Miscellaneous News
- Thread starter bd popeye
- Start date
Its really not that complicated. In the biggest and most broad picture humanity is fastly running out of resources while at the same time we are all also in a global situation of population overshoot, thus straining the earth's carrying capacity and jeopardizing the entire ecosystem of all life on earth. On the whole, everyone will be a lot poorer and times will be getting a lot more harder in the coming months, years and decades ahead, this is almost a mathematical certainty. Money/currency is nothing but a mere human symbolic social construct created as a mental proxy to account for the energy and resource deposits that exists on this planet. In modern times all/every economic activity requires an energy input as an essential prerequisite to production/wealth, but as global energy supplies (especially the cheap/plentiful and energy 'dense' types) are all used up and the remaining reserves are diminishing in EROEI (net energy returned on energy invested ratio) this means net productivity of human labor (which is largely propped up by the "work-multiplier-effect" of energy) will continue to decrease as well as the raw purchasing power of money will become exponentially eroded (this is the true cause of inflation and why wages cannot keep up with rise in prices). At the highest levels geopolitically the world is now not only a "zero sum game" but rather in truth it is a "negative sum game" whereby everyone's piece of the pie is actually shrinking even if the proportions haven't changed. For the past half a century or so, America has relied on its so-called "petrodollar hegemony" and the status of the US dollar being used as global "reserve currency" to prop up its extravagant way of life and high standards of living at the direct expense of essentially taxing the rest of the world by way of usury, even way back in the 70s then French President Charles De Gaulle commented on this arrangement of the US enjoying this exorbitant privilege of the petrodollar...
We are quickly reaching a point of inflection in which China is projected to comprehensively surpass America on the world stage within a decade, first economically and then technologically and eventually militarily and politically. The United States real foreign policy and power doctrine has always been that it does not tolerate peer competitors, and will likely initiate kinetic action (a hot war) ostensibly first over the "Taiwan issue" between now and 2027 but later escalating up to and including full scale nuclear war with China sooner rather than later, because China is closing the military gap quickly and so thus if the US were to ever try to contain and reduce China by force before the window of opportunity permanently closed, then it would need to strike sooner rather than later whilst it still retained the military advantage. In terms of an escalation ceiling, once nuclear weapons are involved it would very likely end up in full scale total nuclear exchange in which world will be unrecognizable afterwards. Even if kinetic hot war can be avoided, China is already the world's largest trading partner and has the world's largest economy (in PPP terms) which means the US petrodollar system will soon be up-ended and America's status of the US dollar being the world's global reserve currency will inevitably come to an end. The implication of this is the USA will be reduced to a third world country with massive hyperinflation back in the homeland and likely there will be racial tensions that spark a second Civil war in US, resulting in the balkanization of America much like how the Soviet USSR split apart into many pieces after its fall in 1990s. For America and for Americans living inside of America, the future is bleak and there are no good outcomes no matter what happens or doesn't happen from here on out and this is especially true for Asian Americans that are still around in the US when things really start to collapse.
You rationale is somewhat debatable, but I definitely disagree with your conclusions. Some let me try to explain your trillion dollar hypothesis in a few sentences. First, disclaimer, this is not intended to become a pissing contest, JMHO.
The biggest advantage of the US system is that it's resilient. Its biggest disadvantage is that it's messy.
The biggest advantage of the Chinese mandarine system is that it is very productive and efficient when it is in its gears. Its biggest disadvantage is that it could fall apart if the top is rotten. That can pretty much sum up why China has been closing the gap so fast against US in the last 70 years.
The earth is enough to raise the mankind as-is in the next 100 years. After that, I don't know and I don't care.
China and US will likely trade places a few times in the next few decades, instead of a lob-sided tipping-over in terms of economic scale. We are at a pinnacle of global markets. If US economy goes down, China will not escape unscathed. If China economy goes down, US will not escape unscathed. Both sides are now engaging in decoupling of their own. But my thesis is that each can only decouple to some degree, not a whole lot.
China will always be a standalone civilization, i.e., the middle kingdom, which means China is not going to ally with any country the way US allies. US will always have 5-eyes and Japan in its pockets. If US markets crash the way you are alluding to, then no other markets can be spared. Given how the central banks manage their fiat monetary systems, there is practically not likely that we would see a 1933 style depression. High inflation is yes, but not depression. I can bank my house on it and I can write 3 books on this subject.
Therefore, China and US are going to be de facto G2 for the foreseeable future. You are right in that US absolutely cannot swallow a peer like China for the foreseeable future. But MAD in military as well as in economy will prevent a total destruction, just like the Cold War 1.0. There is a 5-stage theory for grief. This process will certainly be longer than 5 stages. But the mankind will get there, one way or another, not because humans are kind. To the contrary, humans are scared of MAD.
Lol
Another holier than thou bitch making demands, and threats by criticizing yet another country for not being exactly like their hypocritical assess. Perhaps, the Arab world should have maintained their colonial conquests by working with then Ottoman empires, the Chinese should have focused, and worked on establishing outside colonies to plant, spread some of their restive, adventurous populations to places like Australia, and continued the work done from Admiral Zheng He's voyage by the successive Ming emperors through the Qing Dynasty.
The liberal order is on the march to change the world just as they have done so through imperialism and colonialism. These folks will never stop until each and every country will essentially be turned into their colonial outposts imposing their so-called advanced values. The sport of Football/Soccer wasn't even an English invention but a Chinese one, just like golf. The f these high priests talking about
The liberal order is on the march to change the world just as they have done so through imperialism and colonialism. These folks will never stop until each and every country will essentially be turned into their colonial outposts imposing their so-called advanced values. The sport of Football/Soccer wasn't even an English invention but a Chinese one, just like golf. The f these high priests talking about
solarz
Brigadier
tl;dr: eroi
actually the Chinese system is extremely resilient when it works. There's a bimodal distribution of dynasty survival times: short (too many to list) and long (the famous Han, Tang, Song, Ming, Qing). Fun fact: almost all dynasties that survive 60 years will also survive to 120 years.
PRC has already survived 60 years. Here's a fun related paper:
That’s American culture for you. You got to fire with fire like the one Lu Xun used against Liu Bei, not with a Chinese ink brush and Tang style poetry.