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

  1.  @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.
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  2. 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.
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  3. 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.
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  4.  @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.
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  5. Kinda wondering how popular an American version of Patriot Park would be 🪖🙋‍♀️
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  6.  @JK-gu3tl  It certainly worked for Táiwān, which was just as autocratic into the 1980s. Nowadays the Republic of China doesn't even come to mind among foreigners when they hear about the "White Terror".
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  7. 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.
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  8. Right, the work culture prefers we pay for that "fun" now and not into decades of caring for dependents.
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  9. Iraqis also provided considerable support to take down Saddam, and a lot of the hardship was caused by local insurgent groups trying to establish their turf when the Americans weren't around. Ukrainians have long ago rejected affiliation with Russia, and civilian casualties are clearly caused by Russian forces.
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  10. 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.
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  11. 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.
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  12. 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.
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  13. @ The target of the Plaza Accords wasn't Japan, it was America and its domestic monetary policies at the time pushing up the value of the USD versus the rest of the G5. Japan was just in the wrong place at the right time to make the same inflationary mistakes over the next decade, one which their economy was too rigid and protectionist to recover from when the JPY bubble popped.
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  14. If it means lowering the bar on the definition of "poverty" and not really providing the freedom of movement and information needed to break upward, it's not really that much of an achievement.
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  15. 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.
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  16. 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 📈💸📉
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  17. "Flexible employment" (gig work) isn't exactly opening their own business.
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  18. Sadly the way the A380 was designed it won't have much of a second life as an airfreighter either: the top deck can't be removed to make space for lucrative oversize cargo, the cockpit is in the way of a nose door, and it doesn't have the thrust/weight ratio needed to take advantage of all that space before reaching MTOW. Being designed for passengers first it's impractical to retrofit, much like trying to turn apartments into a warehouse or a cruise liner into a container carrier. Part of the genius behind the 747 was that it's actually a cargo plane with seats bolted on, as the engineers had doubts for its success carrying only passengers. I can see the A380 possibly becoming a hybrid where the middle deck can get loaded with ULDs, with passengers only on the top deck. It will be a rare conversion though, as pretty much every other airframe will end up in a boneyard to part out to the few airlines and routes that have economical usage for the superjumbo.
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  19.  @codechannel528  At the same time the PRC is not recognized as the government over Táiwān. It's more like North and South Korea where they both officially claim each other, but are effectively dealt as separate equal entities.
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  20. If you count the outrageous amount they spend on military-grade internal policing, the PRC would be well over the US on how much it spends on "state security". Yet they still can't project its will much past the shores it currently controls.
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  21. Most of them without effective air defenses either, vulnerable to cheap guided bombs and possibly even cheaper grenade-carrying racing drones.
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  22. Problem is the radioactivity generated remains dangerous for thousands of years. Fossil fuels could be phased out and the climate rebalanced in that time, while a single incident with nuclear waste can render whole areas permanently inhabitable.
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  23. The loss of Táiwān will bleed over though, first with the Senkaku/Diàoyú, then perhaps a "liberation" of the Ryukyu from Japan, on top of punitive strikes against the Home Islands.
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  24. No, there isn't much of a land battle for the press or plainclothes combatants to complicate the battlefield. Nearly all the coverage will come from seeing Taiwan getting bombarded by the PLA, inviting the rest of us to support Taiwan's defense.
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  25. Still the same battle of efficiency vs flexibility, where of course America's Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex in getting costs and competition down also leaves us vulnerable to changes in the global geopolitical situation (e.g a war in Ukraine eating through our stockpiles far faster than we're able to replenish them).
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  26. The "same" rules become an issue when China gets included, as they always want to "negotiate" them at their leisure through the lens of vague philosophies and even then enforcement gets interpreted very loosely.
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  27. Overtake forever, or peak and stall? 🐇🐢
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  28. Minding other countries and keeping any fights far away is minding its own affairs. When America tried to disengage, it got sucker-punched by WW1, WW2, and 9/11.
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  29. 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.
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  30. 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.
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  31. Scary, but not unheard of. The previous culture war of the Civil Rights Movement was a lot more visible and violent. Same with the labor movements of a century ago, not to mention the straight up Civil War.
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  32. 🥇
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  33. You're hinting that Singapore (a territory that Malaysia deliberately ejected) contributes and gets support from the West; why then is it wrong to figure out what external entities its Muslim neighbors gets and receives support from?
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  34. Chinese companies are moving everywhere to get around the divestment. While it's mitigating, it's still damaging to them because of the permanent added barriers and reduced opportunities to Chinese workers.
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  35. 1) Kickbacks, reliance, and fear of retaliation from China; 2) Harmonization with a fellow autocrat; and 3) Uyghurs are ethnically Turkic, who are not as central to wider Muslim world
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  36. Right, if you take military spending out of both, how much is that GDP then?
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  37.  @Mr.Septon  Yet there's an active political fight over how much we'll allow those elites to continue getting away with. Hence the "woke" "socialists" who want to get the pie shared more broadly vs the MAGA folks who are trying to return to an ignorantly flawed version of past "prosperity". The US isn't necessarily overstretched, since practically all of those bases exist practically by invitation. For friendlier countries it allows them to spend less of its budget to gain a similar level of effective defense than if they had to fund and experience all that combat on their own, and even for places like Cuba or Pakistan the American presence provides a convenient scapegoat to redirect any internal unrest. America is incredibly resilient and the American Pie overall has not lost its flavor. China can try to grow their pie all they want, but the CPC is realizing that theirs tastes like shit and no amount of slicing will ultimately get people to bite... and it's all the fault of who made the recipe.
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  38. Defenses against earthquakes have been engineered into structures for centuries, the danger is really only for those who use nothing more than mortar for their brick/cement block builds.
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  39. There's also pumped-storage hydro, which can pump water back up the reservoir when prices are cheap for use later when demand surges as the sun goes down. Any elevation difference can be considered to transform into this energy storage solution, even abandoned mines.
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  40. Already takes another 20 years to design and build, and thousands of years of toxic waste, all for 50~100 years of production.
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  41. There was a SEATO before, but that disintegrated with South Vietnam
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  42.  @liu3gz  Which would make China unbeatable in a land war where simple machining and infantry moxy negates the advantages of high tech weaponry. Unfortunately the battles will be more at sea and in the air where casual combatants can't fight (or on Táiwān where the roles reverse), and China's reliance on imports for food and fuel means it won't be able to afford both beans and bullets for that long without getting distracted by the rising unrest back at home.
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  43.  @spacemonk26  Controlled access and hefty punishments for abuse would certainly help with our unique firearms-related problems; our military already does so to the point of complete base lockdowns over one missing sensitive item. As a prior servicemember, it's not comforting to see my fellow civilian Americans (especially politicians) not treat the discussion of firearms with the seriousness that everyone in uniform does.
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  44. Please research the proper pronouciation of native names before recording. Skipping this risks you getting a reputation of not actually having done fact checks are are just another opinion-driveling clickbaiter. 천리마 sounds more like "chul-li-ma". Even worse was your previous video about the 재벌 that dominate South Korea, which should sound more like "jay-ball".
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  45. The US wouldn't have to occupy or even dominate the area around China though, just provide enough return fire for civilian ships to reconsider the waybill and insurance rates for sailing into Chinese ports with the food and fuel they rely on. Even a stalemate would mean the Party loses when their treasury and shelves empty out over the course of a year or more; no amount of patriotic education will suppress the literal starvation and subsequent desire to flee from or fight the failing authorities.
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  46.  @retrodripsupport7510  The price of efficiency is lack of resilience, i.e. putting all the eggs in one basket. COVID and China supply shocks show that it is possible to be too efficient in the corporate hunt for quarterly profits.
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  47. Hypersonics are magnets for self-blinding plasma shields, which also serve as a beacon to defending radars. Those missiles require not-so-invulnerable external guidance all the way in unless they slow wayy down.
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  48.  Golden Eagle  Old generals might capitulate, but pro-unification sentiments might not reach all the way down their chains of command. Remember that Western military doctrine values independent initiative in the absence of good command; if anything the lower ranks (which as a conscripted population includes practically everyone) would self-organize into their own militias, providing the PLA occupiers with one or two generations of armed resistance and disappearing enough of them to raise questions on the Mainland about what's happening to their only sons ⚰️
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  49. Power is a zero-sum game. By definition it's the degree of what one side can do that the other cannot.
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  50.  @steenkigerrider5340  Arts, history, and humanities are what really drives education, because education is all about finding the norms and then stepping outside of it to explore ways to grow. Creativity and innovation come from intelligently violating established rules. STEM focused education by contrast is often tunnel visioned in technicalities and ignores what people actually care about. Hence why they often make horrible managers and don't do well in politics. This is why you often see a large organization headed by someone who studied something like English literature and then used those skills to get into law.
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