981–990 of 1001 posts
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Agreed. Authoritarian is what westerners don't like. They see it as an evil. I see it as one side of a coin. The yin to a yang.
It is seemingly great to achieve societal progress and modern living conditions, but the individuality and freedom of the individual suffers.
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India has a bigger population but they haven't risen anywhere near the way China has. China's rise was due to smart planning and investment in their people and infrastructure. The country went from peasant farmers to the manufacturing hub of the world in a generation. Now they're in the process of becoming a major hub of knowledge workers while keeping a strong manufacturing backbone. And one thing I rarely see menti…
You completely disregarded the central thesis of the comment you responded to. The one child policy means there are no people to do the manufacturing in China in the future. The population pyramid is inverted. You can't do manufacturing without lots and lots of people. Or at least you'll get out competed by your neighbours who have lots of labor.
China invested heavily in machinery and automation many decades ago. They'll be fairly fine.
I visited India a few months ago. Loved it. But I saw construction being done with donkeys hauling dirt and people shoveling the loads onto the donkey's cart with tiny hand shovels. Scaling up from that to the degree of manufacturing powerhouses like China have is not going to be easy.
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> Fishing is less profitable for the whole UK than Warhammer. This sounded completely insane to me. I tried to look up numbers and found that Games Workshop brings in > 0.5 billion in revenue (!!), compared to all of UKs fisheries at 1 billion-ish (profit margins are, as you'd expect, pretty favorable for the plastic figurines that they don' even paint for you). Thanks for this interesting fact.
A game that is not on a computer... So they don't even calculate damage or move distance for you. And you have to buy each figurine and paint it yourself... And people are spending all their money on this? That's why we're not mining asteroids right now? I feel like people could just use AR glasses for this and spend nothing but their time.
This is a _feature_ for the target audience. There's a sizable chunk of the playerbase who enjoy painting more than the game. I even have friends who paint these miniatures professionally as their side gig.
> And people are spending all their money on this?
No. Most people are playing at home on a budget, similar to other board games. A very tiny fraction of the playerbase plays competitively and have larger collections.
> I feel like people could just use AR glasses for this and spend nothing but their time.
You can play this game in Tabletop Simulator, which supports VR. It's _far_ less fun than playing in person with real objects. TTS is mostly used to test strategies before committing to buying the required miniatures.
As sibling comment mentions, the damage calculation is rather simplistic, and it's an exciting moment around the table when you roll a fistful of dice, kind of like gambling. I'm not even that proficient of a player and I can calculate a 17 dice roll attack while sleep deprived at 3AM, no computer needed.
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it really seems like there's a push to de-skill Americans. like Bessent's remark that the laid-off civil servants could become factory workers as we bring back domestic manufacturing, and the recent corporate push towards vibe coding and integrating AI everywhere, and the purge of seasonal and unskilled migrant workers while keeping the H1B program. it almost seems like we're trying to clear immigrants out of the chi…
I've been hearing internet rumours of theories that for a lot of people all of this has something to do with fragile masculinity, a desire for dominance, sexual insecurity, something like that. I don't really understand it fully, but it's something like they want to bring back old sexual hierachies so they can be at the top of them. Machoism. They want to bring the manly jobs back and give them to white people. The r…
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> Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. I blame Peter Zeihan for this kind of thinking. His views are immensely popular in the very powerful and influential circles. And he constantly derides China's capabilities. Since 2014 he's been saying it's going to collapse any day now. He still says it.
There are rank-and-file members of the western intelligence community that watch/read Zeihan just so they know what their own leadership is ingesting.
He also seems to be veering into fabulism. He's recently said in multiple interviews that there's a clothing factory in North Carolina that is so automated that only 2 "guys" are needed to run it. Raw cotton comes in at one end, and finished clothing comes out at the other (hence Chinese labor is not needed to stitch clothes, hence China is going to collapse any day now).
Why do I believe this is fabulism? He never names this company. And the story has evolved. In earlier interviews he used to say that cloth comes out at the other end. But in a couple of recent interviews he's said finished clothing comes out at the other end.
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> … that they don' even paint for you Of course. That way they can sell you the official paints. Fortunately, it seems they’ve dropped that you’re required to use the official paints if you want to enter a sanctioned tournament.
I'm not into Warhammer, but out of curiosity, how did they check that? Scrape a sample off each figurine and run it through a mass spectrometer or something?
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> Why on Earth would taxpayers give their hard earned money to other people to work on their "projects of interest"? I think the implication here is that such a society is not built on markets or even money, but rather by individuals working together to foster a collective community that meets everyone’s needs. Yes, communism. The more advanced we become technologically the more sense it makes. We’re largely at a poi…
If you look around and think most jobs are made up, most goods are worthless, and you have no choice but to make discretionary purchases, I don't know what to tell you. Communism makes no sense until we reach a post-scarcity economy, which will never happen.
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China is over 90% ethnically Han Chinese. Compared to the US it is practically a homogeneous country. The language diversity is greater in China, but the racial/ethnic diversity is lesser. China is more comparable to Europe than the US.
You're conflating racial and ethnic diversity in ways that are distinctly western or even really US-centric. Europe is extremely ethnically diverse, as is China, they just don't use skin color as the primary ethnic marker the way that is commonly (and still incorrectly) done in the US. The 90% Han Chinese number isn't especially useful because it's comparable to the way that most of Europe has historically identified…
Not at all, these are pretty universally agreed upon by global sociologist.
>Europe is extremely ethnically diverse, as is China
Indeed, Europe is extremely diverse, much more so than China.
>they just don't use skin color as the primary ethnic marker the way that is commonly (and still incorrectly) done in the US.
Neither does the US. Skin color is not a primary ethnic marker. No one versed in sociology in the US considers a Black American ethnically similar to an Eritrean. Nor do they consider a Ukrainian ethnically similar to a White American.
>The 90% Han Chinese number isn't especially useful because it's comparable to the way that most of Europe has historically identified itself as the successor of Rome.
It is extremely useful because the subgroups specifically make these claims: "Modern Han Chinese subgroups, such as the Cantonese, the Hakka, the Henghua, the Hainanese, the Hoklo peoples, the Gan, the Xiang, the Wu-speaking peoples, all claim Han Chinese ancestry pointing to official histories and their own genealogical records to support such claims."
Germanic people do not make the claim to be of Roman or Mediterranean ethnicity nor origin. The languages are vastly more varied in Europe versus China, where 70%+ speak Mandarin.
Additionally, Han Chinese are much closer genetically than Europeans. Italians, Brits, and Estonians have much more varied genetics compared to Han Chinese.
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Any experience or thoughts on Vietnam and Malaysia? Are they also moving ahead?
I was in Malaysia ~10 years ago. I saw a lot of weird things for sure, but I also saw a modern capital city that could easily shadow over many European cities today in terms of life quality, fancyness and nearly any metric. I didn't see any shoe manufacturers :)