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

  1. Beijing's published numbers have been so sugarcoated, and our investments have been eating it up for so long, that unless we diversify our capital diet ASAP, we're trending towards the financial version of a diabetic shock.
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  2. Chinese loans are problematic because judicious write-offs are a vital component of achieving larger developmental goals. Western lenders are at least sometimes open to debt forgiveness, unlike China who at best might delay the payment schedule but always want all of that money back.
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  3. Even the rich ones like the Gulf States are on shaky ground once the oil wells run dry, and they can no longer afford to feel so blessed and entitled 🛱📉
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  4. Having lived in Mainland China, I can see why so many want to escape to America. It may be lucrative for corporations, but it’s a horrible place to be a human, especially outside of Party connections. Ironically the effective tax burden is about the same in both countries too. It’s all about where those revenues are getting spent.
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  5. Having just left Mainland China, my observation is that the more pessimistic reports are still much closer to the reality on the ground.
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  6. The late Premier Li Keqiang himself said like half of China is still effectively impoverished. The "poverty" level Beijing keeps touting it defeated is the extreme and easily resolved dollar-a-day type, apparently a lot of which was done through direct handouts rather than actually durable development.
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  7. And very dependent on foreigners to do the actual work.
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  8. The picky exclusiveness is markedly stronger.
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  9. Luxuryburg đŸ‡±đŸ‡ș
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  10. The rich pay the most because they took the most. But as a share of wealth they pay next to nothing compared to what the average citizen pays. That’s how badly stacked the distribution is.
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  11. Autocracy rules over a brittle society, one whose people would either stand by or run away rather than help defend the state when attacked because of the lack of investment in the politics. But this is the norm for China, as a Chinese ethnostate has never seen anything but top-down impunity until Taiwan democratized at the end of the Cold War. Mainland China however doubles down on its aristocracy (in this case a Party instead of an imperial family), and risks the same violent chaotic popping of its insular political bubble that befell every dynasty before it.
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  12. It's in the name: "submission", i.e. obedience to men who claim to carry a closer connection to God/Allah despite all their still very human faults.
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  13. The Middle East used to be the center of humanity through the first five centuries of Islam. Then after the Mongol conquest receded, religious hardliners took over local politics and the region never recovered its past glory because their hostility against outsiders compelled Europe-Asia trade to sail around them ever since.
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  14. Right, it seems like they sourced figures from Chinese state media or uncritical Western parrots. The true picture would be considerably less rosy, and having lived in Mainland China I’ve observed that the more pessimistic reports tends to be the most accurate.
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  15. Unfortunately not, desert sand is too fine and smooth to cement together. Otherwise we'd all be using it by now.
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  16. If you’re not interested in ultimately leading organizations yeah. Soft skills are just as important for lifetime earnings, and one of the quickest way to demotivate most people is by hitting them with technical figures. There’s a reason STEM graduates are notoriously troublesome to work under, and why they tend to perform poorly in politics.
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  17. It’s not crushed, but it certainly curtailed the ambitions to expand its global relevance and influence.
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  18. VisualEconomik really needs to spend the literally one minute to learn how to pronounce names correctly, or at least sound like they try. An apparent cold read is not only distracting but also hints at not actually researching the topic. Their Korean is even worse.
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  19. I studied sociology and earn a six figure salary. Turns out that human users are the weakest link in an information system, hence a career in cybersecurity and network administration.
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  20. I didn't say any of them collapsed, they're all just going nowhere fast. This is especially hazardous to the CPC whose continued legitimacy and tolerance by the Chinese people relies on substantial indefinite progress down to the personal level.
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  21. America was here before basically 100 years ago during the age of laissez-faire trusts. Young (and not so young) workers would protest for better pay and conditions, and managers responded with police-backed violence. An anarcho-communist movement grew as a result, and political takeover was ultimately stopped by compromises of collectivization programs such as strengthened labor unions and the advent of Social Security. Such "socialism" would have to be revisited before younger generations remain enchanted by more extreme leftist ideas when they end up replacing those in power in due course.
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  22. A market that hesitates to buy and only gets more spendthrift as they age into retirement and volatile gig work.
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  23. The US is the greatest example of success by a former colony đŸ‡ș🇾
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  24. Black as in “in the shadows” of back alleys and hidden rooms.
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  25. It'd probably cause even more panic about China's future, as it would signal a critical shortage of funds.
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  26. I have a social science degree, yet work as an IT manager. Turns out pulling cable and tweaking configurations is straightforward, what’s harder is steering human users towards best practices and away from policy violations through the mentally easiest and least annoying methods.
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  27. Healthcare like other utilities is a natural monopoly due to the time sensitivity and huge information asymmetry between actors -- you're not going to shop around for the best ER rates in the middle of a heart attack, and you'd need to graduate medical school yourself to even start challenging the diagnosis and prescriptions of a doctor (even then it's not recommended). This is why the patient-facing side of healthcare is so easily broken when allowing the "free market" to dictate payments and treatments -- each provider effectively enjoys substantial monopoly powers themselves, and especially for-profit schemes come at the expense of the time of doctors and service quality of patients in the exam room. Resolving this seems to involve having a nonprofit accountable administrator (like a government, as much as you refuse to believe it to be one) strictly regulate if not control healthcare like it does every other utility. Top-end services that the rich enjoy might see a hit, but that's not what most patients require anyway. Being constantly abroad, I've benefitted from treatments in places where the whole population pays into the system -- even as a foreign tourist the higher "out of pocket" expense for me still ends up cheaper and services much better due to the collectivized costs of the underlying medical infrastructure.
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  28. From their unborn grandchildren, who at this rate will never exist to pay back all those bonds and loans.
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  29. It makes me question how well researched this video essay was if they can't even pronounce the main guy's name correctly.
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  30. That's what makes theocracies such a drag: "God will provide" so shut up and be satisfied with your station in life.
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  31. Maritime trade just exacerbated the ongoing decline of Islamic societies. Their growing hostility made the treacherous unmapped seas worth the risk compared to comfortable nights at their inns next to their established markets and caravan paths.
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  32. The US speaks loud and breaks things, or rather it loudly proclaims things are broken. The dramatization is how issues gains attention and gets addressed.
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  33. Capitalism where the capital has plenty of competition, sure. Problem is the capital is being allowed to concentrate and entrench itself at the expense (literally) of the average consumer.
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  34. ​ @jliang70 I was just in the Mainland a couple months ago. Crowds felt kinda listless (especially those in their 20s and 30s), lines and wait times anywhere were reasonably short, and holy f*** was the international airport terminal empty. It's like Zero-COVID didn't end, just the daily swabs and mini-app scan part.
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  35. The most shielded income is corporate though. But politicians are scared to simplify those arcane deductions and pursue those funds that is best spent supporting us all.
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  36. I've heard the true are estimates between 3~5x, which makes even the US seem like a prudent debtor by comparison.
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  37. The teaching part is an issue though. Either you need to already have a trustworthy and competent local government to develop their citizens with your aid, or you administer it directly -- which is arguably colonization. Aid project failures stem from giving while having neither condition on the other end satisfied.
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  38. Western lenders are at least sometimes open to debt forgiveness, unlike China who at best might delay the payment schedule but always want all of that money back. This is why Chinese loans are so toxic, because judicious write-offs are a vital component of achieving larger developmental goals.
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  39.  @hkonhelgesen  Only if they’re still working. More likely they’re laid off and getting desperate for a new paycheck. Like I said, it’s a death spiral. It’s not a favorable market correction.
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  40. More like bad government, especially when so entrenched that there are no real challenges to their continued rule. It's not the size of the government, it's what they do with the power -- I've lived in low-tax weak-state Africa and it's not any more comfortable.
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  41. There's been widespread usage of air conditioning, personal cars, and cheap migrant labor for a while now. However based on what they spend their wealth on, it seems what they value are expressions of entitlement.
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  42. Japan got to 1980s tech like two decades before everyone else. Problem is three decades afterward they're still living in the 80s.
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  43. More like climate change, where the predicted ultimate fate still trends towards true, it's only the timeline that's been too pessimistic earlier on.
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  44.  @1krani That’s what the US is already. A lot of implementation inefficiencies and ineffectiveness comes from having states reinterpret and reprioritize national policies, which they can easily do being themselves sovereign over their own jurisdictions.
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  45. That's how bad it was before the ACA for the rest of America who couldn't afford or were denied coverage.
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  46. It is what the CPC wants us to believe about their China.
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  47. A politically and economically centralized nation full of inefficient state-run industries and useless jobs to pad employment numbers, blaming the deliberate acts of some outsider group for its failure to relive a past ethnocentric glory, and openly scheming for total resource independence to support an upcoming forced assimilation of its neighbors? Sounds like the “New China” of the CPC đŸ«”đŸŒ ☭
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  48.  @ArawnOfAnnwn  More like the CPC has caused far worse times, and silenced those who dare to express their experiences that counters the Party’s narrative of being overall “great, glorious, and correct”. Past major dynasties and the Republic on the Mainland have quite a few things in common: they all committed similar mass atrocities on the Chinese people, and they all transitioned through mass violence with not insignificant domestic support.
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  49. Demand for which is also slowing down, as China pressures for payback on current loans for what keeps turning out to be disappointing quality and revenue on their projects.
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  50. It would heal with every funeral and new birth, if certain local powers didn't intentionally reopen those old wounds to indoctrinate those old thoughts.
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