America definitely seems to be a little bit behind in terms of android manufacturing. They have some pretty competitive robots but they seem more expensive and to be being built inefficiently.

Maybe there's an opportunity for a startup that can build a stack and integrate it into one or more off-the-shelf robots to provide the intelligence part. Because a lot of the demos of android are teleoperated since the AI is still quite difficult.

Combining the AI and a rental service would be so powerful.

We might be one or two years away from that being practical.

We’re seeing the effects of ~70 years of hyper-consumerist behavior. It worked for a while, but now the costs have accumulated. There’s shit everywhere, and everything either breaks or is poison. Or both.

Look at BYD sales and Ne Zha 2.

Their gaming industry and entertainment industries are starting to pull ahead of the US.

[1] https://itif.org/publications/2024/03/11/how-innovative-is-c...

[2] https://www.aspi.org.au/report/critical-technology-tracker

> Our research reveals that China has built the foundations to position itself as the world’s leading science and technology superpower, by establishing a sometimes stunning lead in high-impact research across the majority of critical and emerging technology domains.

> China’s global lead extends to 37 out of 44 technologies that ASPI is now tracking, covering a range of crucial technology fields spanning defence, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials and key quantum technology areas. The Critical Technology Tracker shows that, for some technologies, all of the world’s top 10 leading research institutions are based in China and are collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country (most often the US). Notably, the Chinese Academy of Sciences ranks highly (and often first or second) across many of the 44 technologies included in the Critical Technology Tracker. We also see China’s efforts being bolstered through talent and knowledge import: one-fifth of its high-impact papers are being authored by researchers with postgraduate training in a Five-Eyes country. China’s lead is the product of deliberate design and long-term policy planning, as repeatedly outlined by Xi Jinping and his predecessors.

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43338771

By contrast, US has been occupying parts of Syria and Cuba. It overtly seeks to take control of Greenland. It has 800 military bases around the globe; in most cases, de facto occupying a country.

We've seen some of them post "Ask HN's" about what they should do now because they aren't getting callbacks or any traction on their job search.

What I haven't seen yet is this replacement penciling out to actually be less expensive when you look at time to complete tasks and support costs from faulty code/designs getting fairly far into production before being re-tooled. That may turn out to be endemic (at which point the replacement will stop and the trend will reverse) or there may be developments that mitigate these costs and get the combination to be more cost effective. It's something I watch for, evidence of it going one way or the other.

I'm no sociologist to answer that but I question if it's a causal link or if it's more a case of "despite the", what if the USA could be doing better without the paranoia, maybe it's a drag and not a push... It surely seems to be dragging society down into a dark path.

Yes? The political policies will have an impact on the economy.

Its a nice insider look. And its not fake stuff, its just looked at through the most red-yellow colored glasses there are.

[0] https://tphuang.substack.com/

Let me put it another way, even if China is a democracy, it will still compete with US in world economy. So many people there need work, the price will be low to produce things there.

Blame US's manufacturing woe fully on China isn't logical, Japan/South Korea are of the same breed, just lesser on China's scale.

Another arguably more important factor is the over regulation and bloated governance here, to a degree of being comical, just look at the California government.

Is this drawn out, lengthy democratic process really for anything of substance or just performative virtual signaling that essentially benefits no one in the name of benefiting everyone?

Anti manufacturing is a choice, made the government, thus by the populace themselves. And please, do not bring Trump, California has been in a Dem super majority since 2012.

It's not a good argument against UBI, but there are better arguments against UBI.

And giving everyone $30 every month won't break even developing country economy.

Reminds me a lot of the current guy and his obsession with another term, and whether or not the gold (that FDR largely stole from the people in the first place) is in Ft Knox.

I guess the biggest difference is DOGE but it's all too much centralized power for me

Now, that has been realized - but hasn't happened - in the United States, but it can certainly be done.

It'll probably be too late though.

Does it set up a backyard forge and start to cast new arms and legs out of discarded cans? Does it finish the parts on a manual Bridgeport or does it carve them out manually with a hand file?

When it needs silicon chips, does it make them itself or try to order more from the company that made it? Will it become a right to repair activist when it finds out the company won't sell components to individuals?

Maybe it has to pay for all this with a part time job at the local fast food joint.

> The Chinese system was studied by Europeans between 1815 and i830 and adopted by the English East India Company in 1832. The effectiveness of this method was investigated by a committee in 1854, with Macaulay as chairman. The result was that the system of competitive examination was introduced into the British Civil Service in 1855. An essential feature of the Chinese examinations had been their literary character. The test was in a knowledge of the classics, in an ability to write elegantly (both prose and verse) and in the stamina necessary to complete the course. All these features were faithfully incorporated in the Trevelyan-Northcote Report, and thereafter in the system it did so much to create. It was assumed that classical learning and literary ability would fit any candidate for any administrative post. It was assumed (no doubt rightly) that a scientific education would fit a candidate for nothing - except, possibly, science. It was known, finally, that it is virtually impossible to find an order of merit among people who have been examined in different subjects. Since it is impracticable to decide whether one man is better in geology than another man in physics, it is at least convenient to be able to rule them both out as useless. When all candidates alike have to write Greek or Latin verse, it is relatively easy to decide which verse is the best. Men thus selected on their classical performance were then sent forth to govern India. Those with lower marks were retained to govern England. Those with still lower marks were rejected altogether or sent to the colonies. While it would be totally wrong to describe this system as a failure, no one could claim for it the success that had attended the systems hitherto in use. There was no guarantee, to begin with, that the man with the highest marks might not tum out to be off his head; as was sometimes found to be the case. Then again the writing of Greek verse might prove to be the sole accomplishment that some candidates had or would ever have. On occasion, a successful applicant may even have been impersonated at the examination by some- one else, subsequently proving unable to write Greek verse when the occasion arose. Selection by competitive examination was never therefore more than a moderate success.

Tariffs and industrial policy may increase the US' manufacturing capacity, but don't expect to see many manufacturing jobs from it.

Pull the other one, we saw how they went in the 20th century. Large centralised governments have never managed to systemically outplan democracies.

The issue is US culture has been giving priority to anti-industrialists. As a result they aren't the leader of the industrial world. This has been planned for a long time and a bunch of people were celebrating it the entire way along. You try standing up and saying "we should prioritise industry!" anywhere in the west - it is a bruising experience as soon as it gets to the specific policies that are likely to be successful.

Huge chunks of what China did are illegal. Running a successful industrial economy seems to violate a host of western employment & environmental laws as well as many regulations. That isn't bad planning, that was an explicit rejection of the outcomes China achieved.

1) maintain the autocracy

2) have a strong police to preserve the autocracy from rebellion

3) have a good enough economy to defend the autocracy from external threats

... ten more "for the autocracy" points ...

improving the country for the people

Also, Zeihan overselling or not, China is facing an unprecedented demographic decline. So to the parent comment about "not doing anything and winning", honestly the US can do the same and watch China implode demographically.

This becomes less of a difficult pill to swallow if a) we're involved in a trade war, b) the economy has crashed and we must work our way out of it "for the country", c) the right people get enough money.

They're too smart for mass murder because that would actually spark a resistance, not to mention get other nations involved. I don't think a sweatshop labor economy will spark a resistance because we can't even resist our current labor abuses (and neither can that segment of China's population).

I fear this is going to be achieved with a World War in the not-too-distant future.

Get rid of a lot of dissatisfied poor people and seize some more resources for the wealthy at the same time.

They don't really need those lower end resources anyway. I think they are OK to give them away just in case.

I dont believe those tech workers would wish to move, unless the political system in china changes to one that is more amenable to democracy; not to mention that having high salaries in the US, it will be impossible to achieve similar levels in china after migration (even if the PPP remains the same!).

Also, multiple foreign countries like Russia are trying to make war right now.

China has exercised incredible restraint over the actions of a belligerent warmonger US.

Or “back” as in when we built astonishingly expensive liberty ships for a large fraction of our GDP in WW2?

Because since the move to steel ships, there’s never been a time the US has been good at building ships.

Brian Potter goes into great detail on this [0], it’s a great read.

[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-cant-the-us-build...

Generally disassembling the machinery of state and starting trade wars is not an effective way to achieve your policy objectives unless your policy objective is economic and social chaos.

"Back" as in massively increasing input costs?

"Back" as in alienating close allies who are a large part of our customer base?

"Back" as in repeatedly disrupting the supply chain by flip-flopping on tariffs without a clear plan?

"Back" as in undermining research across the board?

The current policy will not employ lots of people. It will have lots of people out of work fairly soon, if we continue on the current path. It will diminish our industrial base further, and reset our manufacturing skills to the 80s or earlier. But hey, at least toy manufacturers are hiring, that's a really important industry.

Setting aside any questions about intentions, the effects of the current policies are hugely deleterious.

https://www.seatrade-maritime.com/containers/us-wakes-up-to-...

This isn't something you turn around in a few years by adding tariffs, it's a long term strategy that requires high investments and tariffs. Like the chip act, but Biden did that so that cant happen either.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/honda-...

Sort of. I’d move the needle to the 1970s, when Soviet power was on an obvious downside. Realpolitik would dictate, at that time, for Europe and Asia to balance America. But we were a good ally. So balancing wasn’t seen to be necessary.

So far US has gotten measurably worse, while China has gotten measurably better.

UBI is similar to confining an animal? Deciding what and when it eats, when it bathes, where it goes? Training it, whether it likes it or not? Deciding whether it gets medical care? Whether it gets to have companions of its own kind?

I thought it was giving people money.

1. We aren't close to exhausting our resources and we're getting better at minimization and reuse. We need to spend money on cultural initiatives that discourage consumerism and reduce waste. The bigger issues are not the limited resources in, but the nasty things going out: the stability of the biosphere is far more important and 100,000,000 people in America outright reject the responsibility.

2. No, it's not. Or is disability and child welfare and Medicare and veterans care all keeping them as pets too? It's called taking care of your people. Anyway, glad you're proposing solutions too.

3. They're leeches and need to be removed. Tax wealth and productivity gains from automation to pay for UBI.

That's one way of looking at it. Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity. I would love to be FIRE, for example. A lot of people will love it. Some won't, and they will work.

I think UBI is not there yet, but a hallmark of this is the rise of influencers and time burned on media and Netflix. This tells me that leisure time is rising and we have the economic capability of sustaining non-productive activities.

But we're not there _yet_. I don't fear the inevitability of UBI in my lifetime for example. But I'm confident we'll be able to devise a useful system when we get there. In the end, we didn't have capitalism untill we thought up this system. There is surely another kind of system we could have converged to, I seriously doubt it's some magical rule of nature. But we did not, we wound up here. We'll end up in another place at some point.

It's a good question. The Reagan-era response would be that having billionaires inspires people to work hard, take risks, come up with ideas and better themselves. In a post-scarcity era where the only route to wealth is capital, and machines handle the hard work and ideas, I'm not sure what benefit remains from having billionaires. What good are incentives at that point?

This does not mean the making of the deals and building the factory had anything to do with it at the time, but stating that those past decisions also have benefit in today's situation is not surprising.

It also does not mean that this has anything to do with the actual reason the deals and investments were made years ago. As you point out, those deals & investments years ago couldn't have anything to do with this week's tariffs.

Best of luck =3

People on welfare? I can imagine a lot of these people "accept" that the goal is to get themselves out of welfare, ASAP (especially if there's a deadline), but they can't see a way to that goal - e.g. applying for jobs but getting rejected left and right, and feeling dejected.

With utopian UBI, one would be free to do what they want.. even if it's just jagging off the whole day.

The UBI in my mind is not $$$ but merchandises and services coupons.

That is assuming UBI is funded through government borrowing as we saw with COVID stimulus. If funded through new taxes the inflationary impact should be much less.

(I don’t have enough economic training to determine how much less.)

You seem to be assuming housing rental is an perfectly monopolistic market, which it isn't, and any place where it even loosely approximates that needs to correct that whether or not UBI is adopted.

No matter whether you're the 40th percentile (a vacancy-sensitive landlord) on price or the 90th (a vacancy-insensitive landlord), the dollar value of the underlying distribution is defined by the market's willingness and ability to pay. If that goes up, the entire distribution moves to the right.

Do you think "just move away from the city centers (where all the jobs that you used to need are) to random middle-of-nowhere wherever-we-have-space" will hold forever, and won't trail off once the initial phenomenon of everyone dispersing is finished?

Soviets had more hardcore ideologues at helm most of the times until SU dissolution. They hardly allowed their ideology to be diluted without challenge, which made plans infeasible without real time feedback. China's Mao era was somewhat similar to that. After Mao, during fight between Gang of Four and Deng Xiaoping, realistic faction came on top with famous Deng saying "it doesn't matter if a cat is black or yellow, as long as it catches mice". Also China does experimentation at province and city level, with people succeeding promoting to national level, containing pitfalls of bad policy.

Basically, China is centralized politically and decentraliced economically. The soviet centralized everything... even meat prices, a recipe for disaster.

They plan the outcome, but let the governing to the different provinces and the implementation to the (mostly) private sector. These actors are forced to compete, among other things, via export discipline that cannot be faked.

And somehow, despite facing the same corruption and cronyism problems we do in the west, they seem to get better results.

Over a decade ago, I worked in a public hospital with a really tight budget. The Pneumology section was clean, orderly and provided service to patients as they came with no waiting time. The service in the building nearby could well fit in the definitions of crimes against humanity. Same hospital, same financing, same system, just a different boss.

The last 30-40 years it's different, the Chinese have navigated market liberalization and transitioned from copying to leading in a number of areas, while still having a central planning aspect. It could be that some amount of central planning is preferable to pure ideological communism or capitalism.

What 'went wrong' was the economic war that Kennedy admn. started to starve the USSR of GDP by starting an arms and space race. The USSR did not bite the space race bait, but arms race was impossible to not participate. So it did. Then in the 1970s, the US started an economic warfare against the USSR with the help of its Gulf allies by manipulating oil prices. That wasn't enough either, so Reagan started another arms race. In the end all of that combined, crippled the USSR and it went bankrupt.

The US also went bankrupt, but it was able to delay it for ~15 more years by printing money and pumping it into the stock market and real estate thanks to the reserve currency status of the dollar. That came crashing down in 2008. The US did some more of the same and dragged it a decade and half more and here we are, where everything is finally crashing down.

China avoided most of that economic warfare by sitting on the sidelines and taking lessons. Sometime a decade ago, it passed the threshold of being too well-rounded and large to fail. To the point that it became a driving engine of the world economy, but backed with actual goods and services instead of the financial voodoo that the US built everything on.

> Basically, is such 5 year plans a recipe for success

Yes, if your country can keep the private interests and capitalists under control. Otherwise, they derail every plan to maximize their profit by siphoning off state resources for little actual progress. Like how the last US administration's 'build back better' plan was derailed.

You have no reason to believe people with new marginal income from UBI would move to lower COL areas. We have strong reason to believe they'd spend that money to move toward high COL areas. Evidence for this is the fact that people, when they have money, choose to live in high COL areas.

Any system with UBI requires other sources of income to exist (thr absence of such sources means that nothing of value is being produced for exchange, in which case any money printed is basically monopoly money and how you distribute it doesn't matter because it isn't doing anything), and a major premise of UBI has always been that it enables those transitionally deprived of income more freedom to reconfigure their lives and ramp up these sources of income (and does so with less redundant—with the progressive tax system—bureaucratic overhead) than do means- and behavior-tested welfare programs.

The particular mix of available other forms of income between wage labor, independent business, or capital don’t really change the basic arguments.

The idea would be that when automation advances to the point that something can be made with very little labor the government would build automated factories to produce that thing and make the output available for free.

There would still be room for private companies to make those things too. They could make fancier or higher end models for those people who want something more than the free models from the government.

Mentioned above but I'll put it here too for other readers: the reason rent is unique is that in high COL areas, it's driven primarily by the price of land which is has zero supply elasticity. Higher prices induce supply in all other forms of goods and services.

I can’t not consume rent, that’s never an option.

To put this in perspective, San Fransisco, a city considered to have a housing crisis, has a ratio of 9.

When minimum wage rises, yes rents rise.

When high paying employers come to an area, yes rents rise.

These are a lot more random/diffuse in the market than UBI is, but they still cause the same effect.

Can you please explain why rents go up at all?

regardless, why do you think land in burlington is expensive?

this also means you want your record pristine. And it is also why officials cover up problems rather than report it up.

But their current success to out-maneuver the US in terms of trade, as well as capacity, is testament to perhaps the success of such a system. I do recall there was a massive purge on corruption over the past decade(s), which is probably helped a lot. This did not happen in soviet russia.

Stuff like that can’t happen if you have protected national giants.

What? Yes it does. That's how prices work. If UVM sold all of their land, prices would go down, but they aren't selling all of their land, so the prices are higher.

I never said "all land is being used productively." I said "land prices are the primary source of cost in high COL areas." One contributor to high land prices are all the things you mention: people withholding their unused land from the market.

No, there are not more variables than just the sale price. The price of land is the price of land, and it factors in all the variables you mentioned.