Comments by "Winston Smith" (@kryts27) on "Patrick Boyle"
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Deglobalization has already started and is snowballing. China's manufacturing hub, particularly around places like Shenzhen and Guangdong province (not far inland provinces, those now must be basket cases), much foreign manufacturing firms have left or are already leaving, like Apple. Local Chinese manufacturers cannot either sell to international markets or local consumers because of the severe recession in China. China's economy has tanked, strongly driven by a debt crises in provincial governments (including Guangdong and Shanghai) and is not recovering from the extensive Covid lockdowns. Recently, risk this has crossed over into large Western service companies with the recent all encompassing anti-espionage law by the CCP, whose powers are broad, definitions are vague and Western, Japanese etc. service companies, such as accounting and commercial law firms are highly at risk doing business in China now.
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Wildfires or bushfires (Australian idiom) are a consistent spring to autumn problem in South-Eastern Australia, which includes 8 large cities, and especially hundreds of townships, thousands of farms and dozens of large environmentally significant national parks. Some of the most damaging and expensive disasters has been caused by bushfires in this region of Australia.
Bushfire prevention is better than bushfire management, which starts at home, i.e, clearing flammable material from around your home, having sufficient water reserves (e,g, a large swimming pool and independently powered pumps) to fight fires at home, and a bushfire evacuation plan to save yourself, family menbers and pets. Many people die fleeing too late in their cars where buildings can offer better protection from radiant heat. You ought to get a property insurance reduction if you can prove you have carried out these fire provention measures on your property.
Finally, civic authorities need to do a better job in bushfire prevention. In safe weather condition, cool burns in forest reserves (other than the immediate smoke nuisance), remove undergrowth and dry flammable woody material which can otherwise add to the fuel load of a fire, which causes more heat, destruction and out-of-control bushfires.
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I thought World War 2 brought the US out of the depression, but this is not correct. In the US economy by 1939, consumption had recovered to (more or less) pre-depression levels. Unlike in Europe, government taxation had not yet gone heavily into armament production, although expensive capital ships (like carriers) had been built. Nevertheless, full wartime funding had not ramped up by the US government until 1940 (it was substantially engaged in war by 1942, but the numbers of planes, ships and tanks and full-strength front line manpower were still behind the Axis powers at that point). World War 2 was a setback for global economic growth, like the Great Depression.
Spending for war is not productive, because world trade is interrupted by economic blockades and shipping destruction (so you need to spend more money on escort ships and aircraft to prevent this). The civilian economy atrophies as well as more workers are drafted into wartime production; workers have more money but little to spend it on, particularly when food and fuel rationing was applied. This happened substantially in the US (except rationing) as well as British Empire in WW2. Additionally, substantial housing shortages occurred in countries that were not bombed at the end of WW2 (bombing destroys houses). This is because the civilian economy builds housing, which was atrophied and still the population increased where total war had not decimated it (such as in Central and Eastern Europe and Asia).
The Great Depression was a substantial economic shock, but Japan (and now China) are in a generational depression, not a short-term one like the Great Depression. In the 1930s, the US had fully industrialized and had a growing population (more importantly) from natural higher birth (than death) rates and still some immigration, so the Depression only ever was going to last a few years until consumption caught up again. Neither Japan nor China are emmigration countries, and although industrialized, they now are now both lacking industrial manpower because of population decline and aging. Old people consume less. This is affected Europe as well (particularly Eastern Europe), but immigration has kept the level of decline down for Westerm Europe compared to Japan and China.
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I don't necessarily agree with this. Rural China, on the whole, has not benefitted from any improvement in China's GDP in the past 30 years. Mao only destroyed what remained of China's overall economy (particularly the rural economy). The rural economy in China did benefit from the end of Mao's dead hand (literally and figuratively) in the 1980s, but fell behind relatively when the cities took off in the 1990s. China's rural sector suffers from a radically aging workforce, fields lying fallow from a lack of labour in a still labour intensive sector (China's rural sector is still radically under-mechanized), heavy and uncontrolled pollution from industry, land reclamation for ghost cities without compensation, and an over-use of organochloride pesticides which have been banned in the Western world in the 1980s and 1990s. China now imports 24% of it's food needs, something that did not happen under Deng Xiaoping's rule. Even Vietnam, a Communist state and a much smaller country exports rice from a production surplace, so unlike Vietnam, China has systematically mismanaged it's rural sector for the past 30 years. China's rural population is still half the population of China, so " lifting 800 million people out of poverty" is a false piece of propaganda slogan set by the CCP. Many of China's farmers remain the poorest in Asia.
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