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Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project

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51–60 of 164 posts

Re: Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project

#51

The weakness of centralized planning is what allowed the western way of life to dominate in a world where technology hampered its effectiveness. In this new world we may need to accept that our individualistic nature has become that very same weakness that dooms our way of life in the great game of life.

The reality is throughout civilized human history there are certain aspects of society that are better planned centrally, certain aspects that are better planned completely individualistically, and certain aspects that are better as a varied mix of both.

The biggest problem is people who insist one of those stances is the only correct one in practice, as well as morally, and deride other proven better options simply because of an ideological distaste for it.

A lot of us here are from the Tech and specifically software industry, and one of the most common refrains is to use the best tool for the circumstances. Sometimes that may be a functional language like Haskell, and in other cases may be Javascript.

The same concept applies to central planning vs markets. Both are just a few of many tools, and the correct approach is to pick the best tool for the specific job.

Re: Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project

#53

Hmm. Italy allies with an evil dictatorship that has a concentration camps for millions of minorities, and prosecutes religion by shutting down churches and jailing pastors. Sounds familiar...

Yes, Italy is also allied or has trade partnerships with Saudi Arabia or Israel.

Re: Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project

#54
post #33

Centralised planning will beat democratised decision making if they indeed manage to respond in time to a changing environment. The advancements in tech and communication allows you today to be more effective than ever. Think about global corporations with offices around the world. They are effectively operating under a centralised model and they do it very well. What China learnt in the past 4 decades was how to man…

This is Italy, anyone can beat them. Maybe now Italy can beg Beijing for money instead of Frankfurt.

Don't you think your analysis is a bit too much simplistic?

The ECB monetary politics was never meant to "save" any specific country (a whole system, maybe. You could argue abut this).

On Beijing giving away money to Italy: it is a commercial deal we are talking about. The political implications of this deal are way more complex than a passing statement.

Re: Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project

#55

Hmm. Italy allies with an evil dictatorship that has a concentration camps for millions of minorities, and prosecutes religion by shutting down churches and jailing pastors. Sounds familiar...

Yes, Italy is also allied or has trade partnerships with a country that tortures prisoners, overthrows democratically elected governments, invades countries on the whims of its military industrial complex, uses drone strikes indiscriminately, and who tech economy thrives on oil/oligarch money...

Re: Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project

#56

Hmm. Italy allies with an evil dictatorship that has a concentration camps for millions of minorities, and prosecutes religion by shutting down churches and jailing pastors. Sounds familiar...

The US has allied itself with China since the 80s...

Re: Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project

#57
China is doing what is a great advancement for the world: integrating east and west, and in the process bringing the long forgotten areas in the middle east into the world trading order. The more investment in the Silk road, the more we will have a robust economic system integrating countries that until now were forgotten by the previous world order.

Re: Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project

#58
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone, but the current, post-Soviet, US-led world order has seen the greatest reduction in world poverty probably ever in history. South Asia is heading from being poor to being middle income, the AIDS epidemic is in retreat in Africa, etc. My home country of Bangladesh was known for its extreme poverty when we left in the 1980s. Now, thanks to capitalism and westernization, poverty has plummeted, and it is on…

The "US-led" part has very little to do with that reduction in world poverty; if anything, it's all about countries other than the U.S. adopting the same sorts of market-based norms and institutions that the West themselves adopted in the 1980s. To think of socially-beneficial innovations as "Westernizing" just because the West got there first is pretty clearly a fallacy - https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-th…

I will leave you this quote from History of the New World by Girolamo Benzoni:

Egg of Columbus

"Columbus being at a party with many noble Spaniards, where, as was customary, the subject of conversation was the Indies: one of them undertook to say: —"Mr. Christopher, even if you had not found the Indies, we should not have been devoid of a man who would have attempted the same that you did, here in our own country of Spain, as it is full of great men clever in cosmography and literature." Columbus said nothing in answer to these words, but having desired an egg to be brought to him, he placed it on the table saying: "Gentlemen, I will lay a wager with any of you, that you will not make this egg stand up as I will, naked and without anything at all." They all tried, and no one succeeded in making it stand up. When the egg came round to the hands of Columbus, by beating it down on the table he fixed it, having thus crushed a little of one end; wherefore all remained confused, understanding what he would have said: that after the deed is done, everybody knows how to do it; that they ought first to have sought for the Indies, and not laugh at him who had sought for it first, while they for some time had been laughing, and wondered at it as an impossibility."

Re: Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project

#59
post #13

> The European Union is also worried about unfair competition from Chinese companies, which are controlled by the Chinese government and benefit from the state’s financial backing. So... like many European companies and even entire sectors?

Besides Oil and Gas, which companies are state owned? Bonus points: which of those states are authoritarian?

Re: Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project

#60
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lesser evil, any country with Western norms has my vote. Nothing is perfect

For you, east is China, Mideast and subcontinent only, right?

Western norms, could also be India/Japan from my point of view
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