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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1751 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 18, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Here is one for you - Chinese failures. We write a lot about china successes in the culture war topic and it is not undeserved. But what about the other areas - that are structural, important, the government is keen on them succeeding, but they fail. So far the only thing that comes to my mind is civilian aerospace. They are way behind, rely on western parts, doesn't seem to be able to be waned off them and everything is way behind schedule. And that in a moment in which the lead times for delivery of aircraft approach 10 years. The market is hungry, China wants to provide, but they can't.

Software.

China is so ahead on physical manufacturing and speed of deployment that it's easy to forget that they're bad at software.

Granted, everyone is bad at software, except the US, and even then only arguably. But with China, the mismatch between increasingly higher tech manufacturing and deficits in software is incredibly obvious.

In theory, the need to get everything past the CCP to get approval should allow for greater proliferation of unifying standards. In practice, software is such a kludge and such a mess in practice that the kind of outside-the-box innovative thinking and creative problem solving America kind of selects for by design is quite lacking.

I hear good things about their AI labs right now, but in terms of what normal, everyday people engage with, I think their software is terrible.

That, and their website UI is designed around entirely different principles than the rest of the world, principles I find completely atrocious. The fact that it works for them somehow kind of blows my mind a bit.

Can you elaborate a bit? Because at the current year of the lord almost every user software that is not open source is utter shit or in the process of turning to shit fast. The software on the chinese devices is as crappy as the one on the rest.

And to me it seems that they are quite capable of writing industrial software for their own needs.

Chinese failures would take the form of the classic seen vs. unseen economic costs that no one seems interested in taking seriously anymore. Trump's US is unabashed in taking pages out of the Chinese playbook, at risk of our ruin.

US government has been doing it for the most of 20th century (I am not even talking about FDR who pretty much run the economy on manual, but it persistent well after) but Trump has this miraculous quality of making people noticing what is happening when he's doing it. Maybe we can have an actual discussion about whether the government intervention into the economy is really as good as it has been told, now that Trump had done it?

The difference between the 20th century and now is that we know better.

Who's "we"? Nobody in the current US federal government or US Congress ever gave any indication they know better. And it's not like we're talking about 20th century BC - it's literally the same people now, just way older (and a bunch of new ones, many of whom are so far left FDR looks like Mises from where they are standing). I know of no major political party in the US that makes "knowing better" any part of its program (no, LP does not count as "major political party" and if their past performance is any indication of future results, never will).

What you say is more about wrong policies (which is interesting in itself). Their real estate policy was a mistake, as is belt and road probably, but no one doubts that chinese can pour immense amounts of concrete in various shapes and lay tracks with the best of them. I am more interested in the moonshots that failed than the roads they did not take.

they fail. So far the only thing that comes to my mind is civilian aerospace. They are way behind, rely on western parts, doesn't seem to be able to be waned off them and everything is way behind schedule. And that in a moment in which the lead times for delivery of aircraft approach 10 years. The market is hungry, China wants to provide, but they can't.

Brian Potter wrote up his findings about the "China cycle" in commercial aviation here. I found his arguments convincing.

He argues the core issue is that going after Boing and Airbus is simply extremely difficult, especially if you want to go after Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce and GE at the same time: "One is simply the sheer difficulty of building a modern commercial aircraft, which is probably one of the five or six most complex technical achievements of modern civilization (along with jet engines, leading-edge semiconductor fabrication, and nuclear submarines)." There's many subtleties (Boing and Airbus don't do manufacturing and tech transfer deals with China, Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce and GE don't do that either and also don't sell SOTA jet engines to China, US/EU air travel regulators are not favorable to Chinese hardware, ect.)

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