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- Thread starter bd popeye
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Surely some pound of flesh will be extracted by China for all that bs.
To be fair, it was easy to see this coming a mile away. At this point talk is cheap and people can see it.
I don't think that's how economies work. In fact, the prevailing strategy of capitalism is control of the global financial system and the fruits of production through it. The idea being that, it doesn't matter if you do all the production, as long as I take most of the value from that production via share holding profits. I then take that value and invest in other production centers, playing them against you, until you have no choice but to obey me. Because the alternative is I take my investments and my business to them, and your factories go bankrupt because I'm not buying from you but from your competitors.
That is effectively the strategy practiced by the US; and it is what India is trying to imitate. It works very well against export-oriented economies like Japan and South Korea because so much of their economy is built on selling to others. Production capability without financial independence doesn't work; at the end of the day, you're in a tough spot because ultimately, if a country can get away with printing $100 billion with little consequence, and you accept their currency in exchange for products, you're just giving the value of your labor for free and that country is going to end up buying up your whole economy.
To use an example from life - you can spend all your life creating the most inventive products ever, but if you have no capital, you're still going to end up signing away all of it for a mere middle class salary, while the investors make billions.
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Their conclusions as ever seem to be based on the implicitly understood even if subconscious racism of thinking that Asians cannot be creative and innovative. It creates then flawed circular logic: "We know they must have stolen the technology from us because they cannot be creature. How do we know they cannot be creative? Because they stole the technology from us."
There was a 3 part documentary over 9 years ago of which I could only find 1 part easily still online (the part on creativity):
Essentially they had a competition between a Danish school and a Chinese school (from Harbin I think) in 3 areas: English, Mathematics, Creativity. The Danish students were asked how they thought the results would be before the tests. They thought they would easily win in English, conceded they might lose in mathematics, but were confident they would win in creativity. The result was actually they lost in all 3 areas. However the Danish students then tried to say they had more fun and that the Chinese were too focused on just results so "they" (the Danish) were still the real winners. Their school principal still asserted they somehow were better despite no objective evidence of that. I think one of the documentary makers or maybe it was one of the creativity panel judges said there was a dangerous combination of Western ignorance and arrogance. That was over a decade ago and things are not really much different now, though now we are seeing the coping as advanced material results of Chinese creativity and innovation enter the market, whereas before iterative improvements on existing technology was more easily dismissed as "not true creativity".
I wouldn't be surprised if it were the other way around, last I heard the argentinian government is trying to close the chinese space monitoring base they have over there
Which is what China has been doing, though mostly not by share holding (as only a very small part of Chinese companies are publicly traded).
Which are also China owned.
More accurately, the competition causes each of the companies to keep growing. It's import dependent third world countries that have to obey the company owners/producers, because while they're giving away resources and money to recieve consumables, countries like China used the business to make even better companies. These capabilities directly improve tech, security and economy.
One party owns the capability to improve while the other is just a client, a consumer that has to take whatever gets offered, because they can't develop things for themselves.
Engineer
Major
I didn't watch the video, but based on your description, I have to admit they won in creativity. They were able to have such a warp view of reality to think they came out as winners despite losing. If that's not creativity, what is?
plawolf
Lieutenant General
You need leverage to extract concessions. Argentina under Milei doesn’t have shit to bargain with. That is why they are pulling the mafia move of trying to threaten Chinese assets (space monitoring station) instead of bringing anything of value to the table themselves.
The space monitoring station is something nice to have, but it isn’t indispensable. Worst case China can just park one of their space monitoring ships in international waters like they used to. It will cost more but not remotely enough to warrant China giving Milei anything.
If Argentina was in a position of strength, Huawei wouldn’t have become China’s top beef importer since all the Argentines had of value is beef these days.