221–230 of 238 posts
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> The US has about 4T of foreign exchange reserves Source? Wikipedia puts it at $250bn. The US has liquidated most of its reserves in recent years.
I got the figure from here: “ Foreign Exchange Reserves in the United States increased to 37628 USD Million in April from 37566 USD Million in March of 2023. source: Federal Reserve” https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/foreign-exchange-...
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Frankly it's bullshit. The Putinist narrative that democracy is a sham makes sense for a man isolated from the real world that doesn't use the internet, but it's stunning to me how disconnected some people in the west can be from the society they live in. I have family in the British military at a moderately high level. A friend was a researcher for an MP, and another a government adviser. Sure politics is messy, it'…
Trump is case in point of the two government system between elected power and longstanding unelected power that remains between elections. He was just a loud mouthpiece to appease his political base basically. He, like presidents before him, did not do anything substantial to buck the steady march of the us hegemony. He was not unilaterally making any decisions. There is a lot of business in government and in militar…
In other words the people elect politicians that align with their desires and intentions. And that's a bad thing because.... help me out here.
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I can understand this being hard to comprehend, but if China actually effectively deployed a zero covid policy initially - it's up to you whether you think the reports to this effect are true or not - then a mask-less concert is in fact pretty safe as long as you're not allowing foreigners to bring COVID into the country. Of course the moment you let Americans in to your country, you've given up your battle against C…
'Let it rip' is 'flatten the curve' for someone who unscientifically thinks zero Covid is practically possible. China made the wrong decision and almost sparked an internal collapse. They lost the youth and the hopelessness in the country is palpable.
Did anyone try and fail at that point? Were there experiments that tried to achieve zero covid, exhausted all practical methods and still failed?
I'd argue that even today, zero covid is not "scientifically" proven practically impossible. The fact that China tried and failed does not mean it's inherently practically impossible. For all I can tell, it's only "practically impossible" because only China was able to pull off the authoritarian measures to suppress the spread of the virus. In a more authoritarian world, we might have been able to eradicate covid. Does your "science" include a deep discourse in political systems?
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Can you provide the examples for US part in pervasive IP stealing, predatory infrastructure loans, trading with sanctioned countries? Not single issues (every country will have some examples here and there), but actually using those as long term strategies?
Look into earlier in the Industrial Revolution and you'll find plenty of IP thefts and outright defiance of UK laws of technology export controls and laws against emigration of skilled workers. The US went further than "being a fence" and had agents stealing technology as early as 1787. It isn't limited to industrial technology. Music piracy got so bad in the 19th century that Gilbert and Sullivan premiered "The Pira…
Those interested might want to look at this as well: https://creativelawcenter.com/dickens-american-copyright
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'Let it rip' is 'flatten the curve' for someone who unscientifically thinks zero Covid is practically possible. China made the wrong decision and almost sparked an internal collapse. They lost the youth and the hopelessness in the country is palpable.
How is thinking zero covid is possible in 2020 "unscientific"? Did anyone try and fail at that point? Were there experiments that tried to achieve zero covid, exhausted all practical methods and still failed? I'd argue that even today, zero covid is not "scientifically" proven practically impossible. The fact that China tried and failed does not mean it's inherently practically impossible. For all I can tell, it's on…
-R0 was quite high
-Animals can hold and spread the virus, so even after vaccinations of humans it was going to be in the background
-not every country was trying for zero Covid, therefore at some point in the future if you ever hope to have an open border with a country that has open borders with that country, you get it eventually.
-there are no 100% secure borders
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>Military-industrial complex emerges and captures politicians (US 1950s) So far China has completely avoided this. The military is very firmly under Party control. >Military interventionalism shows its flaws through failed post-intervention nation-building Germany, Japan and South Korea have been fantastic successes in nation building. Sure there have been failures too, most recently in Afghanistan. For China, their…
> The [Chinese] military is very firmly under Party control. The point about the military-industrial complex capturing politicians isn't about control, but rather excess procurement. On the one hand, China has a long way to reach parity with the US. On the other hand, they're building extremely quickly, and that means lots of government money going to corporations. Subsequent restrictions to that funding flow tend to…
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We weren't smart enough to solve the tragedy of the commons situation because we believed a wealthy China would drop the true-believer Mao ideology.
They did drop maoism. China practices state run capitalism now.
Most people on HN basically have no idea what Marxism is, what the road to socialism is about, the stages of socialism, or why China really does what they do. I don't watch Xi's speeches on YouTube, but you could if you really wanted to.
They treat "not free market capitalism" as a monolith of ideas and states.
Even a light reading of Marxist economic theory with some other adjacent authors like Lenin, Mao, Trotsky, etc. would make clear exactly why Dengism was needed and why it worked and why Xi finds it necessary to return to straight Marxism.
The worst part is how greedy corporate oligarchs of the US sent all the jobs to China. That made Dengism work really well.
I mean, I don't really know what to say. If you wanted China to lose or not be Marxist, the US did a really bad job. It's really clear the only long-term planning the US does is lining pockets and that's probably going to be the death of the country.
But this is HN, so please pretend like I was complaining about wokeness or whatever other imaginary problem is popular here.
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Trump is case in point of the two government system between elected power and longstanding unelected power that remains between elections. He was just a loud mouthpiece to appease his political base basically. He, like presidents before him, did not do anything substantial to buck the steady march of the us hegemony. He was not unilaterally making any decisions. There is a lot of business in government and in militar…
Basically the parties and individual politicians have their own political areas of intention and aspiration, which all overlap with each other. What actually ends up happening is 90% within the overlap area. But that's just because there's a broad consensus in the country, both among the electorate and among the politicians they elect. In other words the people elect politicians that align with their desires and inte…
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I mean it's the gigantic elephant in the room. The reported narratives have aligned over the years as if they were our enemy. Here are some: Economically, they're an adversary; they undercut western manufacturing and all our manufacturing went there. They manipulate their currency. They interfere with foreign owned businesses. They steal IP. They're seeking to upset the global money standard. They entrap other nation…
> trying to annexe land and sea that definitively isn't theirs (Tibet, "South China" Sea) The matter of Tibet is complex, and I think "definitively" is handwaving away a lot of Tibetan history.