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Comment by euix | Hacker News Reader

It's not about tanks or numbers its national resolve and there each side can vastly misread the other. Each side believes it has greater resolve and is in the right. There is no quantitative way to measure this. The only way to to find out is to fight. Just like two people who size each other up, one may be bigger or faster but the will to prevail and willingness to bare any sacrifice and tolerate pain in order to achieve victory is intangible and cannot be known until it is tested.

I fear the future will be dark in our lifetime.

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Exactly.

Not only that, but it's so much easier to misread your opponent and the nature of the game when the dynamics are very high dimensional as they are now. It's not just about tanks or militaries anymore. Information warfare and misinformation campaigns, economic warfare, cyber warfare... When all of these potential channels of conflict exist it's very hard to reduce tension in any one domain without tensions rising in another, which in turn fuels an increase in general tension.

> It's not about tanks or numbers its national resolve and there each side can vastly misread the other.

Agreed, but to be perfectly honest, I would be 100% happy to see the US pull all manufacturing out of China and put it back on US soil. The US has gained a temporary price reduction in labor that is now evaporating, gained no access to the Chinese market or influenced China to open further, and has lost the actual ability to manufacture far too many goods.

If that means things will get more automated because of expensive labor, great! Then we should build our own robots, too. If things will get more expensive, then perhaps we will start throwing things away less and start worrying about longevity more.

And, you know, the US has a lot of unemployed people who will need jobs very shortly.

And who in the US will do the work? It's not just the jobs that went overseas, it's also the factories, the molds, and the skills, on top of that we all apparently want cheap stuff.

Just because we elect morons, don't assume all of us are morons. Lots of people could do factory work for the right wages, and lots of capital is floating around that could build new factories. Sure, we're deficient in certain specific skills, but skills can be learned and processes can be designed around their lack.

A couple of decades should do it then.

And? We didn't ship everything to China overnight.

However, it doesn't take that long. The problem is that there is no continuity in American businesses:

https://operationsroom.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/why-is-ge-br...

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190912005862/en/GE-...

GE learned the lessons and brought it back. Then shipped it back out. And now are bringing it back again.

The problem is nobody gets promoted for being solid--everybody needs to be a rockstar.

We need some innovation where small domestic businesses run rings around the big guns. The problem is--those aren't home-run businesses--they're solid and profitable so nobody wants to invest in them.

The US doesn't care about China being open. They care about maintaining domination.

The US has no issue replacing democratic governments with dictatorships as long as they keep their influence and power. If China was a democracy, we would see the exact same rhetoric.

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