491–500 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Democrat voters didn’t want anything to do with her during the 2020 primaries and didn’t turn out as much for her in 2024 as they did for Biden in 2020, so who are the real misogynists here?
Pretty clearly republicans, to be honest.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The weird part for me is this: While the economy was evolving, Production was offshored from US for cost-reasons, but also in part to focus on higher-skill labor in US, delegating the low-skill mass-production to China. Over time, China also developed mid/high level skills, complemented their low-skill production offering with it and now competes in new industries, new tech, etc. So...to compete with China, the count…
I think the mistake here is the model of low-skill/high-skill labor is not a useful distinction. Manufacturing is high skill period, however there are low-infrastructure and high-infrastructure products and factories. The labor wages themselves are a factor, but an increasingly minor factor in product costs. By bypassing investment in US manufacturing skills and infra, the US sat itself on the sidelines for the abili…
One of the foundations of conservatism is the priority of hierarchy over effectiveness. In a conservative culture it doesn't matter how well things work as long as the right people in charge.
We're seeing the limit of this now, where it's literally more important to maintain hierarchy by denying facts and rationality than to "lose face" by admitting that power isn't absolute.
You can't run a modern country like this. You can't plan for the future, make effective decisions, govern, have a working legal system, build housing, create health care - anything at all - when all decisions are made according to the whims of a despot.
Power and resources - including wealth - have to be distributed. Or at least there has to be the illusion they're somewhat distributed. Anything else guarantees terminal contraction and decay.
Fine, we underestimate the difficulty. But we can make a detailed plan like other countries do. The US has massive advantages. Just no longer so massive that we can expect to win on sheer awesomeness. I feel like we in the US have a horrible split evaluation of ourselves: either we're supreme or we're doomed. Both sides of that split are emotional states, not useful facts.
> But we can make a detailed plan like other countries do The problem isn’t that we don’t know this: it’s that the person making the decisions rejects the idea of needing to make a detailed plan, or even understand the situation well enough to recognize the problems a plan would need to address.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
China has been moving cheap product production to SEA for awhile now, what the USA wants is countries like Vietnam to make cheap products without Chinese involvement in the manufacturing tech and supply chains…which is pretty much impossible.
> China has been moving cheap product production to SEA for awhile now, what the USA wants is countries like Vietnam to make cheap products without Chinese involvement in the manufacturing tech and supply chains…which is pretty much impossible. Not too long ago it was "common knowledge" that the Chinese couldn't do advanced stuff, now it's "common knowledge" you can't do advanced stuff without the Chinese. Nothing is…
Yes, America too could build out this capability by aggressively investing in it for a couple of decades.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Other than that it seems to be mostly good points, especially the overall one: you cannot do this overnight. It's annoying Americans were given only two choices - offshoring is great and let's keep doing it, and, as you say, the opposite, meth-fueled let's bring back manufacturing overnight. The kind of slow and steady protection and promotion of home-grown industry that China and most of Asia so successfully used…
> It's annoying Americans were given only two choices - offshoring is great and let's keep doing it, and, as you say, the opposite, meth-fueled let's bring back manufacturing overnight. There were a lot of slower manufacturing on-shoring incentives during the Biden administration that would have presumably continued under the Harris administration. Mainly around green energy and electric vehicle manufacturing incenti…
Biden's infrastructure and funding bills were basically doing exactly this, and their foreign policy largely aligned with this goal as well.
I was not a huge Biden fan early in his presidency (Breaking the rail union strike and the complete lackluster response to actually prosecuting criminality in the outgoing admin were not my desired policies - democrats are markedly too corporatist in general).
But his infrastructure bills were sorely needed practical steps to doing a lot of good for a lot of folks in the US. There's a reason so many politicians then tried to take credit for them (incl Trump).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> China generates over twice as much electricity per person today as the United States. Why? >> This appears to be completely wrong? All the stats I can find say that the US has about 4x the per capita electricity generation of China. I believe the comparison is absolute production, not per person. Anything else would be odd. Considering China has 4x the capita of US it would mean that in absolute terms China is prod…
China electricity consumption is growing by 6-8% a year and is likely to hit 10500 trillion kilowatt-hours in 2025. Which at $0.10/kwh the avg is a $1 trillion dollars. Though from what I understand in China home users are charged about $0.07 and industry $0.08 so $7-800 billion a year on electricity alone. They are rapidly moving to renewable with grid scale BESS auctions avg $66-68/kw they are likely to have electr…
It used to be that the Chinese economy was based on just cheap labor. It's now increasingly based on cheap energy and automation. Replicating that elsewhere needs to start with modernizing energy infrastructure. Without that, there is no chance of competing. Manufacturing is energy intensive. So, cheap energy is indeed a key enabler.
The cost per kwh is a good one to call out. I think the medium term target for that should be < 1 cent per kwh. Effectively it trends to zero because there is very little marginal with solar, wind, and batteries other than the depreciation of infrastructure, equipment, etc. over time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the part that is so frustrating to me, and not just with regards to tariffs. It's that I see the extremes being so laughably bad (though not necessarily equally - I'm not "both sides"-ing this), and more ludicrously bad is that I've seen positions that don't follow these extremes as being derided now as "centrism". E.g. before the administration's attack on higher education, I do believe a lot of elite univer…
You’ve been conned if you think overactive DEI was anything more than a minor annoyance in 99% of American universities. Did some people overdo it in a destructive way? Of course. But it wasn’t anything that was going to lead to major problems. The problems come from the folks who can’t just roll their eyes and move on but instead feel personally attacked and hold a permanent grudge instead of realizing that they the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fall of the Soviet Union was arguably more graceful than the two world wars and myriad of colonial worlds it took Europe butt out. Even if you exclude the world wars it probably holds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_territory... Very graceful.
Edit: You could probably even include the current Ukraine shindig and my statement would still hold.