Whats really interesting about our timeline is when you look at the history of market capture in Big Oil, Telco, Pharma, Real Estate, Banks, Tobacco etc all the lobbying, bribing, competition killing used to be done behind the scenes within elite circles.
The public hardly heard from or saw the mgmt of these firm in media until shit hit the fan.
Today it feels like managment is in the media every 3 hours trying to capture attention of prospective customers, investors, employees etc or they loose out to whoever is out there capturing more attention.
So false and condradictory signalling is easy to see. Hopefully out of all this chaos we get a better class of leaders not a better class of panderers.
I mean, to whatever extent it matters. All these outrageously rich morons still have tons of economic and social clout. They still have pages upon pages of fans foaming at the mouth for the opportunity to harass people asking basic questions. They still carry undue influence in our society and in our industry no matter how many times they are "outed."
What does being outed even mean anymore? It's just free advertising from all the outlets that feel they can derive revenue off your name being in their headlines. Nothing happens to them. SBF and Holmes being the notable exceptions, but that's because they stole from rich people.
In the defense of the people, there has been an explosion of useless information. Just look at the number of settings on an Android phone or Chrome browser or in your Google account. Human Brains dont grow at the same rate year on year.
Agree. Difference being the amount of stuff competing for kids Attention has exponentially increased. Attention Theft is a phrase I read on HN a while back. Felt like a good description of the main dynamic in the Attention Economy.
>Well US is not dependent on anyone for her Energy needs.
China's strength is they have the means of production (and maintenance) of everyone today, including the US. All the energy in the world means jack squat when all the means of using that energy rely on China.
Could the west regain our own means of production? Certainly, but it's going to take far too long at the point China starts pursuing Bigger Gun Diplomacy. We're talking multiple decades to reachieve what we've surrendered, perhaps even the better part of a century because we simply don't have the ambition and political will to do so.
I think China has been very shrewd with how they conducted themselves in the past half century or so. They've already won most wars they might be involved in before they start by seizing the economies of their supposed enemies.
China makes consumer crap not our guns and bombs. In a wartime situation maybe people can’t get iphone cases from temu, big whoop. Not the first time the american population rationed consumer products in wartime. We will still have power and air, sea, and space superiority which is what really matters.
This is really out of date thinking, even South Korea is better at making ships than America now. In wartime China would switch from gadgets to bombs and drones and out produce us by an order of magnitude. They already produce 3x more vehicles than America; It’s 2024, not 1956. Review the article called “The return of industrial warfare”.
China also makes a huge amount of pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, electronic components, and parts for capital equipment. Decoupling from them would be very painful.
China makes a lot of electronics on which our infrastructure and logistics run. Much good a gun or a bomb will do you if you suddenly cannot get them from point A where they are made/stored to point B where they need to be used on time.
Look at the rate at which munitions are expended on the frontlines in Ukraine, for example. Those kinds of amounts need the transportation network to be working in good order. Bring down a single major logistics hub, and bad things happen.
I'm not talking about production here, but delivery. For that you need roads and railroads, bridges etc to function. How many of those are susceptible to digital takedowns?
Although factories are also an interesting case if they are not airgapped.
Everyone has outsourced all their cheap and low-quality manufacturing to China, therefore China is only capable of manufacturing cheap, low quality items. Is this your argument?
My argument is we have not outsourced bombs and sensitive military technology building to china. It is mostly the stuff we can stand to tighten belt on. Even if there is some demand for things like chinese medicine or whatever, its a market effect and not because only china is capable of making this medicine like how only US defense industry can make some of its secretive military tooling.
You can convert coal to gas and petrol, and China has a lot of coal. So it can be reduced to an industrial scaling problem which China is very good at.
They have huge amounts, but want slightly more. They're the biggest coal producer, producing half the world's coal, and then consuming it too, along with importing an extra 10% which is coking coal for steel making. They have lots of lignite and bituminous coal, which is fine for heat and electricity, and would be fine for turning into gas and liquid hydrocarbon fuel if that was useful.
Am I missing something? This does not seem consistent with what I have seen going out of the harbors. Exports of both thermal and metallurgical coal from the United States to China have increased [0][1].
Donbas - the part of Ukraine that is presently occupied by Russia - is called that because it's an abbreviation of "DONetsk coal BASin", one of the largest in the world.
Coincidentally, there has been a downturn in coal production there in the past two decades (and the associated closure of mines and processing infrastructure and unemployment) because of reduced demand. But if China were suddenly in dire need of coal, it wouldn't be hard for Russia to scale things up again there.
The Chinese are building solar farms and wind farms at an incredibly fast pace. Have you seen how cheap Chinese solar panels are? It's safe to assume by the time they decide to make a military move on Taiwan, they will have achieved energy independence as well.
I dont know if they teach the Theory of Bounded Rationality anymore but it helped me when I was younger and got thrown into similar complex no win situations.
The tendency is to think ALL complex problems can be solved if I just have the right info, the right skill, the right people, the right resources, enough time etc etc. But for some problems the stars will not align. In those cases what do you do?
You have 2 option - 1. pick a Simpler problem where u do have the info, skill, resources, people, time to ensure the outcome is going to be positive
2. pick the complex problem but accept you are not going to solve it completely.
I'd argue for a third option: don't try to solve it by sitting in your chair. Go out and work on the problem, and see if what you're doing is improving it.
As a very HN-y analogy: there's a reason programmers don't debug purely by static analysis. They don't just stare at the code. They do step-throughs. They look at logs. They tweak things and see what happens. They experiment and learn from their experimentation. A program is about as controlled and isolated an environment as you will ever have in the real world, and even in that domain, pure analysis is rarely sufficient.
A mentor put it this way to me: you can't steer a stationary ship. The ship has to be moving for the rudder to work, and therefore it's better to be heading in the wrong direction (where you can turn around once you figure that out) than to be sitting still, doing nothing.
> I'd argue for a third option: don't try to solve it by sitting in your chair. Go out and work on the problem, and see if what you're doing is improving it.
Amen to this. Doing is a strong teacher, sometimes the only teacher.
I've grown a ton as a person from my work, and one of the biggest things I've learned is how easy it is to have confident, empirically-supported, well-argued, and totally wrong opinions. There's no better way to test your views than to bet on them and put them out into the world - even if they don't work, you'll learn something.
Of course, that can go too far in the other direction, because empirical results are often driven by factors outside your control too. So you do need to be doing analysis and not just looking at results. But analysis alone doesn't get you there, even if you're extraordinarily brilliant (and, statistically, you probably aren't).
Yup, but what I see so often happening is that people will look at the situation and automatically affix responsibility to whatever side has the most power, they obviously are being derelict in not working hard enough to solve the problem. Any attempt to point out other factors is treated as supporting the abuse by the side with the power. They have "solved" it by finding someone to blame.
Or you just can fight that tendency, fight this “solutionism” worldview, not everything is solvable, things may not turn out all right, but that’s ok, too. I.e. one should embrace the fatalism, the “it is what it is” worldview.
Once upon a time I used to live in libraries to make any kind of progress on certain problems. Then Google arrived and my library visits reduced drastically. Yet libraries still stand. And I still head there whenever I need some peace and quite. Something like that will happen with StackOverflow, Wikipedia, Quora,Reddit and even HN.
The public hardly heard from or saw the mgmt of these firm in media until shit hit the fan.
Today it feels like managment is in the media every 3 hours trying to capture attention of prospective customers, investors, employees etc or they loose out to whoever is out there capturing more attention.
So false and condradictory signalling is easy to see. Hopefully out of all this chaos we get a better class of leaders not a better class of panderers.