ffmpreg

with the sino/us geneva agreement in danger of breaking down due to chips/rare earths dispute, one wonders if china bottlenecking RE will finally allow the US to rediscover industrial policy. it's pretty clear that chinese dominance in REs allows them to crush any competitor on the free market at will, with the disturbing implication that the XHS strategy of using fake money (but i repeat myself) to build out supply chains in peripheral countries, at least in this sector, could be less than optimal. it was dicey for strategic necessities in the first place, but for something with as much capital overhead as REs the risks become noticeably starker.

it appears that the necessity of security of production, once subsidized by western technological and financial superiority, is once again asserting itself as hegemony erodes. the ongoing russian drone fiasco provides illustration in this regard (i think someone else actually mentioned factories being a more valuable target inthread). the working assumption is that no one is dumb enough to halfass things in this situation (the actual working assumption is nothing ever happens), but i wouldn't rule out the funniest outcomes of building processing in australia/greenland or failing to protect monopoly power from non-government corpos.

But the US can mobilize unemployed/underemployed domestic resources and put them into better use.

like i said, it's a political problem, not a technical one. to utilize those resources is likely politically toxic as of right now, which is why we don't see any movement thereof. like, if real life were a map painting game, the one billion americans meme is probably not such a bad idea for the US in the medium term, but it's constrained less by how fast the US can birth/import 600 millionish burgerlings and more by the willingness of the american ruling class to create conditions that can sustain that level of spawn. how fast the culture at the top changes is anyone's guess and it's a race to the bottom on both sides of the pacific.

in any case, as good marxists, it is understood that political solutions are usually downstream of material changes. considering the current rate of nothings happening per week, i think it is not overly optimistic that we will begin to see the quantitative changes accumulating into some sort of transition stage toward qualitative transformation in the next 2 to 5 years. whether or not that transformation is something actually conducive to the human race, again, remains to be seen.

i'm not an accountant, so i don't know what the specifics would look like, but i would like to point out that the main problem here is political and not technical. just as the US as it stands could technically print its way out of any economic hard spot, technically, china could also pivot to an electricity backed currency on top of thoroughly modernizing its water purification and distribution networks. these in conjunction with the tax reforms would usher in another round of growth that would be on par with the post GFC real estate boom as well as position china favorably at the beginning of a parallel and more modern economic order. unfortunately, reform of those three taxes is equivalent to a revolution for the bourgeoisie, and would count as the fourth major redistribution event (could also be considered elite replacement event if we're feeling superstructural) in the CPC's history after the GLF, GPCR and reform and opening up.

i personally don't find it likely that the party has the internal political will or consensus to commit to reforms on this level, but thankfully we have comrade trump to act as an external catalyst, and so it remains to be seen how things will play out.

adults need these as well, just have to add up to date references and better illustrations than the 3d garbage that has replaced a lot of the art in these books

could just be marketed towards adults as a curated hobbyist subreddit knowledgebase, kids are mostly only there for the pictures anyway

3 main types need to be implemented: capital gains, inheritance, and customs. realistically these reforms can probably only be implemented after the current geopolitical turbulence is over as such changes would mostly affect bureaucrat-oligarch party insiders and would face much more internal resistance than even the purges of the last decade. as such, there is likely significant vested interest within the party to keep the US on life support as much as possible. not in the XHS sense that they will allow the USD to indefinitely parasitize the world (that would be naive and ignorant of the current nature of capital), but rather that they're aiming for a steady and controlled detonation of US hegemony and a relatively seamless and painless transition of power; the CPC have mostly learned the lesson that the soviet union was in reality america's greatest ally, and that it was the americans that lost the most from soviet dissolution.

saudis should have very publicly insisted that the us use them as a launchpad for a land invasion of yemen, would have been much more fun to watch the regime wriggle out of that than whatever this is

they wouldnt gain anything, they would be handing the us a golden opportunity to generate instability in the region and thus divert large capital flows away from northeast asia and back towards the us. the point is to slowly and painlessly strangle the us influence out of asia while the us is bogged down in the middle east again.

you see the beginnings of this with yoons ousting and japanese waffling on anti chinese aggression while simultaneously trying their hardest to keep the ukraine conflict alive so that the americans have things to worry about other than igniting ukraine 2.0 in westpac.

lmao

chinese opinion-havers are floating the idea that the phillipines will be the one to be made an example of, reason being that taiwan is comically overmatched and that offing another vassal will send the same message of american impotence to sk/jp/tw while not actually destroying territory you intend to take. also because the pinoys are the least economically relevant entity in the region.

they're gonna swap reserve currency status for a chance to wipe out the national debt and reindustrialize via a hyperinflated currency

could work eventually imo, might have a hard time holding down the domestic situation in the meantime though

theyre not, the police get kickbacks and look the other way so long as people upstairs arent pressured to 'do something'

there are routine inspections but heads up will be given so people can clear out ahead of time

as demographics shift, the problem of education (elite overproduction) will fix itself to some degree (50% hs admittance cutoff already relaxing, blue collar work is more and more well compensated as labor pool shrinks), but it wont go away without massive reforms, which will likely not happen as there are too many people who benefit from the way it is currently set up, same as hukou

this case of education and its motivating factors is a great example of superstructure shaping base, how pecuniary emulation remains a relevant, perhaps even marxist, concept even today, and is a primary driver of why the asian diaspora, particularly in america, is so dependent on white supremacy for its continued existence