271–280 of 467 posts
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Not really, china has never started a war and overall seems to understand it as a pointless yet necessary endeavour
China has 100% started wars. The Sino-Vietnamese War for starters.
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Visit if you can, and take some bullet trains! We had a blast last year there.
Shanghai was great in the 2010s. Seems like a different place today. Are the bullet trains making enough to pay down construction debt yet? My understanding is that that has been a struggle, which is going to be a problem when they get past being new and start having more and more maintenance expense on top of paying back construction debt.
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I have two chinese-born coworkers (who spent 20-30 years here in the us) in the same room. When we talk about china's expansion, I am always jealous of the public projects, infrastructure, housing, etc. They always point out the huge unemployment of young people, declining birth rate, and other social ills. They say they're worried when the building stops. Even more people will be out of jobs. And when the nation age…
Why is that a problem? Most of the people in China live in about 1/3 of the country. Imagine if everyone in the United States lived in just 1/3 of the United States even with 350 million people that would be crowded , but China has 1.3 billion people living in an area the size of the United States from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi river imagine 1.3 billion people living just in that area. Building infrastruc…
Take a 100 mile strip down the east coast and the west coast. Add Chicago. That's pretty much everyone.
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In what world is China less "protectionist" than the US?
There are two types of protectionism: 1. Protecting your interests by building a dynamic strategy. You protect your interests by enhancing your strengths and building on them. 2. Protecting your interests by playing “defense” against your decline. We all know which country chose which path. Chinese party leadership is stacked with literal engineers. They’ve prioritized development of industries crucial to their succe…
Our gasoline risks hitting $6-7/gallon because of a war we needlessly started to distract from our leader's seemingly rapidly progressing dementia, his approval numbers that are the lowest since I think LBJ, oh, and him being named repeatedly in the files of a notorious pedophile and child sex trafficker.
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American car manufacturers have extremely small market shares outside N.A., and many (all?) of them required multiple government bailouts over the past few decades. If you think that keeping China is good for the consumer, you'll have to present a stronger case than "we must protect our companies".
> If you think that keeping [out] China is good for the consumer It would be excellent for the consumer, in the rather short term, to not keep them out. Cheap cars! Cheap goods flooding our markets are great for consumers in the short term. > American car manufacturers have extremely small market shares outside N.A Here's a game: One company is American. The other is not. Company 1 Market Share: North America: 16.5%…
Tesla has no moat. BYD makes better EVs & is leading in battery tech. FSD has been promised forever & not delivered. Now Musky says - for cars to have real FSD they need to be newer hardware tech. Robotaxis - Waymo is better.
> BYD ... is leading in battery tech. Dang, it seemed not that long ago - 5 to 10 years - when Tesla had far superior battery tech. I know that isn't a short scale by tech standards but has BYD, and others, really leap-frogged that much? I'm not in that space myself and do not keep up with EV benchmarks but am curious what advances or other changes were made. I recall reading Ford battery technology was also very goo…
It seems logical that if someone was going to surpass Tesla in battery tech, it'd be a battery company. BYD has, after all, been making batteries since its founding under the name "Shenzhen BYD Battery Company" 30 years ago.
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China has 100% started wars. The Sino-Vietnamese War for starters.
Not in the same sense the US or Russia. The Sino-Vietnamese war was brief, about a month. Compare that to US or Russian wars. Now, Im not saying that China won't start wars since they've become a lot stronger. Just looking at it through a historic perspective.
China is also happily supporting Russia in their invasion of Ukraine, which makes the "not waging war" distinction a bit academic.
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I have two chinese-born coworkers (who spent 20-30 years here in the us) in the same room. When we talk about china's expansion, I am always jealous of the public projects, infrastructure, housing, etc. They always point out the huge unemployment of young people, declining birth rate, and other social ills. They say they're worried when the building stops. Even more people will be out of jobs. And when the nation age…
Why is that a problem? Most of the people in China live in about 1/3 of the country. Imagine if everyone in the United States lived in just 1/3 of the United States even with 350 million people that would be crowded , but China has 1.3 billion people living in an area the size of the United States from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi river imagine 1.3 billion people living just in that area. Building infrastruc…
If only. Everybody loves cutting the ribbon on shiny new infrastructure, but the cost of maintenance is very real and never ending.
As a simple example, rezone some agricultural land as residential and sell it to developers. Yay, free money! But only once, and now you have a bunch of roads and plumbing etc etc that you need to upkeep forever. If there's people living in the houses and paying taxes, that's fine, but if there aren't or they go away, you now have a very big, very expensive problem. Japan is deep into feeling the pain of this and demographically China is only a decade or two behind.
BYD has to me become an icon of US decline vs Chinese expansion. It’s just one example among many of China charting the way forward and innovating while the US recedes further into backward-looking, protectionist policy. See: US politicians on both sides trying to ban BYD imports rather than incentivizing stiffer competition from US automakers. Another example: massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens…
> BYD has to me become an icon of US decline vs Chinese expansion. It’s just one example among many of China charting the way forward and innovating while the US recedes further into backward-looking, protectionist policy. See: US politicians on both sides trying to ban BYD imports rather than incentivizing stiffer competition from US automakers. The problem is, China isn't competing fairly! As a Western manufacturer…
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I doubt it because the Chinese are very protective of their homogeneity and see what has happened in Europe as a massive cautionary tale. So my guess is that they will be very picky and control both quality and numbers tightly.
>>and see what has happened in Europe as a massive cautionary tale As a European - what has happened to us, exactly? I'm curious what kind of thing you think is happening to Europe that is such disaster that even China should be afraid of it.