Based on what, China is too successful as it stands? Maybe they need to handicap themselves to appear less threatening?
The contribution that the finance people in the US made was to - accurately - identify that if they moved all the investment overseas then the US wouldn't need to work as hard. They were correct. The result has been massive leaps and bounds in Asian prosperity and living standards. Which is good for the world, but probably not the sort of strategy that the US wanted to adopt. Typically countries are supposed to promote the interests of the people living inside the borders instead of build up competitors. I dunno, maybe it was intentional but it'd have been cleverer to invest more in the US.
There is a pretty good chance that China implodes because of the authoritarian and bureaucratic streak their government has. But the US's financiers are, if anything, one of the key ingredients helping it revert to the mean from an economically dominant position.
> but probably not the sort of strategy that the US wanted to adopt
only after having enjoyed the lowered cost goods and such. But there's a price to everything, always. And if you're not paying that price up front, it's gonna come to roost at some point.
> There is a pretty good chance that China implodes because of the authoritarian and bureaucratic streak their government has.
i dont think so. China's gov't has been stable enough for long enough, that the people it is governing over don't feel the need to overthrow them. And i don't see any trigger for this either - the average wealth and wellbeing of the chinese citizen has only grown better over the decades. Even now, where there's an economic slowdown, you don't have people starving in the streets.
It is merely wishful thinking that the west's media want to push, that there's a governance problem in china.
Based on China constantly handicapping their capital markets with boneheaded decisions. Their stock market is a wreck sending a lot of their best companies abroad in search of capital.
basically, this legal entity has not been 100% "legal" and undisputed in the chinese legal system - it's vague, and deliberately left so. It allows the CCP any reason to crackdown on any company's foreign ownership (by simply declaring this VIE structure illegal and void).
The CCP has two goals with this method (queue conspiracy music here). The first is to ensure state control all the time, even if the CCP isn't financially invested in said company. The second, and imho, a bit more insidious, is to prevent the local capital markets from developing too maturely.
The reason the CCP don't want the citizenry to have easy and low cost access to capital markets, is to prevent wealth from being built up by ordinary citizens in large numbers (like how it is in the west). Wealth is power, and the CCP don't want power to spread out to ordinary citizens, except as rising economic prosperity (ala, good jobs, cheap access to goods/services etc). It's the reason why they crushed the real estate property sector when they did. It is why stock markets are very difficult to invest in for ordinary citizens.
>CCP don't want the citizenry to have easy and low cost access to capital markets
It's more like like PRC is still a developing country with substantial amount of poor people and little social safety/welfare net. CCP doesn't want people, especially the poor, who mostly skew old, had/has absolutely retarded financial literacy except savings, to investment (gamble) their nest egg. Trading in the 2000s when stock market was bananas. Mass speculation / herd mentality / scams. Government had to intervene so folks didn't lose their shit with no fall back.
Stockmarket is easy to invest in for ordinary citizens, IMO that's why it's being controlled / profitability (and losses) mitigaged. Reality is if you have mostly retail (individual) investors vs institutional, and individuals = a billion superstious traders is recipe for market volatility, which is net bad. People think professional financiers are the answer, but IMO that's just goign to self select for financiers who knows how to play to the masses.
investment, done according to well known economic theories (such as market index investing), is not like gambling. People who do gamble (like wallstreetbets style) might lose, but i don't believe most people, if they're allowed a bit of education, will do that. The degenerate gamblers will always gamble anyway.
> Stockmarket is easy to invest in for ordinary citizens
try investing in foreign companies/indices - you will find that ordinary citizens cannot easily do it. They'd have to do it via a HK broker, or have sufficent capital to have a private banker. There's also a lot of capital flow restrictions (that i'm not too privy to, but it's there). Sure it might be easy to invest in the chinese shanghai index as a chinese citizen, but that's too concentrated and is akin to gambling.
PRC had like 3-10% tertiary education in 90s-00s. IMO the masses are not going to absorb a bit of education. They'll still speculate, bandwagon etc if there's money to be made. It's not so much degenerate gambling as degenerate heresay malinvestment not thinking they're gambling when they actually are. A shares in the 00s was basically a casino, but investors thought they could beat the house because latest XYZ tip. % of educated in society much higher now, but problem is uneducated still around and retiring, i.e. potentially even worse casino reopens.
>investing in foreign companies/indices
No this is definitely controlled out of capital flight concerns. Since the cohorot who would benefit from this are the top quantile, whose capita CCP definitely wants to control.
Typically the leadership of countries does whatever benefits them personally, rather than (actually) care about the interests of the people living inside its borders.
The rare cases where that doesn’t happen, it’s usually because the people living inside the borders actually hold them accountable/align interests. Or people get really lucky.
You can hate the Chinese system for how it limits human rights, cracks down harshly on dissent, and stifles many creative outlets. Hating China or the Chinese people, which are like anywhere, generally lovely people, is silly.
There's plenty of nonsense coming from the mouth of the Party, but it doesn't make the US news, because it's not aimed at the US. There's also a lot less news overall which discusses and critiques the Party and what its representatives say, for obvious reasons.
lol, abortion is perfectly legal in China, the government doesn't control women's bodies.
Certain policies are more set and less up to discussion after a period of experimentation. Political system in China is more geared towards not letting human or interest groups desires reflected in national policies. Instead, national policies reflect the common good and common sense. And political system helps to unify common sense, values, individual knowledge. There is healthy level of diversity, but also a necessary level of unity to prevent extreme polarization, left and right fighting.
For example, no prostitutions, human trafficking, surrogacy, so women from disadvantaged communities are not taken advantage of after decades of that happening in Qing and ROC era. Instead, they are given opportunity to have a proper education, such as in STEM. And they have the opportunity to work in 5G, AI, semiconductors, EVs, batteries, medicine, which interestingly, USA government doesn't want Chinese citizens to work on. U accuse China has no human rights, but China moved from the country with the worst women's rights to one amongst the highest amongst East Asian countries. In my view, women's societal standing in China is equal or higher than South Korea and Japan. And leaps better than India, the largest "democracy" and country closest to China's level 100 years ago.
No drugs, harsh on drug trade, production. So disadvantaged communities are not exploited by drug dealers. We will not let what is happening in the US with fentanyl crisis happen to us. U accuse China caused US"s fentanyl crisis because we make the drugs. Lol, so if we make the drug then why don't we have fentanyl crisis? Shouldn't be its much easier to sell and traffic it where it is produced? Drug issue is a demand problem, there is a demand in the US, no matter how much you squash the supply, people will find a way to make it. U need to end it at the demand side.
Climate policy is set now, no debate on some company can get lax air pollution policies to help their bottom line.
Economic policy is free market, center right, but with basic social safety net in health care, pensions, poverty, high level of social safety net in education, security, crime levels.
We worked hard to lower the price of solar panels, so the world has an alternative energy source in age of global warming. Yet, u accuse us of evil intent to dominate and overcapacity and now expanding hydrocarbon production. So, is global warming not an issue anymore? Or was global warming a narrative used to attack China? The reason we worked hard on lower price of solar is in a perfect free market, solar has to compete with coal and natural gas. And it takes technology and innovation to reduce cost. Cost reduction is a good thing, Moorse law is also cost reduction, if we don't have cost reduction, we will still be using Pentium 3s. So, sorry a lot of solar companies went down, because they can't compete on technology, supply chain, and manufacturing. Ur competitor is not Chinese solar companies, ur competitor is cheap coal and gas. Unless ur solar industry is banking on government subsidies for the rest of their lives. But wait, I thought the west is against government subsidies.
U say Chinese government stifles many creative outlets. When Chinese people work on, dream and create 5G, tiktok, DJI, EVs, solar panels, batteries, semiconductors, AI, phone apps, games, USA is attempting to kill them all, taking away Chinese people's freedom, rights to survival, development and dream. So Chinese people can only do certain things approved by US government? The only thing we approved to do is to overthrow our own government? Or civil war in our country? Or have our country broken into many pieces? Everyone has the right to pursuit of happiness, not Chinese people according to USA.
And how interesting the West is stifling Chinese speech by saying their Chinese propaganda? Speech is "free" if it agrees with West narrative, it is propaganda when it does not.
I used to admire the USA, but not these days. When Chinese people are doing better, being empowered, USA 's response is to attack, oppress, sabotage Chinese people's livelihood. Instead of "it's nice to see good human progress", "we have trade and commerce disputes, but let's resolve that by making the pie bigger for everyone". Tesla and Apple can sell their products without government led market and non-market obstruction, let me know if I can buy a BYD or Huawei in the USA. And US import tariffs of Chinese goods is now much higher than the reverse.
USA accuse us stealing your jobs, no, your own companies shipped these jobs overseas, you should ask your own companies, not attacking some mom and dad working in factories to support their kids in another country. USA is already the richest country on Earth, your problem is most of your wealth is concentrated on top 1%, instead of distributing your wealth better, or help the people in need, you attack regular mom and dads' livelihoods in another country, making them not able bring food for their families. And most people cheer for this and think it is moral? Great values you got there.
Gedhun Choekyi Nyima (born 25 April 1989) is the 11th Panchen Lama belonging to the Gelugpa school of Tibetan Buddhism, as recognized and announced by the 14th Dalai Lama on 14 May 1995. Three days later on 17 May,
the six-year-old Panchen Lama was kidnapped and forcibly disappeared by the Chinese government,
after the State Council of the People's Republic of China failed in its efforts to install a substitute.
Since his kidnapping, the whereabouts of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima have been unknown. Chinese officials state that his whereabouts are kept undisclosed to protect him. Human rights organizations termed him the "youngest political prisoner in the world". No foreign party has been allowed to visit him.
As of 2024, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima has not been seen by any independent observer since his disappearance in 1995.
It's not rare across East Asia that prostitution is outright illegal without exceptions, except its enforcement is selectively applied based on never spoken but established criteria. Same for pornography.
I think it's also probably true that Chinese government don't control specifically women's bodies. Chinese spoken languages always used singular they by default.
Trump is not a great business man, but one thing they are good at is playing the media. I assure you Trump, the person, couldn’t care less about trans people, for better or worse. The fact that you’re even talking about trans at all, as opposed to the fact that they’re a felon, proves it all.
Apart from human rights, it's up to those individual groups to defend them, not to society as a whole. That's why you've got Trump, because other parts of society are pissed off with DEI policies.
It is but it has its risks/downsides. Engineers want to build and architecture everything which is why China has shit ton of rail, metros, bridges, etc... but also they don't want to hear anything about costs/ROI/Profitability/PMF or any of that annoying economic speak :)
Law is a weird one and maybe I am wrong but I think law leadership is the worst of all. They have no understanding of neither engineering or economics.
Engineers have no trouble crafting a solution that fits within a given budget.
The real problem, with all of it, is surplus. What happens to the resources you didn't actually have to spend, once an efficient solution has been engineered?
If you let engineers decide, they spend it on over-engineering. If you can do it for ten million but there is a billion dollars in the budget, you can also do it for a billion dollars and then square away lots of implausible edge cases and improve materials efficiency by a sliver etc. But this is wasteful because those things have diminishing returns or a poor cost/benefit ratio and you ended up spending a hundred times more than was necessary for a couple of percent improvement in the result.
If you let politicians decide, they spend it on cronies. This is wasteful, because obviously.
What you have do is to figure out how to make the surplus end up back in the hands of the taxpayer without letting any of these resource parasites get their hands on it.
It is the mix. Not the pure … obviously when nearly all leaders are engineers you have a problem. But if some are not, and others learn. Even for a lawyer leader group, they can learn or have a whole institution that is effectveky independent from them.
It is the mix. And whether you listen and learn. In spite of your ideology or policies. Btw is trump a lawyer …
Two reasons - cost and safety worries as in Chernobyl/Fukushima/waste etc.
The safety worries lead to excessive regulation and higher costs.
Here's how it's going in the UK with Hinkley C, our first new reactor for 30 years - "EDF now estimates that the cost could hit £46bn" for one reactor. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68073279
>Solar and wind power capacities alone grew by 73% and 51%, respectively, resulting in 460 gigawatts (GW) of combined new capacity versus the 1 GW decline in nuclear.
>In China, a major energy market, over 200 GW of solar capacity was added compared to 1 GW of additional nuclear capacity.
*just a minor correction: costs because of complete governmental, regulatory, and industrial capture by the fossil fuel industry, who owns all the politicians and massive swaths of the industrial supply chain.
Fixed it for you.
There is no way the most abundant and powerful energy source available to human kind actually costs this much. By the standards of physics, it is by far the cheapest -- cheapening energy is simply not an objective the energy barons would allow without a war with them.
The west already built nuclear, but that era is mostly over. Two thirds of the world’s nuclear power capacity is in the west, with the USA far ahead of any country (with double the nuclear output of China).
Even if all of the reactors being built around the world today are completed, overall nuclear power use will decline, as plants from the enormous construction boom of the 1970s-1980s reach the end of their life and are not replaced.
Its not cost effective. The US's latest nuclear plant took 15 years to build and cost $35 billion. The 15 years part alone is enough reason to focus on other energy sources
They don't want to what? Don't want to give up poorly designed regulations? Or do not want nuclear power?
The latter is largely due to the anti nuclear movement, as sponsored by the petroleum industry. This will go down in history as one of the biggest self-owns in trying to protect the environment.
And we're back to the beginning. One of the major costs of current reactors is regulatory burden. One of the reasons we don't see improvements in costs is it is extremely hard to release changes or new designs.
It is just not economically feasible. Money makes the world go 'round and that's often a good thing. I wish you luck convincing a bank to give you a loan for a nuclear plant. They know the math.
I dispute that. I'm as pro-nuclear as one can be, but I don't think the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) is doing a bad job, or that the regulations are unreasonable. In the end, a lot of the regulations came as a response to incidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, and others less well known. One way or another, nuclear reactors are extremely complex machines, with numerous failure modes. As various failure modes were learned (either the soft or the hard way), the regulations were updated. For example, after Fukushima, the NRC asked all the nuclear power plants in the US to undergo changes to make them more resilient to earthquakes.
This does not mean the economics of nuclear power is an unsolvable problem. It is an engineering problem, and it is very solvable. But it can't be solved if one does not try. No problem in this world can be solved if everyone is convinced it's unsolvable and nobody is willing to try to solve it.
Who is then supposed to solve this problem. It's an extremely capital intensive problem. A guy like Musk could do it, but Musk himself is uninterested in nuclear power (he likes to tell the fairly lame joke that we have a giant fusion reactor in the sky). Bill Gates has invested a lot of his money into nuclear power R&D, and this is good. But what Gates did not invest is his drive. Musk showed us that an extremely driven and competent manager can lower production costs by factors of 10 or 50. But just pouring money at a problem does not solve it, see Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin.
Fortunately, governments have much deeper pockets than even Gates, Bezos or Musk. China is a leader in this area, and Russia is very advanced too. It looks like the US Government finally got the message, so there is a pretty good chance to see real progress on this front in the next 10 years.
> ...I don't think the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) is doing a bad job...
"He has a master's from Yale Divinity School and Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Religious Studies from Valparaiso University."
He's one of the better ones as he isn't actively trying to block new reactors going up. There are some gems on the other Chairperson wiki pages like "called for a global ban on nuclear power" (Gregory Jaczko if you want to look it up).
That is understood. The comment had a well written article that goes into detail about how the poorly designed regulations more than double the costs of building nuclear. Just saying you dispute something, without providing any arguments, or rebuttals is not very convincing.
I provided arguments: a lot of the regulations came in response to new failure rates discovered when operating nuclear reactors, many times via an accident like Fukushima.
But since you are asking, here's a typical statement from the linked article:
> Nuclear grade components don’t necessarily have higher performance requirements than conventional components - the cost instead mostly comes from the documentation and testing to ensure they’ll meet their performance requirements.
This seems like an example of "bad regulation". But it's not, it's actually good regulation. If you have 2 components with the same level of performance, and one has more strict documentation and testing, it does not mean they are interchangeable. The one with more testing is much less likely to fail, and this is quite important for a nuclear reactor. Would you dispose with this regulation?
Now consider this: the NRC approved the NuScale reactor design [1]. Yet, NuScale never built a demonstration reactor, the entire approval was based on computer models. A regulatory body hell-bent to stymie new reactors would not have done that. This approval, in my mind, shows that the NRC is quite reasonable.
And by the way, I did spend some time going over some of the approval documents. I remember a dissension paper that I found, where one NRC inspector expressed dissatisfaction with some corner case concerning borated water. I can't find it now, but I found some paragraphs in one of the final documents, where the NRC describes the situation ([2] page 48):
> The applicant also analyzed postulated scenarios involving extended DHRS operation with the secondary side water level in the steam generator tubes above the primary side water level in the reactor vessel downcomer, hereafter referred to as the boiling/condensing heat transfer mode. In this scenario, the boiling of borated primary coolant in the reactor core generates steam, which subsequently condenses on the section of the steam generator tubes that is filled with secondary coolant and above the downcomer water level. The resulting formation of condensate, if left unmitigated, would tend to dilute the boron concentration of the coolant in the downcomer.
The document then goes on to show that NuScale performed some analysis that eventually satisfied the NRC.
NuScale spent a lot of money and man-hours (if I remember correctly $0.5 BN and 1.5 million man-hours) in order to secure the approval. But reading the approval documents on the NRC website, you get the idea that all the work was actually needed. Reactors are just very complex machines with many failure modes.
Technology can make things cheaper, often a tiny fraction of the previous unit cost. We have plenty of examples of this; why wouldn't it also be true for nuclear power?
Think about the opposite of your question. If it could it already would have, so why hasn’t it? It must not be possible. It doesn’t scale like a cpu or a website. You are still hiring extremely skilled welders, complying with regulations so you don’t Chernobyl half the country, figuring out where to put the waste that is radioactive for longer than modern humans have existed.
There are all sorts of technical solutions to those problems already on the drawing board. Even transuranic waste can be "burned" with neutrons leaving only the fission products (half-life of say 30 years, so 300 years is a 1000x reduction; 600 years is a million times reduction, basically harmless at that point). Molten salt reactors could in theory solve both problems at once at low cost. If we can build them.
I just think there's so much promise it's worth putting some time into it. Definitely a more likely payoff than fusion research.
I honestly have no idea either. I'm not deep into this topic at all, but I do remember there being some contracts with coal-based energy companies. They definitely have some agreement regarding nuclear power.
