thablackbull

I get a similar impression that the article was a little odd - I think the author seems to be confusing the intent of the message coming from China's leadership.

China is saying, here is a 'story' to help you understand what we're trying to do with the Belt & Road Initiative. In essence, the focus is not on the truth claims of history, but it is a guidepost of what they want to do in the future.

The author on the other-hand seems to be saying, because the history is inaccurate, the corollary is that the Belt & Road initiative will not succeed (which is not a logically consistent argument).

What we're witnessing today is a chicken-and-egg problem.

USA: America is the chicken. To be a modern country, it is hypothesized that the developing country needs immediately adopt American systems, laws, behavior & structures (the Washington consensus, etc.). In essence, and to keep it short, the 'free-markets' will take over, and standards of living will boom.

China: China is the egg, because they view modernization more or less independent (i.e., democracy is not a necessary). As long as people are given economic opportunities, the rest will evolve around it, systems and laws will adapt and be in sync with the development. That is, it is willing to offer lots of infrastructure and development opportunities to very poor countries, and it is up to those countries to take the opportunity to exploit it.

As someone who enjoys studying economics, I think we're at one of the most important points in time. USA & China, under two diametrically different systems have been able to grow extremely large economically - that means more data points to understand how to modernize other parts of the world.

Democracy, or that standards of living are so high its not worth it to deviate from the status quo? With no political science knowledge, I'm willing to have my view challenged and changed. I think there are 2 elements that are more important than democracy in and of itself.

1. High standards of living that alter the risk-reward ratio for making a political change

2. The rise of Corporations - these days, people view the government as a bureaucratic, slow, and useless entity with decent, but low pay. People aspire to work and move up the ranks in private corporations. The role of the government has been greatly reduced in the ordinary lives of citizens. That means the necessity of making a grand political change is just not as important as it was historically.

No, he specifically separated out the blockchain technology from the currency component.

Via FT Alphaville [1], he says, "I’m going to be really clear in this one. Forget the blockchain, that’s a technology… But… the currency isn’t going to work." The article also points this out, but doesn't differentiate it which has the effect of making him sound hypocritical.

> JPMorgan and many of its competitors, however, have invested millions of dollars in blockchain, the technology that tracks bitcoin transactions. Blockchain is a shared ledger of transactions maintained by a network of computers on the internet.

[1]: https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/09/12/2193624/money-creator...

It sounds like he is doing both (managing investments and doing research) simultaneously. From the article,

> Lun, who was born in Hong Kong, splits his time between his firm in Pennsylvania and lab at Rutgers, where he’s undertaken an ambitious long-term project: creating computer models that predict how cells behave, using data from blue-green algae and other sources. The models allow Lun to re-engineer genes for useful purposes: he has modified E. coli for production of bio-fuel for transportation.

I'm not disagreeing with anything you said but I suppose I am more commenting on the difference in attitude and execution.

While services like Android/Watsapp were created in the West and do service the lower end market, they still follow the "leader", isn't seen by the population as "cool/hip/etc." Even with credit cards, there are many merchants here that don't accept them (especially Amex) and Visa because of the prohibitive fees. The attitude in America is, define your market (high end/low end) and then extract the absolute amount of wealth you can, and defend your market share by any means possible.

In contrast, as you saw with the busker in the article, when it is rolled out in China, it is truly (almost) for everyone. They try to use economics of scale to get everyone on board so the entire nation is moving as a collective. Another example is the high speed rail; I recall reading an article that even though wages doubled, the fares didn't budge at all. It just allowed more and more people to take advantage of a good service. In America, you'd bet they try to increase fares as much as possible to extract as much as possible out of the consumer. Obviously there are problems, as with inferior phones, but when everyone is on board, there is an acceleration in innovation and they start solve those problems. Then you see things like people wanting higher end models and companies are forced to innovate. A company like Xiaomi which dominated suddenly drops to 4th place and needs to innovate - that is a sign of a healthy market.

I think this is a good illustration of the different approach in how China and America approach the consumer economics space. In America, there is a very heavy reliance on "trickle down". We create a "best-in-class", "top-of-the-line" product that only the elite and wealthy can buy into. These people then set the tone of how it will develop in the future. The first mover also tries to do everything in their power to lock you into the ecosystem. Examples of these are iPhones (and the app ecosystem), Tesla, etc.

In China however, they throw away that pride of creating the greatest and shiniest. Instead, they start off with an "inferior" product but use the scale of their population to bring down costs and they try to ensure everyone has access. The top example is smartphones. In the article itself, "Even the buskers were apparently ahead of me. Enterprising musicians playing on the streets of a number of Chinese cities have put up boards with QR codes so that passers-by can simply transfer them tips directly." China starts off with a product that gives every citizen a chance to get in on, not just the wealthy, and they build up their economy from the bottom up, rung by rung.

The way I see it, we have democracy in politics but in products, its authoritarian because its guided by the billionaires and wealthy. In China, they have an authoritarian political system, but democratic economy space because they can actually vote with their wallets.

> We have it pounded into our heads that we need globalization in the form of open markets with no protectionism

Because that is false. It works for developed markets with existing strong industries. Dieter Frisch - former Director General for Development at the European Commission says in his La politique de développement de l'Union européenne [1], on page 38 of the PDF:

"En effet, on ne connaît historiquement aucun cas où un pays au stade précoce de son évolution économique se serait développé via son ouverture à la concurrence internationale. Le développement s’est toujours amorcé au gré d’une certaine protection qu’on a pu diminuer au fur et à mesure que l’économie s’était suffisamment fortifiée pour affronter la concurrence extérieure. Mais un tel processus s’étend sur de longues années, sans parler du préalable que constituent, dans le cas des ACP, la mise en place et le fonctionnement de structures régionales."

Essentially, it means that there are no cases of a country that developed through opening its economy to international competition. It always required protectionism which reduces gradually overtime as it is able to grow and absorb and compete with external competition. Haven't you noticed third world countries that attempt to follow America's advice never escape the poverty trap? What works for America does not imply it'll work for other countries.

[1] http://ecdpm.org/wp-content/uploads/PMR-15-Politique-Develop...

This has been reported and going on for a while.

* MIT Technology review has a story on this [1]

* Police robots in China scan all the faces they come across to identify fugitives [2]

* JD (i.e., the competitor of Alibaba which is somewhat analogous to Amazon here) You can pay for deliveries using facial recognition [3]

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603494/10-breakthrough-te...

[2] http://gbtimes.com/china/police-robot-makes-china-debut

[3] https://qz.com/1009155/chinas-second-largest-ecommerce-compa...

To be fair, it was never about a hollowing out. The link is, "Many Canadians are living on cheap credit rather than living within their means" and the title is, "Canada’s Middle Class Is on the Brink of Ruin". The whole purpose of the piece was pointing out the frivolous spending habits of the average person that leads to deep financial problems when a negative event happens (job loss, divorce, etc.)

You were never to empathize with it; it's just saying people spend beyond their means.

> The article doesn't want to seem to load for me

I had to wait a bit but it eventually loads. Not sure what is wrong with the website.

> what is the source of cost issues in that part of the country? Cost of living vs what jobs pay out there? Or is it more deep than that?

Article concludes frivolous spending coupled with negative life events: Loss of job, "ignore their tax bill while shelling out for rep hockey and baseball", relationship gone wrong.

"Thanks to all the cheap credit, many of us can bridge our financial shortfalls for years before realizing we are on the brink of ruin."

"I can make a bet that when China GDP per capita comes close to the developed nations".

Exactly, people seem to forget that we're so comfortable here that we (I mean the majority) just couldn't care less. Every once in a while, we'll hear about some atrocity in a war we're in half way around the world, complain about it on Reddit and just forget about it the next day. We can sanction smaller countries about a list of human rights we created, but it's next to impossible for a smaller country to impose any sanctions on us thus making the US virtually unaccountable of anything.

The gov does not have to fear the populace here but that is definitely not the case in a developing country.

In order of what I could easily/already drop:

Facebook: Never had Facebook

Apple: Don't use any Apple products

Alphabet (Google): 90%+ searches are now through DuckDuckGo for me

Amazon: Needed as online shopping often through Amazon, and I still buy a lot of books through them

Microsoft: Must have, my life is intimately tied to Excel

He also blogs for those interested - obviously geared more to the finance types:

https://www.aqr.com/cliffs-perspective

If that's what people demand then that's what they'll supply. If it wasn't a profitable venture, they would not be creating it.

What you're witnessing is manufactured consent[1]. There is no need for the crude methods of propaganda here because it's not even necessary. Compare that with China; people there are fully conscious of government propaganda. From the SMH article, they expected the west to be a land of freedom and democratization of ideas, but what they end up finding is that it more or less is the same thing.

> [2] "A lot of them are PRC students who migrated to Australia or come here to study. I think they are quite ambivalent about Australia, and China. Culturally and emotionally they still identify with China, but they don't like the corruption, pollution, propaganda or the regime. So they migrate here and they have some perception about this country, that it's beautiful, clean, prosperous, there is press freedom and the media is objective, not like the propaganda in China. "Here they expect the media to do a lot better than the media they're used to back there. When they realise that the media here is just as one-track mind about these things as the Chinese side but exactly the opposite, they find it really hard to reconcile with what they're experiencing."

Personally, I find that even more worrying. People here seem to think they are free-thinkers not subject to propaganda when really, the more "oppressed" people have way more understanding of what's going on in the world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

[2] http://www.smh.com.au/national/chinese-media-a-threat-to-soc...

We prefer to use the term, seeking inspiration as opposed to copying, over here =P

They are apparently using data from Global Trade Alerts http://www.globaltradealert.org/

I good intro would be their 19th Global Trade Alert Report http://www.globaltradealert.org/gta-analysis/global-trade-pl...

> destroyed by an evil government, just for cheap, shoddily made goods

This attitude is why China managed to get itself out of poverty while other countries don't seem to get anywhere. While you may think phones made in China are cheap, shoddily made goods, guess what, there are billions of people in this world who don't have the financial resources of the 300M Americans to afford an iPhone.

The American model is to have a company create an amazing product at a very high cost (iPhone, Tesla) and have it "trickle down". What ends up happening are these companies monopolize the market, force everyone onto their ecosystem, and extract as much money as possible. Things do progress, but everyone gets locked into a system, and the company lacks incentive to keep innovating.

In China, they create cheap products, but in a few years, every single person has a smartphone. The technology is democratized and because of that, new technology can be built off that initial platform - now they are by far way ahead in things like fintech. Who cares if the product was initially cheap and shoddily made when the people there are upgrading their devices every year. The "cheap" device maker Xiaomi dropped to fourth place in China because consumers demanded more and more high end products. Within the space of a few years, the Chinese phone makers are making quality phones.

Those two aren't mutually exclusive. America is an incredibly protectionist country as well if you aren't aware.

http://www.eulerhermes.com/economic-research/publications/Pa...

In the past 3 years, America has introduced far more protectionist measures than other countries.

To add to that, the SCMP newspaper just released a visual a couple days ago explaining various projects.

The five main projects of the Belt and Road Initiative http://multimedia.scmp.com/news/china/article/One-Belt-One-R...

> it seems it lacks structure to be able to handle itself without risk of collapse.

Could you clarify? China was stable for like a millennium while Europe was fighting each other to no end.

This may or may not be a problem specific to your own installation though. While I don't have 100+ tabs, I've been using quick commands for everything since I started using Vivaldi without any issues - it is very snappy for me.

> I find vivaldi is not really suited for my several hundreds opened tabs navigation style yet.

What is the solution you are currently using that you want them to implement?

Is quick commands (F2) + typing the tab name to navigate around not sufficient on Vivaldi?

> I'm not sure why anyone cares about the US returning the favor.

I don't think you realize that protectionist measures in America is nothing new; in fact, we have quite a lot of protectionist measures. It's just a media bias here that makes you think otherwise.

Here's a chart from Euler Hermes (a unit of Allianz), Protectionism Is Not New: http://www.eulerhermes.com/economic-research/publications/Pa...

I purposely came off rude in my comment - probably contributed to the down votes. But I do think it's a big worry for many people here in the west when an ideology that is diametrically opposed to what we are use to over here is not only succeeding but thriving. It feels like people here have already given up; on Reddit, the buzzword is now basic income (i.e., give me free stuff). Pew survey shows Americans are essentially expecting to regress while people in China are very optimistic.

"When children today grow up, will they be better off financially than their parents?" http://www.pewglobal.org/database/indicator/74/survey/17/res...

People want change, but they're unwilling to consider anything else - democracy, like all systems have pros and cons. Learning from the successes of China doesn't automatically mean adopting the full ideology.

> giving its workers the same rights and wages that we give our workers in the US.

You need to account for cost of living. Also, if you're really worried about low wages, maybe start complaining about other countries since wages in China continually and rapidly increase.

Chinese wages now higer than in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico: https://www.ft.com/content/f4a260e6-f75a-11e6-bd4e-68d53499e...

> China will be fine if it can transition to a better system of government.

lol, so the one that brings more and more people out of poverty everyday should suddenly change and adopt the American style of government where more and more people are ending up in poverty? Genius idea mate...