Are you suggesting that had the cultural revolution not happened, China would still have overtaken the U.S. on R&D spending?

Product development is one of the first things PE cuts when they get their hands on a company. It's a form of investment and vulture capital hates all investment because their goal is to extract short term profits.

The ones really funding research are VCs, governments and founders taking bank loans.

I have EU, Australian and Brazilian passports, so I could live in even more countries including the Mercosul region. I actually live in the EU because of its culture, food, more advanced startup scene and tech companies. Living quality is very similar here and in Australia, what makes the difference is whether you prefer to avoid too cold or too hot weather. Swedens finances are actually better than Australia s as far as I know.

I couldn’t imagine a better place to live than Northern Europe, but Australia is a close second for me. Been to China, Japan, Canada, the US and I think parts of those countries are also really nice to live, just not a good match for me culturally.

Now South America is a different story. If you like good weather and a festive atmosphere it’s actually the best place to live, just don’t expect to have money or to live in a functioning state where services work!

I feel like government is on easy mode if you have a huge amount of natural resources vs your size. See Norway too.

Not saying these countries don't do good things too, but a lot of bad things compound when the government has to balance its books.

> I look at the USA, UK and EU and people seem to have given up trying to vote in a better government? They don't seem to care about importing more than exporting or government spending exceeding revenue as election issues worth voting on?

It's impossible for every country to be a net exporter so I don't see the issue on "care about importing more than exporting", exporting high-value added products and services while importing products/services lower in the value chain is how countries that aren't so lucky as Australia with immense natural wealth and low population get to be rich as well.

Many countries in the EU also have a balanced budget, it's a mixed bag, France overruns its revenue consistently, Germany had a debt brake and until the past few years consistently had surpluses, Sweden has quite low debt and a balanced budget, the Netherlands has a small deficit, so on and so forth. So it's entirely country-dependent instead of being a general EU issue.

The Biden admin passed the chips act along w the infrastructure bill. Too bad about their support for genocide and endless military spending.

Hard to say what good the Trump admin is doing except exposing the rot in right wing “governance.”

China is not a isolationist, monoethnic economy with draconian restrictions on its commerce and immigration. You are plainly wrong, uneducated and defeatist in your take. I'm a non-Chinese person who has lived and worked there for a decade.

China welcomes all skilled foreign talent to come work and take residence in the country with open arms. The process to live and work in China is open and transparent as in any other major Asian economy: first find a job there and second, apply for the visa. You can even work for a major Chinese multinational outside of China, provided that they aren't blacklisted like ZTE by the US government.

Don't enter with the expectation to naturalize and you will find you can do more than you think: go work for Baidu in Beijing, study in Fudan University as a student, or start your own business. Whatever you feel like mostly. Understand that you are on a visa and adjust your conduct like any immigrant in any western country understands.

Learning Chinese has amazing utility but most expatriates can get by without knowing a lick of it, my own family is living proof of this. Any multinational hiring a foreign talent will also hire translators for said talent. In day to day life there is no shortage of people in the city who can speak english, for the rest there are LLM's and translation apps. The Chinese community is behind on truly understanding life from the immigrant's perspective but it is adapting positively.

The most common objection from outsiders is the restricted access to global services like Google, Facebook, OpenAI, the easiest remedy for that is to just use a VPN. You can order a latte from Starbucks down the road in the meantime - or Luckin coffee if you want a better option.

A lot of the fear is unfounded. The local police station is not going to arrest you for accessing the outside world. You aren't going to lose a "social credit score" for being late to work, cutting a line or being obnoxious in public, the scoring system exists but AFAIK it serves as a tool in extreme scenarios, but AFAIK most foreigners don't get one.

Finally, coming back to intentionality of the restriction - most restrictions that irk outsiders are codified and enacted to protect domestic business and individual interests. Reasonable to heavy restrictions on curtailed big American conglomerates and services allowed for amazing domestic alternatives like TikTok/Douyin, BYD, Deepseek to flourish. Companies which provided keystone infrastructure the economy - like Visa - were deemed too critical to allow for a strangle-hold and regulated, for these acted as a foreign tax on every domestic transaction, thus Alipay and Unionpay were born.

Are you nuts or just misinformed? China is investing everywhere. Africa, south America, Russia, EU. And they do have immigrants, as a Western person it’s actually quite easy to move there to study or work. Lots of Europeans I know have studied and worked in China and Taiwan.

Probably get a PR in Hong Kong and hope to be automatically "promoted" to Chinese in 20 years?

I mean, have you worked with the Chinese? They're not like that at all.

They love money so much, you could swear they're American!

This is bs. It is admitedly difficult to become a Chinese citizen, but a huge number of foreigners work in China, especially in tech, higher education, etc. Also, Hong Kong is another good place to find a job if you want to increase personal exposure to China without having to learn Mandarin.

> But living full time in China and competing with Chinese in China...

Even countless Chinese in China don't want to do this.

The UK learned the exact wrong lesson from Suez in my view, it learned it must never get on the wrong side of Washington when the correct lesson to learn was that it must never be dependent on Washington. France provides an interesting counterfactual here.

Chinese people do not consider themselves inferior to white people and do not accept Western world domination.

For those of us living in America and Europe this truly is shocking and earth shattering. It is the end of the world as we know it.

You don't need to speak Chinese to live in big cities.

Sounds like a horrible idea. You don't need to be in the #1 fastest growing country to have a good life and Asian work culture seems miserable.

Another programmer who played Stardew Valley one too many times, I see.

This is the real answer.

But noone is gonna want to hear it.

I’d wager it didn’t happen due to the advice of economists who don’t believe in nation states. What happened is the natural conclusion of optimizing for maximum profit and giving capital (read i.e. corporations) the means to do so.

Any attempt at course correction is now labeled with “government overreach, socialism, communism”, etc. in an absurd way.

> The US was convinced otherwise by economists who don't believe in nation-states

You mean economists ultimately employed by the corpo ownership class, who were using those "beliefs" as cover to put money into their own pockets for shipping entire production lines overseas. Of course the corpo ownership class hasn't sat still - now that the jig is up, they've moved on to the next scam of destroying what remains of our distributed economy so they can continue centralizing. They've even come up with revanchist political movement based around rallying cries that would have helped the common person iff done decades ago, to make the average joe think they're finally being listened to...

Unironically, Biden's Infra Act was held up by the other acts and policies favored by the left/democrats. America loves to pay more and get less across many areas of economy and society, which is the same reason we are facing a rise in populism. People will try other forms of government if they current one cannot deliver on the promises.

Winning is a strong word, but they have significantly higher home ownership, purchasing power, less drug addiction, and generally safer big cities.

I believe the average worker in a tier 1-3 Chinese city is better off than a living in a North American City. Or at least, my content feed leads me to think this way.

Have you looked at China from 15 years ago? It was also said to be in a depression and youth unemployment was also high. Just look at articles from back then.

What people don't seem to understand is that China is developing in stages. Every 10 years there is a new stage, a new revolution, with different winners and losers. Maxxing out on the previous growth engine was already forseen 10 years ago. That's why they bit the bullet and decided to pay the price to transition to the next growth engine. All transitions are painful.

Besides, these are Chinese we're talking about. They'd even complain about the economy being bad even when it's growing 10% and they drive away in 2 luxury cars. When they say they're "barely surviving" they mean their savings account isn't growing.

When you look at the bad economy in China, are you looking at the costs, or are you looking at the development goals? Development goals have costs, not paying those costs to reach goals has even bigger costs pater on. The Made in China 2025 goals have already been largely achieved.

Sources?

What does the stock market have to do with anything?

How to defeat America: Wait.

Our current President first and foremost among them.

It's less a masterstroke of the rich, and more the media environment the various voter blocs you mentioned are soaking their minds in 24/7

You go to a chinese city today it looks like the future short of flying cars. All the novel things we invent here and cities look the same as they did 30 years ago, only more people in tarps on the side of the road.

What is "wrong" is that they have a culture of being conversative when it comes to 0-1 innovation. Everything is set up to reward concrete results. With 0-1 innovation you have no idea whether it's viable, so few people have the risk appetite and would rather pursue proven venues.

But westerners also underestimate the importance of 1-10 innovation. Scaling manufacturing and iterating on existing concepts are not at all trivial, and are also very valuable.

0-1 and 1-10 are complementary. Unfortunately, many people deliberately turn this into a pissing contest by accusing the Chinese of "only being able to steal" while ignoring how their own country is unable to produce basic goods like masks on a large a cheap scale, and can't fix a brige for less than xx million.

It's not stealing, it's learning. The original person still has it. Copied, duplicated, sure. But not stolen.

Your #1 is exactly one of the things people mean when they bemoan oligarchs destroying the country. Rather than compete in a market, they buy off the government to approve mergers so they don't have to compete.

Your #2 "not as healthy fiscally" is itself an oligarch narrative. Spending money to invest for the future is a sensible thing to do, and the US has the world reserve currency so we don't even need to ask others to borrow to do that, but rather can unilaterally make new money and have our currency hold its value as long as others believe we will have a good future. But every time this fake austerity narrative gains a foothold, it's used to destroy spending that had been investing in the future (with jobs/incomes that were going into the distributed economy!), while actually creating even more monetary inflation than there had been - but it goes right into the oligarch's pockets! In order for your argument to be true, voters would have to actually punish politicians for wasteful spending. Given that Republicans specifically have been running this fake austerity scam for decades and getting away with it, it is clear voters do not. What voters actually seem to respond to is feel-good propaganda, which is exactly what the fake austerity narrative is.

Meanwhile the whole point of "clean energy" in this context is that it's a widespread distributed project that creates real jobs that produce tangible useful assets. Much better than the oligarchs' preference for fake make-work jobs like that whole healthcare denial industry.

Social programs to help towns experiencing economic depression would inject money, training, education, etc. which would create opportunity for new growth and development in areas with a low cost of living. When people are too busy just trying to survive, they are not going to be working on inventing the next big thing, and they certainly are not going to support tax dollars going toward investments for tomorrow.

Pretty much everywhere has proved that ensuring people have a place to shelter and eat doesn't stop them from wanting to do something with their lives. It's the oldest and most wrong talking point from this debate.

Doesn't China have better social programs? They have universal healthcare.

It's amazing how people think this is true when by every known metric, people who are given a minimally comfortable life almost always end up being far more productive members of society than those who are not.

If it is about "incentivizing people to work" and getting warm butts in chairs or out swinging hammers... well, how are we going to compete with a country that has 4x the number of warm bodies?

We can't compete with China via the number of people we have working.

We need to build a functioning society instead of a group of rugged individual capitalists who only come together when we need to help out the wealthy with a bail out or tax break.

That is why China is losing to the US. China massively more social programs than the US and it has reduced their economy to shambles because no one has incentive.

> the current ai boom started here in america with private funds.

private funds until the bubble pops, then it becomes public funds for the bailout.

same as 2008.

He will continue to ignore Congress and the current laws on the books, probing the limits of what the Supreme Court will allow him to get away with.

He hasn’t bothered to work with a Republican Congress to pass laws. He certainly won’t bother with a Democratic or split Congress.

We could have had a slowly declining empire and a smooth handoff.

Instead we decided to elect a bunch of people to burn it all down and speedrun the fall of Rome.

We'll still be a world power at the end of it--in the same way France and England are world powers.

I wouldn't say I support Iran, but I'm not happy that we attacked them in an illegal war of aggression (Congress approves legal wars).

I see no reason to believe they were close to having nuclear weapons. Trump didn't say anything about nukes when he announced the beginning of the war, they made that up later.

Trump hasn’t proposed any improvements except maybe year round DST, so we wouldn’t miss it much. Trump has tried to brand the democrats as pro-Iran for not supporting his war, and it has worked on some people like you, but most of us don’t see it his way. You can be against a war and not for the country the war is with.