SSW

川建国 Enjoyer

[SSW @SimonSW13]

@NeoliberalAkiho There's many things you don't understand when you're a retarded liberal

[SSW @SimonSW13]

Yeah she definitely studied something like politics or econ. Absolutely braindead takes from someone who - at her core - is just racist

[Izabella Kaminska @izakaminska]

The below story about Chinese tech involution is really insightful. I think it perfectly explains why China has had such difficulty reinvesting capital into the West (beyond purely financial assets or assets it wants to strategically sabotage).

Chinese FDI fell quite sharply post 2018 and it’s not just because Western countries became more wary of Chinese control and influence.

The documentary ‘American Factory’ perfectly illustrated the beginnings of the involution problem. The Chinese factory model (when powered by cheap exploited labour) simply can’t be replicated competitively in the West. At least, not without making the West visibly poorer, something that would likely trigger a political backlash.

The documentary tracks the successive attempts by the Chinese owners to block American unionisation to protect profitability. The Chinese managers are also regularly bewildered by American labour norms.

But the reason their investments eventually fail has little to do with Americans being lazy or overly unionised. On the contrary, it’s because when one’s comparative advantage is cheap labour and repression, it’s impossible to make that model work anywhere that doesn’t abide the same norms. This limits Chinese corporate expansion to jurisdictions with poor worker protections and standards, or non democracies.

This is why China’s American investments were eventually abandoned in favor of BRI countries: jurisdictions where China had more clout and influence over local governments and thus greater ability to run exploitative models. It also helped that these populations were generally poorer and had to take terms as presented.

But even that strategy is becoming increasingly politically contentious.

This has left China with no choice but to compete technologically. After all, the only alternatives at this point are: 1) bankrupting its primary customer and trade partner, aka the force that powers what growth it has, 2) writing off the wealth it thought it had on grounds it is no longer materialisable, a move that essentially locks its own people into exploitative conditions for the long term or 3) annexing foreign countries so that foreign populations can be forced to work in exploitative conditions instead. Aka actual old school colonial imperialism.

So far China is opting for the technological path.

But as the below story illustrates, the more China gives up on using its true comparative advantage (large cheap workforces) in favor of technological advances, the more likely it is to run into involution. This is because without a natural input cost advantage it has to compete on actual merit and non human labour cost control.

The problem for China is that simply shifting towards automation and technology is no guarantee of success, especially if the overall operation is far more capital or energy intensive than the old way of doing things. It might not even guarantee greater efficiency, since foreign competition will no longer be put off by an inability to emulate exploitative working practices their systems won’t tolerate. On the contrary China will now be the one constrained by its own inability to adopt Western practices, notably the art of yielding to consumer feedback and power, cost control and respect for hard budget constraints.

[SSW @SimonSW13]

@Bluebearmonkey @Mont_Jiang Lmao

[SSW @SimonSW13]

Next step is to stop investing too much time debunking each evidence free assertion of these retards and just directly calling them retards.

[SSW @SimonSW13]

Watching Glenn go from a very (overly) polite commentator to someone just roasting the retarded china watchers is like reliving my own trajectory back in 2019. Only my patience ran out way quicker.

[Glenn @GlennLuk]

So Brad followed up his initial evidence-free claim ("Chinese automakers aren't making money at home") by deflecting with a follow-up claim that Chinese carmaker industry margins are "shrinking" and "eroding".

Once again I asked for evidence, which he failed to provide in any meaningful way. Further, he said that I should go out and disprove his claim (burden of proof normally falls on the person making the claim).

Despite the quite-childish, intellectually dishonest, and ad hominem-laced responses, I went ahead and did the work that he was unwilling to do (or incapable of) to support his various claims. Fortunately, I am the type of person who reads company financial reports for fun.

And to no one's surprise, it turns out the follow-up claim is once again completely wrong.

[SSW @SimonSW13]

To be fair, this is specifically for people who managed to get into the 姚班 of qinghua. You need to be an absolute genius to qualify for that.

[Chon Tang @chontang]

Apparently Deepseek is paying 5500 rmb a day ($19k USD a month) to *interns* out of Tsinghua.

Apparently ByteDance pays 8000 rmb a day ($26k a month).

Most Chinese returnees from Silicon Valley compare offers between US and China with a 1:3 ratio (because of the lower cost of living / higher quality of life in China). In other words, they would choose the Deepseek offer over a $500k USD offer from the US.

Tldr, frontier labs in China are offering competitive pay vs US labs.

[SSW @SimonSW13]

Lmao

[Sinologo incazzato @sinologhi]

@Bluebearmonkey In fact it's the other way round. It's the Chinese who don't understand their own country, because since childhood they're fed on myths, like "the Chinese dialects are written the same but pronounced differently", just to give one example.

[SSW @SimonSW13]

Silicon valley leadership is full of marvel brained liberals, who top the list of most effectively evil political faction.
These people are worse than evil, they're idiots who unironically believe genociding their opponents is the (painful, but) morally righteous thing to do

[Palantir @PalantirTech]

Because we get asked a lot.

The Technological Republic, in brief.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.

3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska

https://t.co/8igjazz1On

[SSW @SimonSW13]

Many people piling onto her, I think she's correct. The US reliably drags countries into war. It reliably is the biggest abuser of human rights on a grand scale. Many Western people just don't see it.

[Bonnie Glaser / 葛來儀 @BonnieGlaser]

@AngelicaOung @jamespomfret You seem to want Taiwan to end up like Hong Kong. BTW, the US is more reliable than you think. It's all happening under the radar. You just don't see it.

[SSW @SimonSW13]

@gonglei89 If you couldn't figure that out a long time ago, I have some bad news

[SSW @SimonSW13]

@AngelicaOung You overestimate peoples intelligence

[SSW @SimonSW13]

As this guy has correctly figured out, Europe isn't incompetent and corrupt due to naivety or bad luck. It's systemic, structural.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

[Mehdi (e/λ) @BetterCallMedhi]

fusionner des géants européens pour battre les chinois c’est exactement le type de réponse qui prouve que l’UE n’a toujours rien compris car le problème de l’europe reste avant tout culturel et tant que personne ne l’admettra rien ne changera

par ex les dirigeants français européens sont formés à l’ENA HEC, sciences po… ce sont des machines à bachoter, des spécialistes de la dissertation et de l’optimisation de parcours de carrière, ils savent parfaitement naviguer les systèmes existants mais ils sont structurellement incapables d’en imaginer de nouveaux

la chine est dirigée par des ingénieurs et des scientifiques qui pensent en systèmes à 30 ans, l’Europe est dirigée par des juristes et des financiers qui pensent en mandats de 5 ans et en cycles électoraux

et regardez qui dirige les grandes entreprises françaises, des profils X-HEC, mines…techniquement brillants sur le papier capables de résoudre n’importe quelle équation mais incapables de voir au delà du prochain trimestre fiscal, ces gens optimisent des P&L avec une précision chirurgicale mais demandez-m leur où sera leur industrie dans 15 ans et vous obtenez un silence gêné suivi d’un slide mckinsey, le PDG moyen du CAC40 sait lire un bilan consolidé mieux que quiconque mais il ne sait pas vous expliquer pourquoi la Chine domine les batteries, les panneaux solaires, les drones et les robots humanoïdes, il n’a aucune vision géostratégique, aucune compréhension des chaînes de valeur technologiques mondiales & surtout aucune intuition sur les rapports de force industriels qui se dessinent

et la condescendance c’est peut-être le pire de tout, pendant 15 ans l’europe a regardé la chine de haut en disant «ils copient ils ne sont pas innovants ils font du low cost » et pendant ces 15 ans la chine a construit BYD, CATL, DJI…le sans compter le réseau quantique le + avancé au monde, un écosystème de milliers de startups deeptech et une chaîne de valeur intégrée de la mine au robot

quand vous passez 15 ans à mépriser votre concurrent au lieu de l’étudier vous méritez d’être dépassé
et pendant que l’UE parle de pseudos champions européens, elle laisse les américains racheter ses actifs stratégiques un par un sous ses yeux

ce sont des sujets dont j’ai déjà très largement parlé ici via les différents threads mais on a par ex des fabricants français de pompes à chaleur rachetés par des groupes américains, alstom qui a vendu sa branche énergie à GE sous pression politique, technip fusionné avec FMC sous contrôle américain, des pépites européennes en IA en cyber & en biotech qui se font racheter par des fonds US avant même d’atteindre leur pleine maturité parce que le marché européen est incapable de les financer à l’échelle

et les dirigeants européens laissent faire avec le sourire parce qu’ils sont idéologiquement et structurellement vassalisés à washington, les mêmes qui parlent d’autonomie stratégique achètent leurs avions de combat aux US, hébergent leurs données souveraines sur AWS et azure et laissent la DGSI dépendre de Palantir depuis 2016 pour ses outils d’analyse

je l’ai déjà dit mais pour moi à ce stade c’est pas de la naïveté c’est juste de la soumission organisée MÉTHODIQUEMENT

fusionner AlSTOM avec SIEMENS ou THALES avec je ne sais qui ça ne résoudra strictement rien parce que vous allez créer des mastodontes bureaucratiques lents incapables d’innover et protégés de la concurrence par les régulateurs

c’est exactement l’inverse de ce qui produit de l’innovation, la Chine n’a pas gagné en fusionnant ses entreprises elle a gagné en créant un environnement où des centaines de startups se battent entre elles dans une compétition féroce avec un accès direct aux composants, aux talents et au capital

le modèle chinois c’est littéralement la sélection naturelle technologique à grande échelle, le modèle européen c’est le protectionnisme bureaucratique déguisé en stratégie industrielle​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

bref que du BS européen qui ne mènera à rien ENCORE UNE FOIS

[SSW @SimonSW13]

You're swedish

[Jojje Olsson @jojjeols]

@NiSiv4 Great, can we be left alone now then?

[SSW @SimonSW13]

@eigenrobot 80 IQ take

[SSW @SimonSW13]

@DrewPavlou This is very effective PR for China

[SSW @SimonSW13]

Loving the infighting in the west, perhaps Europeans might finally grow a spine (nah, they won't)

[Michael Lucci @Michael7ucci]

Even at this late hour, European leaders still don't realize the choice.

🇺🇸 or 🇨🇳🇷🇺

There is a 0% chance of the EU being a 3rd major power.

Partner with the most powerful, innovative & dynamic part of (your own) western civilization: USA.

Or get torn up by China and Russia.

[SSW @SimonSW13]

ITT: self professed capitalists unironically complaining about capitalism

[zerohedge @zerohedge]

*DEMOCRATS CALL TO STOP CHINA CARMAKERS FROM PRODUCING IN US

[SSW @SimonSW13]

@coryfromphilly Lmao you're retarded and don't even know what you don't know.

[SSW @SimonSW13]

@alexjordanATL @RnaudBertrand Evergreen

https://t.co/Ll7zMb6NWg

[SSW @SimonSW13]

@Noahpinion Noah, how does it feel to be consistently wrong on every topic you ever write about?

[SSW @SimonSW13]

@NewLeftEViews your understanding of the chinese government, or really, anything, is functionally the same as a 14 yo marvel nerd's

Which, to be fair, probably places you in the top percentile as far as liberal retards go