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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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"