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2025 Letter

danwang.co

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Re: 2025 Letter

#291

Post by fragmede »

That's a lot of words to analyze the world, but no mention of drugs. Which, if you don't do them, you'd never realize. But we all have heard the rumors by now, that Elon's on Ketamine, the Republicans are all on coke, Hunter S Thompson is worth mentioning, Betty Ford put her names on those clinics for a reason. Rob Ford. Boris Yeltsin was an alcoholic. Margaret Thatcher was on stimulants. I'll avoid Godwin-ing this thread.

The stereotype about German engineering is bolstered by the fact that everyone there is on speed and has 4 extra hours in the day to do nothing but clean and tidy up.

Re: 2025 Letter

#292

Post by podgorniy »

snake_doc wrote: post #246
throwaway132448 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you only have to quote the letter itself: "I have a hard time squaring the poor prospects of Europe over the next decade with the smugness that Europeans have for themselves. I spent most of the summer in Copenhagen. There’s no doubt that quality of life in most European cities is superb, especially for what I care about: food, opera, walkable streets, access to nature. But a decade of low economic growth is…

What exactly is wrong with Americans or for the most part the rest of the world valuing economic performance as a measure of prosperity and progress? Your comment is again another anecdote confirming European stereotypes. It’s not a “trap”, it’s a different world view.

> What exactly is wrong with Americans or for the most part the rest of the world valuing economic performance as a measure of prosperity and progress?

Prosperity of the nation? Or average people of the nation?

Imagine economy grows. But created value is distributed in hands of few. How then we think about prosperity? It is a prosperity of those few not a nation's?

Re: 2025 Letter

#293

Post by riku_iki »

maxglute wrote: post #290
riku_iki wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's obvious that some country with 1.5B working people will have edge in some niches, and will demonstrate tremendous growth from the bottom where they were 20 years ago. But for global picture, if we are comparing Western World: US+Canada+EU vs China in technological domination, the picture is likely not super-clear and more complex analysis is required. Even if we consider manufacturing output, where China is su…

The tremendous growth is still happening on sector by sector basis, and arguably west only holds edge in few extreme frontier niches while PRC increasingly dominating rest. Relevant PRC joke: If China can't make something, it's considered high tech. Once china makes it, it's no longer high tech. PRC makes high tech products into low margin commodities. That's what happens when they have roughly oced combined in stem…

unfortunately, your comment consists of many loud hand-waving statements without much substance, so there is no much to discuss.

> The point is when PRC makes >50% of global stuff materially but charges and could you provide source of >50%?

Re: 2025 Letter

#294

Post by maxglute »

siavosh wrote: post #206
Animats wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US Per-capita real income tracked productivity growth until about 1975. After that, productivity continued to climb, but per-capita real income did not. This is why life sucks worse than it used to for everybody but the top 10%. With AI coming along, productivity is about to get another boost. Maybe a big boost. But will most people benefit from it? Under capitalism as currently implemented, no. That's the meaning of…

I agree. The center of capitalism may have shifted to China, but they'll have to deal with (are already) dealing with the same problems and it'll probably happen even faster for them. Instability in the system is only overshadowed by the growing instability in peoples lives. I think most people feel this and the discourse has fundamentally shifted in the west, but these are tectonic and unpredictable forces. A partin…

Consider PRC has 90%+ home ownership rate and declining population, i.e. almost every person in PRC is functionally going to inherit a house, likely multiple, the floor for stability is going to be much higher. This is not west where high % of population is one paycheck away from eviction. Worst case scenario for PRC youth is to have roof over head. Worst case scenario for PRC elderly is they die 100s of times more materially affluent than any past Chinese. VS west deals with onerous social safety nets that's increasingly unsustainable, old gen will lose benefits while new gens finance and live worse off then old gens... because everything is financialized, something CCP very keen to guard against... because it regulates capitalism. IMO very different scale instability to govern for.

Re: 2025 Letter

#295

Post by maxglute »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #160

> For tragedies too widely experienced in modern times to be censored — the Cultural Revolution, the one-child policy, Zero Covid ... this part has me confused can someone explain to me why Zero Covid - the most successful program that minimized Covid deaths - is a tragedy? imo it was better than whatever clusterfuck was happening pretty much everywhere else

Because fundamentally Dan is a western libtard at heart, not many Chinese immigrant kids join Royal Canadian Army Cadet.

The reality is zero covid is the greatest epidemiology response in human history that insulated against ridiculous covid R value variants, when most countries didn't have system capacity for even basic lock downs and simply forced to gamble on vaccines. And when zero covid became unsustainable because R-value rose, it took CCP like weeks to end it, again unprecedently fast response time. Meanwhile new variants less deadly, PRC vaccines 90% as effective after 2 dose, parity effective after 3 dose and openning up resulted in significantly less deaths as % of population (using western excess death numbers not PRC gov numbers).

Yeah lockdown was harsh but they didn't force people to take vaccines, which frankly was a little retarded, also arguably less authoritarian.

Re: 2025 Letter

#296

Post by [deleted] »

maxglute wrote: post #294
siavosh wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. The center of capitalism may have shifted to China, but they'll have to deal with (are already) dealing with the same problems and it'll probably happen even faster for them. Instability in the system is only overshadowed by the growing instability in peoples lives. I think most people feel this and the discourse has fundamentally shifted in the west, but these are tectonic and unpredictable forces. A partin…

Consider PRC has 90%+ home ownership rate and declining population, i.e. almost every person in PRC is functionally going to inherit a house, likely multiple, the floor for stability is going to be much higher. This is not west where high % of population is one paycheck away from eviction. Worst case scenario for PRC youth is to have roof over head. Worst case scenario for PRC elderly is they die 100s of times more m…

[deleted]

Re: 2025 Letter

#297

Post by cassepipe »

> One of the startling geopolitical moves of the year was how quickly Donald Trump withdrew his ~150 percent tariffs on China. Trump folded not out of beneficence, but because Xi Jinping denied rare earth magnets to most of the world, threatening many types of manufacturing operations. And yet I’m struck by Beijing’s relative restraint.

And it makes sense they would do so. Isn't US isolationism their best ally ?

Making up a Sun Tzu quote for this occasion: "If your enemy is about to step in poop, show him how beautiful the sky is"

Re: 2025 Letter

#298

Post by throwaway132448 »

snake_doc wrote: post #286
throwaway132448 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say there was anything wrong with having that value if you want to. The problem is not having the self awareness to realise when that framework of values is clouding your view of other perspectives. A lack of self-awareness is a trap - the most insidious one because you don't know when you're in it :) And you'll need a citation on "for the most part the rest of the world". Economic performance as the one tru…

> Most Americans have no sense of how very different their country is now from say, the country that launched the Apollo missions. You cannot be kidding right? Those that remember the Apollo missions will undoubtedly agree their country is different, first but not least they are most likely using a smartphone assembled and designed with technology unimaginable by NASA planning the Apollo missions; not only that, the…

That’s not change unique to America though. Why would I be thinking of changes that have affected almost every country, when talking about whether Americans recognize how America has changed?

Whether someone remembers the Apollo missions or not is irrelevant to my point. Quite the opposite: It matters more what people who don’t remember think of it, and how distant their assumptions are from the reality of that time.

It’s also funny how you keep bailing on your previous assertions that we’ve dismantled, and cherry pick different parts of every argument in the hope you might finally get a “win”.

Re: 2025 Letter

#299

Post by ehfeng »

decimalenough wrote: post #110
kaonwarb wrote: post #2

I recommend Dan’s book ( https://danwang.co/breakneck/ ) to those wanting to better understand China - and the United States.

+1, it's a great read. It also defies easy summaries, but my biggest takeaways were that 1) the CCP really doesn't care about the costs any of its policies (one-child, zero COVID, etc) impose on its citizenry, and 2) that the CCP is actively preparing China for a world where it's entirely cut off from the West, because it realizes that's the price to pay for invading Taiwan.

I'd agree that China is preparing to be cut off, but it's not because of Taiwan. Dan specifically mentions this:

"In vain do I protest that there are historical and geopolitical reasons motivating the desire, that chip fabs cannot be violently seized, and anyway that Beijing has coveted Taiwan for approximately seven decades before people were talking about AI."

Consider the historical timeline: "Fortress China" policies coincide with the rise of American protectionism on both sides of the aisle and the introduction of chip restrictions and punishing tariffs. Taiwan is an emotional/nationalist issue for China, but it's only one part of their policy, not the lynchpin as your comment suggests.

Re: 2025 Letter

#300

Post by ryukoposting »

keiferski wrote: post #225
ryukoposting wrote: post #216

I've lived in Silicon Valley for exactly 3 days now. Recently moved from the Midwest. There are two kinds of people in San Jose: locals who are normal folks you'd find anywhere, and techies with the AI brainworm. People who are astonished by the natural beauty of this place, and people who are astonished by an office park because there are Apple and Nvidia logos on it. It's all incredibly weird and I don't like it mu…

It is really quite unfortunate that one of the most naturally beautiful places in the world is full of jobs that require sitting inside in front of a computer all day long.

It is peculiar, isn't it. SV also seems hell-bent on expanding outward rather than upward, which runs against the staggering cost of land here. That approach is also rather anti-urbanist, which is unexpected for a place that's otherwise pretty progressive.

I've known people who are walking contradictions (I'm one of them), but SV is a place of contradictions. I've never seen that before.

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