Mr.Digg

Always Aim to be King 👑 *Pharmacist*

[The Shift Journal @TheShiftJournal]

Malcolm Gladwell explaining why some people succeed and some don't.

[Anime Updates @animeupdates]

'That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime' Season 4 New Anime Officially Premieres in 2 weeks!

https://t.co/EFFqfZKsIA

[Tensura News ENG @tensura_updates]

🌊💧 That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: Tears of the Azure Sea

3 Scene Previews Released! 🎬✨
Catch a glimpse of the adventure!

[𝕭𝖊𝖑𝖘 🇺🇸 @therealbelano]

He hit him with the African “it’s not far” 😂

Never fall for that fam 😑😂😂

This is the funniest video I have for you this week man! 😂

[Daily Naruto @NarutoDaily_]

No other anime openings will ever move a crowd like this 🔥🔥

[Cartoon Base @TheCartoonBase]

‘THE LEGEND OF AANG: THE LAST AIRBENDER’ releases on Paramount+ in 8 months.

The film was previously set to release in theaters. 💔

[Anime Tokki @AnimeTokki]

The Big 3 of Isekai shows will all be airing this year:
- Re:Zero Season 4 - April 2026
- That Time i was Reincarnated as a Slime Season 4 - April 2026
- Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation Season 3 - July 2026

[Anime Tokki @AnimeTokki]

'That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime' Season 4 will Officially Broadcast with 50+ Episodes, Anime Movie Premieres February 2026.

Broadcast begins April 3rd, 2026.

[Marvel Studios @MarvelStudios]

December 18, 2026. #AvengersDoomsday

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

He’s been pumping gas for 50 years — watch him hit a flawless $25 fill-up in front of thousands.

[Ghana Tech & Infra @GhanaTechInfra]

🚨 Ghana’s 🇬🇭 nominal GDP has reached $111.9bn, now ranking as Africa’s 8th largest economy after overtaking Côte d’Ivoire 🇨🇮 and Ethiopia 🇪🇹, and the second largest in West Africa.

The cedi also strengthened from GH¢14.7 to $1 at the start of the year to GH¢10.45, marking its first annual appreciation since 2007.

[Yishan @yishan]

When people are suffering because the cost of living is too high, and you (as a policymaker) intend to spend public money to fix this, there are two main routes:

- subsidize demand, or
- subsidize supply

Subsidizing demand is "give people money to pay for the expensive thing."
Subsidizing supply is "give producers money to build out capacity to make more of the expensive thing."

These routes represent a difference between (to use coarse-grained terms) current Western liberal thinking and Chinese socialist thinking.

Subsidizing demand causes inflation if the expensive thing is expensive due to insufficient supply. The number of people who will have access to this thing will not go up, because the actual amount of supply stays the same. Prices eventually rise to reflect the inflation (speed depends on implementation of the subsidy).

Subsidizing supply increases the amount of the expensive thing being produced, reducing its price and increasing availability. More people are likely to have access to it because now there's more of it and it costs less to buy.

There are probably broader considerations involved that professional economists take into account but these dynamics seem relevant for our current economic situation.

A few weird things seem to be involved in this situation in our present cultural moment:

1) Western liberal elites don't like subsidizing supply because subsidies for producers often feels like giving money to owners, or capitalists, or rich people. Why would you give money to the capitalist owner of the factory instead of to the common man?

2) American elite thinking tends to focus on "virtualized" things (like prices) while Chinese elites think more about "real atoms" (actual goods). Hence, viewing the prices of things as being too high leads to favoring virtualized solutions like helping with the price (give more virtualized money to bring down the virtualized price). Thinking about the amount of physical goods leads to thinking about how to make more of the physical good (build more factories).

3) There is this idea that you don't want to "crash prices" through "overproduction." In the West, classical micro-economic incentives lead producers to make a profit-maximizing amount and that it's bad to disturb that; only occasionally disruptive exogenous events result in large changes to supply and deflationary drops in pricing.

There isn't much thought given to the idea that "price collapse" also lowers the cost of the good as an input into other things, as well as (in the case of widely-consumed goods) effectively lowering a tax burden on the population. China seems to think this way, and so subsidizes massive "overcapacity" which results in both everything that uses that good as an input becoming more economically viable, and people who consume it having more money for other things.

The above idea is not obvious so I will give three examples:

1) The idea of asteroid mining and bringing back billions of tons of some valuable metal (nickel or gold or platinum), worth "trillions of dollars." Someone always points out that it'll "crash the price" (it will); this statement shows an inability to separate the virtualized idea of a price from how it represents the cost [to produce/acquire] - in fact it would be bringing trillions of dollars of value to the entire economy, as now there's a lot more of the metal to use, and everyone who uses it to produce something useful has lower cost of production and more downstream products (value) can be made.

2) In my own industry (global reforestation) I hear a similar objection to the idea of enabling much larger scales of sustainable timber: wouldn't it collapse the price of timber? Yes, and that's a good thing: now there's more timber for everyone to use and it's cheaper so more products become economical to make.

3) Finally, the "peace dividend" over the past 30 years where the proliferation of mobile phones made cameras, gyroscopes, and batteries far smaller and cheaper due to forcing producers to scale up production: this is what enabled the drone industry to develop as an economically viable product.

The difference is that the West (to the extent that it remains laissez-faire) only allows these exogenous shocks or market trends to periodically drive down prices by expanding supply - the cause is unpredictable, whether it's discovery of a new source, business model, production methods, etc.

Even the phrase "price collapse" sounds horribly negative and conversation-ending. But if you want to "lower taxes" on your citizenry you can either
a) lower taxes revenues, or
b) find a way to make something that everyone buys cost a lot less

Examples of things that would essentially be a massive tax break for the citizenry if they went through a "price collapse":
- housing
- health care
- education
- fuel
- ... you get the idea

Current Chinese socialism is focused on increasing material wealth for its citizens, and so uses industrial policy to greatly increase production capacity - not just through subsidies, but also via competition: producers are given money to build more factories, but also forced to compete so that they innovate on efficiency and cost. If you give every producer money but tell them only a couple will win, you get a lot more stuff made and it gets better-cheaper-faster.... sooner.

They are essentially accelerating the long-term deflationary effects of capitalism through socialist planning.

But this is not a post about socialism!

That's just the name for it, because the big idea that everyone has missed is that "Chinese socialism" is nothing like what it took from the West - the common moniker is "socialism with Chinese characteristics - but I prefer to think that the degree of distortion from having to translate between such alien cultures and language resulted in so much leeway for re-interpretation that what China ended up with was nothing like what Western socialists had in mind, it's like a Panda Express version of socialism: unrecognizable to people familiar with the authentic original, but optimized for its local conditions.

After all, western conservatives - although apt to implement subsidies for producers ("giveaways to the rich") - still stop short at telling the producers to produce more than the profit-maximizing amount - they assume that the profit-maximizing amount is the "right amount" to be produced for the market. There is not as much thought given to "what are the downstream effects if 10x as much is produced and the price trends towards zero?" Bringing up "it would collapse the price for X" is enough to end most discussions.

(Of course, you do see some modern tech barons thinking this way, and it's part of the galaxy-brain/megolomanical thinking where one company might intend to dominate or reshape an entire ecosystem, but we are mostly talking about non-technocratic Western policymakers right now)

So instead the West contents itself with incremental reduction of prices (cost) through piecemeal innovation and competition, rather than targeted identification of areas where driving down a cost deliberately as close to zero as possible might have some kind of macro effect on society, and then implementation of industrial policy intended to achieve this effect.

This is not socialism, because if it were really socialism (as the West understands it), at least some branch of the extreme Left in the US or EU would be advocating for it. And the Right won't brook quite that much market intervention: it prefers to just deregulate to accelerate the incremental price reductions - you know, regular ol' capitalism.

Here is the point: the argument about whether China is socialist (communist) or capitalist is wrong. It is not either of those things - they are both Western ideas. It is a secret third thing.

Now I am not sure exactly what it is - because I am steeped in American culture while having cultural access via my Chinese ethnicity - I can only tell you that it's not one of those things.

It has something to do with a practical materialism, where "materialism" is not the word with the connotations of "shallow and liking money" (though Chinese people do love money), but rather a concern with real atoms, real things, the real physical world.

It is not as though China has no art or culture or life of the mind, but that there is a profound recognition (perhaps even an overcorrection from being humiliated by "culturally inferior" barbarians) that if you haven't mastered the physical world, nothing else matters. And so it's not about the price, and thus virtualized measures like "GDP" - it's about how much real physical stuff you're making.

For the tech people, it's a bit like counting productivity by Lines of Code (LOC). Writing more code means more productivity, right? Whereupon great programmers turn out to improve functionality by deleting Lines of Code, and so have "negative productivity."

The same glitch exists in GDP, because with Mississippi having a GDP per Capita of $53k and Chongqing having a GDP per Capita of $14k...

Well, you can increase GDP by making incrementally more stuff

And you can increase GDP by giving out subsidies so everyone pays more for the same stuff

But if you figure out a way to make the same stuff for way way cheaper super fast, you'll crater nominal GDP even while real economic welfare rises.

Statistical agencies typically try to correct for quality/price changes like this and can account for it incrementally, but if you simply don't care about GDP as a measurement at all and are using some secret third thing to guide your policymaking towards the idea of "make as much stuff for as many people as possible" I guess you might even end up driving GDP towards zero along with your prices while your people mysteriously get rich.

Anyhow, you might think this is a critique of American policy or something but really it's just a message for the new socialist government of New York City: if you want to drive down cost of living for New Yorkers, don't spend precious public dollars subsidizing goods. Figure out a way to spend it on increasing production capacity so that you can "collapse prices" because then everyone can afford it and have more.

Remember: secret third thing.

[Tim Cook @tim_cook]

It all begins with a great idea.

[Johnny @j00ny369T]

All kinds of rice.

[Z Fellows @zfellows]

At the core, running a company is about solving a problem you care about so deeply that you’re willing to suffer for it.”

- Elon Musk

[The Figen @TheFigen_]

In Brazil, a drunk was lost and his own bull went to look for him and took him home.

[DiscussingFilm @DiscussingFilm]

First poster for ‘BLUE EYE SAMURAI’ Season 2.

Coming soon to Netflix.

[DiscussingFilm @DiscussingFilm]

First poster for the ‘SPLINTER CELL’ animated series.

Trailer releases on Thursday.

[Wholesome Side of 𝕏 @itsme_urstruly]

Asking an audience member to come up and tell a joke, and he nailed it 🤣🤣

[NHIS Ghana @NHIS_Ghana]

We've received a lot of questions pertaining to the things we cover and what you're entitled to with your valid NHIS card. Here is a summarised breakdown of everything your NHIS card can do for you.

Be abreast with this information because it'll come in handy when next you go for healthcare.

Dial *929# to renew and link your Ghana card. Or install the MyNhis app for registration and other services. You can also call our helplines; 054-444-6447 or 030-274-6447 for further assistance. We are here to serve you.