For the people of Central and Eastern Europe communism=socialism. And we learnt that the hard way. 'Nuff said. Please don't argue if you don't have first hand experience of the "worker's paradise"
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Russia/Ukraine conflict
- Thread starter amolina
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stopcrazypp
Well-Known Member
Maybe we are speaking past each other, but I haven't disagreed on this point. In fact I said pretty much the same thing in the comment you responded to: "China is pretty much "communist" in name only now after Deng Xiaoping."
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/posts/6554115/
Note, I'm not arguing it's not an economic success in its own right, but the points about education and healthcare are a reminder that China has pretty much abandoned communism and that in significant sectors it's not even a leader in socialism. For flying the banner of "communism" you would expect them to have a robust free education and universal healthcare system, but instead plenty of governments that fly the banner of "capitalism" beat them in these metrics.
That's not my point, it's that it leaves out a huge proportion of the population and instead focus on metro areas that likely have higher income and better living conditions, which aids in getting higher scores. If instead your metrics take a survey that samples throughout China (as it appears to do for the other countries), I doubt it would be anywhere near the same.
I don't think it's a fair play to look at raw population number instead of percentage of total population, otherwise the metric would instead by the amount of people above a certain score (a metric that countries with small populations would likely lose in by default), not about high average scores.
You can see the same thing in poverty metrics. If you only consider similar cities and metro areas, China's claim they have "solved" poverty look fairly convincing. But if you sample throughout China, the story is fairly different.
This is not even touching on the subject of why China has struggled to generate innovation despite having plenty of people that score high in STEM and why copycat culture is still going extremely strong there.
I'm mainly presenting a counter example that investors in capitalist societies necessarily only care about short term profits, instead of long term. Venture capitalism has changed things in this regard. As for your other examples, you didn't consider tons of failed Chinese ventures, not only in the solar sector (lots of stories also in the semiconductor sector):You’re missing the point, how many Tesla companies do you know out there? Why did so many solar companies go bankrupt in the US? We were fighting Chinese solar for awhile, which caused bankruptcies like this, ever heard of Solyndra?
Solyndra misled the feds out of over $500 million. Why you should care | Fortune
Years after we all thought Solyndra was gone. A new government report brings it back with a sort-of explanation.fortune.com
Minnesota solar installer bankruptcies leave unfinished projects, calls for better oversight | Energy News Network
The state’s solar energy trade group has made improving consumer protections a priority after a string of bankruptcies in recent years left dozens of customers stuck with unfinished projects.energynews.us
Imagine invested in these companies for years without profits while fighting Chinese state subsidized solar. How come investors didn’t “stick around” with these money losers for years on out? Simply put, the Chinese were exporting cheap solar and we couldn’t compete. Most of us here don’t realize this but I’m 90% certain Solarcity would’ve went bankrupt had Tesla not buy them out. Sentiments and morale among investors during those days were some of the lowest in Tesla’s history (I remember every drop because I’ve been with this company since 2012). The point here is that when you’re a private firm operating in a capitalist society, your chance of surviving vs a Chinese state owned enterprise is quite low. This is because they can artificially drop prices unbearably low till makes zero sense for you to stay in business, and when you go bankrupt, that’s when they’ll raise prices to normal levels (this is what happened to US shall/fracking, the industry couldn’t survive because OPEC dropped gas prices below their survival threshold).
Once in a generation you get a company like Tesla who beats the odds, don’t get too confident with hubris here because if the Chinese decides to play favorites with Nio and Xpeng, they can dump $100s of billions into that company for decades just to have a “halo” brand, and guess what? They can do that with any company of their choosing since we owe them over $1 trillion in debt. To exacerbate this, they can also whisper into CATL’s ear to direct more batteries towards NIO/Xpeng if Elon decided one day to tweet against president Xi (perhaps asking Xi to fight against him for a prize in Ukraine). This is the benefit of running a social-capitalist economy, you get to pick your winners and losers. Although it’s unfair, unjust but you have to admit, it’s effective. Which is why China has arrived.
How China’s solar boom fizzled and went bust
Same deal in the EV sector, there is a huge graveyard of failed Chinese EV companies and subsidy scamming was rampant:
Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
The government just throwing boatloads of money at domestic ventures does not necessarily lead to success, especially in the long run. Success is just as much a rarity as it is in venture capitalism (if not more).
You seemed to be suggesting somehow China's recent success can give some credit to communism and your use of the phrase "socialism/communism" seems to be what a lot of people do when they tie two together. If instead you also agree communism had little to nothing to do with China's modern success, I think we are in agreement.
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TheTalkingMule
Distributed Energy Enthusiast
That's great. The US has done all that as well.
Another strong and provocative interview by Scott Ritter:
Why should I believe what this guy is selling. Have seen nothing from other sources outside of Russian aggressors saying anything like it. Stopped watching when I heard the claim that the base the Russians attacked near Poland, that had a training center where foreign soldiers were, was a “de facto NATO base” with specious reasoning to justify that claim. Despite info posted by others about Scott Ritter’s dubious credentials and other issues, I started watching. No more.
I am open to contrarian viewpoints as long as they have substance. You haven’t posted one yet - is this by design? I’m not mud-slinging; I am truly curious what your perspective is.
SwedishAdvocate
Active Member
Thanks - I had seen this, but forgot. That just redoubles my point about the poster. I skimmed his previous posts on the forum and nothing jumped at me. I hesitate to disparage a poster so I asked the question directly about their viewpoint. Unless there is a meaningful reply, I will just skip reading their posts in the future.
sundaymorning
Active Member
Try to look at where China is headed, and not where it was in the past or where it is currently. Somewhere around 2030, their economy will be the world’s largest, surpassing the U.S. economy. China is currently giving up some social welfare in order to invest abroad & expand their influence. Keep in mind that China’s vision isn’t 2-3 years out, they look decades on out, instead of spending all their money on public welfare, they’ve chosen the path of investing abroad, ie Xi’s Belt and Road Initiatives. The return on investment and foreign influence on Xi’s vision are staggering for this network of rails, roads, shipping,
etc. all leading back to China from across the globe. The interest return on China’s US debt of over $1 trillion is enough to finance any major public welfare programs mentioned above, instead, Xi is focusing on economics abroad in order to build an even stronger China that will yield even greater profits.
Again, the west shouldn’t look down on China’s communist past, and neglect the fact that they’ve arrived, and will eventually surpass us. The attitude here is that capitalism is better just isn’t true anymore (this is old school thinking and a thing of the past when China was practicing primitive forms of communism). Their government is much more efficient than ours today in getting things done, in mobilizing the workforce, in production and manufacturing. And how long did it take for them to get here? 45 years, while the west has practiced capitalism for how long? We use to laugh at Chinese quality, well guess what? Many of their products surpasses the quality of the US today, just look no further than how fast Teslas factory was built? How fast they’re able to ramp… this is why we so happily buy their products. Sure China lags behind in some areas, that is until they either acquire, steal or innovate their own capabilities and then beat us on quality.
Many good manufactures in China are willing to build public housing for their employees and their immediate families to live in and near the factory, keeping their worker’s spirits and happiness high. This trend will continue as more profits from Xi’s Road and Belt initiatives creates more profits. And when they surpass us by a factor of 200-300% you really don’t think China will use some of that profit and put it towards public works, welfare, Medicare, etc? Again, China is just getting started here, try to look further beyond right now and it’s scary how Gigantically BIG this country will be economically. It will be the mother of all Gigastates on steroids.
Again you’re stuck on this metric of we’re better than they are. China doesn’t have to take an entire sample size of education statistics from 1.4 billion people, it’s simply too much data to accumulate. The point here is a sample size of cities consisting of 200 million is enough, and no matter how hard we the West push our kids, we’re not getting to 200 million, it’s just not going to happen. Where else can you find that amount of big brains in one country, ready to join the STEM workforce? Here in the US, we have problems finding workers, there’s labor shortages everywhere, and that’s how they’re going to beat us.
Again, don’t look at China’s current 2nd standing, they’re going to beat us. You just have to accept this fact, every economist and their mother has resigned to this fact. There’s no changing it unless Xi decides to pull a Putin and the West sanctions them. If we do that, we might as well take a bullet to the head ourselves because economically speaking, it’ll be painful. But with Xi’s Belt and Road initiative, he’ll have plenty of buyers whereas Russia’s economy $1.4 trillion GDP doesn’t nearly measure to China’s $14 trillion GDP.
The West is very good with innovation, but it won’t matter, if you want to do business in China you have to give up your IP, unless you’re Tesla. This is the problem with capitalism, it has to expand in order to attract more investors. The moment companies stops expanding, investors are gone, eps goes down or stays stagnant. Capitalism will sell its own soul for the sake of expansion. And if you hold the high ground and refuse to enter China, your competitors will, and effectively outgrow you, then they will out spend you on R&D.
Do you see the problem here? They have a monopoly on their people, their people is their product. China got here within less than 50 years since Nixon visited China. What will they do the next 50 years with millions of kids with high IQ studying STEM? They haven’t even scratched the surface of their true potential yet. With huge sums of corporate profits, China will be able to pay/hire everyone, all it takes is one innovative mind out of 1.4 billion.. it’s a game of probability and they have the numbers to do it. They haven’t been able to lemme a leader of STEM as they’ve only been in this game for 50 years since Nixon.
Furthermore, China doesn’t need everyone in its country to be educated, they’ll need the majority to be factory workers, farmers, growers, shippers, etc. because if too many people are equipped with a degree, they’ll end up like the US where manufacturing jobs just gets shipped overseas. This is why the US is struggling, we’re a service economy now. We serve one another to get by, and in order to get by, we borrow, borrow and borrow. Hence the deficit…
Their government is working on a surplus, and can afford failed ventures. We’re working on borrowed money…. It’s easy for the rich to lose money, they can find ways to make it back. But when you’re borrowing because your country is in a deficit, guess what’s going to happen one day? Do you know what’s keeping us afloat? Money printing, bailouts… 2008.. bailout… money printing… Covid, bailout, more money printing….and more deficit. It’s a vicious cycle that hasn’t played itself out yet. I’m not too confident with the US economy the next 2 decade, but it doesn’t mean I’m going invest in China neither. Xi can decide to take profits from any tech company and put it towards public use (or $$$ towards more failed ventures). The difference, China can afford it, over $600 billion a year in surplus or 2 times the amount of Russia’s current entire useable reserves can bailout or finance all kinds of ventures.
You’re missing my point, China needed to adopt communism in order to overthrow the emperor system, they pivoted from that to adopt socialism as well as capitalism, making their country a hybrid. China is no longer fully Communist, they’re working in a hybrid system of all three with a very logical/ambitious leader who has vision and deep pockets. The question here is are you ready to be #2 or are you in the mindset that we still have a chance to be #1 in terms of economics around year 2030?
It will take a major catastrophic idiotic mistake for China not to beat us economically in terms of GDP. As for better healthcare, income per capita, that can come later… as long as they have someone like Xi in power. Where would we be today if Trump was in power? will democracy, capitalism survive him? I think not…. but that’s a different debate that I don’t care to get into.
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stopcrazypp
Well-Known Member
Yes this was already mentioned up thread. The person posting ignored questions about why the need to post things from people that seem like shills for Russia (and one who does not make their connections clear, but instead seems to try to put an air of impartiality).
Russia/Ukraine conflict
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Tiger
Active Member
Utterly unfounded crap, you can see it (disbelief) from the facial expressions of the co-hosts. For rexample, european people are on board to take a cost hit even if the companies don't like to compromise their bottom line.
We need wide deployment of Tesla autobidder in various renewables wind solar what-have you.
I admit that I don't know how those who grew up behind the Iron Curtain associate the terms socialist and communist. I have been having discussions with Europeans and other non-Americans who grew up outside the Iron Curtain for almost 30 years. A common source of confusion in political and economic conversations has been how Americans and non-Americans from the "free world" associated the terms. There are a fair number of non-Americans who are from outside the Iron Curtain in this thread. For clear communication it's good that everyone knows where everyone else is.
EVNow
Well-Known Member
EVNow
Well-Known Member
Just because you use it wrong doesn’t mean, that’s the only way to use it.
sundaymorning
Active Member
It appears that the person in charge as military commander of the Russian side is someone without military experience, or military training, who comes from an engineering background versus Russia’s previous wars where the person in charge is a commander with military training, if true then Putin has put the wrong guy up for the job. Which explains the lack of preparations and assessment.
stopcrazypp
Well-Known Member
If China's population have little to no way to reflect dissatisfaction with the status quo in terms of public welfare, what incentive do they have to put more towards it? Although it seems China will surpass the US in total GDP, per capita they are still very far behind, so individuals benefiting from it is still fairly far off. This is compounded by regions in China having cost of living just as high as in western countries, while wages have not followed (Beijing and Shanghai being prime examples of this).
And note, factories in China are increasingly built to largely serve the Chinese demand (this is true of Tesla's factory also, especially with Berlin coming online), and increasingly less for foreign consumption. China enjoyed great economic success from having an inexpensive labor force, but they are replaceable by other countries, which is exactly what many companies are doing now. Since the trade war, there has been a flood of companies either moving completely out of China or at minimum diversifying to other countries, like Malaysia, India, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam.
You still don't get the point. That is not how statistics work. You don't have to sample 1.4 billion people to get a representative sample, only have to sample a much smaller number from scores from different regions that can represent the country as a whole. But by sampling only Beijing, Shanghai and Jiangsu, Zhejiang (which surround the Shanghai area) it gives you an extremely skewed view, due to the fact those areas are some of the richest areas in China.
Read up on how representative samples work.
Representative Sample is often used to extrapolate broader sentiment
Here's a GDP per capita map of China. Beijing and Shanghai are in top red category ($20,000 - $24,999 above), Jiangsu, Zhejiang are in second highest orange category($15,000 - $19,999). In your statistic, there are no regions presented that are in the other three lower categories, some of which make in the $5000 range.
List of Chinese administrative divisions by GDP per capita - Wikipedia
Companies are well aware of that, which is why they are far more protective of IP now and as above they are diversifying their manufacturing to countries that are far less likely to steal IP.
Putting aside China's GDP have long have a lot of overestimation (and rumblings of economic unrest like the whole Evergrande debacle), even under the traditional dept-to-GDP ratio calculation, the US's debt level is considered very sustainable for the foreseeable future.
Current US Debt Level 'Very Sustainable': Fed's Powell
BOA suggests using the method that banks use which is discounted cash flow analysis, US debt actually isn't very high:
The US national debt isn't actually very high, BofA says
I'm not sure if you are aware, but the emperor system in China was overthrown through the Xinhai Revolution by revolutionaries that founded a republican government. Communism played no role and was never "necessary" (even though Chinese propaganda obviously tried to make that point, much in the same way as overstating their contribution during WW2).
1911 Revolution - Wikipedia
Republic of China (1912–1949) - Wikipedia
The Chinese communist party instead came into power via a civil war, with the impact of WW2 on the ROC destroying the military and economy of the nation and later the CCP inheriting Japanese military equipment from the Soviets as well as other supplies being crucial to the PRC being founded.
Chinese Civil War - Wikipedia
China - Wikipedia
The remnant of the Republic of China fled to Taiwan (as well as controlling few other areas and island) and today is a democracy (after first being a one-party military dictatorship on first arrival to Taiwan).
Taiwan - Wikipedia
While I think they will eventually surpass us in GDP, but per capita they have a long way to go (and may never surpass), so most people will still by far prefer to live and work in the US (even ignoring the political differences). I think this will continue to be reflected by desires for immigration (still plenty that want to immigrate to the US or other western countries, while very few that want to do the opposite).
Plenty of analysis is saying the date China surpasses the US in GDP is going further in the future and may never even happen if China does not escape traps other economies have faced. Here's an article that goes in far more detail than I can:
From economic miracle to mirage – will China’s GDP ever overtake the US?
There is also overfocus on this point as if it really is a game changer. China by most accounts has already surpassed the US in the PPP metric, but it has not led to a game changing difference for everyday people for either country.
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I think he's dead now. The Russians are saying he's "ill". A lot of people in the Russian government have suddenly gotten ill.
Sergey Shoygu is/was the equivalent of the Secretary of Defense in the US. The position is the Minster of Defense.
He probably was completely unqualified for the job, but ministers/secretaries of defense in other countries have sometimes been people with little or no military experience. Most US Secretaries of Defense have had some military service, but quite a few never achieved very high rank (Leon Panetta was a 1st Lieutenant, and Donald Rumsfeld was a captain, Dick Cheney never served to name a few).
Doing a bit of reading about the Russian system it appears the Minster of Defense also has a rank in the Russian military. Their system is so corrupt that he was probably pocketing a lot of money out of the defense budget along with many other officers up and down the chain of command.
Shoygu has been one of Putin's "inside" oligarchs for many years. The inside oligarchs are the ones who rarely leave the country, but get many of the government jobs. The outside oligarchs are the ones the rest of the world is most aware of because they mostly live outside of Russia and Putin uses them as his bag men with his various shady international money operations.
Just reminding those that don't know. Scott Ritter is a qanon twit and on the payroll of Russia Today.
Ritter is on the Russia Today payroll, he's a Qanon twit. Nobody should ever click a link with him featured.
Threats of sanctions might deter possible aggression in some circumstances but not when the opponent is determined to seize what they want by force. Sanctions are the punishments/consequences for what the opponent's aggression. It's unlikely to deter because it can't be known in advance how much unity there will be on applying really strong ones. Especially those that will cause pain to the countries applying them.
While it was reasonable for Biden administration to threaten sanctions I doubt they thought just the threat would prevent the invasion.
They said up front that even strong and unified sanctions would take time to slowly tighten the noose and become a greater and greater factor pushing Putin to reverse course and find a way out.
