Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

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They have a lot of problems I'm reading about but there will be a void with the fall of the US from global superpower status and that void wouldn't be left unattended.

Anyway, with the banning of TikTok it's pretty clear to me: No more global companies without hard tech. The US used to be the bastion of free global trade but they resigned. Anything that relies on things like network effect or branding will become local because countries can enforce it. If some country has the engineering capacity to build a website where people post texts and media and others like and share that media then the American version wouldn't be allowed.

Therefore, the US economy will become as powerful as having about 300M citizens, not as global power. China has huge number of citizens, they win by default as long as they can do the hard tech good enough and they apparently can do that.

US embargoes only pushed them to make their local alternatives and they made them pretty good, whatever they make they make it for over a billion people.

EU has a version of this problem, that is they don't have one large chunk of people who speak the same language and trade on the same rules. The trading on the same rules is something that EU fixed a lot but the EU is still fragmented and this makes EU companies anaemic because they can't get huge without going global. When the global trade is gone, the US will have the same issue(probably still better situation than EU but much worse than China).

A lot of people aren't as optimistic about China anymore because they constricted their population pyramid too much (one child policy), haven't reached first world affluence and are now facing an aging population. By 2100 China might be down to 850m people and the US might even grow to 450m. Economic prowess is all that matters in the end, because economic power allows for military and industrial hegemony.

That's true, they have huge demographics issues. But the west has them too at different extent.

Also, Chinese don't operate on western principles therefore you can't expect same outcomes. Aging population issues are much different when you have enough production base that can sustain old people with small number of young people(they no longer rely on manual labour as much as they used to). In the west aging population means reduction in consumption(therefore reduced investments, economy slowdown etc.), but in countries like China that doesn't have to be a problem, they can simply keep producing as needed. When the west was preoccupied with investing all the money into optimising advertisement, they invested in wast infrastructure.

I'm personally more concerned about the west than China. Well, of course I would be since I'm part of the west but yeah I think you get the point.

The US has been embargoing industries since its Independence. I doubt TikTok will be a remotely meaningful event in the history of the nation.

The things don't stay the same outside of the US, therefore you can't expect that doing the same thing will always result in the way.

There are very few technologies where the US or EU has an edge over China. Embargoes helped a lot with that.

In fact it becomes absurd, for example the EU/US/UK wants to make the world a better place by replacing ICE cars with electric ones. China builds great cars for cheap in huge amounts and the EU/US/UK act like Gavin Belson saying "I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do". There you lose the environment claims, even if EU/US/UK have a point.

The west lost the technological edge, the Americans like to claim that EU regulated too much but in the American case it appears that not regulated billionaires didn't invest in tech but resorted into rent seeking and now they expect the politicians to protect them from the Chinese companies who allegedly received unfair support from their governments but nonetheless they made better products.

I don't know I'm not a clairvoyant or expert analyst in this stuff, I'm just pessimistic on the near future of humanity and the west will be the bigger losers because they lost the plot.

Why are you giving a free hand to China to do as it likes and then blame the west for following its interest? Why do you give China a pass at forcing any western business to always enter a joint enterprise with chinese firms if it wants to do business in China? Seeing a lot of critique about the blunders of the west for trying to have more leverage and no critique for chinese practices.

I'm not giving China a free pass for anything. The stuff you are talking about paved the way for Chinese catching up and eventually surpassing the west but that doesn't change the outcome.

I'm not a China fan at all, in fact I'm very concerned that the west will imitate China and in fact banning TikTok was a sign of it. Banning is the Chinese way.

The Chinese don’t support free trade. Why should the US support free trade with China? Why not embargo them until such time as China opens up? This isn’t a hypocritical contradiction. The US supports free trade with those who support free trade. They suppose power imbalances with those who support power imbalances.

The US becomes a China with crazy politics and poor infrastructure then. A shitty world where the citizens are a commodity that can be pushed around to consume from companies who such at R&D but good at lobbying.

Remember when the US was pro-free speech and criticised dictatorships for blocking social media? Kiss good bye to that, now it's US that blocks it. Chinese citizen experience, imported into the west.

If Trump wins, there's Project 2025 where they plan to replace every government position with party loyalists - Just like China.

> Remember when the US was pro-free speech and criticised dictatorships for blocking social media?

Outside congresspeople pushing for re-election I feel like I haven't heard this at all. Not since the Snowden leaks has the US been so happy-go-lucky with their denouncement of surveillance.

> In fact it becomes absurd, for example the EU/US/UK wants to make the world a better place by replacing ICE cars with electric ones. China builds great cars for cheap in huge amounts and the EU/US/UK act like Gavin Belson saying "I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do".

You have to think about this like a country that has the ability to globally project power or take part in regional war.

The US (and Europe) doesn’t want to lose its domestic auto manufacturing industry because it can be easily retooled to pump out war machines when required. [0]

You don’t let a foreign nation (especially an adversarial nation like China) destroy an industry that is critical during total war if you’re the global hegemon, or more realistically, a country that may go to war in the future (see Volvo in Sweden, Renault in France, etc)

Here’s GM Defense, Ford and Chrysler have similar histories during the World Wars, as do auto manufacturers in various European countries.

> World War 1: Over 90 percent of GM’s truck production was redirected to war manufacturing during the First World War.

> World War 2: GM began delivering war materiel as early as 1940 with all U.S. manufacturing plants – over 100 in total – eventually being converted to produce defense goods. Between February 10, 1942 and September 9, 1945, not a single passenger car for civilian use left the assembly line at any GM plant.

[0] https://www.gmdefensellc.com/site/us/en/gm-defense/home/abou...

I understand the motives and I agree, however it still means that China makes batter cheaper EVs that supposedly can save the planet and suddenly saving the planet is not THAT important and it can wait when we play politics, meanwhile why don't you eat less meat and use paper straws?

The planet will be fine and people will adapt

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