The rise of the U.S., the rise of China
construction-physics.com
construction-physics.com
Likewise the Chinese often ignore foreign copyrights and patents, though not as much as the US did back then.
“No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion?”, https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-...
In every political system, the existing rules are created to preserve the existing status quo. Where do those rules come from? There is chaos and war (not necessarily kinetic; there are trade wars too), the war ends with a political settlement which satisfies enough participants to create stability (as all wars must end; otherwise people keep fighting), and the signatories to peace create rules to maintain their desired outcome.
Later a power arises for whom that peace isn't desireable. They are the revisionist power and want a change. Intellectual property rights are desireable for those who have a lot of intellectual property, the status quo IP powers. New powers might not have IP and don't find IP rights to be desireable.
If the revisionist power is strong enough, then either the status quo powers accomodate them - perhaps a controlled IP transfer program for developing countries, in return for strong IP laws or openness to foreign investment within those countries - or there's war (again, not necessarily kinetic war - maybe lots of hacking and IP theft, for example).
[0] "International relations analysts often differentiate between status-quo and revisionist states. Revisionist states favor modifications to the prevailing order: its rules and norms, its distribution of goods or benefits, its implicit structure or hierarchy, its social rankings that afford status or recognition, its division of territory among sovereign entities, and more."
https://oxfordre.com/internationalstudies/display/10.1093/ac...
And up is up unless it is down :-)
It's not that 'wars must end, otherwise they keep fighting', but that there is 'a political settlement which satisfies enough participants to create stability ... otherwise they keep fighting'. [0]
I will stipulate that the sentence could have parsed more clearly. :-(
[0] It's just Clausewitz, effectively: Warfare is politics conducted by other means.
Drink!
Apologies to fans of Bret Deveraux :-)
Some wars end!
In 2000, Bo McCoy and Ron McCoy organized a joint family reunion of the Hatfield and McCoy that garnered national attention. More than 5,000 people attended.
Edit: the Romans first “stole” silk in the 500s, but still
Look at SpaceX. What they had perfected isn't going to be easily available in patents, homeworks for other people to copy, especially the Chinese. What they are willing to do is what other companies and organizations aren't willing to do. When SpaceX steadily made progress, people kept dismissing them until it's too late and now SpaceX is pushing ahead anyway.
It's a form of false strength, and there had been discussion about how detrimental patent laws are to innovations.
He apparently wished to both protect his process and keep it secret.
The free software movement has shown that freely distributing IP is quite workable.
It’s very successful in areas where software is a “cost center” (i.e. allows companies to use it reduce the cost of developing (semi)proprietary software)and not the end product. Everywhere else it’s mixed or a failure (e.g. video games).
If I built a binary Linux distro, you know damn well ZFS will be in the kernel, it will be hosted on only .onion and .i2p, and all Linux Foundation and Oracle Corp C&D emails will be published with sensibly witty lampooning comments.
The talking point is always focused on rewarding those who did the work but that I have to pay to enforce the scheme and the cost of going without if we don't get permission is also not important at all.
Funny as hell to pay so that it can be assured I don't get to use something.
I think we should find ways to at least judge some technology valuable enough to buy it into the public domain at sensible but non-negotiable rates.
Even this feeble pitch would hold a lot more weight if companies either couldn't own copyright or couldn't purchase the copyright. As it is it's more like a corrupt rent-extraction scheme with government backing.
If you’re ignoring copyright and IP rights while catching up? That’s just freeloading, you need someone to pay for all the research/innovation.
> if I have to navigate patents
Albeit still more likely than if you have no funding? Investors don’t have as many incentives to provide that if they can’t get a return.
Of course you need a balance, over restrictive IP protection might be as bad as not having it at all.
This is not true. Everyone, everywhere, who created any thing ever, built it on the backs of [millennia of] previous creators.
History teaches us that innovation flows in the absence of restrictions - including rent-seeking. Conversely, modern history teaches us that IP gets in the way everywhere it can.
It’s rather [extremely] simple and obvious , generally R&D requires significant investment. If you can’t get any return on your investment, you won’t invest.
Of course there needs to be a balance to minimize rent seeking beyond a certain point.
The first publisher to get a hold of one would have a massive advantage.
Publisher pays Charles Dickens to only provide his newest work to them. Many publishers want this privilege, there is a bidding war.
Publisher sells millions in the first week, eventually other publishers get in on the action but it takes time to typeset, print and ship the books. The book is the talk of the town, consumers want one now.
Publishing house doesn't make outsized profits years after the authors death and instead has to compete on the quailty of its publishing in the free market.
Rent seeker has to get a factory job or dies. The market is brimming with high quailty editions of each authors work available to everyone at a price point they can afford.
That’s not how it worked back in the 1800s, that’s not even how it works now.
In any case Charles Dickens would have earned less than he did and a larger proportion of surplus would have went to printers and publishers. How is that in any way a positive thing?
And of course without physical distribution your “business” model is even more absurd (being very absurd to begin with).
I’m not sure if you are aware (presumably not) but that’s how publishing worked in the 1500s. Cervantes got a lump sum for the Don Quixote (and his other books) and he was never able to sustain himself by writing and a had to have a daytime job.
His books were (relatively) extremely popular at the time and no publishers outside of Spain paid him anything. It seems rather absurd that even someone like him could never make a comfortable living by writing?
> Rent seeker has to get a factory job or dies
These bizarrely unhinged anti IP takes are truly something else..
I mean sure the “fair” duration of copyright is up for discussion, author’s life + 70 years is probably excessive.
Why does that level of effort entitle someone to a "comfortable living"? That's on the order of a few words a day.
Shakespeare wrote 39 plays and 154 sonnets. He didn't need a day job beacuse he wrote full time. He didn't enjoy copyright protection and was fine.
Because people enjoyed his books and were willing to pay for them? (But all the profits when to the printers in Belgium etc)
> That's on the order of a few words a day.
That irrelevant. It’s about the value/utility you provide and not the amount of labor.
Also you(or me) really have no clue how many words he wrote per day even if that were relevant. Maybe he wrote a dozen drafts for each book which he discarded, how would that change anything?
I mean… if you wrote down 500 words per day would you believe that you deserve to be paid more for that than Cervantes for e.g. 0.01 of his words?
> Shakespeare
Ran a theater (together with his partners) i.e. he was both the writer and the publisher.
His final theater troupe was sponsored directly by the King (previous one by the Lord Chamberlain) and had a royal patent and operated in a heavily regulated market. So surely not a very good example?
Or is patronage and a system heavily regulated by the government preferable to legal copyright? Because that the only realistic alternative besides having no content.
> entitle
What entitles you to the content of your bank account or retirement savings? Maybe even your house? What kind of a question was that even? (I don’t really get it)
People paid for something that took forever to materialize but were somehow excited to be part of the process.
Innovation right there!
Edison basically pirated "A Trip to the Moon" and showed it in the US:
Owning a home might seem more "real" than owning some IP, but it is just an agreement, and without a proper enforcement, anybody could enter and live in your house (which is what actually happens with squatters in some European countries where you're not allowed to kick them out by yourself and police don't care).
So property rights were never "real" (inherently) — they only become real when somebody kicks your ass for violating them. That's the only real thing about it.
I know everyone gets a stupid stick up their ass over property ownership and "rent seeking" but property ownership is just ownership of "something". You can rent seek any investment. The whole point of much every professional license is that we all agree to let these people "rent seek" because they've proved they don't suck at the subject.
Property ownership restricts what you can do on my property.
IP restricts what you can do on anyone's property, including your own.
With a few exceptions, most of the claims coming out of Chinese reserach is immediately suspect. For decades claims were irreproducible or the work not of high quality.
It's certainly improved, and there are a few institutions that produce high quality work, but they make up a few percent of the total coming out of China.
No doubt the quality will continue to improve, but no more than any other developing country.
Chinese scientists are now publishing more papers in journals like Nature and Science than American scientists are. Those are journals with very difficult peer-reviewing and editorial thresholds.
I got published in a Nature journal but my paper was not groundbreaking by any means. You have groundbreaking research and you have “we made a slight, but important modification to an existing technology”.
In my area of physical sciences, the big breakthroughs are still coming from the US and Europe.
For what it's worth, my impression is completely different from yours. A significant share of major findings are now coming from China.
1. Chinese researchers are catching up and increasingly producing good papers.
and:
2. There is a lot of low-quality junk science spam coming out of China.
Are entirely compatible. Both can be true at the same time.
I don't really know about scientific papers, but the high number of Chinese patents is generally considered a fairly useless metric files mostly for "CV reasons" rather than representing any genuine invention (see e.g. [1]). But here too, "China is producing tons of trash patents" and "China is catching up on innovation" are entirely compatible.
[1]: https://www.cigionline.org/articles/what-do-chinas-high-pate...
I remember when I was in university in the UK (2014). The cohort was atleast 40% Mainland chinese. I bet some had cheated on their English tests to get into the university. One of my Chinese friends told me he planned to learn the cutting edge research in the UK from a well known UK company related to my field and bring it back to his dad's business.
Strategically, not only are we in a bad position, but it is actively getting worse. Economically, there is nothing wrong with Chinese citizens paying £40K a year on university tuition fees, on top of that, spending money on nice accommodation, which has been "great" for the UK economy. We pay for their cheap labour and manufacturing, and they pay for our services. Also, going back to Zuck, chinese employees have a harder working culture (e.g. "996") - that hustle leads to exponential better results (IMHO). The western work life balance does not. Can you start a business in a culture of working 4 hours a day?
Only if you're not gonna be competing internationally, like working for governments or state companies.
Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men.
Ultimately America, particularly once you get to the upper middle class is a straight up lazy country.
You see this often in immigrant families. The first gen comes here, knows struggle. The second gen grows up, fails to appreciate anything, drops out of college and blames mom and dad for their failures.
Then again, I don't buy into this neo coldwar propaganda.The fear mongering is getting out of hand. The Military Industry Complex needs fear though, how else would you justify spending trillions.
if anything I feel like Americans have become extremely self loathing in the passing generation since the release of Team America: World Police
Everything you said describes the US and other western nations better than any other civilization in history. The US backs genocide after genocide, consistently breaks the international “laws” it pushed for. From the start of the empire, that’s been the explicit policy of the American empire. Trail of tears anyone? Hiroshima? Agent Orange? East Timor? The banana republics? It’s a really long list…
Students really need to be taught their actual history. It’s really quite horrific.
This comment displays not even a shred of understanding regarding China or it’s history.
How dare China have territorial sovereignty. How dare they have security in their own region. How dare they build infrastructure in the global south, when everyone knows they should be pillaging those regions instead! Unthinkable! That all belongs to the west!
That comment represents an insanity in the west that may just be the downfall of organized human life.
They get people riled up about Taiwan or Ukraine, meanwhile the education system, the housing supply, job market, healthcare system, etc... are all in shambles.
Americans don't even question it anymore! It's now fair that housing should be >=40% of your wage. It's fair that companies that are propped up by the American people can screw over those same people.
But when you see how modern and lively China is and how they live, compared to the crumbling, old United States... oh boy. Strange how they can afford it but we, the supposed 'richest country in the world', can't.
China hasn't fought a war in 40 years. It's been too busy focusing on its own internal economic development. In terms of the international order, China is much more committed to institutions like the UN and WTO than the US is, because China wants a stable international framework in which to continue its own internal development.
This also describes the actions of the US in many circumstances in its history.
The way they curb free speech, even projecting that internationally.
Their announced intention to become the world's superpower and displace the US militarily, technologically, and economically, and the risks to US interest which tie to that.
Their active pursuit to enact that claim, specifically with rapid military technology development, and international organization of BRICS.
Their aggressive tendencies towards US allies.
Their aggressive spying on US military and industrial facilities.
It could of course be that they would be much worse without us but that didn't happen.
If not the US, it would probably be Europe and/or the Soviet Union. China and the Soviet Union nearly came to blows in the 60s.
Europe decolonized largely because Hitler wrecked major continental colonial powers France and the Netherlands) and put Britain with their backs against the wall such that it had to partially abandon its empire in order to defend itself and avoid a complete disaster. So they let India go, but tried to hold on elsewhere. This worked to some extent, but not in others. What remained tried to morph into the Commonwealth, this was only partially successful.
The US assumed the crown, this time with a different model, hegemony vs. colonialism. They had a rival in the Soviet Union, which funded Communist revolutions in many parts of the developing world. With the exception of Vietnam, something the Chinese did not do. They valued North Vietnam as a buffer against Wester imposition, but were not too keen on a reunified Vietnam, indeed they invaded a few years after South Vietnam collapsed.
> Because of how they treated Hong Kong.
If the US doesn't take a strong stance in support of its ally in Taiwan, China will only take it sooner. Once China invades, that begins the massive expansion to WWIII that JP Morgan CEO claims has already begun with Ukraine.
The US can't lose Taiwan as an ally, strategically or economically. If we give up our support of Taiwan we've as good as handed over hegemony to China. And we'll have lost the AGI race in its infancy.
In their time as the dominant world power, the US hasn't always used their influence for good, but at least its a democracy with some form of constitutionally protected human rights in charge. I much prefer that to having a country with a permanent ruling party where critics go missing being the dominant force in world affairs.
This is a bit of an understatement for anyone in latin america.
> but at least its a democracy with some form of constitutionally protected human rights in charge
as far as i can tell, those only apply to US citizens, not humans in general.
These sentiments are not hidden. They are openly spoken during policy discussions and in policy papers. Fake concerns about the nature of Chinese governance have nothing to do with it - the problem the US has with Chinese governance is that China is not governed by the US. The US is jealous of China's tools for censorship and the tight top down political control.
edit: the US government is not at all concerned about the citizens of China. It also did not invade Afghanistan for women's rights, and it is not helping Israel to preserve gay rights. These are barely even serious pretenses. It is not in Ukraine because it cares about the freedom of 2/3rds of the population to suppress the other third. These are stories for children.
> Source? Wikipedia predicts US population of ~425 million, China ~632 million in 2100. Still a dramatic decline either way.
Also, assuming current trends continue for a ridiculously long time. The Chinese government has the ability to be massively coercive if it wants to. It's been less than a decade since they ended the one child policy. I wouldn't be surprised if that's deployed in the next 75 years to increase birthrates (e.g. "hey women under 35, you're fired unless you have two kids, kthxbye"). They already have a youth unemployment problem, and it probably wouldn't be too big of a deal for them to make sure all those unemployed youth are women having babies, and slot unemployed men into any jobs that are opened up.
Yes, but that was coercion in the other direction. Nothing's preventing them from using coercion to course-correct their previous policy. They're not timid liberals or libertarians afraid of using state power to do whatever.
Even if you start coercing people to have kids: that will be much harder than enforcing the one-child policy. And it will have a slow effect either way, because it is starting from such a low base.
Immigration would be a tough sell but not out of the question. In fact with an aging population China’s options may be highly limited.
> Immigration would be a tough sell but not out of the question. In fact with an aging population China’s options may be highly limited.
I think you're making the mistake of thinking of China as having the same policy limitations and constraints as a Western country (i.e. limited to some weak carrots due to a respect for personal liberties).
If the Chinese government wants more Chinese babies, I don't think they're going to fret at all about a lot of the things Westerns would fret the most about. I think they have plenty of options to push Chinese women into having children: onerous fines for not doing so, penalties at work (getting passed over for promotion, demotion, firing), banning access to birth control, etc.
The genius in a two party system is that one party can scapegoat the other for unpopular policy. If there’s no second party, the public will begin to question the system itself.
And ignoring the political aspect, raising kids costs money. One question is who will bear that cost, both at a personal level and socially. If women are taking care of kids, they’re not in the workforce. And Chinese women have fairly high labor force participation rates (slightly higher than the US).
... then again, I am a self-interested heterosexual man. :^)
On the other hand the way they are slowly encroaching on some of the largest economic moats of the west like car manufacturing and Jumbo Jets the wars might be coming from the other side.
A huge sector or our commerce can be summarized as "Alibaba but with expensive middle men".
I would place Temu, Alibaba, and TikTok shop somewhere on that same spectrum of safety.
Having been to Armenia, which has practically no laws because it’s not part of the EU, I wonder what would happen “naturally”, if EU laws didn’t exist in the EU. Maybe we’d get exactly the same quality of products.
The kicker is that this is a classic "cobra effect" [1] that has bogged down government offices. Those useless brands exist because Amazon tried to cut down on counterfeits and no-name junk by implementing a policy of requiring the brand to be a registered trademark. Instead of cutting down on junk products, it led to an explosion of junk brands [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...
If by "better," you mean "crappier but even cheaper." IMHO, we're kind of in a race to the bottom with product quality. You can't really tell what's good and what's bad online, so people gravitate the what's cheapest to minimize the risk of getting really taken advantage of. A lot of the stuff that's still good quality has massive luxury premiums tacked on, and a lot of the stuff that used to be good quality has been debased by some bean counter trying to convert goodwill into cash money.
If you were to look at this in terms of a CPU chip, the cheapest chip would be the chip with the most defects that runs, while the chip with the fewest defects would be overpriced to sell, or extra-overpriced and overclocked to barely running.
Think about it - do you run out an buy a Xeon Gold blah blah for $15k or a core i7 for $200? Marketing keeps you from thinking the core i7 is "crappier and cheaper"
Until we figure out how to develop our infrastructure without throwing manpower at it, we're going to get left behind. Our roads, rail, power, etc will all age and fail to keep up.
We got to where we were because our great great grandparents all worked for significantly less, consumed significantly less. Our society shouldn't expect that of us, we need to have technology/IP that enables us to more with less people. One person controlling a bricklaying robot can get paid a respectable wage while keeping costs down.
> doing big labour projects in us, EU, UK, etc is too expensive
Just watched a Bloomberg short about SK where they complain that they are overworked, over-stressed, hypercompetitive, depressed as a people, giving up on starting families out of fear of financial insecurity. (also, seems top suicidal in SK) No idea if it's true, but that all might have something to do with keeping the wages down?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2024-10-31/south-korea...
what happens to all other persons? For example, there are 3.5 million truck drivers in US, whose only skill, with all due respect, is to sit behind the wheel all day long. Once we have robocars, they will all start to sing and dance and will get some time to discover their true calling?
Before even breaking ground, the environmental assessments would take years and close to $1M. Relatively straightforward assessments are contested by people who don't want it built, and current regulations force builders to come to yet another hearing, respond, then wait for a response, then another hearing for a decision.
If they win, then the NIMBY files a lawsuit contesting the environmental hearing's decision.
This is a reason why people selling fixer-uppers in SF charge way more if they have approved permits for it. The time and money spent can easily be >$100,000.
Yes. I think there's a lot of lazy thinking happening in the West vis-a-vis China, which will serve to delay hard decisions until it's too late.
I wonder what this perspective can tell us about the new wave of Chinese expansionism, which becomes somewhat akin to the US's abandonment of isolationism and the resultant war with Spain (1898) and joining the two World Wars.
it was a sensible doctrine in 1823, and we see 40 years later in 1864 the French under Napoleon III still attempted to install a Hapsburg as Emperor in Mexico.
The definition of a sphere of influence is "a country or area in which another country has power to affect developments although it has no formal authority."
And “the Mexicans” in this context were an expansionist Spanish colonial empire too.
What do you mean by this? The Philippine War started in 1898 in Cuba, and began US world expansion. If you're dating expansion over the continent as overlapping with that (which you should) you're agreeing that there was unbroken expansionism.
edit: and what does Spain's (or France's) empire have to do with anything? If I burgle the house of a burglar, it doesn't make me not a burglar. The question was whether the US was expansionist, not a moral judgement about the people who controlled the places it expanded to. You can't say that we weren't expansionist and also that they deserved it.
To be clear it's not that you're in a burglar's house, it's that you're robbing the same place.
That is not entirely true. The United States government and/or its citizens acting autonomously had global reach much earlier than 1898.
Throughout the nineteenth century, American expansionism was seen in various Central American countries, Ecuador, Liberia and Japan, for instance. In some cases, like in Japan and in Brazil, America’s aggressive policies were thwarted. But it does not mean that there was not expansionism.
Spain lost the vast majority of its empire in the 1820s. Just a few possessions, like Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, remained in Spanish hands until the end of the nineteenth century.
The dominant native cultures did the same thing to get that land before the Europeans arrived. The Aztecs colonized and subjugated plenty of groups.
Ang's argument is that there are 4 types of corruption - Petty Theft (eg. policeman takes a bribe), Grand Theft (eg. a Governor embezzles from the state pension fund), Speed Money (eg. business pay bribes to speed up processing of a permit), and Access Money (eg. pay bribes to get access to the bureaucracy).
Ang's thesis posits that China's comparative ability to somewhat temper Speed Money corruption was the primary driver for China's economic growth (eg. via SEZs and allowing foreign corporate structures to leverage Hong Kong).
This is not meant to be treated as a positive though. Ang points out that China still has an active problem with Access Corruption due to the chumminess between regulators and politically connected firms which can lead to systemic risks (eg. Evergrande Crisis):
"China provides a sharp illustration: by enriching capitalists who pay for privileges and rewarding politicians who serve capitalist interests, access money perversely stimulates transactions and investment, which translates into GDP growth (Ang 2019; Ang 2020, chapter 5).
Yet this does not mean that access money is “good” for the economy—on the contrary, it distorts the allocation of resources, breeds systemic risks, and exacerbates inequality. The harm of access money only blows up in the event of a crisis: for example, America’s first great depression of 1839 (triggered by risky public financing and state-bank collusion) (Ang 2016, chapter 7; Wallis 2000, 2001), the 1997 East Asia financial crisis (Kang 2002), and the 2008 US financial crisis (Baker 2010; Igan, Mishra, and Tressel 2011; White 2011; Fisman and Golden 2017; Fligstein, Brundage, and Schultz, Forthcoming)"
- "Unbundling Corruption: Revisiting Six Questions on Corruption", Yuen Yuen Ang 2019
While the "spoils system" did incentivize access, the principal-agent problem in this case would treat a voter as the principal and a legislator as the agent, as is a common issue with patronage systems in general.
Access Money in Ang's typology hasn't been extended to patronage politics (yet).
[0]large mean time between scattering events, e.g. number and make-up of parties dont change very much since the last time the current system became barely-functional (we take on socio-technical debt before we have actual social tech??) as it is, 1789 was a bit too long ago for founder-mode, may halloween continue to console us!
[1]more tk. it seems mostly everyone is tripartite. Tripartism, has its own en.wikipage! But more research on YYA’s taxonomy is required of me.
a/ everyone is tripartite
b/ every now and then, mid and high circulate, often by appeal to the low
c/ as soon as the old mid becomes the new high, they forget their promises
which is completely in keeping with what he said in Animal Farm. (did he have a third book on the topic?)
{a: PIE, b: Veblen, c: Machiavelli}?
(I recently learned the chinese latin TLA "SPA" from a Zhihu question about the PRC equivalent of the low)
* not completely fast forward: one sentence of the last narrative explains why the Man even bothers to keep the low down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40023059
EDIT: on Tripartism, yeah, a large part of our current "The Middle" party was previously known as Christian Democrats.
Not sure if the sage is allowed cruelty(=irreversibilty?<= deluging), more sure that the sage is forbidden from enjoying it (or even signalling its enjoyment, cf Not-Hillel)
The chinese note a tension between 霸 and 王 , do they also note one between 正 and 仁?
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92WwPFDn_xM#t=90s
*Check out DP-G and TSC’s 2020 update, where their Ham doesnt seem so contrived, and in fact, closer to, let’s say, the-country-that-shall-not-be-renamed. Are the chinese paying attention??!! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42039941
Citation on the tension? I suspect the tension isn’t between elite-driven and anarchism*. No time to hunt for a item i saw a while back here (its “everywhere”) observing that you cant see any of the supposedly cataclysmic events of the XX (& XIX?) on the emissions chart.. perhaps we should explore (cue tony blair’s victory song) the tension between inflation and deflation instead?
*https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42031606
[maybe Einstein saw Goedel as Spinoza reincarnate, pity he hadnt heard about MPB (or even RPF/AG]
PS hadnt seen the PC article, thanks! The content is very familiar.. however.
How long before we have Gravitational Engineers?
EDIT: as to pro-logician (in the proset sense) JYG is the closest I know of, and for him physics is more than one applicational layer away. (I find presenting boolean truth tables makes the foundational q's that bother him disappear for me. A gramme is better than a damn!)
EDIT2: [multivariate, wlog] calculus works because things have interiors and exteriors, so in the sense of highly leveraging containment/implication, that'd be an advanced application of logic? (compare CSP's existential graphs)
EDIT3: wow, looking at china vs india (esp. the crossing!), we can really see the power of:
if your time horizon is...
1 year plant rice
10 years plant trees
100 years educate people
Will have to think of a good citation; I'd thought it a truth universally acknowledged that bureaucracy, customer interfaces, and other formal systems (正; 正名) cover all bases in theory but in practice the lasting ones tend to leave pragmatic, if implicit, escape hatches (仁; fac et excusa)?
Does <<the galois theory of algorithms>> throw any light on vNuC? (von Neumann universal constructors, aka(?) the orthographically suggestive “geon”)
P4: >…we have to construct a Hamiltonian whose ground-state energy is dependent on the outcome of a (quantum) computation. This is possible thanks to Feynman and Kitaev’s history state construction used ubiquitously throughout quantum complexity proofs
[Escape hatches of substance, steadfast in starstorms, abstracting into infinity…]
To make a uC you need a quine and some generators; the galois connexion above ought to pick out the fixpoints/closed sets. (in particular, we're usually interested in cases where the latter are infinite but the former are finite — the XX continuation of angels* dancing on medieval pinheads)
Lagniappe: https://www.xkcd.com/974/
* I guess now we would say they expended a great deal of intellectual energy on attempting to discern if angels had 0, finite, or infinite measure?
EDIT: if you haven't already, consider that quinoids don't have to exactly self-reproduce, don't have to be quines: one can program "objects" that, upon receiving a message, reproduce themselves and all their response methods (essence) — but with a new state (accident).
Having missed its 64th anniversary, I guess I should plan to get a working implementation of my kleene algebra (quantale) in shape for its 75th?
What surprisingly good policies may have also emerged? Where was old times better than current environmental awareness?
It seems warped to talk if these only as success stories.
While it has invested infrastructure, the scale of its investment does not equate to the US - it vastly, vastly overshadows it. The nature of its infrastructure investment: centralist planning under socialist leadership, is also nothing like US robber-baron driven development. Modern China's urbanization has been nothing less than the largest human migration in history. The infrastructure went from the odd railroad with a few urbanized cities to fiber optic internet, 5G data, high speed trains and airports everywhere in the country within ~30 years. 1.4 billion people have cell phones, flatscreen TVs, instant messaging, e-vehicles and streaming movies.
But now the bubble has burst. Growth has slowed. Factories are closing, or heavily automating with world-leading levels of technical integration, cutting headcounts. The educated youth are unemployed. International investment has dried up. Rumours abound that the party leadership is in crisis with factional schisms and high profile coverups, and the national pension fund has been emptied. Chinese with money seek to escape by moving their families overseas. The specter of the party looms over remnant private industry seeking a tax to aide its flailing coffers. Everyone recognizes the education system is terrible and seeks to send their kids overseas. A fledgeling venture capital industry, once buoyant, has seized, and while domestic remittance is ~free and ~instantaneous international financial remittance is heavily regulated. But everyone can watch the latest Hollywood, Bollywood or Chinese content. Wealthy young Chinese can obtain information from across the country in seconds and access drugs like cocaine, ecstasy, ketamine, and marijuana, drive Teslas or Ferraris and wield iPhones. Everyone in the cities has a VPN on their phone to get foreign content. AI's potential to accelerate further change looms large.
How is this anything like the US in the 19th century, an era before even broadcast media? This to me seems a frankly ridiculous assertion. Modern China is nothing like anything that has ever happened before, in terms of technology, political ideology, or economy. At best, weak parallels can be drawn along constrained axes, but the big picture is totally unknown to history. I only hope for the people's sake the current situation can be resolved without civil war. And indeed such wishes should be extended globally, as in the current era, the UK, the US, parts of western Europe and even my native Australia could be said to have the socioeconomic preconditions for civil war. Let us not see another world war in our lifetime. Let us not be blinded by nationalism.
Nationalism is an infantile disease: the measles of mankind - Einstein, who also incidentally, it should be highlighted, was himself a globalist-humanist and turned down the presidency of Israel considering Zionism a self-destructive political ideology...
If anything, it seemed rosy; for example I was under the impression that China had cracked down on VPNs. But if GP says they're still widely accessible, then it leaves me with the impression that China has more free access to information than I previously thought.
The picture being painted is of a doomed, sinking ship.
It seems scary until you think about the kind of information warfare that a certain cross pacific neighbor likes to employ, frequently.
Please tell me you're kidding. There is way, way more pro-Chinese propaganda online than anti-Chinese. So overt at this point that you'd have to be willfully blind not to notice.
Americans grow up in this soup. They even have rebellious media companies that say edgy things, but all tow the party line. It’s genuinely incredible.
Videos online very, very clearly showed many rockets bypassing the system, with some interceptions in the video that made it all the more obvious how many rockets were not being intercepted. All western media claimed the Iron Dome was exceedingly successful and blocked 90%+ of the missiles. This was also not corroborated by non-western sources. It wasn't until Planet Labs released evidence of dozens of strikes on an airbase that this specific messaging decreased.
At that point, they didn't acknowledge that 'error', but instead shifted the narrative to say that the attack, which Iran gave several hours warning of and had explicitly designed not to take lives, had failed because nobody got killed.
Israel coverage in general is a great topic to witness this phenomenon.
https://www.propublica.org/article/china-cartels-xizhi-li-mo...
And
https://www.propublica.org/article/chinese-organized-crime-u...
China has an extremely large chemical industry. They supply the world's pharmaceutical industries for their re-agents, precursors and such.
Fentanyl, like LSD, is highly HIGHLY potent, so quantities of ingredients don't actually have to be so high so that it becomes obvious. Also like LSD, there's analogues up and down the chain. They've banned all analogues of fentanyl and some of the direct precursors, but analogues and other pathways exist and new ones are constantly invented to circumvent bans.
In hindsight, it would have been better to not have wrecked Latin America so much that there's sophisticated mega-cartels that overwhelm whole nations, but what can you do...
China is on its own league. The nation has repeatedly claim the largest nation under the same culture heritage and political evolution, and economy development for over 2000 years, non-stopping. And among the time, claimed the longest period of time among the most powerful nations as well.
China's transformation since 1840, is a 200 years turmoil that repeated before in that 2000 years history. When Xi Jinping proclaimed that now is the juncture of major-changes-unseen-in-a-century, the idea is that China was already in a changing period that unseen in thousands of years, which was proclaimed by Li Hongzhang.
You see, China as a nation understand her own heritage and destiny.
Her role is to be the manifestation of the Mandate of Heave, to build the great harmony that everyone under heaven can life peacefully together.
That's different than western heritage, which is built upon dominance and hierarchy.
Both are powerful systems that align with some of the most fundamental aspects of human nature. And each of these 2 systems also internally manifested the counterpart. For example, Chinese system emphasize hierarchy from the Confucious, and a spirit of rebellion ignited by Chen Sheng & Wu Guang's line of "Are kings and nobles given their high status by birth?". West system emphasis harmony in Christian teaching.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-long-game-chinas-gran...
Do the Taiwanese feel comforted by statements like that?
None of political is moral. Only morality makes political bearable.
Great harmony is about creating a system that can peacefully forcing everyone into their position and not go out of boundary.
But all Chinese knows the art of tense and relax, forward and retreat. If you think Chinese are depressed because of some GDP numbers, then you are a normal non-Chinese individuals.
When I say Chinese being fundamentally different, I do mean that normal non-Chinese individual indeed cannot make sense of China.
Going to be training my nephews on raid techniques and Sun Tzu...
I think the US raised interest rates in part to put the breaks on Chinas economy but the US was unable to keep high rates for longer without tanking it's own economy. That China and the US have bubble ponzi economies is one way I do think they are alike. I'm in disagreement with the Peter Zeihan with his predictions of a population bust with aging. I do agree there will be some population decline but Chinese old people are vastly cheaper than US old people and if they have to will work right up until the point they keel over. I really don't know which country is in a worse state but most people I know do not believe the US can continue in it's current state for much longer. Compared to that China does not seem that bad - but that could just be because I'm too far removed to see it's warts.
The traditional way of managing civil discontent is by exporting it with a war, so as much as I hope China does not have a civil war I would rather they have a civil war than intentionally trigger an international war.
Not sure how you square the US support for Israel as part of the global-humanist effort by the US. A nationalistic US would not support a nationalistic Israel.
But yes, the US is certainly in a difficult position with its socioeconomic trajectory, and the current election is a powder keg.
A somewhat popular meme in the expat community in China has long been that the US and China are just converging on the same future from different paths. Those who have lived for extended periods in both places can see the truths behind this suggestion.
It has been said that "Our true nationality is mankind", but I think it better to state "Our true nationality is Eukaryote". We should care more about the environment and other species' outcomes, not obsess over monkey-squabbles.
Trump is merely wearing the cloak of nationalism in order to get elected which I guess is why it gets confusing - Zionism is a wedge issue in the culture war and an ability for the right wing to take part in grievance politics. Evangelicals have also been thoroughly brainwashed to support Zionist Israel but those are dying out and the new ones are smaller in number and have a net negative view of Israel. Support for Israel was already on a demographic timer which has only just gotten much shorter since Oct 7th.
We're going to see some weird things in the near future.
I will not be hoodwinked again!
-t. Bamboozled 2016 Trump Voter
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_Albert_Ei...
Well, hey, I'm the first to admit I never met the guy. I have also read that wikipedia page, which is probably not impartial or complete. My limited understanding is that he didn't want an Israeli state - "I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state". Later, he initially supported Israel (as did many fleeing Europe, including my own family), but never Israel-for-the-jews-to-the-exclusion-of-others. Later he was disgusted at the political leadership of this bent he saw emerging to dominate the political reality in the fledgling nation, which is what my GP comment referred to. He would without doubt be critical today, though it seems he wisely tried to stay out of politics where feasible. Probably I should have said "militant exclusionary Zionism" or some other phrase, but it seems everything is a loaded phrase these days in discussions touching on Israel.
Edit reply to child: I can see clearly that quote must be taken out of context quite often. Perhaps you should imagine if you had lived somewhere for generations and then a bunch of foreigners show up from Europe and start altering the status quo, how exactly you the residents might feel about it. It seems peaceful protest and strikes had been carried out in living memory but the results were violence. So you can see what sort of tinderbox that would be. I don't think deploying historic quotes out of context in an attempt to allocate blame and transfer that to a modern context is in any way shape or form constructive, valid, useful or intellectually honest.
"He took the draft of a speech he was preparing for a television appearance commemorating the state of Israel's seventh anniversary with him to the hospital, but he did not live to complete it. In the draft he speaks about the dangers facing Israel and says “It is anomalous that world opinion should only criticize Israel’s response to hostility and should not actively seek to bring an end to the Arab hostility which is the root cause of the tension."
I hope it helps
On the whole, however, Einstein suffered from the same blind spot that many people in his time did: not paying enough attention to the rights of the native population of Palestine, which was more than 95% non-Jewish.
He also was a product of his times: no one questioned the moral existence of USA, Australia or New-Zealand in regard with native population rights.
Israel was founded at a time when anticolonial movements worldwide were gaining strength. That made its founding - through the mass expulsion of the native population - an anachronism.
Einstein was very clearly against the foundation of a Jewish state until it actually occurred. He accepted is establishment in the end, and like many people of the time, he glossed over the incredible injustice that had been done to the Palestinians in order to establish Israel.
I do know that not everyone thought this way, though. Some of my own Jewish family members opposed to establishment of Israel at the time, precisely because they thought it was unjust to the Arab population.
Many Jews actively opposed the creation of a Jewish nation; the Bund is just one example [0]. I’m not sure what your point is here—people are entitled to different opinions. However, Einstein actively persuaded world leaders to support the UN partition plan, which was before the founding of Israel.
The founding of Israel resulted from the UN decision on the partition plan, which the Jews accepted while the Arabs rejected. The "mass expulsion" was a consequence of the war, similar to contemporary events in Europe (where 3 million ethnic Germans were displaced) and India (with approximately 20 million displaced). Additionally, you seem to overlook the 900,000 Jews displaced from Arab countries and areas that were meant to be part of Israel but ended up under Jordanian control. This is why, many people at the time (Einstein included) didn't hold the prevailing view that 80 years later is dominating the left.
The U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada were undeniably created through colonialism. Live with it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Jewish_Labour_Bund
About the Bund: indeed, they represented mainstream Jewish opinion before WWII, which was anti-Zionist.
> The founding of Israel resulted from the UN decision on the partition plan
This is just historically wrong. First of all, the UN "decision" was actually a nonbinding proposal. Second, the leaders of the Zionist movement were preparing to go to war to create a Jewish state, regardless of what the UN did or did not propose. With the British leaving, there was going to be a power vacuum, and the Zionists were going to seize the opportunity. They had already built up an army (trained by the British) and most of the organs of government (like a legislature, an executive, and ministries handling different state affairs). They weren't waiting for the UN to decide.
> The "mass expulsion" was a consequence of the war
Zionist paramilitary forces went town by town forcibly expelling the residents. Those who remained were often killed. Many Palestinian civilians heard of these atrocities and fled in advance of Zionist forces. The Palestinian Exodus isn't just something that happened by itself. It was a brutal affair.
After the war, the Israelis refused to let the Palestinians return home, and either expropriated (read, "stole") or destroyed their homes and property. If you just go down the list of major Israeli cities nowadays, many (maybe most) of them were formerly Arab cities, which the Zionists "cleansed" in 1948. Lod is the Hebrew name for Lydda, an Arab city where the IDF massacred over 100 civilians, then stripped the rest of the inhabitants of all belongings and drove them out at gunpoint, forcing them to walk on foot through the summer heat to the Jordanian army. After the war, Israel resettled the city with Jewish residents. The Israelis did this sort of thing all over Palestine.
> U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada were undeniably created through colonialism.
If they had been created by the same methods in the last 75 years, then people would care just as much as they do about the expulsion of the Palestinians. Israel was founded as the colonial era was coming to an end. I would even say that if it weren't for the fact that Israel rules over millions of stateless Palestinians to this day, far fewer people would care. About 40% of the population of greater Israel - the area actually ruled by the Israeli state since 1967 - is subject to martial law and treated worse than dogs. That's why so many people care, and can't just "live with it."
>This is just historically wrong. First of all, the UN "decision" was actually a nonbinding proposal. Second, the leaders of the Zionist movement were preparing to go to war to create a Jewish state, regardless of what the UN did or did not propose…
Resolution 181, while not binding, remains a plan that the Arab side rejected, and the Jews accepted. This isn’t speculation; it’s simply what happened. The Arab side not only rejected the plan but also took less than 12 hours to murder seven Jews — four women and three men. Again, this is not speculation; this is actually what happened.
The Jews, acting like responsible adults, prepared for the worst-case scenario and, rightly so, prepared an army. Did the U.S. act wrongly when it strengthened its army before any hostilities from Japan? That’s what responsible adults do — they prepare for the future.
While we can only speculate on what might have happened to the Jews if the Arabs had won, it’s not speculation that Mohammed Amin al-Husseini cooperated with the Nazis. Between 1941 and 1945, he lived in Berlin and worked as a Nazi propagandist.
> Zionist paramilitary forces went town by town forcibly expelling …
At the end of the war roughly 20% of Israel population were Arabs, so obviously you are lying when you say that they went “town by town”. Why are you lying?
> The Palestinian Exodus …
I never said it happened entirely on its own; many people were forced to leave. All I said was that it was (and to an extent still is — just look at Syria) a common practice in war. It happened during the partition of India (affecting 20 million people) and at the end of WWII, when 3 million ethnic Germans were displaced. So, intelligent people, like Einstein, wouldn’t think it unprecedented And as I was saying, and you ignored, all the land that was captured from Israel was ethnically cleansed from Jews. And there was a mass explusion of 900,000 Jews from Arab counties.
What I really find it puzzling that you might have some good arguments to the peaceful nature of the Arabs, that they were all loving and caring. 2 most lovely examples: Hadassah medical convoy massacre [0] and Kfar Etzion massacre [1]
> 1967 borders ...
I'll never defend the settlements it is an abomination. Yet the root cause of the conflict remains the Palestinian refusal to any peace plan that doesn't include the destruction of Israel.
> a Jewish homeland in Palestine
This does not mean a Jewish state, as anyone who has read even a little bit about the history of Zionism knows. The term "Jewish homeland in Palestine" comes from the Balfour Declaration, and the point of inventing this term was that it implies some sort of Jewish community in Palestine, but doesn't specify that that community will have a state. It doesn't even state where in Palestine that homeland will be. Part of Palestine? All of it? It's unclear, and intentionally so.
So when you bring up Einstein supporting a "Jewish homeland in Palestine" as proof that Einstein supported a Jewish state, you're just revealing that you don't even know the basics of the history you're trying to discuss.
> The Jews, acting like responsible adults, prepared for the worst-case scenario and, rightly so, prepared an army.
Okay, so the condescending tone continues. Another way of putting this is that the Zionist movement was aware that what they were doing - attempting to establish a state on someone else's land - was so unacceptable to the local population that it would inevitably mean war. Yet they persisted in this policy anyways. By the way, this is one of the central reasons Einstein gave for rejecting a Jewish state. He said that the establishment of a Jewish state in a land that was majority non-Jewish was unjust and would lead to violence. He was correct on both counts.
> At the end of the war roughly 20% of Israel population were Arabs, so obviously you are lying when you say that they went “town by town”. Why are you lying?
The fact that Israeli forces went town by town expelling the Arab population is very well established. There are records of how this happened in countless villages all over Palestine.
Without the expulsion, a vast majority of the population of the territory that became Israel - far more than 50% - would have been Arab. The 20% of the population that was Arab after the war was a small fraction of the original Arab population. In fact, about 80% of the Arab population was expelled.
> and you ignored, all the land that was captured from Israel was ethnically cleansed from Jews.
No land was "captured from Israel." There was no Israel before the war. It was the Zionist forces that were seeking to capture territory to establish a state, against the will of the overwhelming majority of the native population of Palestine. There were small numbers of Jewish people who were expelled from the parts of Palestine that ended up under Arab control, but that was practically nothing compared to the number of Arabs who were expelled.
> And there was a mass explusion of 900,000 Jews from Arab counties.
That happened over the following decades, and it was caused pretty directly by the establishment of Israel. The expulsion of the Palestinians by Israel caused a wave of antisemitism across the Middle East, which led Arab governments to start taking their own oppressive measures against their Jewish populations. One of the tragedies of Zionism is that it undermined the status of Jews in the Muslim world.
> What I really find it puzzling that you might have some good arguments to the peaceful nature of the Arabs, that they were all loving and caring.
Where did I ever say they were all "peaceful" and "loving and caring"? They were normal people. They would fight under some circumstances. One circumstance under which almost any group of people anywhere would fight is when another group of people comes in and tries to conquer their territory.
It really quite difficult to discern what benefit you might see in presenting such an obviously false and derisive characterization of what another user has been saying, such as this.
And genocide, slavery and a whole host of other evils.
That doesn't mean we need to accept those evils when they're happening in the present day.
Live with it.
Or maybe you're thinking about the raped women in Darfur [0]?
There are so many real evils to choose from—not imaginary ones involving Jews. But I know what you’ll end up choosing... the hallmark of anti-Semitism.
Live with it.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/nov/03/w...
Saying that antisemitism is the reason people care about Israel killing 15,000 Palestinian children is pathetic and contemptible. You're abusing that term.
But my point is that as soon as you apply different rules to Jews that is antisemitism. Pure and simple, there is no way around it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Israel%E2%80...
Your accusations of antisemitism are just a bad-faith attempt to shut down all criticism of Israel. There's no point in even taking your accusation seriously. Find a better argument.
Almost none of the Jewish population in 1948 could be termed "native," except for the tiny minority that had actually lived in Palestine before Zionism (and that Jewish minority was by and large opposed to Zionism). The overwhelming majority of the people who founded Israel were European or American, with a small fraction of young people born to European/American parents.
Not sure why you keep reiterating it when I just pointed that native population at the time (when Einstein addressed it) is estimated to be more than double what you stated.
You brought up the percentage of Jewish population, not me. I just pointed out your mistake. Now you're suggesting it's not important by claiming I'm "obsessing over it"?
If in fact the size of Jewish population at the time isn't relevant to the point you're trying to make, why would you even bring it in the first place?
P.S. you again quote a wrong stat. The Zionism movement is considered to have started on 1897. At the time (1890), Jewish population was estimated to be 7.9%, not 3%.
Just not the fine grain of whether it was 3 or 5 or 8 percent.
Either way, the commenter's salient point still stands: like all Zionists at every point in the history of the movement, regardless of subvariant -- Einstein never paid enough attention to the rights of the non-Jewish native population of region (being variously an absolutely overwhelming majority of the population up until about 1936, to a still thoroughly solid majority until 1948).
> Certainly the ballpark size of the ca 1897 population is relevant.
Sure, it is relevant to many things, however, the number that caught my eye (see my first comment here) was mentioning Einstein's blind spot and other "in his (Einstein's) time" yet continues to quote a figure that was false even when Einstein was but a baby, let alone "in his time" which I take as when he published his views on Zionism (on 1931). There is no ballpark similarity in numbers _here_, which is what I commented on.
It's okay to get that number wrong but when someone points it out, I think a reasonable thing would be to either explain why the numbers do not matter in this case the explain why if did they chose to include that figure in the first place, or if the numbers do matter explain how it changes the rest of their argument.
You're pointing to later figures on the number of Jews in Palestine to argue that the native Jewish population was substantially larger. The problem there is that you're considering European Jews who had just recently immigrated to Palestine (or at best, who were born to European parents) to be part of the "native" population.
The basic conflict in 1948 was between an overwhelmingly Arab native population and a European Jewish population. There was also a tiny Jewish population with mich deeper roots in Palestine, but they were actually very skeptical of Zionism.
The pre-Zionist population of Palestine, before the First Aliyah, was about 3%.
So no, one does not get to say "Einstein supported Zionism" per the latter's modern definition and context.
China has been suppressing domestic private consumption, it stands at just 40% of the GDP. For comparison, the US is at 68% and Germany is at 53%.
This was probably done to prevent the appearance of the true middle class. China has no problem controlling a fairly small percentage of rich people, but the Party is afraid of large population strata that might start asking for political representation.
But it does give them a _lot_ of leeway for easy growth. They just need to make the country more business-friendly at the lower end.
Consumption-led growth is all but over. The population is shrinking, manufacturing is fleeing as fast it can, and the number old people exceeds young — China got old before it got rich, which has never happened before
China's fundamentals are fine. They just need to allow more low-level business activity. It's easier to start a factory compared to a neighborhood café.
It’s not really possible to say “China’s fundamentals are fine” because China’s fundamentals look like nothing the world has ever seen. It’s not clear they have the leadership to navigate it.
The fix for that is long-known: liberalize the business environment and let the market settle.
The question about the leadership is right, though. I'm not sure they _want_ the market to win.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1101677/population-distr...
Is that so? My understanding is the Chinese education system is pretty cutthroat, and lot of the Chinese kids studying overseas are the ones with rich parents who could not compete academically. So a rando foreign degree is not looked on as highly as it once was, and many domestic schools are more prestigious than they used to be.
Chinese leadership is deeply influenced by Marxism. The representation of the masses is strongly prioritized. There are obviously many problems, but it doesn’t take long to be certain of this fact.
There’s many many examples that support this. Evening out the education landscape, ruthless drive towards ecological sustainability, massive anti poverty campaigns, state funded healthcare, hard regulation of the housing sector, complete renovation of the slums (they even pay out or rehouse citizens when they do said renovation)
The perception about China in the west is genuinely psychotic.
You know what I found? The value of Chinese domestic university education was a net negative. For instance, in R&D work, I found it to be a solid predictor of futility in the face of unstructured problems. Local employees who had never been to university outperformed those who had - every time.
While I wasn't hiring Tsinghua elites, I did hire from a range of universities across a range of provinces. Many of these graduates would last only days before being fired. I found no more efficient way to screen than to allocate tools, space and a task. Domestic employment law is supportive in this regard.
If I had to generalize, when performing R&D work, the university educated Chinese people were the worst performers, mostly due to no capacity to handle unstructured problems but also due to assumptions of being in a "team" and active seeking bureaucratic excuses for lack of progress. They would freeze up and have no confidence reasoning forward when questioned. The "made it without university" Chinese people were the best performers, and excellent communicators. And the foreigners were generally somewhere in the middle. Overseas educated Chinese were essentially equivalent in this regard.
Other foreign bosses in China have reported to me that they prefer to hire women who have already had children as they are stable employees willing to do what needs to get done, graduates and in particular young men are considered near to useless, with zero loyalty, commitment or motivation.
I was most impressed by those from 'second tier' universities and some without degrees at all who were more obsessed with quality and rigor than they were about 'GPA', prestige, or whatever it is. I don't expect this to be different anywhere in the world, due to the nature of selection systems. That is Goodhart's Law after all.
The selection systems employed by these institutions favor those who optimize for select-ability, which distorts things quite a bit. I hold very little value in a PhD from any university at this point. In fact, I'm quite weary of prestigious credentials in general, as they often translate to over-confident idiocy with power in credentialist institutions, rather than self-aware idiocy which can at least self-regulate to some degree. PG put it well when he called them "professional fakers".
That being said, research output in China is quite strong. I have also learned that average people, given enough time, resources, and a little bit of good direction, will be able to accomplish quite a bit. China has made undeniable, unprecedented progress across the board in high-tech sectors. I say this having been part of competitive analysis at two of these top tier American institutions, looking at how China is overtaking our own products.
> Chinese domestic university education was a net negative.
Is fair but not exceptional observation to PRC tertiary education. Can be generalized to most mid to shit tier western university talent as well, i.e. if you're not hiring from elite. But really also tons of low calibre all over "top tier" western institutions with academic inflation in last couple decades.
IMO generalized tier list is follows: c9 league (or other PRC elite) -> self motivated / self educated go getters -> competent grads from good (not elite) institutes -> average to bottom barrel grads. Note here competent grads includes much of your expats, and foreign educated Chinese... both have some qualities of self motivation to do well because they decided to go (or return) to PRC to work instead of working/staying in west. Western educated Chinese who returns also largely falls under / prefiltered the bucket of basically not being good enought for elite/C9 but have smarts and enough resources to goto a semi decent western uni. Chinese educated in mid to shit tier comparable to same quality of medicore talent from mid to shit tier western uni. Plenty of such western educated PRC grads just chilling in the west being useless, many from fairly well ranked western institutions - plenty of useless non-Chinese grads in even well ranked western institutions bad at unstructured problems (maybe disproportionately so). Young men being < young women for skilled work force also pattern you see in west, except in west, young men aren't being pushed through tertiary at similar rates as in PRC.
Also worth nothing Chinese C9 has like 400,000k enrollment (500+k if you include seven sons), vs 150k US Ivys + MIT,Standford,Caltech, good UCs, and it's maybe 250k... a big portion being non S&T.