Oh also -- while the S&P does indeed include 500 companies, fully 35 to 40 percent of the index's entire value is derived from just seven companies.

Seven.

All of them are tech companies and their valuations depend *extremely heavily* on this AI boom, the future of which is anyone's guess.

 

And yet so many Americans dismiss the Chinese as makers of "useless crap I can buy at Walmart." They surely do make plenty of that sort of stuff, but in recent years they have become much more forward-thinking with their industrial policy than we have.

China has tons of its own economic issues, and they still can't make a decent commercial aircraft... But they're absolutely on a trajectory to overtake us as the world's economic superpower at some point in the next decade.

Meanwhile we spend our time changing Notices to Air Missions back to Notices to Airmen. Yup, we've got our priorities straight...

 

Excargodog is basically a troll poster at this point, offering completely unserious takes and irrelevant comparisons. He's basically become the new sonicflyer (what happened to that guy?)

A page or two back, he defended Trump's unhinged twitter rantings by claiming that's the same way we won WW2.

The economic analysis of a guy who thinks WW2 was won because FDR threatened the axis powers in the style of Trump should be taken with a grain of salt to say the least

 

Well unfortunately the link you posted (which I found quite educational) was to the NYT so it will instantly get dismissed as "fake news" by some on this forum 🫪

I think one of the second-level effects of this war, as you point out, is that while this shock will hurt the US less than it would have in the 1970s (both because we produce more oil, and because we have far more efficient planes, cars, etc etc), the oil shock is much worse in Asian and European countries that import most or all of their oil. They are absolutely going to do whatever they can to transition away from oil, and guess who's going to be there to profit from that transition? As you said -- our friends in Beijing.

 

That's not a bad idea at all. Unfortunately I think that would get labeled as "unnecessary government intervention" by most everyone on the red side of the aisle in Congress.

 

It is very difficult to contort China’s progress into something apropos here. The regulatory environment existing in the United States is essentially absent there, nor are the administrative hurdles. Unless we take down the guard rails, they are bound to surpass us.

 

nonsense.speak from your own soapbox

 

Nuclear energy is the way to go in the U.S. I will not support any "green new deal" in the U.S. until Nuclear is made the priority. Then you can have your windfarmes or whatnot, whatever makes you feel better. Nuclear is the only thing right now in the world that will make a difference.

 

This attitude right here is why China leads us by leaps and bounds in battery technology and renewables. Diversified energy production is better than putting all your eggs in one basket, but small minds take a political view to what should be a question of physics and logistics.

Nuclear is fine, but the upfront costs make it currently much less viable than solar/wind, even with current battery technology.

When you're more interested in optics and politics than science and physics, you end up abdicating your position as energy superpower. This is why China has surpassed us in this field.

Maybe concern yourself more with wattage than whether something could be called "woke"

 

My knowledge regarding China is more shaped by my knowledge of USSR/China and Russia/China history and relations.
IOW fragmented.

That said, what you just wrote should have applied to the USSR in her economic competition with the West in general, and the USA in particular.
Other than some specific successes achieved by brute force and the channeling of resources to narrowly focused goals, it was never close. In spite of Russia's enormous natural resources, it still isn't.
Reflect for a while on why that is.

Authoritarian and autocratic China suffers from the same ills, and has the same advantages you mention, as the USSR, todays Russia, and Mao's China.

China's success has occurred more due to joining the world's rules-based order, abandoning ideological litmus tests for ideas and policies, and actively sharing a significant share of the benefits with the people.
Probably the biggest change from orthodox Communist thinking is the encouragement of innovation. Rather than just attempting to copy observed technologies and systems, they actively encourage improvements. In other words, reasonable risk is encouraged while impatient recklessness is discouraged. To an outsider such as myself, they know who they are and where they wish to go.
(something the Bolsheviks destroyed....they shattered old traditions, but failed to provide a replacement to fill the soul. Soviet citizens had taken from them what they were, only to be replaced with slogans. Brezhnev's USSR and Putin's Russia tried to replace 800 years of Russia with deification of WW2, but that still falls short)
By our standards China is authoritarian and repressive. But it seems to allow just enough freedoms and shared benefits to harness the positive aspects of Western capitalism and liberal politics to have transformed itself from Mao's China.

It probably won't last forever. Recession looms if Western economies falter. But for now China seems to doing so well due to innovation, long term planning, and patience.