No, it is all about the birthrate. Those countries are poor as "they are having more children than they can feed, yet alone afford to educate."

Japan might be infiltrated by spies that report that to US's enemies, like the US might be infiltrated by spies. But Japan's government isn't going to institutionalize spying the US, what a ridiculous thing to suggest.

The number of ships the US builds and other general quantities of war materiel is public knowledge. Beyond government accountability, US policy is designed around deterrence, where you want your potential adversaries to see just how big a stick you're carrying so as to prevent them attacking you in the first place. With modern satellites, it would be impossible to hide any large scale production even if we tried to keep it secret. The US certainly does have some classified military procurement, but these items are too small to have any critical details revealed by a crude analysis of steel consumption.

Do you genuinely believe that other governments don't already have that information?

Most of it is publicly available, and what isn't can be estimated reliably via satellite imaging

You realize we freely publish a lot of that right? The US has a gigantic military, and showing that off is an important form of deterrence.

Like, most of those tanks are just sitting out in the desert, in full view of global satellites.

YOU can collect that information for like a thousand bucks, by buying satellite imagery. People are doing that right now.

Why? I'm not trying to troll, but I am wondering what the goal is? To me it seems like encouraging fair competition and letting deserving smaller companies survive is a sort of efficiency. A lot of big companies seem to be big because they're doing something shady - like the US steel example, or Microsoft with browsers (and now AI), or Apple with app stores and payments.

We need both efficient businesses, with their large economies of scale, as well as efficient markets, which reward innovative efficient businesses by allowing them to get larger.

The trick in any attempt to create economic policy like taxes is to balance these two needs of capitalism, and right now the balance is sorely in favor of the former against the latter.

Small efficient businesses are being bought by larger ones (and are often taken apart), reducing their impact on the market by reducing their ability to threaten larger businesses. Since capitalism helps people by reducing prices through competition, the ability for oligopolies to use market control to reduce threats to themselves ultimately creates market inefficiency that translates into larger consumer expenses and less common good.

Because we're experiencing oligopoly control in most market places, breaking them apart and reducing them with taxes are the two largest levers to create more market competition. I hope this makes sense.

Who is "they"?

I Google'd for "Nikon’s EUV program". First hit: https://www.nikon.com/company/ir/ir_library/event/pdf/2023/2...

Page 47:

    > Nikon exited the development of EUV lithography systems about 10 years ago due to the enormous investments required for the development.

I could not find anything about "giv[ing] IP to ASML". Can you provide a reliable source?

First, you would have a very determined adversary versus the very best of Homeland Security aka completely incompetent fools (in reality it would be outsourced to the very best lowest bidder).

Second, what are you gonna do when you find a violation, fine them? If you can even prove it, we know how well that works.

Third, no matter how you bend the algorithm, I can make it bend further to do what I want.

Finally, China will just keep swallowing whatever penalty in order to keep feeding propaganda.

All you are doing is postponing the inevitable shutdown. You might as well get it over with now.

In the 80s and 90s there was a lot of hostility to Japan, because they looked like they might surpass us economically. They were even the villain of some Tom Clancy books.

Now, the fear/hate is aimed at China, same reason.

And I’m pretty sure if Japan became adversarial, there would be a breakup triggered on national security concerns.

Japan is littered in American military bases and personnel. It is practically a territory with a fig leaf of domestic policy self determination.

The difference is that Japan is a Western country, China isn't.

China has never been a western ally

For the last 80 years.

Things will probably change someday, but not anytime soon.

Yeah but times are very different than the past. Today, Japan is one of our greatest allies in the region and their economy depends heavily on the US. The US is Japan's #1 trade partner and a lot of their industries are heavily involved in the US.

For them to become an enemy of the of the US would probably kill their economy.

> Majority shareholder in toyota today is a private bank out of Plano, TX.

Correction - Fisher Investment is the largest individual shareholder, with just a 0.05% stake. Stating "majority" would mean they own >50%.

https://www.wallstreetzen.com/stocks/us/nyse/tm/ownership#:~....

The US.

There's a lot of areas that it feels were split off due to external influence. Arguably nearly the whole of east Asia has at some point or another been under some form of Chinese control. They are making extensive claims on the south china sea into waters contested with Vietnam and the Philippines. There are several small islands between Taiwan and Japan which are China claims (and more importantly the oil beneath them). There are a number of territorial disputes with India and Bhutan over control of parts of the Tibetan Plateau which are critical to the water supplies of nearly the whole of Asia. Additionally several border disputes previously settled between China and it's neighbors, such as Russia and the states of Central Asia, are likely to be reconsidered as Russian influence in the region diminishes.

China has also been proactively setting up claims to various exclaves around the world, primarily in the Indian Ocean and Africa. They've set up various "debt traps" where they lend money to build infrastructure like ports to nations that have no serious chance at repaying the loans, and should they default then China receives control. Additionally China is pursuing traditional overseas military bases in Burma, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Pakistan, Seychelles, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Tanzania, and the UAE, in addition to bases it already has in Djibouti and Cambodia. Such bases are not in and of themselves expansionist, and probably are more about keeping vital trade links open, but increased ability to project power would be a pre-requisite for any expansionist goals in those regions.

So just give or take 35 million people, with Taiwan being integral to the world's chip manufacturing industry, and HK conquest violating the handover treaty. That's far from nothing.

I mean, I feel like "generally satsified but for a couple of sovreign states" is handwaving things a bit.

Russia similarly feels Ukraine was split off due to "external interference". Makes the claim no more legitimate.

But also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_imperialism

> Calling yourself "the allies" doesn't make you long term allies.

The original claim was literally "China has never been a western ally". GP pointed out a counter example during WWII. Your response seems to be against a strawman argument...

Had the Nationalists in China prevailed against Mao they would have likely remained a Western ally. Certainly their descendants in Taiwan are today. But who knows?

Very apt example on Stalin, exactly right.

Overall, I agree with your sentiment. The specific example that you chose was very thoughtful. If parliament is forced to accept a court decision, it says a lot about the maturity of a democracy.

However, I take issue with the term "Western". In this case, I would say the most advanced countries in OECD, which implies: highly functioning democracy and highly industrialised, capitalist economy. To be clear, for historical reasons there are some, err, odd members in OECD, including Turkey (currently a dysfunctional democracy) and Mexico (high levels of perceived corruption, drug war, poor control of police). And, to be fair, I don't have a good way to decide which are "the most advanced countires in OECD".

Saudi Arabia is an unfortunate alliance as a pawn in the larger game against the more severe problems that China, Russia, and Iran pose, along with ensuring energy stability until we have better options. In a better world, we would never be friends with a dictatorship like that and their ideals. It's the less bad option, unfortunately. Snubbing all countries with problematic governments like Turkey, Saudi, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Vietnam, etc. will quickly land you in a tougher situation to accomplish better ideals.

I want to clarify that I'm not "pro russia" here. I'm "anti bullshit". Every nation has propaganda, don't get high on your own supply.

That said, if you think for 5 seconds there are some blatant recent and ongoing examples of USA and allies invading and killing a lot.

While realpolitik and unfortunate compromises always have to be made in the arena of current geopolitics towards greater prosperity and lesser violence, you'd be mistaken to assume everyone has equally cynical goals.

Despite everyone wanting to boast about their good deeds and demonize enemies for PR points, some actors genuinely do a better job towards prosperity than others, and you fall prey to the worse evil by equating everyone just being selfishly bad. No one is even close to 100% good, but that means we need to highlight what amounts each actor does good and what they do bad; all of them.

> Russia has a story of the west systematically stripping their influence from Eastern Europe, overtly and covertly.

Ultimately, this is bogus and not the real story. It just takes one look at Poland's GDP per capita chart: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

Poland broke off the old soviet chains and successfully integrated economic reforms to prosperity and trade with other successful western economies. Ukrainians are Polish neighbors and looked over there wondering "why tf are we so poor when the Poles are flourishing? Oh ya we still have these old soviet apparatchiks gouging our economy, let's instead make the western economic reforms a la Poland." Russia, being an 85% vote dictatorship and also a soviet apparatchik economy, realizes that just like Polish neighbors, having economically successful Ukrainian neighbors will cause average Russians to resent the exact same thing about their old stodgy economic oligarchs and ruin their golden tickets..."

There's a special place in hell for people who espouse "don't help Ukrainians, their government and economy is corrupt" when all they need is some support to take off the corrupt shackles, which they're trying to do, instead of abandoning them to remain strangled by the corruption.