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

i.e. Their plan is to kick the can down the road and hope somebody will be able to recycle it later on... while the can is full of toxic waste and not getting any younger ☢️
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Depends on the local geography too. A shore with a steep dropoff won't see nearly as much swell as one leading towards a vast expanse of shallow flats.
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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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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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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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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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Anti-ship missiles are fairly dumb without external precision guidance all the way to the target, which would be degraded by EW and shootdowns of surveillance assets. At some point someone's warhead would mistakenly strike a container ship thinking something that big was an aircraft carrier. Regardless of who launched it, this would scare off civilian traffic around Mainland China in general, and it's the Mainland that would more quickly empty its coffers paying for insurance upcharges and overland alternatives for the food, fuel, and mass export revenues it relies on.
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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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Beijing destroyed all its negotiating leverage with HK. It’ll take a couple generations until the Taiwanese might be open to considering converging with the Communists again.
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Trump made it a vital campaigning platform for the GOP though.
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America's role as the world's police fighting smaller local conflicts before they organize into industrial-scale wars is the reason for post-WW2 global prosperity. Pax Romana, Pax Mongolica, Pax Britannica, and Pax Americana are named as such because that one power maintained trade security for like a third of humanity at the time.
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The one with delayed macroeconomic consequences, while emboldening aggressive adversaries with personal endorsement.
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We need a voting system that allows for convergence on more than the winner-take-all from the collection of all losers, perhaps ranked-choice ballots.
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Biden wasn't the one who cultivated the Afghan leaders who abandoned their people, and were entrusted to do their duty as we departed as the Office of the President (i.e. held by the previous guy) firmly promised.
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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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@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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@douglasgyi We don't necessarily want China to fail, only the haughty (can't do wrong, conveniently forget Mao years and 1989), exclusionary (Han ethnicity >> everyone else), and patronizing (unchallengeable authoritarianism) attitudes that the CPC advocates. However the CPC deliberately equates itself to "China", and so calls for Communist downfall sounds like calls to take down the Chinese people, which the Party can then use to rally hateful support.
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They're scared that it ultimately means political reforms. The CPC doesn't want to continually defend its dominance against political competition, even though that's what free market actors have to do all the time.
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@ivanbudianto1962 Make friends yes. Make families no, at least if they want to keep their identity as authentically "Japanese".
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That will backfire spectacularly. The "uneducated" literally help keep our food affordable, along with keeping America's massive agricultural exports competitive. Plus coming down hard on whole groups of 'undesirable' newcomers also discourages consideration from the ones we really want.
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That's exactly what Japanese companies say they support, but in practice are wholly hostile to.
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The US recently came out with an improved bolt-on JDAM kit that turns cheap gravity bombs into warship killers -- there's tens of thousands in the existing stockpile launchable by practically anything that flies, each at 1/20th the cost of a regular anti-ship missile. A dozen-sortie raid would easily overwhelm even the most heavily-armed cruiser, and would be overkill for the practically defenseless patrol boats and coastal cutters that make up the bulk of the PLAN fleet.
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Land forces aren't that useful in a largely air and sea battle of cross-Straits combat. In fact they may be a liability having to feed them all, especially when food and fuel prices explode in the absence of shipping to Chinese ports who got scared off by the crossfire.
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America has been tearing itself apart constantly, critics have doubted its continued existence since 1812, various Panics, the Civil War, the anarco-communist insurrection, the Great Depression, and the Civil Rights Movement where even the President wasn't safe from some random sniper. These critics underestimate the American ability to come back and help each other just as fast. China also has a long history of revolt and reform, but each reform often requires a full and usually violent change of leadership, which is exactly what the Party fears.
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Chinese soldiers aren't paid as much, but they're also stuck doing a lot of political indoctrination classes while American units regularly get sent to field exercises if not the combat zone. Plus PLA equipment gets enough complaints of breakdowns in garrison, imagine how reliable those would be in the degraded maintenance of war.
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The US wouldn't be fighting to dominate China, it'd be more returning enough fire and gathering allies to make trade with China undesirable and prolonging the pain until the Party's dragon starves and collapses under its own weight as food, fuel, and foreign reserves dwindle. Even seizing Táiwān won't guarantee Communist victory, because it'll be followed by an insurrection in very defensible terrain by a prepared hostile population... who have been asking the US their direct experience on how to defeat the political agenda of a modern occupying force.
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But then the PLA's budget is split between defending its territory from its neighbors (nearly all of whom carry considerable discontent with China), rehearsing and performing grand parades, and regular stand-downs for political indoctrination. This doesn't leave much to go toe to toe with a opponent with much more training and combat experience... and there's no land war for casual combatants to ambush them from.
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Veterancy and experience would be especially important in this scenario, because there wouldn't be much of a land war where casual combatants can hide and ambush from. For air and sea operations, pure technical superiority is all that really matters.
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@HDsharp What makes you say that? Maritime SE Asia is leaning anti-China -- I was just there, and that's the feeling I got talking with the locals.
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The effect of the spending depends on access too, Afghanistan is literally surrounded by major anti-US powers on all sides so a lot of that money had to go into basically bribery for the gatekeepers. For Táiwān though there's only open ocean and plenty of friendly ports nearby... combine that with defensible terrain and a hostile population, and the island is arguably the Afghanistan for Mainland China.
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US doesn't have to overpower China either, just dissuade trade with sanctions and potential crossfire, starving the Mainland of the food and fuel it has to import. That's if America wants to preempt the looming challenges of aging, debt, pollution, and corruption which threatens the continued prosperity of the PRC (and thus the legitimacy of an unchallenged CPC) anyway.
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Once the missiles launch the supplies will dry up anyway. Anti-ship missiles aren't terribly smart on their own -- especially when the long range sensor assets are under attack -- and it only takes one container ship being mistaken for a juicy aircraft carrier or amphibious assault ship to really scare away the civilian traffic who were sailing to China.
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Don't forget that the Taiwanese will be fighting too. Even with a PLA takeover there's still plenty of space on the island from which they can hide and mount an insurrection... and they're increasingly asking the US on how even a minimally armed but determined population can defeat the political agenda of an occupying force.
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Russia relies more on subterfuge -- it's estimated that their intelligence community is like 3x the size of America's. The cost being a culture-wide lack of trust in each other, on top of having not much else going for the average Russian citizen.
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Right, Maritime SE Asia has been heading anti-China despite their "non-aligned" policy because of all the hostile acts with Chinese fishing hordes emptying the local seas. Indonesia alone could make it really hurt for China by stopping ships going through their waters -- they're already readily suspicious of Chinese, Communists, and acts of anti-Islam -- and along with Vietnam and the Philippines would easily empty the PRC's treasury by forcing them to use more expensive overland routes for basic food and fuel. I wouldn't be surprised if undeployed PLA forces were even left largely unmolested, just so they can eat through the Mainland's dwindling supplies and fuel unrest among China's civilians to cause even more division in operational efforts.
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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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@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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@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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