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

  1. Yet Visa can handle tens of thousands of transactions per minute globally, whereas Bitcoin has to compromise the inherent security of the blockchain with Lightning side channels just trying to keep up. And that's considering most people with a cell phone haven't even generated their own crypto key pair yet, while happily moving money through transfers of airtime credit and other financial apps which structurally operate more similarly to traditional banking and card networks.
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  2. Lightning is basically an off-block side channel where microtransactions can be done before publishing it into the main blockchain. It trades the blockchain's inherent security for convenience, and there are scenarios where this can be used to compromise Bitcoin transactions (e.g. mass closing of channels and flooding the block, creating errors in legitimate transactions in the race to verify them all).
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  3. The US specifically prevented Taiwan from achieving nuclear capability because of the threat of a cross-Straits conflict blowing up into WW3. Taiwan remains however a breakout power, able to build a warhead probably within a year if it wanted.
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  4. If you look at China-flagged movements globally, they want to take as much resources around the world as they can get their hands on. The real infrastructure they build focuses on getting those resources to the open sea where they ship it over, not so much is done with education and interconnecting the host nation like an actually benevolent aid package. It's all but copying what the Europeans did with their colonies a century ago.
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  5. In a cross-Straits war there's really no land for casual combatants to booby trap, and no reporters around amplifying the message of the resistance -- in the air and on the sea would be nearly pure combat of technology and experience. If anything invading Taiwan will be the Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan for the PRC.
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  6. Indo and M'sia only protest because they don't want to prematurely get cut off from the lucrative trade with China. Given their history with both Chinese and Communists though, I'd wager if they must decide it's going to be with the West.
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  7. Rumor is Australia is getting British Astute boats anyway, since the UK is about to complete its original order (and thus have engineers about to go idle) while the US is still maxed out at the shipyards trying to build for itself. This would explain why the UK is part of this alliance for a theater on the other side of the world.
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  8. The C919 is smaller, shorter-ranged, and less fuel efficient, making it a tough sell for airlines that plan to fly it over the next 20~30 years. That's on top of being like 60% imported American parts. COMAC has a long way to go to hope to be the next Embrear let alone an Airbus or Boeing, especially with China's economy itself stalling from aging, debt, pollution, and global divestment.
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  9. 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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  10. Right, a common currency really needs a common budget to work properly. I doubt Brasilia would prefer to have its public spending driven by Beijing.
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  11. Taiwan has been a threshold nuclear power for decades now, they could probably get a warhead together in a year. In fact America has had to stop the ROC from proceeding further to not antagonize the Communist Bloc. Granted this was before Tiananmen when the Mainland seemed to be heading the Western way, much like how Taiwan was likewise about to end the KMT dictatorship and democratize.
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  12. Let's hope if the war obliterates anything Ukrainian, it's their infamous corruption that had kept the country weak.
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  13. That's because the government isn't putting downward pressure on the debt amounts it's forgiving, it's just paying out whatever the college bureaucracies say they're worth.
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  14. The USSR prioritized its STEM grads, and look where they ended up. STEM folks are notorious for being horrible at leading other humans, not to mention they often dive into solving whether could it technically work without really asking what are the wider effects of trying. China today is heading down a similar path of developing technical prowess yet undermining their efforts with toxic mistrusting relationships and an increasingly brittle society facing self-made aging, household debt, and soil pollution. If anything humanities and social sciences will become more important over time as those products are harder to reverse-engineer, they're not as vulnerable to automation, and they help focus efforts on what truly matters to humans.
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  15. Uncontrolled subsidies, not questioning and limiting payouts to what college administrators say they're worth.
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  16. That's not necessarily a bad thing, going through the suck helps let the soldier narrow down what tasks are useful and what's BS (even if they say all of it is).
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  17. That leadership probably won't come from a place that can't even openly discuss its own history. Limiting themselves to STEM fields won't help either, STEM grads tend to make for horrible managers of humans.
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  18. Not necessarily, online can do dry instruction, but for application in the real world full of humans, there's no substitute for meatspace meetings. Education is more than just memorizing formulas, it's also learning how to get others to care about your work.
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  19. Because America in general is so political. If you want to avoid ideological controversy in your higher education, China's universities have plenty of seats reserved for foreigners (even then most "foreigners" there are just Chinese anchor babies raised domestically).
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  20. It's not, but post-Tiananmen "patriotic education" ensures that Chinese students avoid exploring narratives outside what the Party says, and to rat out fellow students who try. Colleges look the other way because they're a reliable source of money, and the "teaching" of politics is really less a deliberate agenda and more a reflection of American willingness to confront and converse about politics regardless.
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  21. Although America's colleges were cheaper and at least as good when the state provided more funding. The problem is their priorities followed the Boomers, cutting education to save on what makes retirees happy voters.
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  22. But that would be “socialist”, says those who look forward to their next “business-related” tax break and Social Security check.
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  23. Violent crime anyway. Commercial crimes like fraud and hacks are surging.
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  24. Reported crime.
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  25. That treaty though was proudly punitive to keep Germany from rising again through reparations debts regardless of changes in leadership and policy. The current sanctions are meant to degrade Putin's ability to cause that damage in the first place.
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  26. Nuclear is also expensive and increasing in costs while also creating thousands of years of hazard on the tail end. Renewables by contrast are getting cheaper and more available. The main problem isn't sourcing, it's storage of the excess for when demand surges later like it does every evening.
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  27. Russians still largely tolerated Putin, especially when considering their prosperity compared against the relative fiasco of post-Soviet Yeltsin's Russia. We've been warning about how his political adventurism is going to cross the rest of the world, who will ultimately push back; no other real democracy recognizes Russia's need to reimpose the USSR's political colonies in Eastern Europe. The same can be said with Putin's PRC umbilical cord and their dreams to reestablish China's old imperial arrangements over East and SE Asia.
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  28. Paradox of Tolerance: to have a tolerant society, intolerance cannot be tolerated lest it take over like a psychological cancer.
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  29. China and Russia already weaponize the internet through nearly shameless trolls and hacks, with China further destabilizing poor countries by feeding local corruption through their loan arrangements and not demanding better governance and transparency like Western aid does. The weakening of globalization comes more from the realization that a "Sunshine Policy" ultimately fails, as the prosperity emboldens autocrats while not effectively compelling them to interpret the rules the way everyone else does.
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  30. China is certainly eyeing for an opportunity to take back the relatively resource-rich Siberian Far East that the Russians "stole" from them back in the 17th through 19th Centuries.
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  31. I feel that Indonesia still has a simmering yet healthy suspicion of anything Communist and/or Chinese too.
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  32. Combat eats through stockpiles surprisingly quick. Really the only weapons we have plenty of are a couple hundred-thousand dumb gravity bombs left over from carpet bombing Vietnam, and only because we're not producing bolt-on JDAM guided fin kits fast enough.
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  33. Remember last time a bunch of traditionalist reactionaries tried to fight for their state and way of life? They lost ownership of all their slaves. A century later they lost legally sanctioned dominance over their descendants too. America's "Great Experiment" doesn't reward going back to a flawed past.
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  34. It's also what's counted in "defense" spending. The US includes Veteran's Affairs expenses, while China isn't publishing how much it spends on militarized "internal security" even though it's likely at least as much as what's going to the PLA.
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  35. ​ @michaelmayhem350  The PLA is trapped in its own country though, they'd only be overwhelming if we literally tried to invade China. For the air and sea battles we're all expecting though, there is no place for crafty ambushes and suicidal berzerking; the side with the superior technology and the combat experience to employ, supply, and repair it more effectively will determine the victor.
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  36. So lobbying by Northrup-Grumman and Raytheon are the cause of Russia further invading Ukraine?
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  37. The PLA has fairly new equipment, although they're also "Designed in China" and it's not like they have a great track record against adversaries who actually shoot back in the past like 50 years.
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  38. The PRC government is very much right-wing: ethnocultural dominance, traditional values, paternalist governance, Make [this country] Great Again attitude... all the hallmarks of fascism. Remember that the term "Nazi" is itself a contraction of the German for "National Socialism", and the CPC promotes combining both nationalism and its idea of "socialism".
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  39. Problem is popular media thrives on edgy dissent, and modern China discourages alternative thoughts and vaguely defines where the edge even is. Notice how cultural powerhouses deliberately dramatize their own issues, while forgettable ones are full of mere pretty faces and childish plots.
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  40.  @GamingAccount-ru1gi  The PRC wouldn't want to risk it now, even with conventional weaponry. The CPC can't afford anything but a quick and decisive victory as they would inevitably lose trading partners to import food, oil, and other crucial resources from, and most families only have one child which would be societally devastating if a critical mass of them get lost in battle. Plus there's Taiwan's highly defensible geography -- there's a reason the US opted not to invade Japanese Formosa even at its height in WWII. And then afterward the PRC would have to reconcile its not so "peaceful rise" to the rest of the world, the negative ramifications of violently conquering Taiwan would be like Tienanmen x100.
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  41. Taiwan has a formal partnership with the US, who could convince others to join in Taiwan's defense or at least economically-damaging disengagement with the PRC. It's also logistically trivial to get to with its open ocean, no surrounding countries to get transit agreements from.
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  42. Although the US also won by coming in after the first punches were thrown. We don't do as well capitalizing on preempted operations.
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  43. That might change though. The ROC long abandoned it's actual intention to reclaim the Mainland, and now the majority of its citizens reject even being called "Chinese". With the PRC's grand fumble on its "one country, two systems" policy, Taiwan is on the path to formally reconciling its de facto independence.
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  44. Taiwan and Japan are threshold nations when it comes to nukes. If they wanted, they could likely assemble a warhead in a year. It just hasn't been worth the financial and diplomatic ramifications yet.
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  45. Reinstitute SEATO?
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  46. Just keep tapping the right side of the screen (on mobile apps) or drag the time slider
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  47.  @lordcarl3374  HK was never physically defensible, whereas Taiwan has the world's biggest ocean (i.e. open sea and air access) as its backyard. Plus the PRC already had military and armed police presence in HK, whereas in Taiwan it's just an office building of bureaucrats.
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  48. China is already committing what is basically transnational organized crime with its state-owned fishing hordes stealing fish worldwide. Although Taiwan's equivalent isn't too much better, just much smaller and less blatant.
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  49. China has a "no first use" policy with its nukes, but it might end up using them on Taiwan under the excuse that the PRC considers Taiwan as part of China.
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  50.  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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