241–250 of 453 posts
Why is this post being flagged?
I didn't flag it, and clearly I'm here commenting, but I'm also sympathetic to people flagging this.
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> China's population is purportedly set to halve by 2100. 75 years is a long time. At lot can change. 75 years ago, China was just finishing its civil war, with the losers retreating to Taiwan. Land reform had an "estimated death toll ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Reform_Movement The infamous famine was only about 65 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_…
> 75 years is a long time. At lot can change. True, but population collapse specifically is a tough headwind. You can't make more 2055 30-year-olds unless they've already been conceived today, and those will be the parents of the 2100 45-year-olds. While a lot can change, it's unrealistic to assume a birth rate will skyrocket all of a sudden (China's at 1.18 per woman and US is only at 1.6). The painful part, the bad…
Much less of a problem if the government mandates gender selection for the unborn resulting in 1/1.18 etc. of live births being women.
Already technologically possible. I don't know if they could make that culturally, even dictatorships have limits, but the technology is there.
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Couldn't you say the same thing about parents?
No. In most countries there are laws restricting what parents can do. On the other hand, nobody is proposing a father figure running a country, so I don't see the connection here.
I'll never understand why this man gets so much attention.
He found patronage in the American oligarchy (look up his ties with Peter Thiel, for example) and as a result, his ideas are now directly implemented by the current administration, that is 100% subservient to capital.
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> China faces civil unrest and balkanizes, due to backlash against its increasingly authoritarian regime? I've been hearing this is eminent for my entire life.... > major population shock that radically and painfully transforms their economy Ah Peter Zeihan's evergreen bugaboo. Chinese old people != American old people, the cost of old people is completely different. While China does have a Ponzi economy, much like t…
You’ve been hearing it’s eminent because most of Chinese history has played out this way and the Chinese world view sees government as dynastic and cyclical as opposed to progressive or something else. It’s plausible because it’s culturally coherent but that does not necessitate it. Communism could have easily been too alien to succeed but Mao made it contextual, so it unified the society instead. The way I look at i…
Then the argument would be CCP dynasty is just starting - 70 years into multiple generation spanning 250+ year cycle where they're already cooking, and TBH more geographically and culturally cohesive than any past periods. Or, US is 250 years into cycle, i.e. potentially approaching bulkanization time. But that would defeat / be contrary to the entire is PRC collapsing / bulkanizing meme. It's based on hopium.
I mentioned this previously, but I frequently think back to Gibson's "Jackpot" -- a cross-lashed, polycausal catastrophe: Lots of bad little things accumulating, building up a certain momentum. I think that even as far back as 2009, an astute observer would have noticed that society is beginning to burn through its seed corn. In some places, things are now getting extremely acute: https://www.neilobrien.co.uk/p/the-c…
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In this context, three years ago, Vance was describing Yarvin as his "good friend" (when he was campaigning for a seat in the US Senate, which he won), while four months ago, Yarvin is saying he barely knows Vance. If you're suggesting that the apparent discrepancy is a result of strategic dishonesty for reputation preservation, that would mean that either: 1. Yarvin wants to distance himself from Vance because he fe…
You've left out the fairly obvious possibility #3, which is "Yarvin fears reputational damage to Vance that might prevent Vance from helping him advance his ideology". This, after all, was Thiel's concern in the quoted exchange. #2 gets a lot more plausible when you remember these folks often care more about the backing (especially $$$) of someone like Thiel than the regular public, too.
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Understatement of the millenium, but Yarvin has written a lot more than "let's do fascist technocracy!" I find his writing style wastes a lot of one's time and I disagree with him on nearly everything, but there's no denying that there are many interesting ideas in there.
I absolutely deny that there are any interesting ideas in there. We've done this, it was called the dark ages and it sucked and we moved past it. Engaging with this pablum in any way is granting it attention and vigor it obviously doesn't deserve.
Well, the "dark ages" is now widely considered a misnomer, and that time is seen as an important era development-wise.
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What makes Scott a crank?
https://miniver.blogspot.com/2024/01/scott-alexander-siskind...
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They have invested a lot into their energy sources whether it's nuclear or renewables + batteries or hydro. They also have industrial capacity. I feel like we tend to forget that the brunt of the economic output is made by machines which feed on energy. When you have virtually free energy and sufficient level of machinery, you can do anything.
Personally, I directly use energy, both current and future (access to resources) as the main currency of my economic model of the world, not money. So I do understand that China is well-equipped to weather the storm on multiple fronts. But that's orthogonal to the fact that they will experience major population shock that radically and painfully transforms their economy, and also to the fact that China is a totalitar…
It's not just China, it's a global problem.