Comments by "Doncarlo" (@doujinflip) on "VisualPolitik EN" channel.

  1. VisualPolitik originates from España 🇪🇸
    2
  2. That seems to be happening, but absorbing the regular army could make the IRGC so powerful that they can start formulating state-level policies and strategies independent of the Ayatollah. There's rumors that the PLA in China (who are in this situation now that the ROC Army got ejected to Táiwān) have begun doing so, and that the CPC has to constantly watch their own army more than ever.
    2
  3. ​ @beni4366 Which shows how long-tailed the extreme right has gotten, and that's especially concerning considering how America's "liberals" would be "mildly conservative" in any other developed nation.
    2
  4. The US has been the leader of precision weaponry since the end of WWI, when we realized we're not the type to accept millions of dead men in an mass mobilized slugfest. Hence the focus on instrument-compensated bombsights, guided missiles, smart bombs, drone observers, and increasingly automated weapon systems to ensure each shot renders the intended effect to clear the path for our soldiers, organizations, and ultimately diplomats.
    2
  5. We've been wanting to get out of the irreconcilable Middle East, but its centrality to shipping, aviation, and internet lines of communication make it impractical.
    2
  6. It is famous within Africa. Lagos drives African modern media much like California does for the English speaking world. And Nigerians are also wary about phone scams, because they get targeted too (often about fake real estate opportunities).
    2
  7. Right, a lot of folks don't realize how difficult it is to store hydrogen. Pure heat is more straightforward and efficient, so I'd wager we'd see molten salt solutions before hydrogen ones.
    2
  8. China got confident that Shànghǎi can have all the benefits of HK without it being a safe harbor for Western thoughts and values. But I doubt a more legally whimsical Shànghǎi will attract as much foreign investment, and this leaves China more brittle by relying even more on the façade of internal economic prosperity.
    2
  9. HK was a safe Western portal into China, and I doubt Shànghǎi will attract foreign currency to the same extent. If anything, China is losing a major way of attracting overseas investments by closing down the HK gateway.
    2
  10. Correction: Republicans, through their policy of isolationism and disengagement.
    2
  11.  @ipg6772  Singapore is a democracy, and what the PRC thinks it itself is on a much bigger scale. However they conveniently forget that: 1) S'pore relies on positive relations with its neighbors, including well-defined boundaries; 2) The SAF isn't an existential threat to its neighbors; 3) Government corruption is a huge deal and the fastest way to fall from grace, whereas in China it's really the only way to rise in the Party ranks; 4) It openly embraces and promotes ethnic diversity, instead of trying to Sinicize the place; and 5) The ruling PAP has been waning in popular support as its citizens gradually want more than sterile prosperity 🇸🇬🗳
    2
  12. Third one looks to be East Asia, likely cross-Strait or in Korea.
    2
  13. If anything Taiwan should be first, since they're the lynchpin of both US allies and free movement of global trade in Asia, while also being fairly inexperienced with actual combat and softened by decades of a deceptive "peace dividend" with the Mainland.
    2
  14. There's wide discrepancies in China's purported census data and other counts like hukou registrations and school enrollments, totaling millions of Chinese who don't actually exist. The true number is probably closer to 1.2b, making China second to India by headcount.
    2
  15. If it can afford them, along with the network of long-range sensors needed to keep the missile on target. Hypersonics are _expensive_. Meanwhile the US just came out with a bolt-on guidance kit that can handle moving targets (ships, tanks, etc) for its hundreds of thousands of dirt cheap gravity bombs... Russia apparently exhausted its stockpile of precision guided munitions already.
    2
  16. Macau exists solely to transact with China, and that's the attitude that the PRC advocates for. But money doesn't buy love, and from the Macanese I've met, they seem like the type who'd be the first to abandon ship when China fails to pay rent for their attention.
    2
  17. A PRC collapse would at least not be as painful to the Chinese people, who have always been great market merchants able to trade their way out of hardship. How violent the transition and how fractured China ends up becoming (the cities and provinces are quite independent in daily operations from each other) is anyone's guess.
    2
  18. Socialism refers more to distribution though, while capitalism and communism focus on production. Clearly capitalism is superior to "public" state control in getting resources where it's wanted, the main battle is how socialized do we want the profits to be versus how much wealth those who earned/stole get to keep with libertarianism. Then there's democracy/autocracy which governs the policy. So the real evolution might not be feudalism > capitalism > socialism > communism, but finding the mix of policy + production + distribution. It's arguably possible to be a capitalist socialist democracy.
    2
  19. The US arguably still holds China's fate, just as it did since the end of the Opium Wars: empire-ending Western education, WWII materiel, abandonment of the KMT, switch of diplomatic recognition, support against the Soviets, introduction to global markets, allowing integration into the world economy post-1989, and constant infusion of knowledge and dollars. The Mainland also relies on the US for agriculture and open sea trade to import cheap food -- Americans can adapt to digital hacks and expensive gadgets, the PRC can only ignore polluted meals and empty stomachs for so long.
    2
  20. Right, the PRC survives because it had to abandon the ideological purity of Communism. That's why critics are alarmed by Xi's push to return to its "roots", which hints that the Party is also losing its grip on an economic prosperity-driven legitimacy with little else but hateful nationalism to maintain unchallenged power.
    2
  21. Right, it takes the replacement of experience and mindset to make the changes durable, which unfortunately involves a lot of physical burials over time.
    2
  22. We should also look into raising registration fees on heavy vehicles -- the formula for estimated road wear involves the fourth power of average vehicle weight. This will help to get EV owners to pay their fair share, as their curb weights are surprisingly heavy.
    2
  23. Which is unfortunately controversial there because they often see it as some sort of genocide to limit family sizes by any means, even though they're spending a lot more of their limited wealth juggling resources between many kids and leaving little to invest on improving individual productivity and developing reliable market connections.
    2
  24. China might surpass America for a bit, but it faces increasingly strong headwinds with things like an aging population, an unattractive modern culture, explosion of debt, and overall lack of trust. I wouldn't be surprised if America regains its dominance simply by waiting out the PRC's peak 📈💸📉
    2
  25.  @Arcaryon  Right, modern China is like china -- hard and impressive but also very fragile and brittle. The PRC keeps saying to itself that it is loved around the world... but I've lived around the world and the locals express resignation at best and extreme suspicion at worst over Chinese intents with their countries, and it all smells a lot like the colonization which they have recent memories of if not lived through. It seems like the Party is waking up to the fact that money doesn't buy love, hence their increased aggression in securing their interests, because unlike America they don't have an attractive modern culture to retain peaceable engagement when the money stops flowing.
    2
  26. Not to mention these include the Defense Attaché liaison offices at the 100+ US embassies, as well as military reservations that between exercises are merely empty fields.
    2
  27. That's probably why RCEP needed to be so weak, hardly better than the WTO baseline. Nobody trusts that China won't use it to exert political impositions later on.
    2
  28. More like the peaceable global economy is done for. The Pound and Yen are decadent, the Euro is uncoordinated, and nobody really trusts the Rupee or the Renminbi. The resulting chaos will likely lead to more conflicts gone kinetic as the values of payments lose predictability.
    2
  29. All propped up by an explosion of debt, making our children pay for a short burst of political gain... which he promptly failed to defend when a pandemic made paramount the protection of our human capital as opposed to "normal" commercial vibrancy.
    2
  30. The "charter" schools have to continuously compete against each other for real student achievement and thus public funding. Plus the teachers get subsidized intensive education themselves. None of this letting a church or other private organization set up a curriculum that's merely alternative to the government-run "failure".
    2
  31. Japan and Táiwān are both threshold nuclear powers, able to design and gather the material for a nuclear warhead within a year or two. "No first use" China would also be inviting its total destruction if it nukes either of them especially before a proven test detonation.
    2
  32. Not to mention 50~100 years of production followed by thousands of years of nuclear waste afterward ☢️
    2
  33. Tom Clancy wrote "The Bear and the Dragon" going over this scenario, though it's a pretty fantastic one 🧚‍♀️
    2
  34. Defeating an invader means just surviving, which is a much easier objective. The US has multiple decades of experience on the wrong end of booby traps and ambushes in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and are nowadays teaching the Taiwanese on how to politically defeat a similarly well equipped occupier.
    2
  35. That identification has to come at no cost to the voter anywhere in the world. Remember citizens who are homeless or overseas are also fully eligible to cast a ballot. We specifically abolished all forms of a poll tax because at all prices it was such a deterrence to valid voter participation.
    2
  36. Japan is literally giving away vacant homes to young folks willing to move out and stay there. Problem isn't the costs of a house, but access to the wages, amenities, and opportunities that are only found though the specializations cities provide.
    2
  37. Peak productivity still hasn't changed from the 25~65 age range, and automation is much more easy to replicate among the competition. A market where the bulk of the labor force is past its prime isn't as promising as an equally automated alternative who is in its midst or at least upcoming within a couple decades.
    2
  38. The greater threat comes from the regime who is aiming to normalize grossly inaccurate reports, official corruption, legal opaqueness, disappearances for dissent, and mistakes expressions of unpopularity as military-grade violence. Meanwhile a lot of those hard builds are getting built like 50% larger with half the technically prescribed material so that the official in charge can pad his achievements and pocket the difference -- in China structural failures of brand new construction seem to be an annual incident at least, and overseas even the locals watching the BRI projects note an alarming lack of rebar and concrete, yet they're still on the hook for all those debts incurred.
    2
  39. Rail and road links alone won't make up for the loss of shipping by sea, and all the West has to do is provide enough crossfire to make civilian ships reconsider the costs of entering a war zone with the food and fuel China needs because they're too polluted, inefficient, and overextracted in their own lands. Choke off the supply lines (it doesn't even have to be completely) for a year or two and the Party's grip will collapse in the explosion of unrest within the Mainland.
    2
  40.  @joem0088  China's debt ratio has been growing alarmingly fast, riding on a less diverse portfolio of shoddily-built structures with quickly shrinking returns on investments. They're losing their low-end manufacturing to South and SE Asia, while lagging in high value-added services because of the lack in societal trust and exploratory dissent that truly creative ventures require -- their economy is becoming as brittle as the flaky concrete of their "modern" buildings because that's literally the only place they can trust their money to grow in.
    2
  41. Probably not. Chinese people aren't as brainwashed and infantilized as North Koreans (who generally would sacrifice themselves for the glory of Kim and the Korean race), and the deaths/disappearances of so many only-sons could incite open revolt against the Party now that those families have no legacy left to lose.
    2
  42. But does their equipment work as advertised? They're already getting complaints of low quality and high amounts of downtime in peace, imagine those things in the degraded maintenance environment of war.
    2
  43. Right, if you take military spending out of both, how much is that GDP then?
    1
  44. The CPC ☭ A diverging Taiwan gives the Party the justification to further reinforce societal controls and get everyone to ignore the insane amounts of debt they're racking up, while Taiwan and the West squabble over how much of the reality about the Republic of "China" they're willing to recognize.
    1
  45.  @troywalt4834  Satellites are naturally weak and laggy signals, and can be easily jammed or hacked. Iran stole an American drone mid-flight just by remotely commandeering the controls. A drone that has a line of sight pencil beam to a manned asset and is hard-coded to prioritize commands from there would be much harder to infiltrate.
    1
  46. You can tell it's there, but the return is so small that it's hard to distinguish it from the background noise, and even harder to keep a lock on it especially with the puny radars on the missiles themselves.
    1
  47. If they can afford to develop it. The project partnered with Indonesia and even then they're finding it a bit too expensive with still no firm timeline on initial delivery.
    1
  48. Airlines have a very high barrier to entry, and aren't that profitable for the costs of operation. Competition won't be as strong especially if governments abandon them, which means higher logistics costs and reduced mobility going foward.
    1
  49. During a conflict, it's generally better to be open to the initial waves of refugees, since these tend to be women, children, and professionals with valuable skills. As the conflict drags on though, you start seeing hardier but less skilled people who will also be much more persistent in trying to cross in while the rest of their family waits at home or in a refugee camp for their sponsorship to immigrate, for increasingly economic reasons rather than political violence and vulnerabilities.
    1
  50. Right, it would take time for a new Russian expat to earn the trust that they don't secretly serve the old country, whether by intention or exploitation of any ongoing personal vulnerabilities they couldn't shake off in the escape. This limits their opportunities largely to routine maintenance, open source development, etc where they don't have the powers to hide their activities until they develop that trust over time.
    1