291–300 of 309 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure where he got his stats from, but 9.56 million sounds about right. https://news.sina.cn/gn/2023-01-17/detail-imyanfvn6707213.d.... (Figure 3) 2017 - 17.23 million 2018 - 15.23 2019 - 14.65 2020 - 12.00 2021 - 10.62 2022 - 9.56 Note that this is official Chinese gov statistics. Their numbers are known to be untrustworthy.
Falling in half in six years? Again, woah. Any idea what's driving that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a professor remark once (this is circa 2009) that we should all learn a highly skilled trade around advanced manufacturing because eventually offshoring will reverse itself and by your early 30s you'll be in a prime position to profit immensely off the re-shoring of advanced manufacturing equipment and processes Maybe he was right. I'm in my early 30s now, and I don't regret becoming a software engineer, but al…
> the highly skilled tradesmen I've met in the last 5 years make at least what I do, often more, and have the benefit of actually owning their own businesses or real, meaningful slices of other ones. _This_. A lot of software developers think they are the only high earners out there. Skilled tradesmen are making a killing in europe as well. And unlike software engineers, the path to starting an actual business is muc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the highly skilled tradesmen I've met in the last 5 years make at least what I do, often more, and have the benefit of actually owning their own businesses or real, meaningful slices of other ones. _This_. A lot of software developers think they are the only high earners out there. Skilled tradesmen are making a killing in europe as well. And unlike software engineers, the path to starting an actual business is muc…
Guy down the street has a (house) painting business. I am sure he started out as a painter before deciding to own his own company. He heads out to the sites/jobs he has that day to see that the teams know what to do, then heads to the golf course. Sometime in the late afternoon he makes the rounds again to see how the jobs have progressed that day. Does some book-keeping in the evening. I envy him. I would be surpris…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compared to A Tier cities in some Asian countries? Does Santa Barbara or NYC really look antiquated compared to Mumbai? Or Da Nang? Or Fukuoka? Maybe if you're trying to compare Detroit to Shenzhen or Tokyo.
NYC looks older than Paris somehow, even though that shouldn’t make sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...
A lot of what you think of as "Paris style" is much newer than New York City. NYC has plenty of buildings older than that, and more importantly, its grid pattern is even older.
New York does have many newer buildings, while Paris deliberately prevented much modernization after that. Downtown Paris has no skyscrapers except the Eiffel Tower itself, but it does have modern business centers pushed off to the outskirts of the city.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two things I want to point out: First is Google is an outlier, even among Silicon Valley. So is Meta. They both are well known for very high total compensation. I also specifically didn't say FAANG for this reason. There's other high compensation places that I would bucket in as top 5% that aren't in the acronym (Microsoft comes to mind) which very good TC packages. Second is I removed stock because stock is hugely o…
I don't know anyone in the trades who is going to pull north of 200k unless they own the business. In which case my Ex's father comes to mind; he owned a plumbing business and had 4-5 vans out servicing clients. He made 300+, and busted his ass to get it. Most of his guys were in the 60-85k range. HVAC at 300k is an absolute outlier, and there are going to be some serious tradeoffs in terms of how brutal that's going…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With a larger population combined with more of a chance of living past the age of 5, you need fewer births to get the same population growth rate globally. As the world population rapidly urbanizes we will settle into a new normal that will still approach Earth's carrying capacity faster than we can adequately react.
Human population has overshot in 1971[1], what are you talking about? Carrying capacity has long been exceeded, we’re living thanks to the phantom carrying capacity[2]. 1: https://medium.com/@CollapseSurvival/overshoot-why-its-alrea... 2: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2005-03-06/dependence-pha...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>have the benefit of actually owning their own businesses This sounds like a business is just something that happens to fall on your lap while you're fixing a pipe rather than something that you build with your blood sweat and tears. Most tradespeople make nowhere close to 300k. Their success is credited to their hard work, not their happening to choose the trades.
I should have addressed this more sufficiently, but there are a couple different things I'm saying here so let me clarify: One is being the trades is rewarding, yes not all bring in 300K+, but I don't know a single trades person, many often my junior, who don't bring in a good income pretty comparable to software engineers at non FAANG companies make (typically 150K+) and I don't think any of them are carrying high d…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, re: comparing to "elite SV company" compensation, it doesn't really make sense to discount stock, since stock at the "elite" SV companies is effectively cash, because they're public. Unless you mean that your friend is also making a significant amount of stock, but since you can't value it (e.g. the company is private), it's harder to compare to the "elite" SV companies. I know Google was handing out $385k tota…
Two things I want to point out: First is Google is an outlier, even among Silicon Valley. So is Meta. They both are well known for very high total compensation. I also specifically didn't say FAANG for this reason. There's other high compensation places that I would bucket in as top 5% that aren't in the acronym (Microsoft comes to mind) which very good TC packages. Second is I removed stock because stock is hugely o…
RSUs are the companies you're talking about are effectively cash, and they make up a significant portion of the compensation for the "elite SV" companies. So yes, if you exclude ~40% of the compensation for the "elite SV" companies, then you friend is probably making more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't say governments were always good at it. But every one of the East Asian tigers owes its first-world status to aggressive industrial policy. And despite France's issue with unemployment and immigration, you'd still rather be born there than almost any other nation on the planet. And I'd add, NASA is industrial policy. ARPA is industrial policy. University funding is industrial policy. Government-directed inve…
I would argue that both China and Vietnam owe most to their success to market reforms and not to particular industrial policies. Prior to Deng, China couldn't even produce enough food, and they had industrial policy for years(every 5 in fact). South Korea is a US satrap that has been showered with development dollars since the 1950s, and even still the economy took off after liberalization and a turn to democracy. Mo…
"The 5th Republic has been teetering on the edge of collapse for the last few. years, so I wouldn't be so bullish on France."
OK, I don't think we're going to see eye to eye on anything if you hold those kind of hyper-cynical views.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Despite all these cherry-picked numbers, China's economy will grow by 4-6% this year vs. USA's 0-2%. https://www.barrons.com/articles/us-growth-gdp-china-economy...
One government sponsored number, vs multiple numbers pointing to China's economic decline, which multinationals check in order to gauge the real health of China's economy. Multinationals know the real numbers, which is why they're all leaving. What other numbers don't lie? 20.4% youth unemployment rate https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/29/record-youth-unemployment-st... . 22% drop in daily home sales in 2023 vs 2022 https…
Right now China isn't pouring money into industry because it frankly never needed it. With the opening, more money is now being pumped into reopening services in China, that's why when you look at the PMI for services it's much higher, because people are taking money out of industry (unless it's high tech oriented) and parking it in services. People aren't necessarily consuming more, but it doesn't mean they aren't using much more services than they previously were, and eating out more, etc. GDP doesn't only look at industrial output.
BTW. All the other numbers you cited in the other articles were also provided by the Chinese government.