ilaks

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all.

[ilaks @ilaks]

In the olden days whether it’s in China or Europe, in feudal times where lords and generals get funding to protect the border against bandits or invaders, the invaders typically are always around and never vanquished. It happened so often Chinese even have parables and an idiom for it.

They call it 养匪自重，which translates to nurture bandits to strengthen his own position.

Political Rascals do this a lot.

[ilaks @ilaks]

@ylecun @JohnProperBTC @Xnarkycritic @DavidSacks Of the most academically capable, the numbers chasing tenure in universities in the most financially rewarding fields have been dropping for decades.

R&D no longer comes from academia in the most lucrative fields where the compensation gap is widest.

[ilaks @ilaks]

There is a walled nation. There’s picture of an animal with four legs. PengDeHuai and Liu ShaoQi said “That is a deer”. Mao arrested Liu and Peng and said “That is a horse.”

Decades later, Deng and other survivors said “that was a deer.”

To people outside the walled nation, we can’t know for sure, but from far apart, a lot of people agree it’s probably is a deer. Some believe it was a horse.

Now today, people inside the wall probably know that whether it’s a horse or a deer depends on who decides. Most understand it no longer matters. Only who is talking matters.

But if someone wants to climb the wall and tell people outside the walled nation that it’s a horse, my first worry is that whether it’s a horse or deer is not as important as whether it is even legal to climb walls.

[ilaks @ilaks]

The heavy tariffs on imports stops many opportunities to assimilate new technologies and production processes. That also plays a role.

It’s understandable to try to force companies to build local factories to access the domestic market, but China tried a different approach starting with Foxconn, Apple in Shenzhen and that became a template for how you can build a supply chain and export to the world. China achieved the same goals but relied less on the stick and got all the tech and employment numbers they needed by trying something less obstructive.

Decades ago, China didn’t know how to operate or maintain a science park or even lease properties in the early days and they go Temasek to invest in one in HangZhou.

They learnt the entire system from the Singaporeans and then replicated the same business park operations everywhere. It was a period of massive absorption of ideas and operational processes that helped them scale up quickly.

[ilaks @ilaks]

Nation wide IQ numbers are suspect because if orphanages or GaoKao takers are over represented, you will skew the numbers.

The point is that there will always be a distribution, and just about any ethnic group can point to representative individuals in the extreme right or extreme left of the distribution curve.

Identity politics is obsessed with collective group numbers when the answer is staring plainly at us. It’s individuals who can change the world, and they can look like any major ethnic group.

Treat people as individuals and give them opportunities to excel. Most will still fail for all sorts of reasons, but the few that do succeed will change the world.

This is why if we treat a person as a person and not as some identity, most of societies conflicts can disappear. The angst and discord is mostly self inflicted.

[ilaks @ilaks]

Mao used the pretext that Deng was a capitalist to purge him.

To really understand the impact of why Mao’s policies didn’t work, you can study what happened in XiaoGang village in Anhui. The villagers signed a secret pact to bypass the collectivized policies that allowed them to meet production quotas as the country faced a famine that killed tens of millions.

This is all within official history of what happened. Sure they will use more positive language, but the existence of the pact to raise each others children if they were caught or executed for doing capitalism should be clear if you can read between the lines.

The point is a simple one. Collectivization didn’t work, and has always failed everywhere they were tried. Mao believed to his deathbed that collectivism will work.

Deng realized early that collectivism doesn’t work and he worked to dismantle it after he won power.

This fundamentally is why Maoist economic policies failed and Deng’s worked. No amount of revisionism changes the observable numbers and changes by contrasting the two leaders’ approach to basic economic ideas.

[ilaks @ilaks]

The key economic grown come from Alberta, BC and Ontario. Alberta isn’t carrying the burden of keeping the country together alone.

There’s advantages of staying together. Whatever narrow financial or economic advantages of separation is outweighed by the major disadvantages.

A workable strategy is to negotiate for policies that help Alberta sell its resources efficiently. To get this done, you have to try to bypass eco warriors who will try anything to sabotage any infrastructure plans to allow pipelines or forestry or mining anywhere.

A key obstacle just resigned from the liberal government. If you can push out most of the extremist Woke green elements from the liberal party, their policies become more centrist and workable. We all need to work harder to get these green obstructionists out of any policy making roles, and that’s the only way to make the country prosperous.

There’s unlimited wealth per capita under our feet. If we’re allowed to harvest even a fraction of that, the opportunities are endless.

[ilaks @ilaks]

Hollywood actors should look at what AI is doing to the entertainment industry in China.

Many actors have accepted that it’s mostly over and have started to license their likeness with a series of photos which can then be used to generate realistic AI slop of entire movies.

This way at least they can get some revenue to survive. The role of stuntmen is pretty much gone. AI can generate realistic action scenes easily at low cost.

If you want to reimagine capitalism, watch capitalism run its course within Hollywood movie making first. It should create some appreciation of how the blue collar workers faced during the decades of deindustrializon as the world globalized.

[ilaks @ilaks]

Deng and ZhuRongJi were the engineers of China’s reform. The specifics of their plans was what started the decades of massive growth.

The periods before were a series of calamity. The Great Leap Forward’s disasters were determined within the CCP as 70% manmade first in the LuShan conference of 1959 (Peng DeHuai wrote a detailed analysis that is still viewed as a definitive analysis of the key mistakes) and then publicly in 1962. Mao accepted responsibility but also collectivized the mistakes by pushing it to everyone else.

Then Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to punish his critics (they mostly died in prisons or hospitals (including Liu ShaoQi and Peng DeHuai, but Deng and XiJinPing’s father survived). About 2/3 of the central committee were purged and persecuted.

The point is before Deng’s reforms and implemented by Zhu, there were consecutive major mistakes that were clearly caused by decisions made by Mao (Revisions to blame JiangQing (his wife) and the Gang of Four were mostly a deflection of who was responsible).

[ilaks @ilaks]

Many years ago, when everything was still relatively open in china, a friend in Beijing took me on a tour around TianAnMen square. He wasn’t part of the protests that night but he was a grad student who stayed late and saw parts of it. He said he didn’t see what happened in the square, but he saw a few wounded pushed by carts towards hospitals. He basically recounted what he heard and what followed the next few days.

The students from outside who took part in the protest mostly made it back home by train, but they were confronted by people on train rides who gave them a hard time.

He claimed the protests originated because a few leaders had families who accumulated large amounts of wealth and while it may have involved some rivals settling scores by exposing what their rivals had done, the blame was put on Zhao ZhiYang. The protests got out of control because students couldn’t state what they wanted or negotiated workable deals. Which made Zhao’s efforts impossible.

He said, Zhao was a decent man they had and what happened to him was unjust, but Zhao was an idealist who could not win against the core of the party. He got a lifetime of house arrest. Compared to Mao’s enemies, Deng’s treatment of Zhao was relatively kind. But Deng and Xi’s father were both purged and imprisoned by Mao for being capitalist sympathizers, so there was no further appetite for killing political rivals.

Also said something about a Mao Dynasty prevented by the crown prince weakness for egg fried rice in N Korea. His death stopped Mao’s succession plans. He believed Mao blamed PengDeHuai for the death and they never reconciled.

Apparently a forbidden topic in China. Mentioning this enrages many patriotic Chinese.

[ilaks @ilaks]

It’s the US voters who seem to be unwilling to accept some of the costs of being the global security guards.

Is it because they don’t recognize the payback for the unpaid security guards? Sure. But in actual honesty, the financial advantages don’t trickle down enough to Main Street other than in the form of over consumption and debt and loss of purchasing power.

That reserve currency status has a dark side.

Trying to fix it won’t be painless. But certainly Wall Street and the establishment governing entities are being challenged by populists from the entire spectrum.

One party in the US is pushing nativist protectionist economic changes. They are willing to punish corporations who rely more on foreign suppliers and factories by taxing them with tariffs. This mean things will be more expensive. Paying higher wages means costs go up. But the traditional globalist politicos in this party are being retired with primaries.

The other party is being taken over socialist and collectivist populists where laborers are not a core part of their grievances. The establishment members are forced to go left or retire.

This is not about a person shaping national sentiments. It’s about national sentiments boiling over and seeking major changes that had been pushed back for decades. The world order is being dismantled out of voter sentiment. Whether you choose left or right options, the core problem is actually the same.

This can be fixed fundamentally by addressing the wealth disparity. One way or another big parts of the bottom 40% of the voters must believe their wealth is growing faster than their grievances for the pain to stop.

And it’s happening globally.

[ilaks @ilaks]

It’s mainly about inability to to proper pricing of goods and services vs incentives for production that ruins socialism at an economic level. Collectivism doesn’t work. When everyone owns everything, no one owns anything. And the everyone is actually the central ruling team who determines everything and actually controls everything that is owned by everyone.

At a governance level, it’s because the government becomes very efficient at keeping out challenges to their power and in most countries see the challenger comrades get killed by the biggest a**whole who win power and keeps it long enough to really do damage.

[ilaks @ilaks]

@onlyaim98 @Bills_gallery @thecyrusjanssen 在美国去超市，只是两毛美元。但是要在饭馆的服务员捧出来，那得加钱。

[ilaks @ilaks]

@Bills_gallery @thecyrusjanssen Or how overpaid US servers and cooks and restaurants owners are.

In china, at high rent locations, food costs more (still less than US). A bigger chunk of it goes to pay for rent.

[ilaks @ilaks]

@thecyrusjanssen The simplest number is annual per capita sugar consumption.

The US is 4x to 7x of China. Each person daily average intake of sugar is 4x-7x on average. And most (more than half) of this is in sugary drinks.

[ilaks @ilaks]

The company owners certainly don’t care. The marketing execs won’t either. It’s basically the blue collar unskilled workers in western countries that’s the problem.

To understand the origin of the problem, you have to go all the way back to the 1960s 1970s when the labor unions were extremely powerful and strikes were frequent.

It eventually led to western societies deep hatred for unions and strikes, for an entire generation, they voted for anyone who would promise to punish the unions. Margaret Thatcher and Reagan won landlords elections by punishing unions.

This environment led to the rise of the free trade globalization. The argument is that labor had too much negotiation power. Factory workers were paid so much, their children were happy to work in factories as it was a sure way to enter the middle class, so basic economic theory kicked in and pushed aside the original protectionist sentiments that used to determine how governments pushed economic policies.

The western countries rushed to deindustrialize and it was highly successful for decades. Bankers, company owners cut their production costs by going global, chasing where labor was cheapest and best trained and docile. These countries typically had no capacity to go on strike and halt production.

Everybody won, GDP exploded, company owners, investors, lawyers, bankers, engineers, designers all benefited from globalization. Unskilled laborers no longer had negotiation power over wages. So they were the only ones who lost out and everyone else blamed this group for daring to earn high wages without earning skills.

The tricky part of all this is that the deindustrialization doesn’t stop at the unskilled workers, it rapidly moved up the value and skill chain. Eventually designers and engineers find their negotiating skillls eroding in industries that are mature.

Company owners also find that they no longer owned the factories as competition grew that can sometimes out compete them. Only in very specific areas with higher entry moats (GPUs, CPUs, chips) did the company owners keep their deepest secrets to stave off competition. All other western industries saw leaner cheaper hungrier versions of themselves in the country that was supposed to be only their factories. Suported by centralized capital following 50 year strategic plans to bury them.

So now they call this over capacity.

And the pendulum swung back. Now people are starting to point out the unintended consequences of punishing their own labor unions and workers. And the difficulties are showing up with higher costs for components of production. Because the whole point is western workers were overpaid. Protectionism has a cost in product margins and final costs charged to consumers.

But this whole transition has to be dealt with because the struggle over higher costs or higher wages has to be worked out when you can’t have both.

[ilaks @ilaks]

Canada’s problem is a new one. This country for decades were highly friendly to global immigrants. But they changed when it became obvious something is seriously wrong. It showed up in car thefts, home invasions and gang activity.

And the reason is the government stopped vetting applications by creating a study program that was actually a work permit bypass. People pretend to be students to work and the schools weren’t real, the jobs were paid for to a goal towards a permanent resident status. Hiring managers were paid kickbacks just to hire specific people who paid to get the jobs. Think about that for an incentive system.

People were use fake school transcripts to get entry and the consulate didn’t even check.

The ones willing to break laws to enter are not the same people as the ones who apply legally. And this is one key reason why existing established immigrant communities have criminal shooting into their homes and offices after they refuse to pay protection money.

A nation wide extortion gang was just arrested recently. These people entered under a system that don’t even know who they are allowing in.

[ilaks @ilaks]

What drives the involution in china is not driven by lab results.

There’s several characteristics, but the primary one is they’ve discovered a very efficient way to scale and reduce costs in producing practically any device once they learn the first production from someone else.

Then they have a system of regional and central government funding where cheap money is funnelled their way to scale up quickly.

The real competition kicks in because several regional governments all do this to support local companies. This is what leads to over production. Because the regional governments are able to create private sector entities with implicit requests to finance through the banks, these loans don’t show up as government budgets.

Once several large companies all scale up, the supply vastly exceeds domestic demand, and they must export. And they can survive for years without a profit because of the financing. They then move towards a phase where they keep producing to get competition to give up.

In the western countries, without limitless government backing, private sector money is highly unforgiving of this type of competition and funding and loans dry up quickly. Companies would go bankrupt under the old system, and supply reduces naturally.

There are indications that the central government has recognized this in regional governments, and have taken steps to stop it. Funding is drying up in many areas to fix the unhealthy competition like Real estate and EVs. Other examples are caviar, truffles.

In turn not allowing unhealthy companies to fail is what misallocation of capital is about. When companies are forced to keep production lines going in order to meet loan requirements and eventually sell at a loss, that’s what is stressing local finances.

[ilaks @ilaks]

@ArchVisionW The Chinese dress is Manchurian from Qing dynasty. Not Han.