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Trade Wars, 5G, AI, Peak Oil and the big picture future?
General discussions of the systemic, societal and civilisational effects of depletion.
by bochen777 » Sat 15 Jun 2019, 17:06:47
The US doesn't actually want any trade deal at all, it is all about decoupling the two economies since they believe at this point that is the best strategic move is a quick untanglement. Hence everything is designed to intentionally irritate China in order to provoke it to retaliate and thus speed up the decoupling process even more, which is the true goal here. America views this as its crossing the Rubicon, since it knows that inaction will mean certain defeat. It believes right here and right now is the point of inflection and if it doesn't do whatever it takes to contain China using any and all means necessary it will forever lose the initiative and never get the chance again. For this reason, Huawei ban will never get reversed.
Also, Huawei could be just the tip of the iceberg, I'm sure right about now all the tech companies in China are getting together with the Chinese government to work out a plan forward. Huawei making its own Android alternative isn't just about Huawei anymore, it will be leveraged as an insurance policy against the credible threat of Trump administration putting more Chinese tech firms onto the list, such as Oppo, DJI, etc etc Once a homegrown OS or chip ability is developed, it will be adopted and used by all Chinese companies to help shelter the coming storms, the only hope and only way forward is for all of China to stick together. The Chinese domestic consumer market is surpassing that of the US, it no longer makes sense to prop up the unsustainable petrodollar hegemony at the expense of its own BRI plans... Geopolitically it is a zero sum game, and at the very least, Asians should be in charge of the affairs of Asia. This is why MIC2025 is more important than ever for China in terms of an existential perspective.
At a macroeconomic and geopolitical level it is a zero sum game. China rises at the expense of the American empire and vice versa. The focus now is on 5G, the Internet of Things, AI, big data, and the kind of next level automation and intelligence multiplier factor that comes with it. From self driving cars to helpdesk and call centers to all facets of the traditional workforce, increasingly neural networks/machine learning and AGI are able to do tasks better than humans, and in a much more scalable way, reducing many jobs from janitors to CEO high level decision making to mere electric or electricity costs to run the deep learning inference models and associated applications etc. This sort of efficiency in productivity should have brought about massive increases in standards of living if it were for the fact that globally we have approached and hit the ceiling to the limits of growth, and things like climate and environmental degradation, peak oil, diminishing eroei etc offest even the greatest productivity achievements that could be accomplished by a super AI. The basic premise of a UBI society is that artificial intelligence handles the bulk of the "work", ushering into massive abundance due to productivity, and we humans enjoy the resource allocation. But this ideal scenario is predicated upon an environment in which the global resources haven't yet hit hard constraints.
To but it bluntly, automation screwing people out of a job in masse could barely even cover for the hard constraints in limits to resource extraction/availability imposed upon us by the laws of physics, much less enable the sort of redistribution of abundance in that sort of utopia society that most people ideally are hoping for. AI screwing people out of a job will be a increasingly necessary thing to keep the lights on and the fabric of society and civilization tenable, but the displaced will never be given the reallocation of wealth that never even existed in the first place and doesn't in fact exists at all to give out. Certainly in the US homeland, the trend of shrinking middle class will only continue accelerate until the elite and the concentration of power decide that it is in powers best interest to do a culling of sorts. The erosion of rights and civil liberties will certainly accelerate in that direction.
How do you guys see this playing out?
bochen777
Joined: Sun 18 Dec 2016, 12:01:22
Re: Trade Wars, 5G, AI, Peak Oil and the big picture future?
by GHung » Sat 15 Jun 2019, 17:52:10
America views this as its crossing the Rubicon
Which America would that be? If you mean Trump's America, you are WAY overthinking things. Trump's only stragedy is making crap up every 5 minutes or so, throwing chit at walls to see what sticks, and blaming any/everyone else when things don't go so well. Can't say "when things don't go as planned" because there is no plan beyond Trump's self-aggrandizement.
Blessed are the Meek, for they shall inherit nothing but their Souls. - Anonymous Ghung Person
GHung
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Actually the POTUS doesn't have real power, Trump like Obama and those before him, merely PR figurehead that do as the CIA/ Fed/ lobbyists, think tanks, military industrial complex, joint chiefs, tell them to do. The presidents change, admins change, but the overarching long term principles and strategies remain the same.
bochen777 wrote: Actually the POTUS doesn't have real power, Trump like Obama and those before him, merely PR figurehead that do as the CIA/ Fed/ lobbyists, think tanks, military industrial complex, joint chiefs, tell them to do. The presidents change, admins change, but the overarching long term principles and strategies remain the same.
Ah, yes.... The evil Overlord Hive Mind, in control.
Last edited by GHung on Sat 15 Jun 2019, 20:05:45, edited 1 time in total.
by asg70 » Sat 15 Jun 2019, 19:36:10
I see we have a new doomer in the house. Seems to be someone from Alex Jones' Infowars who has wandered off campus.
by Cog » Sun 16 Jun 2019, 06:11:37
China puts Spyware in its chipsets which is why the US is banning their use here. The theft of US proprietary information in big business in China. They are being punished for it appropriately.
by GHung » Sun 16 Jun 2019, 09:01:33
Cog wrote: China puts Spyware in its chipsets which is why the US is banning their use here. The theft of US proprietary information in big business in China. They are being punished for it appropriately.
Conveniently skips the part where it's the American consumer who pays the costs of "appropriate punishment".
by KaiserJeep » Sun 16 Jun 2019, 10:00:17
I am eternally tired of people NOT UNDERSTANDING why China has an economy that is more vibrant and developing faster than ours. I just finished a 34 year career for a major "big four" tech company, where I was one of thousands of engineers developing computer hardware.
We NEVER wanted to do business with China. They have massive problems producing products and maintaining consistent quality. Take disc drives for example - when we ran months-long, even years long reliability assessments of disc drives, we ended up disqualifying every single Chinese vender for poor quality. That left us with a single disc vender in San Jose, CA (IBM). When they sold out to Hitachi and Hitachi ended production, we had no choice about who we did business with.
When you do RFP's (Requests For Procurement) and the only venders who submit samples are Chinese, you reluctantly do business with the Chinese, knowing that you will have problems, and that when you correct those problems, you will have other problems with the corrections, until you are lost in a series of overlapping quality actions.
But no American companies responded to our RFPs, even though we would have paid more, and tolerated a lower profit margin, for quality product components.
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KaiserJeep
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GHung wrote:
So do Chinese tarriffs on US products hurt Chinese consumers? If tarriffs didn't hurt China, they wouldn't be raising Cain about them.
by evilgenius » Sun 16 Jun 2019, 16:02:33
As far as I could tell, when it was happening, the rise of China was based upon cheap labor. Does anybody remember how it was when Walmart was starting? They used to have American flags all over the store. They touted themselves as a place where you could buy American. That was not entirely a response to China. The Japanese had a lot to do with that. Nowadays, we only wish we could go back to the days of the Japanese bogeyman. Made in Japan used to be a byword for cheap quality, but low cost. Only the Japanese never had the capacity to pull off the scale that the Chinese could with their population base. Today, incidentally, Japanese goods are not noted for poor quality. They have to compete with the Chinese somehow too.
So many of today's problems are related to the lower wages that people have had to accept because of the influence of first Japan, and then China. But it wasn't those country's fault that happened. They needed to rise up, for the good of the world and themselves. This is just like the crash of 2007-8, where multiple parties are involved. Only one of those was big business. Another was the American consumer. But lowest price appeals to those who have less to spend, and that wasn't always the case with Americans. They did once have the money to buy quality over what was simply cheapest. There is some sort of misidentification of class among Americans that feeds into this. Laboring people in America don't want to be known as laboring people, or so it would seem.
The other day I was watching this thing, I think it was on CNBC, that talked about why Home Depot failed in China. The Chinese don't believe in DIY. They, instead, believe in do it for me, DIFM. America once used to believe in DIFM too. When furniture started to show up in flat pack boxes, it didn't receive nearly the level of acceptance it does now. Nowadays, people in America consider it normal to buy furniture that way. They don't know what solid wood looks like, unless they buy their furniture second hand. The same goes for the quality level of things like appliances. A washing machine may have needed a new belt every now and again, not a replacement in total. Mind you, it's some and some. You used to be able to buy nails by weight at lumber yards. Home Depot sells them by the box. There has been a reaching for efficiency alongside everything else. But that efficiency has always been related to cost. There is a fixation with cost around which so much of this has revolved. That same fixation with cost has spread to become a fixation with taxes. You don't see those very high marginal rates upon the wealthy which used to slow the velocity of money among the super rich any more. Enough marketing has been done by those people that even the poor think those are awful ideas today.
Earlier than that change, there were many pushes by big business against labor. Business never embraced labor as a partner, per se. Instead, they have always looked upon them as a cost. I think the rise of the misidentification may be partially due to marketing directed at the American people which sought, on a long term basis, to bring about pretty much the ideals we see today. Also, business sought, and got many changes to the law over time which disenfranchised labor and promoted a feudal approach, with the corporations where people worked being the feudal centers. Early Koch brothers, if you will. The voting people used to do was often based upon how many jobs were going to be lost or gained as a result. People still vote that way, sometimes, but it was part of the vernacular at a certain point in American history.
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There is some truth in your words. But let us not pretend that the UAW and specificly the Democrats were not fully co-dependant partners, or that they did not effectively end the reign of Detroit's "Big Four" in our vehicle marketplace. The unions and the Democrats both sickened the vehicle manufacturers, then bailed them out. Then AMC folded and there were three. Meanwhile good little UAW members voted Democrat as they were told, little parts in a big machine. The cost of labor is the reason automation was carried to an extreme, and the number of workers minimized as well. Now, outside of Chicago, the unions are no longer dependable parts of the Democrat machine. They were the victims of their own success.
KaiserJeep wrote: There is some truth in your words. But let us not pretend that the UAW and specificly the Democrats were not fully co-dependant partners, or that they did not effectively end the reign of Detroit's "Big Four" in our vehicle marketplace. The unions and the Democrats both sickened the vehicle manufacturers, then bailed them out. Then AMC folded and there were three. Meanwhile good little UAW members voted Democrat as they were told, little parts in a big machine. The cost of labor is the reason automation was carried to an extreme, and the number of workers minimized as well. Now, outside of Chicago, the unions are no longer dependable parts of the Democrat machine. They were the victims of their own success.
Yeah, that's true too. The point, and I have tried to make this point on this site before, has more to do with how we, as Americans, view ourselves. It's kind of sad that we couldn't embrace capitalism in a different way, nor labor relations. Today, there is a whole new approach to business management that may have included labor, instead of marginalizing it. Thus, if that had been the standard rather than that of the nut cutter back then, labor and management may have coexisted as partners. The past was all contention. I don't know, though. We may have been forerunners of a failed experiment that had to take place. It's so hard to tell, like how it is so hard to shed the bad acts of those who proceed us in families. The sins of the fathers and all that.
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