I thought it was the Chinese AI we had to worry about. But if you hook the Chinese AI to the Chinese Nuclear Reactors… game over man. Game over.

Depends on how you define “best,” I suppose. I’d say we are already there.

This is because we badly want the shit China makes while they don’t want anything we make

That’s not entirely true. China produces a lot of low-margin industrial goods that Americans then assemble into finished products. Americans produce an assortment of agricultural and mineral goods that are in high demand in China (oilseeds and grains, particularly soybeans, followed by mineral fuels and oil). We also produce a number of high-margin technology components (include aircraft and parts, electrical machinery and TV parts, and nuclear reactor parts and mechanical appliances) that are expensive but comparatively smaller by volume than the products China sends our way.

Think of it this way. If China sends us a pound of feathers and we send them a pound of iron, even if they’re the same price one of them is going to fill up a shipping container a lot faster than the other. The end result is a net positive number of shipping containers coming into the US.

Anyone who think this represents economic weakness on China’s part is batshit crazy.

It’s a generally symbiotic relationship and one that any neoliberal economist would laud. We’ve stratified our industrial economies such that we’re highly specialized in respective fields. It isn’t weakness on either side’s part any more than the heart is stronger/weaker than the lungs because one beats faster than the other breaths.

Containers as cheap home starting points in US is also a function of this dynamic. No need to ship empty ones back to Asia.

Not entirely true, they love our soy beans and alfalfa… But Chinese junk and cattle feed are both horrible for this world. In fact, you can pack a freighter full of alfalfa and hardly add to its weight.

imminent collapse is a fairly common theme among anything we’ve learned to engineer fairly well… if a bridge isn’t in imminent danger of collapse under its theoretical maximum loading, it used too much material and was thus over-built which means fewer bridges for people

if an economy isn’t in imminent danger of collapse then it’s resources aren’t being used efficiently and that means fewer luxuries - and bridges - for people

It’s a built in, central facet:

This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries Of Financial Folly

a common theme song among capitalist economies

Are you talking about China or the US?

Yeah that tracks, same with Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Being aware of America’s abuses of power is good. Being contrarian and acting like everything they’ve ever said about China is a lie is bad.

hahahaha this one is hilarious

FEED THE MACHINE

What exactly does “should” mean in this context? Either it does it it doesn’t, and saying it “should” just sounds like saying reality is wrong for not conforming to your economic theory.

To get terminology out of the way, they are building towards Communism through Socialism, ie an economy where public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy. In other words, large firms and key industries are overwhelmingly publicly owned, so the Bourgeoisie doesn’t have power over the state.

Now that terms are out of the way, you’re correct, China does have billionaires. Even though that number is decreasing in recent years while working class purchasing power and wages are rising, that isn’t enough of an answer as to why they still exist. Billionaires represent a contradiction the CPC must resolve. But how is the best way to go about that? What time scale? The CPC’s role is to gradually resolve contradictions within Socialism in favor of the Proletariat in any inter-class dispute. They have to erase the foundations for billionaires, not the billionaires themselves.

I recommend checking out China Has Billionaires. The important thing to understand is that contradictions exist in all systems, and it is the process of working out these contradictions that provides room for advancement.

the country is in a socialist mode of production

the party is communist

Dialectics?

Its run by the communist party, whose purpose is guiding the country to communism and self dissolution; which has necessitated not skipping over the industrial and consumer revolutions, both of which likely require capitalism, but in any case have been done with capitalism so that path is easier and known, allowing them to benefit from the waste from less competent countries.

Or in other words, they’re the only country in history to execute billionaires, whatever they are is objectively better than the US or EU.

What no theory does to a mf

What is mutually exclusive, though, is reality and China’s “imminent collapse” which has been looming just around the corner for the past 20 years

Pundits have been predicting the economic collapse of the PRC for decades, there’s an entire sub-industry dedicated to “China Watching” that makes good revenue from predicting xyz economic collapse, and it exists because the West wants the PRC to open up its markets for foreigners to plunder freely, rather than the current situation where trade in China is heavily controlled and managed.

Agreed. I’m not saying that “collapse is imminent is accurate”, but don’t act like these are mutually exclusive when the idiom “a candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long” is accurate (to itself - literally the candle).