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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, and you’re going to be poorer as a whole. People in backwards places like rural and urban ‘hoods live reasonably well with very low labor productivity relatively speaking.

I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia. Basic survival for rural poor is a car.

When you take away cheap clothes and cheap TVs, all made in modern Asian factories and replace them with shitty American products at 3x the price, the current populist movement will look like a party in comparison.

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>I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia.

>People in backwards places like rural...

That's not actually true. You want to visit rural Asia and compare.

There are backward rural places in America. However the vast majority of rural people have had reliable electric since the 1950s, along with phone (though those lines may not longer work since everyone has gone cellular). They bought their first color TV in the 1960s like everyone else. They drive cars (the image of a red neck mowing his grass and finding a car - they drove that car 30 years ago, when it wore out they go a different one and quit driving it). Most of the backward in America are groups like the Amish who have every ability to be modern but choose not to.

In rural Asia there are a lot of people who don't have electric, they don't have cars.

Though I don't know why rural is even a topic here. Factories don't exist in rural areas, this exist in cities and towns where the workers live.

In the US? Whenever possible, we build industrial facilities in rural areas for a cheaper workforce and to avoid unionization. Meat packing is the textbook example. Distribution centers are the more modern one.

It’s always important to talk about rural citizens because politicians pretend that they don’t exist. The rural poor have a lot in common with the urban poor, but are separated both deliberately and by inertia.

We build in small cities. That is different from rural. The people live in the town.

>When you take away cheap clothes and cheap TVs, all made in modern Asian factories and replace them with shitty American products at 3x the price, the current populist movement will look like a party in comparison.

Would the rest of the world even care anymore? Everyone from Canada to New Zealand is now making plans for long term disconnection from the US. They will not let the next Trump boss them around like they have been this past year. The reputation is torched and so if the US launches another populist movement that leads nowhere and collapses the country as a result why should the other 95% of the planet care?

The other 95% of the planet has mostly been relying upon the USA as the global hegemon to provide the security guarantees and financial infrastructure necessary for large scale free trade since the end of WWII. If the USA steps back from that then global trade networks will gradually break down because no other country or stable coalition has the desire or resources to step into that role. The situation will revert to something more like what we saw pre-war when most trade was regional. New Zealand in particular is in a weak position as they are heavily reliant on agriculture exports, and lack any ability to project power beyond their own borders.

Nope… the US has been relying on the rest of the world to fund it's deficit, provide land for military bases to project it's 'power'

There’s interdependence, which is a system that benefits the world and the US. The US taxes the world with inflationary currency, and most of the planet has been relatively peaceful.

> and most of the planet has been relatively peaceful.

People from Vietnam, Iraq and many other countries would probably disagree with you

> I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia.

Lol, Asia is a big and diverse place. Are you really claiming that American society is more primitive than that of farmers in the arse end of Gansu?

Hint, one of those areas is more likely to have flush toilets.

Access to contemporary luxury does not a genius make. There was that bit in the film, "Goodwill Hunting," about an Indian man who found a math book and went on to define groundbreaking math from what he extrapolated. I don't know the details, but I don't think the film made that up.

I’m guessing Ramanujan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

20 years ago, we had a server named after him. It was always fun explaining how to pronounce it and the who exactly he was.

The Music of Primes by Marcus du Sautoy has a chapter on him

Book is a bit heavy going but well worth a read

A bit of googling suggests that the model for the mathematician in the film was George Dantzig, and he was actually studying mathematics at college level.

The story of Srinivasa Ramanujan fits your sentence, although early 20th C. He studied mathematics from a revision book he had access to in a small place in India then wrote a letter to GW Hardy a professor at Oxford with a range of new and strange results but expressed in the idiom of the revision book.

I don't necessarily agree with GPs, but I do think we're near the tipping point where the whole Eastern half of Asia combined is nearing or passing the Europe+US on the big progress-o-meter.

Some parts of East and Southeast Asia might have been working on paving roads and building schools even just one generation ago. To think they still are "like that" is legitimately an insult to them. That part is largely done and they're moving on.

This might be a shocker for you, but flush toilets are really not that big a deal compared to the Asian kind.

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