It is worth remarking that this production figure was far larger than the British iron output in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, seven centuries later! The Chinese were also probably the first to invent true gunpowder; and cannons were used by the Ming to overthrow their Mongol rulers in the late fourteenth century.

[…]

But the Chinese expedition of 1433 was the last of the line, and three years later an imperial edict banned the construction of seagoing ships; later still, a specific order forbade the existence of ships with more than two masts. Naval personnel would henceforth be employed on smaller vessels on the Grand Canal. Cheng Ho's great warships were laid up and rotted away. Despite all the opportunities which beckoned overseas, China had decided to turn its back on the world.

[…] Apart from the costs and other disincentives involved, therefore, a key element in China's retreat was the sheer conservatism of the Confucian bureaucracy—a conservatism heightened in the Ming period by resentment at the changes earlier forced upon them by the Mongols. In this "Restoration" atmosphere, the all-important officialdom was concerned to preserve and recapture the past, not to create a brighter future based upon overseas expansion and commerce. According to the Confucian code, warfare itself was a deplorable activity and armed forces were made necessary only by the fear of barbarian attacks or internal revolts. The mandarins' dislike of the army (and the navy) was accompanied by a suspicion of the trader. The accumulation of private capital, the practice of buying cheap and selling dear, the ostentation of the nouveau riche merchant, all offended the elite, scholarly bureaucrats—almost as much as they aroused the resentments of the toiling masses. While not wishing to bring the entire market economy to a halt, the mandarins often intervened against individual merchants by confiscating their property or banning their business. Foreign trade by Chinese subjects must have seemed even more dubious to mandarin eyes, simply because it was less under their control.

…

This dislike of commerce and private capital does not conflict with the enormous technological achievements mentioned above. The Ming rebuilding of the Great Wall of China and the development of the canal system, the ironworks, and the imperial navy were for state purposes, because the bureaucracy had advised the emperor that they were necessary. But just as these enterprises could be started, so also could they be neglected. The canals were permitted to decay, the army was periodically starved of new equipment, the astronomical clocks (built c. 1090) were disregarded, the ironworks gradually fell into desuetude.

These were not the only disincentives to economic growth. Printing was restricted to scholarly works and not employed for the widespread dissemination of practical knowledge, much less for social criticism. The use of paper currency was discontinued. Chinese cities were never allowed the autonomy of those in the West; there were no Chinese burghers, with all that that term implied; when the location of the emperor's court was altered, the capital city had to move as well. Yet without official encouragement, merchants and other entrepreneurs could not thrive; and even those who did acquire wealth tended to spend it on land and education, rather than investing in protoindustrial development. Similarly, the banning of overseas trade and fishing took away another potential stimulus to sustained economic expansion; such foreign trade as did occur with the Portuguese and Dutch in the following centuries was in luxury goods and (although there were doubtless many evasions) controlled by officials.

In consequence, Ming China was a much less vigorous and enterprising land than it had been under the Sung dynasty four centuries earlier. There were improved agricultural techniques in the Ming period, to be sure, but after a while even this more intensive farming and the use of marginal lands found it harder to keep pace with the burgeoning population; and the latter was only to be checked by those Malthusian instruments of plague, floods, and war, all of which were very difficult to handle. Even the replacement of the Mings by the more vigorous Manchus after 1644 could not halt the steady relative decline.

One final detail can summarize this tale. In 1736—just as Abraham Darby's ironworks at Coalbrookdale were beginning to boom—the blast furnaces and coke ovens of Honan and Hopei were abandoned entirely. They had been great before the Conqueror had landed at Hastings. Now they would not resume production until the twentieth century.

Is anyone saying China isn't in some of ways impressive? But except for maybe industrial might it's still no comparison. For example, many Chinese people joke that the Chinese dream is "becoming American". It's an unpleasant place to live for all but a few. Much like the Soviets it's a poor totalitarian dictatorship forcing money into key sectors at an unsustainable rate to keep pace with America. I'm not implying it will totally collapse like the Soviets by the way, but acting like a country with a $13k GDP per capita is a true peer to America in most ways is on its face pretty tough to swallow.

I have only ever visited China once but most of the people I spoke to (and the Chinese I have known outside China) were very proud of their country and not very interested in America.

This is the point being made above about glibness. China is rapidly developing industrial might, while America (plus Europe) looks an awful lot like a sclerotic mess with incredibly high costs, propped up by finance and an AI bubble. And faced with this, Americans claim that ‘actually, the Chinese want to be like us really’ and ‘Chinese growth is all an illusion so it’s not worth worrying about’*. Americans seem right now to be incapable of genuinely entertaining the proposition that the American way of doing things isn’t the only way or the best way.

*The latter claim may be true. Genuinely unsure.

Whereas one might as easily point out that huge amounts of Western economic activity are either self-sabotaging (wasting vast amounts of treasure and brainpower on finely-balanced legal questions, financialisation of the real economy) or fripperies and super stimuli (witness China heavily restricting video games).

Ultimately people didn’t want to be American or like Americans because of America’s culture and system of government, but because America was rich and powerful and they wanted to be rich and powerful too. Even for Americans themselves this is the case, I think: how many Americans would happily live in a third-world shithole economy as long as it was run faithfully in accordance with the American Constitution and Amendments? 10%? If America loses industrial might, they will lose a lot of other things in quick succession.

This is the same mistake we British made, incidentally: that the rest of the world looked up to us and came to be educated by us and copied our parliament because they liked us and respected our way of life. No. They respected Empire and when the Empire died so too did the respect.

I have only ever visited China once but most of the people I spoke to (and the Chinese I have known outside China) were very proud of their country and not very interested in America.

I have spent a lot of time in China and more time with chinese expats in Asia and America. There is a subset of people who are absurdly pro-CCP, mostly party insiders and a subset of highly educated/succesful ultra-nationalists. These are the only people you will probably meet if you don't speak Chinese or another Asian language. Young people at large are very unhappy with the current state of corruption, know the wages there are awful, and furthermore know the youth unemployment rate is awful and rising. Of course, my sample set (so to speak) will be biased, (particularly the expat community in asia) but it's not a secret that the Chinese youth are being screwed over by the CCP intentionally depressing wages and an additional issue of huge unemployment. There is no more "the future looks brighter than yesterday" feeling in China now. Quite the opposite.

And when I say "The Chinese dream is to become American." I say it because it is actually a phrase thrown around many circles in (at least South) China. I didn't create it myself.

This is the point being made above about glibness. China is rapidly developing industrial might, while America (plus Europe) looks an awful lot like a sclerotic mess with incredibly high costs, propped up by finance and an AI bubble. And faced with this, Americans claim that ‘actually, the Chinese want to be like us really’ and ‘Chinese growth is all an illusion so it’s not worth worrying about’*. Americans seem right now to be incapable of genuinely entertaining the proposition that the American way of doing things isn’t the only way or the best way.

This seems like a huge strawman to me. Americans aren't capable of ciriticizing themselves? Really? I mean, go just about anywhere and all Americans do is complain about America to the point of parody. Hell, if you want me to give you a list of my complaints about America I will gladly list them here, but they just won't be that America is poor with a government funneling people's money into a tech race that it's not fit to compete in. You have some fair points about the sclerotic bureacracy, but undoubtedly it's much more complicated than the popular meme of "China just gets things done and America/the West doesn't".

Ultimately people didn’t want to be American or like Americans because of America’s culture and system of government, but because America was rich and powerful and they wanted to be rich and powerful too. Even for Americans themselves this is the case, I think: how many Americans would happily live in a third-world shithole economy as long as it was run faithfully in accordance with the American Constitution and Amendments? 10%? If America loses industrial might, they will lose a lot of other things in quick succession.

I would say 150+ years of mass immigration before American total hegemonic power suggests that people wanted to be Americans long before America was the all powerful hegemon it is now. However, I will admit a lot of that shine has worn off since America has become more and more like a European bureacracy laden all encompassing state. America is not as much the land of the free as it was, even if it's doing better than any other developed country I can think of.

EDIT: Let's also note that right now China is very poweful and nobody wants to become Chinese. Even me, somone who has an obsession with Asian culture and languages, who finds Chinese history very interesting, and loves parts of its (former) civilization would admit this.

But there is also a truth that people want to emulate winners, not losers. Britain and Europe at large are on large losing streaks to say the least.

Without doxxing yourself, can you tell us when and where you were in China/East Asia? I feel this is one of the most important pieces of information when discussing the country. China in 2025, 2015, and 2005 are completely different places, and people’s views on the current state of the country, the outside world, and their own upward mobility differ dramatically. Without that context I find the discussion largely moot. I probably fit your description of the “well-educated, ultranationalist Chinese you find outside China”, although I’d describe myself as overeducated and only mildly nationalist. My social circle is obviously not representative of China as a whole, but at least within this overeducated slice of society, opinions about the Chinese state and future life prospects have changed substantially over the past two decades. During my childhood, among adults (and by osmosis among kids), there was a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction especially around corruption. As a kid, I remember adults constantly talking about “塞钱” (stuffing money) into police officers pockets to change a child’s name, birthday, etc. Corruption was absolutely rampant then. Ten years later to around 2015, when I was in university, tthe general sentiment at least in big cities had shifted a lot. There was a sense that the wind had changed, and unless you were very rich or very well connected, you couldn’t and shouldn’t expect things to work the old way. Gifting doctors money probably will get you a bed by the window but wouldn’t get you better treatment, police wouldn’t take bribes to change your kid’s name. Of course this wasn’t uniform across the country, corruption remained more prevalent in smaller cities, but the change was real. Other things like copy right also changed quite a bit. Gone were the days where I can find pirated movies on bilibili with a simple search, and now you’d need many layers of get-around to find those movies, although those are still out there if you try harder.

Another ten years later, here we are in 2025. The corruption issue is certainly not among the top things on people’s minds, which is why I think your information is at least 10 years out of date, especially the claim that “young people are very unhappy with the current state of corruption”. Young people simply have not experienced the level of corruption that will make them very unhappy with the current state of corruption. Xi's anti-corruption campaign created a shit ton of extra bureaucratic nonsense like asking dance club of elderly to fill fifty forms and only spend 20 rmb per person on their Chinese New Year gift purchase or what not, but by no means ineffectual. I think the top concerns on the average Chinese person’s mind today are wages, housing (which I actually think is a critical failure point of the country. housing price where I grow up increased 50 folds in 20 years), healthcare, and marriage/childcare. Corruption in China today is much more like corruption in the U.S. than in Nigeria: subtler, not a dominant factor in everyday life, but one that occasionally erupts into major scandals. I do agree that most young people think wages are bad and unemployment is bad, in a way not unlike the vibecession discussion in the US. But to be blunt it’s simply regarded to say that Chinese people by and large have not benefitted tremendously from the economic development, or better off than they were ten years ago. Claims that only a tiny fraction of people benefited from China’s meteoric rise, that only the “highly educated, successful ultranationalists”, or 富二代 who drives aston martin in Vancouver and driving up rent, or the red princelings, got their share, while everyone else was left behind, strike me as peak delusion if said by some Chinese youth and peak cope if from an American, NYT columnist or themotte frequenter. It’s just undeniable that a vast majority of Chinese people benefited materially from the CCP’s economic policies over the past two decades. Maybe one consider that to be only small achievement, but I disagree strongly. Or maybe we can do the usual “but at what cost” thing and I’ll even agree largely, but I don’t think that’s what you said.

As for “the Chinese want to be like Americans”, you’re not entirely wrong but you are still very mistaken. Again, there’s a clear progression in sentiment. Twenty years ago on Baidu Tieba, then the largest Chinese discussion forum, people requesting porn would often append “下辈子美利坚”, or “next life, America”, a pun implying a wish to be reincarnated in the US with a pun (坚means hard, as in harder penis) for a harder “weapon”. That kind of open and widespread worship of the U.S. (and, by extension, of whiteness. people even slapped “Made in Czechia” labels onto low quality chinesium as a supposed mark of superior quality) is nowhere near as common today. Those same people, I suspect, either turned into 反贼 (traitors, as pro-CCP pinkies 粉红 call them) or transitioned into 粉红 themselves. As a line from a Chinese movie goes, “they follow whoever wins”, and China has been doing a lot of “winning” lately, certainly less than those “winnologists” (赢学家, Chinese nationalists who crave winning) believe but more than enough for the mildly nationalists online to be 10x as vocal as they were before. Are people more pessimistic about their own future than a few years ago? Maybe, especially after the catastrophic handling of covid. But have they reverted to wishing everyone could be reincarnated as Americans? No. That era is gone. Maybe that’s a low bar, but a change is still a change.

It does pain me that many of my fellow countryman want to turn their cities into LED hellscapes, which in many minds signal “development”, a cargo-cult worship of I guess the American or their imaginary West with Chinese characteristics. Still, as many below have pointed out, the Chinese want to be like Americans not because your Americaness, but because you’re rich and powerful. To Americans, this distinction may seem unimportant, since being American is already synonymous with being rich and powerful. But I think it is not synonymous for most Chinese and when American economical gild fades you will see the distinction.

I’ve lurked on here for many years. My own social circle is a giant blue bubble, and this is one of the few places where I can read from a grayish-red slice of Americans who are thoughtful and articulate. Over time I’ve sensed a growing belief there that something is rotten in the US. Whatever their prescriptions for social illness, there’s a pervasive pessimism. Difficulty celebrating small wins (see the thread down below “small hiccups among decades of winning” re the OU placing the trans TA on admin leave); tech pessimism (more among general well-educated blue tribers, not here); cynicism toward government everywhere, but especially at home. Yet despite all this, most Americans on that forum still seem to believe that America, whatever she represents, is fundamentally great. They criticize her, but they also believe in her. I’d argue the Chinese are similar.

Why is it so hard to understand that, just as Americans can criticize America while loving and caring about it, the Chinese can do the same? Why assume that when they criticize the government for mishandling of covid, or flip-flop between one-child policy and infinite child policy, or letting real estate being a major source of local government income and get them hopelessly addicted to it, they are not simply voicing their concerns similar to red-blooded Americans, or like performative blue tribers ranting about silly shit, but are actually losing hope in CCP’s mandate of heaven and yearn for liberty and democracy? Why is it unthinkable that Chinese people, nationalist or not, mean what they say, not because they’re misled by the CCP, but because they’ve actually experienced the benefits of their country’s rise? Why default to cynicism when a much more straightforward explanation is available? I suspect the answer says more about Americans than it does about the Chinese.

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I would say 150+ years of mass immigration before American total hegemonic power

Sure, people don't really care about "power" - but wealth? Already from the mid 17th century, America was more or less the wealthiest place in the world per capita and really broke away from Europe in the 18th century.

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All points taken.

FWIW what I’m basing my ‘Chinese’ reports on is:

a) various conversations with (mostly older) people in train stations etc. Maybe I am the victim of a sophisticated propaganda barrage designed to subvert visiting foreigners but if it can successfully hire/imitate retired professors of geology then it’s a very good program. I didn’t speak to younger people.

b) My Chinese co-workers in Japan. One of whom is a very good friend and left China to escape his overbearing extended family not Xi. He is mildly pro-China rather than anti-China or pro-America, but not to any silly extent.

This seems like a huge strawman to me. Americans aren't capable of ciriticizing themselves? Really?

Of course Americans are capable of criticising themselves. But in the main they seem to criticise themselves for not being American enough. For failing to live up to the American ideal, undermining American freedoms/rights, too much or too little immigration according to taste. Very few people apart from the largely-defunct pro-European movement are saying that maybe the American way of doing things is at best one system among many. Or for example things like, “maybe balance-of-power democracy and a system of rights defended by law is less effective than a single party run by engineers and a tightly controlled industrial policy” or “maybe basing our national mythology on having a revolution to avoid paying taxes and submitting to central authority encourages fractiousness and sectarianism”.

EDIT:

150+ years of mass immigration before American total hegemonic power suggests that people wanted to be Americans long before America was the all powerful hegemon it is now

You do have to bear in mind who these people were, though. Overwhelmingly Irish, Italian, German and Jewish, with some Chinese. All people who had pretty good reasons (poverty or persecution or not wanting to live with the Prussians) for leaving their current country. I am sure they liked the idea of freedom but I think that the push factors were more pressing. And indeed Britain also got many of these people.

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Modern Chinese are becoming less materialist, less pro-democracy and more nationalist, even as life satisfaction falls, so I really don't think they're attributing their woes to the CCP.

it's not a secret that the Chinese youth are being screwed over by the CCP intentionally depressing wages and an additional issue of huge unemployment

Isn't this pretty much an obvious conspiracy theory? They simply don't have enough high-paying white collar jobs for an enormous surge in overqualified university graduates. Why the hell wouldn't wages be stagnant if supply outstrips demand.

Hell, if you want me to give you a list of my complaints about America I will gladly list them here, but they just won't be that America is poor with a government funneling people's money into a tech race that it's not fit to compete in

I think that's proving his point. Like, this kind of framing strikes me as deserving of very harsh criticism, it's basically barbaric gibberish. But it's part of your culture, your "civilization", such as there is.

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Does it even matter who wins this industrial competition? It might as well be a football game between foreign nations to me, and you. I just want to be, a swiss. To live comfortably without an overlord. If pikes no longer suffice, nukes.

When the japanese and south koreans copied and then bested american cars and german optics and swiss watches, did the americans and germans and swiss subsequently sink into poverty? No, they just got richer. It has never been a zero-sum game. Believers in zero-sum games end up playing negative-sum games.

When the japanese and south koreans copied and then bested american cars and german optics and swiss watches, did the americans and germans and swiss subsequently sink into poverty? No, they just got richer. It has never been a zero-sum game. Believers in zero-sum games end up playing negative-sum games.

I see your point, but it occurs to me that it's at least theoretically possible for a nation (or some other group) to end up in a situation where they don't produce anything that anyone else wants. And in fact there are nations (and groups) with these characteristics, and they tend to be very poor and also reliant on handouts.

Germany, Switzerland, and the United States still produce a lot of goods and services that people will trade for.

When the japanese and south koreans copied and then bested american cars and german optics and swiss watches, did the americans and germans and swiss subsequently sink into poverty?

I don't know what the Swiss thought of it, but Americans absolutely had a psychotic meltdown about Japanese competition. I think you don't get how intoxicating the sense of supremacy is. Switzerland is just a nation, its manufactures are just manufactures, it operates on the logic of comparative advantage. Americans have an ideological stake in being Number One.

Half of congress in the 80s had literally fought Japan in the Second World War, anti-Japanese hostility was far from purely economic.

China was at best a secondary antagonist in the Cold War (and no longer after 1972). Korea is little remembered, before the memory of almost all living Americans and the present state of North Korea means that most people have no idea of how involved the PLA was. So the last ‘real war’ that was USA vs China was what, the Boxer Rebellion?

It could change if Xi panics and decides to abandon the slow game for Taiwan (which would be surprising) by staging the most audacious possible invasion involving a first strike at American bases, but even in the event of a ground invasion (unlikely) I consider that relatively unlikely.

Some grand global game of competition in which AMERICA NUMBA ONE just doesn’t really exist in the minds of most Americans in the way it does for the Chinese or even for, say, the French. American identity is tied to more amorphous things that don’t really have anything to do with global affairs like the Wild West and country music. A Dane or Swiss will gladly lecture you on why Denmark or Switzerland is the best country on earth (both would be mostly correct). Americans don’t really do that except in a very tongue in cheek Team America World Police way and even that is mostly limited to the middle class.

Italians abroad will talk about Ferrari and Columbus and pasta. Americans abroad don’t really lecture anyone about Google and Microsoft and Chevron. It’s not shame in the German way, but it’s not really pride either; global economic and cultural hegemony just isn’t central to American self-conception.

Some grand global game of competition in which AMERICA NUMBA ONE just doesn’t really exist in the minds of most Americans in the way it does for the Chinese or even for, say, the French. American identity is tied to more amorphous things that don’t really have anything to do with global affairs like the Wild West and country music. A Dane or Swiss will gladly lecture you on why Denmark or Switzerland is the best country on earth (both would be mostly correct). Americans don’t really do that except in a very tongue in cheek Team America World Police way and even that is mostly limited to the middle class.

Americans don't do that because we don't need to. We know we're number one, we know everyone else (especially the French, who hate it, but excepting the Chinese) knows we're number one, and there's no point in arguing about it.

Honestly, I think the "We're number 1" mentality is integral to American's self-conception, but it doesn't necessarily need to be on wealth/power. We were happily number 1 in Liberty for a long while without any corresponding wealth, and that high will sustain us long after our global dominance ends.

I wish I could agree. That is a future that previous generations would have been fine with, but modern Americans continue to value liberty less and less. See the steady attempts to carve away at the first, second, fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth, tenth, and fourteenth Amendments.

Freedom of religion -> freedom of worship

Freedom of speech -> not including hate speech

Freedom of the press -> should only apply to professional journalists

Right to bear arms -> only if you’re a professional bodyguard or in the military

Freedom from search and seizure -> but only if it doesn’t make the police’s job more difficult

Pleading the Fifth -> “obviously guilty,” according to most people

Private property cannot be seized -> civil asset forfeiture

Right to confront your accuser -> unless the accuser would find it traumatic

No excessive fines -> unless you manufacture guns or are Alex Jones

Powers reserved to the states -> a joke

Equal protection under the laws -> affirmative action

Just to mention a few.

You are unfortunately correct directionally, but you underestimate just how bad it can get in other places. We can remain "first" of a metric that craters globally for some time.

I agree, but will Americans still care that they’re first in liberty, or will they see that as an unfortunate holdover from earlier times? If things continue as they are, I think most Americans will see that as something in need of fixing, not something to proudly base their identity on.

The whole "private property cannot be seized" has to be one of the greatest missteps by the founders of the USA. There are lots of times where taking private property makes total sense (like income tax for example), even the US's current civil asset forfeiture regime leaves a lot to be desired.

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What sort of actual beneficial policies would be prohibited by the 5A?

Also, it's "cannot be seized except for a public purpose and after paying just compensation". That's a fairly big omission IMO.

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Anyone denying America is #1 is silly

But on the other side, Americans going "we're #1 and always will be, lalalala I can't hear you" when anyone points out China's rise is equally silly.

What's the plan to stay #1? Because right now it's not looking like there is one (see: infinite US Navy procurement disasters, absolutely sclerotic internal politics, and the absolute whiplash of elected political leaders).

Eh, the political class really does have Main Character Syndrome, in the sense that you hear things like "Venezuela is evading sanctions." Um, yeah? Venezuela is not, in fact, part of the US. US law does not apply in Venezuela.

The deliberate pretension of inability to comprehend this sort of thing is something the political class will have to come to grips with as the relative strength of US power wanes.

Um, yeah? Venezuela is not, in fact, part of the US. US law does not apply in Venezuela.

But US law does apply to US firms, and those firms are prohibited from assisting Venezuela in any way. The target of this statement is the former, not the latter.

The US is seizing tankers transporting Venezuelan oil in international waters close to Venezuela with neither the ship nor the cargo having any connection to the US. In plain English this isn't sanctions, it's a blockade. The US carefully avoids saying this through official channels, although Trump has used the word in social media posts.

The US is seizing tankers transporting Venezuelan oil in international waters close to Venezuela with neither the ship nor the cargo having any connection to the US.

The ship was sanctioned (for Iranian connections, not Venezuelan) and thus subject to seizure. Venezuelan oil exports are sanctioned. If you and (in particular) Europe wishes to use "sanctions" as some sort of intermediate path between pure diplomacy and actual warfare, there has to be enforcement of those sanctions. Otherwise sanctions are a farce.

In plain English this isn't sanctions, it's a blockade.

The wording only matters in that a blockade is an act of war. Certainly Venezuela is free to respond to it that way. But enforcing sanctions isn't generally considered that.

Normally, "sanctions" refers to laws a state makes which restrict its own citizens, residents, businesses etc. (including foreign-owned businesses operating on its territory) from doing business with the sanctioned country, and increasingly to laws which restrict its banks from financing (even indirectly) transactions to and from the sanctioned country. (And it is effectively impossible to transact in USD without a US bank being indirectly involved, which is why US sanctions even in the conventional sense have such a powerful extra-territorial effect). Enforcement of traditional sanctions, like enforcement of the vast majority of laws, is territorial. States enforce laws against activity taking place on their own territory - even if in this case the aim is to produce an extra-territorial effect. The US has a long tradition of effectively enforcing sanctions by prosecuting US-based entities who trade with/finance sanctioned parties, and the EU has a long tradition of effectively enforcing sanctions by prosecuting EU-based entities likewise.

The ship was sanctioned (for Iranian connections, not Venezuelan) and thus subject to seizure.

The passive voice is obfuscating what happened here. The US declared the ship "sanctioned" despite the ship being entirely outside its jurisdiction. (The claim that it was sanctioned for Iranian connections is a distraction - the ship was seized because it was trading with Venezuela. The US does not generally seize ships on the high seas based on vague "Iranian connections", because you are not pirates). The ship is "subject to seizure" as a matter of US law, because the US made a law which applies outside its territory. As a matter of international law, it probably isn't. (There are some technicalities here because most of the flags of convenience used by oil tanker operators are US client states - the situation where the US seizes a Liberian or Panamanian-flagged ship and the country of registration doesn't object is messy).

Regardless of legal technicalities, the policy here is seizing ships which export Venezuelan crude. That is the essence of a blockade. Is it an act of war? The Trump administration is deliberately blurring the distinction between peace and war here.

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I think you don't get how intoxicating the sense of supremacy is.

Americans have an ideological stake in being Number One.

This is out of date if it was ever true at all. Maybe you could say this about a broad subset of the American Right when the Neocon movement was at its peak circa 2002 or so. But the Left has never really subscribed to that at all, and the modern Right is increasingly dominated by its own brand of oikophobes due to woke backlash.

The left absolutely subscribes to America being number one, its just their version of America instead of what America actually is or what the right and normies say they want. What the left wants is hard to pin down, but I'll stake it on some form of vague internationalist semisocialism that serves primarily to keep their own enemy, the right (kings, kulaks, landlords, their dad) in the ground and they themselves on top - with a similarly vague hope that everyone else who helped the leftist get on top of the pecking order will accept that leftists ascension as a fait accompli.

The left absolutely subscribes to America being number one, its just their version of America instead of what America actually is or what the right and normies say they want.

If I'm from Mars and landed my saucer in America to take it over, would you say that I wanted America to be number one, I just wanted this to be an America run by Martians?

"I want America to be number one" has to imply a certain amount of respect for America as it is or the idea becomes meaningless.

I’m not sure what you and @TheAntipopulist mean by “the Left”. I’m sure actual American Marxists (all five of them) are genuinely committed to the international cause of the working classes. But the broader liberal left and the Democratic Party was already pretty nationalistic already, in a quiet polite Obama drone-strike kind of way. Then in the late 2010s they absorbed most of the never-Trump neocon right and now they are now absolutely rabid about it. That’s the quarter where the heavy American involvement in the Ukraine War came out of, and it’s also where you see most of the new Yellow Peril about the rise of China.

Is it really oikophobia, or just political tribalism?

I still think that old proverb, "Me against my brother. Me and my brother against my cousin. Me, my brother and my cousin against the world." generally applies.

The modern right doesn't like woke progressives in "peaceful times", but I would imagine that after a natural disaster like a fire or hurricane, that most people, left or right, tend to put their differences aside and help each other out.

And I think with a truly "worthy foe", most Americans would set aside political tribalism pretty quickly, and band together against that foe. The problem is, we haven't had anything close to a worthy foe since the Cold War.

The modern right doesn't like woke progressives in "peaceful times", but I would imagine that after a natural disaster like a fire or hurricane, that most people, left or right, tend to put their differences aside and help each other out.

That depends on if the "FEMA tells employees to avoid houses with Trump signs" story was an isolated incident or not.

I think "most people, left or right, will probably band together in a disaster" is compatible with a single federal employee, who got fired for their actions, deciding not to help political opponents during a disaster.

a single federal employee, who got fired for their actions, deciding not to help political opponents during a disaster.

And her underlings who complied with her directions

And I think with a truly "worthy foe", most Americans would set aside political tribalism pretty quickly, and band together against that foe. The problem is, we haven't had anything close to a worthy foe since the Cold War.

Economically, the Chinese are far ahead of where the Soviets were relative to the US during the Cold War, and the last time there was a hot war they chased the Eighth Army halfway down the Korean peninsula while at a severe technological disadvantage, so they seem plenty worthy to me.

For a more recent example/counterpoint (though still relatively ancient) look at the Chinese invasion of Vietnam. The Chinese got their asses wrecked in a month or so, where it took the US a decade to withdraw.

Americans have this funny, somewhat childish manner of scoring wars on style points. Basically it's a generalization of how tough guys in a bar in Alabama or whatever might boast. I lasted 10 years! I could go on, just got bored! One against ten! Machismo. Very impressive for scoring mates. The question is, have the objectives been ultimately achieved? What was the war even about? We don't really have a good understanding of what the Sino-Vietnamese war was about.

As for the objectives, here's the perspective from the other side:

Vietnam is different from the rest of Asia because it does not depend on the U.S. for security and China for trade. In fact, it is the opposite. Vietnam depends on the U.S. for trade and China for security. … Vietnam heavily depends on China for its security. This is not to be confused with an alliance relationship, in which Vietnam needs China’s assistance against a particular threat. Security dependence in this context means that China can militarily hurt Vietnam on both the continental and the maritime domains while Vietnam cannot hurt China in return because of Vietnam’s limited resources and weapons inferiority vis-à-vis China/.

Whether Vietnam can economically develop in a peaceful environment is up to China. Vietnam was on the brink of economic bankruptcy when it tried to arms race against China between 1978 and 1991. Only after China ended its “bleeding Vietnam strategy,” normalized ties with Vietnam, and settled the land border and Gulf of Tonkin disputes in the 1990s and 2000, could Vietnam decrease its military spending in service of domestic economic development. It is not a coincidence that Vietnam always affirms its pledge not to host foreign military bases on its soil and not to join any alliances against China in high-level exchanges with China to assure China of Vietnam’s peaceful intentions. Avoiding a second Chinese invasion has been at the center of Vietnam’s defense policy since 1991. Even in the absence of such an invasion, Vietnam cannot and should not seek to arms race with China as a deterrent. Also, maintaining amicable Vietnam-China ties matters to Vietnam’s own relations with its neighbors Laos and Cambodia, as Vietnam must convince China that it has no intention of turning Laos and Cambodia against China.

China’s importance in Vietnam’s security thinking thus dwarfs that of the United States. The U.S. cannot protect Vietnam from a second Chinese invasion because Washington’s ability to project power onto continental Asia is limited. During the Cold War, the U.S. military could not defeat an inferior Chinese army in Korea and Indochina.

It's similar to how Russians «lost» the Winter War. While it was a catastrophically bad, shameful operation and @Stefferi's people eliminated a much greater absolute and vastly greater relative share of the adversary's forces than Vietnam ever did, very impressively so, the question is: who got what he wanted? Who lost? Soviets achieved their minimal goals. Finns lost land.

We don't really have a good understanding of what the Sino-Vietnamese war was about.

Really? I thought it was a relatively straightforwardly punitive operation designed to punish Vietnam after Vietnam retaliated to repeated Cambodian aggression by invading Cambodia and decapitating their government (stopping the Cambodian genocide). Obviously the Vietnamese and Chinese both can claim to be the winners (Vietnam: we stopped them! China: we went as far as we needed to go to make our point!) but if the motives are obscure it's news to me. (And I would be happy to update my understanding here.)

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Americans really need to brought down a peg in their delusions of self grandeur to the same level as the rest of humanity. Yes they'll wail and whine and throw tantrums about being seen as the same as rest of us but we have a duty to not humour them, after all, as they say: when you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

The top level post below yours is uncritically discussing the following proposition: "is our culture good because it is American, or is it American because it is good". From the perspective of someone in Europe the complete non-consideration of the possibility that "American culture" may, in fact, not be good is galling. It's as if the possibility doesn't even register in these people's minds.

It's always satisfying to see the mighty brought low and while I have no particular love for China when the inevitable inevitably happens I'll bring out my deckchair and grab a bag of popcorn so I can watch and make snide quips from the sidelines.

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The top level post below yours is uncritically discussing the following proposition: "is our culture good because it is American, or is it American because it is good". From the perspective of someone in Europe the complete non-consideration of the possibility that "American culture" may, in fact, not be good is galling. It's as if the possibility doesn't even register in these people's minds.

This kind of attitude probably carried more weight back when anyone still thought Europe had a future.

It's always satisfying to see the mighty brought low and while I have no particular love for China when the inevitable inevitably happens I'll bring out my deckchair and grab a bag of popcorn so I can watch and make snide quips from the sidelines.

You'll take a break from posting apologia about how your current country doesn't arrest THAT many people for publicly noticing the astronomical rape rate, etc. etc.

From the perspective of someone in America the complete non-consideration of the possibility that "European culture" may, in fact, not be superior to American culture is galling. It's as if the possibility doesn't even register in these people's minds.

"European culture" kinda isn't a real thing right now, as they're not sovereign in any meaningful sense and basically just act as US vassals. The postwar social engineering gave them a synthetic culture that lends itself only to this role.

The only sort-of exception is France, and even then, they only tend to exercise sovereignty in cases where it doesn't really matter.

Even in cases where it kinda looks like maaaaybe Europe is exercising some degree of sovereignty, e.g., fining big US tech companies, it's really more akin to acting as a wing of the Democrat party than an act of actual sovereignty. An act of actual sovereignty would be building their own social media site / web browser / mobile OS / desktop OS, and obviously that never happens to any degree of relevance (and when it does, they immediately hand it over to the Americans like they're supposed to).

Where did the poster that you are responding to even suggest that "European culture" is superior to American culture?

Why do you post here? This is basically just snide at people you hate despite your alleged life being provided by that people.

This thread got so sidetracked by arguments about GDA and "America #1" but this

Chinese successes with their EUV effort. The article is somewhat confused, as almost all reporting on Chinese AI and IC tech is; from my private sources, the situation has already moved further on multiple components, like optics and metrology.

What I want to emphasize here is that it's not just trivial «industrial espionage» or IP theft. Their light source project is led by former ASML head of light source technology and «Light source competence owner for metrology in ASML research» Lin Nan.

Is one of the biggest (arguably, the biggest) stories of 2025. The whole story of the West vs China is that we dominate in cutting edge tech, and they might manufacture a lot, but our qualitative advantage sustains our dominance. EUV (and mono-crystal jet turbines) are the poster children techs for "China may have an order of magnitude more industrial output, but they don't have our X!"

Now that paradigm is falling apart, it's scary.

Sputnik was a big story, Soviet technical competence was not. It will be a big story when we see deliveries of machines, first wafers, first chips. I allow that I may be wrong and trust the wrong sources. 2028 for first risk production seems plausible right now. Hopefully it will be resolved one way or another.

I have to confess that I do not have much trust in Chinese media accurately reporting on this matter, nor do I trust Reuters - what/how would they actually know? What other evidence is there, even if only circumstantial, that would suggest there has been real progress toward developing domestic EUV capability in China?

R&D in different sectors can be extremely different, but at least in the sectors I’m familiar with, I’m not very impressed by the current academic and research culture in China. It is certainly better than in 2015, as more and more people trained in the US, Germany, or elsewhere have returned to China, and creating some shift within academia and shifting from publishing papers in shitty predatory journals to producing higher quality research and technological development at least in Peking, Tsinghua etc that can rival the “west”. But considering how the broader academic culture continues to treat people like candles, burning them up and then tossing them in the trash, I don’t think this creates a good culture or working environment for many of the most ambitious and talented researchers. Maybe I’m wrong and corrupted by the west and turned into a soft-hearted baizuo already, and with enough talent China can afford to waste precious human capital like this (e.g. this or this (Chinese) or this (Chinese)), but I’m not terribly convinced.

Admittedly I am only skimming on what Asianometry presented on Youtube about Asian tech but his assessment is that big names mean very little in the EUV space. Lithography and chip fabbing are incredibly complex industries that are beyond the ability of a singular genius to sway. You need a team of geniuses in a vertically integrated industry with solid government backing and private investment to get anywhere.

Even China can't outbid the entire world for RAM and CUDA cores. Selling to themselves in a closed market forgoes a lot of profit on the international market and will only make prices go even higher. A lot of capital is being sunk into this next frontier of Great Power competition and the West has a great deal of control of the technologies that make it possible.

…Of course, we can still entertain the hypothesis that all of the above is some interesting ephemera and this final dash of the Chosen Nation towards AGI-powered Rapture and completion of history is the real story of the times. I won't completely discount it, we shall see.

IMO, this is still the operating assumption of the AI race. It is also the only thing which justifies the intensity of the efforts expended by various AI companies.

Normally, when a new field of tech is breached, there is no decisive first-mover advantage, where a technological lead of a year will translate into long-term dominance. History is full of cases (e.g. early home computers (e.g. Apple Macintosh), dot-com boom (e.g. myspace), photovoltaic (e.g. German companies), browser wars) where the forerunners became footnotes in history.

But what OpenAI investors buy is not so much future profits if OpenAI replaces most of the work force, but an investment-proportional solid angle of the light cone if Altman achieves aligned superintelligence (and remains aligned to his investors himself). The presumption is clearly that whoever finishes climbing the rope first will then cut the rope to prevent anyone else from following.

Many OpenAI investors don't believe in the singularity. Microsoft is demanding revenue-share from OpenAI right now. They see the power of the technology and naturally decide to invest in it, even if they're unpersuaded on mass automation or singularity. They want it to sell more subscriptions, speed up software development. It's the myopic facebook mindset of 'this technology could sell us so many short-form video ads' and tbf, that is true. AI is making huge amounts of profit for Facebook right now. Tiktok makes enormous amounts of money (in China) based off its algorithms which include LLM tech. AI is highly profitable right now and it is a sure bet that there will be further highly profitable offshoots from LLM technology, besides the singularity. They just require lots of investment to tap and we are still in an early-growth phase of a new market, whereas video is a lot more mature.

Older versions of Claude Sonnet could easily snipe redditors per the /r/changemyview experiments, obviously AI can make huge amounts of money for businesses.

OpenAI is valued at a mere $500-830 billion. The market cap of gold and silver is about $35 trillion. If OpenAI valuations were genuinely driven by belief in the singularity, it'd be worth a lot more than shiny rocks! The lightcone contains a hell of a lot of gold, a company with singularity-pilled investors would get everything money can buy even if they are just one of a few leading competitors.

I agree with the general point about the US losing its broad supremacy. In many fields, America is well behind with little prospect of catching up and there is indeed an unseemly amount of American reflexive dismissal of inferiority. Too many clowns on twitter posting about blowing up the Three Gorges Dam. There's an alarmingly casual attitude to conflict in the information sphere of today's world, as though it's something you can just start and end as you please. War is the most serious matter there is, it must be considered coldly and carefully.

both will have "AGI" at around the same time

Won't the US enjoy a quantitative and qualitative superiority in AI though, based on the compute advantage, through to at least the 2030s? Chinese models are pretty good and very cost-efficient but lean more towards benchmaxxed than general intelligence. GLM-4.7 for instance, supposedly it has stats comparable to Opus 4.5. But my subjective testing throws up a huge disparity between them, Opus is much stronger. It one-shots where others flounder. That's what you'd expect given the price difference, it's a lightweight model vs a heavyweight model... but where are the Chinese heavyweight models? They only compete on cost-efficiency because they can't get the compute needed for frontier performance. If Teslas cost 40K and BYD costs 20K and Tesla doesn't just get wrecked by BYD, then it would show that there's a significant qualitative gap. In real life of course BYD is wrecking Tesla, they have rough qualitative parity and so cost-efficiency dominates. But Chinese AI doesn't seem to have a competitive advantage, not on openrouter anyway, despite their cost-efficiency they lack the neccessary grunt.

If AGI isn't a big deal and it ends up being a cost-efficiency game of commoditized AI providing modest benefits, then China wins. Zero chance for America in any kind of prolonged competition against such a huge country. America is too dopey to have a chance, letting China rent Blackwell chips is foolish. Too dopey to do diplomacy coherently, too dopey to shut down the open-air fent markets, too dopey to build frigates... America is probably the ablest and most effectively run country in the Western bloc overall. That is not a very high bar to meet. The US would need to be on another level entirely to beat China. It's that same lightweight v heavyweight competition.

But if AI/AGI/ASI is a big deal, then America enjoys a decisive advantage. Doesn't matter if China has 20 AGI at Lvl 5 if the US has 60 at Lvl 8. I think a significantly more intelligent AI is worth a lot more than cheaper and faster AI in R&D, robotics, cyberwarfare, propagandizing, planning. And just throwing more AI at problems is naturally better. There will be a huge compute drought. There's a compute drought right now, AI is sweeping through the whole semiconductor sector like Attila the Hun, razing (raising) prices.

China doesn't have the necessary HBM, the necessary HBM just doesn't exist. Even America is struggling, let alone China. Even if China had enough good chips to go with their good networking, there's no good memory to go with them.

In a compute drought, the compute-rich country is king. In an AI race, the compute-rich country is king. China would be on the back foot and need to use military force to get back in the game.

GLM-4.7 for instance, supposedly it has stats comparable to Opus 4.5.

I don't think GLM is really that high. In my experience it may be more comparable to, like, Xiaomi V2-Flash or Minimax M2.1. Chinese ecosystem is uneven, and GLM team has massive clout thanks to their Tsinghua ties. I believe they're a bit overhyped.

Won't the US enjoy a quantitative and qualitative superiority in AI though, based on the compute advantage, through to at least the 2030s?

It probably will have the advantage, but a) unclear what this advantage gives you practically, and b) the divergence from compounding this advantage keeps getting postponed. Roughly a year ago, Dario Amodei wrote:

R1, which is the model that was released last week and which triggered an explosion of public attention (including a ~17% decrease in Nvidia's stock price), is much less interesting from an innovation or engineering perspective than V3. It adds the second phase of training — reinforcement learning, described in #3 in the previous section — and essentially replicates what OpenAI has done with o1 (they appear to be at similar scale with similar results)8. However, because we are on the early part of the scaling curve, it’s possible for several companies to produce models of this type, as long as they’re starting from a strong pretrained model. Producing R1 given V3 was probably very cheap. We’re therefore at an interesting “crossover point”, where it is temporarily the case that several companies can produce good reasoning models. This will rapidly cease to be true as everyone moves further up the scaling curve on these models. …

Making AI that is smarter than almost all humans at almost all things will require millions of chips, tens of billions of dollars (at least), and is most likely to happen in 2026-2027. DeepSeek's releases don't change this, because they're roughly on the expected cost reduction curve that has always been factored into these calculations. […] This means that in 2026-2027 we could end up in one of two starkly different worlds. In the US, multiple companies will definitely have the required millions of chips (at the cost of tens of billions of dollars). The question is whether China will also be able to get millions of chips.

Well, American companies already have millions of chips. We're nearing 2026. Multiple models trained on those superclusters already got released, RL cost is now in high millions, probably tens if not hundreds of millions for Grok 4 and GPTs, and likely Claudes. Result: Opus is not really far smarter than V3.2, an enhanced version of a year-old model Dario writes about, with total post-training costs around $1M. On some hard math tasks, V3.2 Speciale is not just like 20x cheaper per task but straight up superior to American frontier at the time of release. The gap has, if anything, shrank. Wasn't «gold at IMO» considered a solid AGI target and a smoke alarm of incoming recursive self-improvement not so long ago? V3.2-Speciale gets that gold for pennies, but now we've moved goalposts to Django programming, playing Pokemon and managing a vending machine. Those are mode open-ended tasks but I really don't believe they are indexing general intelligence better.

Maybe we'll see the divergence finally materializing in 2026-2027. But I think we won't, because apparently the biggest bottleneck is still engineering talent, and Americans are currently unable to convert their compute advantage into a technological moat. They know the use cases and how to optimize for user needs, they don't really know how to burn $1B of GPU-hours to get a fundamentally stronger model. There's a lot of uncertainty about how to scale further. By the time they figure it out, China has millions of chips too.

There is an interesting possibility that we are exactly at this juncture, with maturation of data generation and synthetic RL environment pipelines on both sides. If so, we'll see US models get a commanding lead for the next several months, and then it would be ablated again by mid-late 2026.

V3.2 was a qualitative shift, a sign that the Chinese RL stack is now mature and probably more efficient, and nobody paid much attention to it. Miles is former Head of Policy Research and Senior Advisor for AGI Readiness at OpenAI, and he pays attention, but it flew under the radar.

But if AI/AGI/ASI is a big deal, then America enjoys a decisive advantage. Doesn't matter if China has 20 AGI at Lvl 5 if the US has 60 at Lvl 8. I think a significantly more intelligent AI is worth a lot more than cheaper and faster AI in R&D, robotics, cyberwarfare, propagandizing, planning.

Another reason I'm skeptical about compounding benefits of divergence is that it seems we're figuring out how to aggregate weak-ish (and cheap) model responses to get equal final performance. This has interesting implications for training. Consider that on SWE-rebench, V3.2 does as well as «frontier models» in pass@5 regime, and the cost here is without caching; they have caching at home so it's more like $0.1 per run and not $0.5. We see how even vastly weaker models can be harnessed for frontier results if you can provide enough inference. China prioritizes domestic inference chips for 2026. Fun fact, you don't need real HBM, you can make do with LPDDR hybrids.

But all of that is probably secondary to social fundamentals, the volume and kind of questions that are economical to ask, the nature of problems being solved.

In a compute drought, the compute-rich country is king. In an AI race, the compute-rich country is king. China would be on the back foot and need to use military force to get back in the game.

I think all of this is stages of grief about the fact that the real king is physics and we have a reasonably good command of physics. Unless AGI unlocks something like rapid nanoassembly and billion-qubit quantum computers, it may simply not change the trajectory significantly. The condition of being a smaller and, as you put it, dopey society compromises "compute advantage". Great American AI will make better robots? Well, it'll likely train better policies in simulation. But China is clearly far ahead at producing robots and can accelerate to tens of millions in little time given their EV industrial base, gather more deployment data, iterate faster, while American startups are still grifting with their bullshit targets. Similar logic applies in nearly every physical domain. Ultimately you need to actually make things. Automated propaganda is… probably not the best idea, American society is too propagandized as is. Cyberwarfare… will American AGI God really be good enough to hack Huawei clusters after their inferior Temu AGI has hunted for vulnerabilities in an airgapped regime for a few months? I think cyberwarfare is largely going dodo in this world, everyone will have an asymmetric defense advantage.

Obviously, that's still the most credible scheme to achieve American hegemony, conquer the light cone etc. etc. I posit that even it is not credible enough and has low EV, because it's an all-or-nothing logic where «all» is getting elusive.

"Tech talent" isn't just one thing. There's the ability to glue together lego blocks on one hand, and there's the ability to make new blocks on the other. West coast tech has tipped decisively to the former.

Over the past 15 years in the bay area tech universe, we've seen a hollowing out of hard technical skill. The slop-shipping proudly-know-nothing React SaaS archetype has become predominant.

Even at the frontier labs, the talent pool is such that Chinese model architectural improvements often arrive as surprises and force rapid catch-up. The labs aren't interested in actual innovation: when they're not up their asses in "AI safety" power fantasies or practically orgasming on Slack about how they will allocate scarcity in the coming AI command economy, frontier lab people are mostly just scaling up what they know works and putting down weird ideas that they claim won't scale.

This is the part of the country that spawned Esalan. The grift has always been strong here. But lately, it's become next level and eroded meaningful expertise. When some TypeScript weenie who has no idea for a CPU cache works overrules the guy who does on the basis of some quoted Twitter pablum about software engineering being obsolete in six months, the industry is in trouble.

will American AGI God really be good enough to hack Huawei clusters after their inferior Temu AGI has hunted for vulnerabilities in an airgapped regime for a few months? I think cyberwarfare is largely going dodo in this world, everyone will have an asymmetric defense advantage.

Maybe it can't hack the servers directly if they're airgapped (though I wouldn't underestimate the power of some social-engineered fool bringing in a compromised USB) but it could hack everything around the servers, the power production, logistics, financing, communications, transport, construction. I doubt the servers even are airgapped, modern data centers are saturated with wireless signals from Wi-Fi peripherals, IoT sensors, and private LTE/5G networks. The modern economy is a giant mess of countless digital parts.

I think people underestimate the power of 'nation of geniuses in a datacentre', even without any major breakthroughs in physics, I think mere peak human-level AIs at scale could wipe the floor with any technological power without firing a shot. In cyber there is no perfect defence, only layers of security and balancing risk mitigation v cost. The cost of defending against a nation of geniuses would be staggering, you'd need your own nation of geniuses. Maybe they could find some zero-day exploits. Maybe they could circumnavigate the data centre and put vulnerabilities in the algorithms directly, find and infiltrate the Chinese version of Crowdstrike? Or just raze the Chinese economy wholesale. All those QR code payments and smart city infrastructure can be vulnerabilities as well as strengths.

China's already been kind of doing this 'exploit large high IQ population' with their own massive economic cyberwarfare program. It works, it's a smart idea. 10,000 hackers can steal lots of secrets, could 10 million wreck a whole country's digital infrastructure? You may have read that short story by Ci Xin Liu about the rogue AI program that just goes around causing human misery to everyone via hacking.

I believe that the physical domain is trumped by the virtual. Even nuclear command and control can potentially be compromised by strong AIs, I bet that wherever there is a complex system, there will be vulnerabilities that humans haven't judged cost-efficient to defend against.

I think it's funny that we've both kinda swapped positions on AI geopolitics over time, you used to be blackpilled about US hegemony until Deepseek came along... Nevertheless I don't fully disagree and predicting the future is very hard, I could well be wrong and you right or both of us wrong.

V3.2-Speciale gets that gold for pennies, but now we've moved goalposts to Django programming, playing Pokemon and managing a vending machine. Those are mode open-ended tasks but I really don't believe they are indexing general intelligence better.

Eh, I think Pokemon and vending machines are good tasks. It's long-form tasks that matter most, weaving all those beautiful pearls (maths ability or physics knowledge) into a necklace. We have plenty of pearls, we need them bound together. And I don't think 3.2 does as well as Claude Code, at least not if we go by the 'each 5% is harder than the 5%' idea in these benchmarks.

Maybe it can't hack the servers directly if they're airgapped (though I wouldn't underestimate the power of some social-engineered fool bringing in a compromised USB) but it could hack everything around the servers, the power production, logistics, financing, communications, transport, construction

You misunderstood my point. I am saying that hacking as such will become ineffectual in a matter of years. Automated SWEs make defense drastically advantaged over offense due to information asymmetry in favor of the defender and rapid divergence in codebases. This “superhacker AGI” thing is just lazy thinking. How long do you think it takes, between open source AIs that win IOI&IMO Gold for pennies, and formally verified kernels for everything, in a security-obsessed nation that has dominated image recognition research just because it wanted better surveillance?

I believe that the physical domain is trumped by the virtual.

A very American belief, to be sure.

Agreed. I'm not convinced the space of exploits reachable via ASI is meaningfully bigger than the space already reachable by fuzzers, code analysis, and blackhat brains. ASI hacking is a fantasy.

That said, AI tools have, are, and will "democratize" access to exploits we already have. A lot of incompetent enterprise IT deployment people are going to have to get fired and replaced with people or agents that can keep up with patches.

IMO Gold is an important signal but not that significant in and of itself, again, it's longer-term capabilities that matter.

How long do you think it takes, between open source AIs that win IOI&IMO Gold for pennies, and formally verified kernels for everything, in a security-obsessed nation that has dominated image recognition research just because it wanted better surveillance?

To proof a complex system against hacking, you'd need ASI. This is a superhuman feat, no humans have ever written a provably secure system that actually does useful work as opposed to just being a toy proof of concept.

By the time these kernels come out and are deployed, it's pointless to hack the datacentre.

To proof a complex system against hacking, you'd need ASI.

Thankfully, verifying proofs is easier than generating them, so we're about to find out if this is true.

Even finding all the things you'd need to secure is a nightmarish task. The CPU's physical structure, the microcode, the BIOS, the lower levels of the OS, a myriad of applications... You'd need a completely accurate, top to bottom model of the whole system: thousands of devices, routers, OSI... You'd then need to rewrite all of it while somehow maintaining proper functionality. Have fun updating the ROM of the management engine! Good odds there are physical flaws in CPUs that either humans are too dumb to uncover or were put there by intelligence agencies for spying purposes, so even if you do all that it still isn't sufficient.

ASI is a bare minimum requirement. Probably ASI + a whole new generation of chips is needed.

You're overrating the irreducible combinatorial complexity (especially given that we can improve modularity when software is this cheep) and underrating the computational efficiency. We're in the regime where 1M of near-frontier tokens goes for $0.3, caching-enhanced prefill is almost free. $300 for billion, $300K for trillion, $300M for quadrillion, $30B for 100 quadrillions. Will likely fall 10x within a year while performance creeps towards peak human programming skill, again. Bytedance is currently processing 50 trillion a day for Doubao, they have a near-Gemini 3 multimodal model (Doubao Seed 1.8).

How much is the entire specification of, say, a Huawei server's full hardware-software stack, all relevant documentation, everything? Maybe a few terabytes if we're obsessive. Blow that up 1000x for experiments and proof generation. A few quadrillions, plus the costs of software execution.

How much is invulnerability to ASI hacking worth? It's worth pretty much everything, given that the US is en route to have ASI and is psychotically attached to its finance-powered hegemony.

What is the alternative? Pretty much just preemptive nuclear strike.

They will be forced to do this.

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In cyber there is no perfect defence, only layers of security and balancing risk mitigation v cost.

There is a perfect defense. We're just not yet willing to pay for it.

You can write probably correct programs. Properly structure them and incorporate all the necessary invariants into their proofs, and you're immune to "cyber" attacks from humans, ASI, and God himself.

The "just ship B2B SaaS lol" crowd doesn't understand math, much less proofs. You need a combination of economic and legal incentives to see shift software methodology away from React slop and towards rigorous, robust, engineering that comes with proofs of security properties you want to enforce. It won't be easy, but it can be done.

Or you can just throw your hands up in the air and claim the problem can't be solved.

And yet nobody is using provably correct software because the core requirement is 'does it actually work' not 'is it totally secure'. This is the first thing they teach you in a cybersecurity course, the mission comes first. It's not cost-efficient to security-max.

Only a strong AI can do this cost-effectively, not even the state actors can manage this, they get hacked all the time. And given we're talking about what happens when strong AIs first emerge, people are not going to have provably secure software already widely proliferated from kernel to application.

Also provably secure software limits you to a certain subset of the features available in most programming languages, since a lot of things in software/math/logic are inherently unprovable.

Yep, essentially you have to give up Turing-completeness to get provable correctness: no unbounded recursion or loops allowed. To formally verify, using a Turing-complete verification language/proof assistant, the correctness of an arbitrary program written in a (possibly different) Turing-complete language is tantamount to solving the halting problem, which famously is logically impossible.

Is your argument that all Turing-complete software systems are possible to meaningfully "hack" with finite knowledge within finite computational time? Can you prove this mathematically?

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Unless NSA overpays relative to FAANG and keeps everyone on an ideological leash the talent simply wont flow to the US state. The smartdicks with some vague natsec aspirations might go join Anduril to pretend at building Cyberdyne systems skynet. And thats only if Anduril stays off the DOD security asset whatever list so the staff dont get flagged at every port of exit.

But if AI/AGI/ASI is a big deal, then America enjoys a decisive advantage.

AI technological knowhow diffuses much faster than AI-driven technology, though. Lets say China is a year behind the US in AI research and engineering when the US reaches AGI. How long does it take the US to integrate it wholesale through its economy, replacing pretty much all labor? China will have its own frictions, but plausibly China can cut through physical, infrastructure, legal, and cultural constraints faster than the US. It's not clear which effect would dominate, but it's not preordained that the US would win.

Even a true singularity, if possible, doesn't seem to change that. At some point the US may well have an ASI that has solved all the fundamental physical, engineering, and mathematical issues of the universe while still requiring human doctors, teachers, drivers, soldiers etc. to perform actual labor, while China at the same time is stuck with a year-behind AI that nevertheless has still replaced human labor in all relevant real world domains.

Won't the US enjoy a quantitative and qualitative superiority in AI though, based on the compute advantage, through to at least the 2030s?

What does that gain you when China can move matter?

Exactly. Most of these takes suppose AGI is achievable on a real timeframe and that AGI then immediately shortcuts through the physical and political realities of the day. The majority of the West is hilariously obstructionist already, even if AGI happens it's not gonna assume direct control immediately.

The new Chinese ASIC accelerators designed for 8bit FMA are going to be a game changer. Nvidia acts like it's still king but soon new way cheaper chinese tech is going to be online and NVIDA is going to eat dirt.

Google's had that for a decade.

Yeah, and I can buy exactly 0 servers kited out with those.

You won't be able to buy the Chinese ones either.

You can make an absolute fortune on that prediction, if it comes true.

The problem is I don't trust the Govt not to pull another fast one like they did with the cash infusion for OpenAI. They will NOT let NVDA tank, the market can remain fraudulent longer than you can be solvent.

Sorry, risk aversion. The probability that would let you say "that's pretty likely" is not the same as the probability that would make it make sense to sink a lot of money into something. If I thought it was 80% likely, for instance, I certainly wouldn't take that 20% chance of losing my shirt. At best I might slightly change the distribution of money that I was going to invest anyway.

I'm sure there's ways of structuring your bet so that you've got bigly upside on being right without your positions immediately resolving to 0 in the event of a miss. It's not like you're doing it solely through binary options or prediction markets, equities provide all sorts of pathways whilst still being broadly positive sum.

Sounds like you're thinking you'd lose all that money if it went badly. Why would you? Mental and automatic stop losses exist.

It is not possible to 1) lose nothing if it went badly and 2) make a fortune if it went well.

You can't be an investor if you're not willing to risk something.

I just said "risk aversion". That's the whole point. You can't make an absolute fortune without risk, and I don't want to take the risk. The implication of

You can make an absolute fortune on that prediction, if it comes true.

is that anyone who really believed that would spend their money on it in order to make a fortune, and that anyone who refuses to spend the money doesn't really believe it.

This implication is not true when there is risk.

This is just a slight variation on "you don't really believe it, because if you did you'd bet money like a real rationalist".

It's just as true when there's some risk. There's always uncertainty when putting money in an asset.

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If you thought it was 80% likely, you can get a spread of buy options for various times/prices. The loss (and gain) is completely bounded up front.

Then that wouldn't count as an absolute fortune.

I don't believe that any specific accelerator will change the situation much. “ASIC” is a meme, Nvidia's Vera Rubin are probably very close to optimality, they're no longer GPUs in a meaningful way.


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