Comments by "Kevin Street" (@Kevin_Street) on "PolyMatter" channel.

@TheAsagrim That's the thing, all authoritarian governments turn bad eventually. If you keep gambling you'll eventually lose and get a Nero, Stalin or Kim Jong-un. Singapore has been lucky so far, and to be fair the people running their government have been remarkably open to innovation and free of corruption, but does anyone think that luck will last forever? Hopefully the PAP will eventually see the need to employ democratic reforms the same way they reformed things like housing and health care.
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Thank you for this new video! So the key points: - The digital Yuan is not cryptocurrency. It's almost the opposite, since it's designed to be trackable and controllable. - The renminbi can't be a truly "international" currency (that is a true competitor to the USD, bought and sold without hesitation all around the world) until the Chinese government removes capital controls and lets the currency's exchange rate "float" freely. It's that last point that interests me the most, as an ordinary person and non-economist. I'm curious how the Chinese government controls the value of its currency.
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Not just proud, but also too frightened to acknowledge the problems.
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@fauzirahman3285 There will always be a place for conventional rail as long as cost matters more than time for some types of cargo. (Like pretty much anyone or anything that's not a rich business person.) And finding ways to move conventional rail away from fossil fuels (Maybe with hydrogen powered engines, or massive batteries?) would be far better for the environment than building completely new high speed rail systems.
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I was just summarizing what I learned in the video. I've no personal opinion on these matters one way or another. But yes, true cryptocurrency would be better than the digital Yuan proposed by the Chinese government. You can look on the blockchain to see after the fact which wallets gave or received crypto, but it isn't immediately and intimately trackable the way this Yuan would be. The digital Yuan would be linked to citizen's social credit scores and could be used to track people as soon as they used it.
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@jackm.1628 Yep, this it. They're very aware of how they came into power, and don't want to be swept out of power by another popular movement.
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Taiwan has done an excellent job of making itself irreplaceable to the world. If this was a game of Civ they'd be well on their way to a Diplomatic Victory. Not quite there yet, but close...
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@fauzirahman3285 Yeah, overhead power is an option too. It seems to work quite well in denser parts of the world where there are multiple nearby towns and connections to the local electrical grid. Where I live in North America it's probably less of an option because trains would have to run for hundreds of kilometres between stops.
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Ironically, you need a credit card to subscribe to Nebula. Just as you need a credit card to buy anything on the Internet. Companies that refuse to take cards are giving up on online sales.
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I would like to see this too.
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Thank you for this video! It's incredibly interesting.
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The ironic thing is that China was doing so well with their previous policies of foreign engagement. Here in Canada they were successful at both industrial espionage (Nortel) and increasing their soft power through programs like financial partnerships with universities. Less than ten years ago anyone who saw China as a threat to Canada was seen as stuck in the past and maybe somewhat racist. Now that's changed, thanks to China's attitude of unceasing bellicosity. Today, when Canadians think of China we think of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, who've languished in Chinese jails for more than a year and are now going on trial for fictional crimes of espionage. We think of Meng Wanzhou and China's crude attempts to force our justice system to let her go. Then there's Huawei and how it nearly got it's infrastructure built into our 5G networks...Before that would have been seen as a positive example of cross Pacific trade, now we wonder what kind of spyware they would've built into our phones.
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