Hacker News Reader

Comment by Xcelerate | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps I'm just bad at economics, but it always seemed to me that the countries making all the stuff would eventually hold all the power (and I say this as someone working in tech who produces nothing tangible). The fact that it costs exorbitant amounts to construct new buildings, railways, etc. in the U.S. and how our cities almost look antiquated or frozen in time compared to Asian cities shows that we missed a generation or two and probably need to catch back up now.

View on HN

> and how our cities almost look antiquated or frozen in time compared to Asian cities shows that we missed a generation or two and probably need to catch back up now.

It takes 75+ years for a rebar building to reach end of life. The US just built up during earlier decades than many of those Asian cities. In another 30 - 50 years those antiquated buildings should start getting replaced.

It always seemed to me that the country buying all the stuff holds the real power. It just feels far more possible to find alternative manufacturers than it is to find alternative markets.

lots of commodity markets are stuck on "lowest price wins". That means that management does not have as many options as you might think, since they will be put out of business if they cannot compete on price. This really happens quite a bit. Survivors of this brutal system are known to stockpile cash and other assets, for example Apple and their cash piles.

This argument, on an international scale, has never made sense to me. Have its proponents never been poor?

If US-China trade were to stop tomorrow, US would suffer 100x more than China due to lack of critical goods. China would have a dearth of greenbacks.

Actually US and China is disengaging, and we can already see what would happen if trade were to stop tomorrow, by what's happening now.

China June 2023: Massive reverse migration by laborers back to countryside, Shanghai population down 135k compared to 2021 https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3215126/s.... Physical retail closures up to 80%. Entirely empty malls in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. Real estate prices dropping 30-50% in tier 1 cities. Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing having 50k+ used homes for sale in span of 2 months. Shipping containers pile up 7 stories in every port https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3210870/c....

US June 2023: not much.

You can tell any story you want by cherry-picking headlines and ignoring the broader context. Pundits like Gordon Chang have been predicting post-Mao China's imminent collapse since 1989.

They've always been spectacularly wrong because they don't understand China and don't want to.

You can brush any counterpoints away you want by mentioning pundits who are too early in their prediction.

Sure, let's talk about broader context and macro trends. unless something big changes, these macro trends won't go away:

- alignment of dictatorship vs free countries. China, Russia, North Korea, Iran vs US, Europe, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, India, Australia, Philippines, Canada.

- dictatorship is losing. China is propping up all the dictators around the world, and its losing that power

- China demographics collapse

- China's rising and insolvent local government debts, which can no longer generate income by selling land. because China has too many buildings - 6 billion by last count. and demographics collapse. and lack of jobs

- Tech sanctions on China. China's inability to catch up on tech.

which indicates China's stagnation and decline for the next 10-20 years.

unfortunately far-right populist illiberalism is on the rise globally. (and also far-left populist demagoguery too, maybe unsurprisingly.) although, hopefully, that'll pass as the current median voter gets a grasp of reality (and get inoculated against social media fueled craziness at least a bit)

here's the thing, humanity got lucky. there was a nonzero chance that china and the dictatorships could have triumphed. if China didn't botch the chance to overtake US in 2008 with a capable dictator. if China got its hands on many advanced US military technologies. if Russia didn't botch the Ukraine invasion. if covid didn't have a vaccine, except one that China developed.

I'm sure most of us are aware of the gulags that China ran in 2022, in the most prosperous city like Shanghai, with welded doors, lack of food, arbitrary killing of pets, moving their own citizens against their wills to camps or cells with no running water and unsanitary conditions. with cries in tall buildings from families in the middle of night for food. If. you haven't seen these things, go watch it online. Imagine if somehow China succeeded, and that's all of humanity's fate.

are you affiliated with any anti-CCP activism groups and how can I get involved?

We’ll think about it from the tech perspective: the companies that control marketplaces and access hold all the power.

Sure you have companies like apple that make $$$ from hardware, but most HW players in tech get slowly replaced offshore. Silicon Valley was silicon valley because of hardware. Now it’s mostly software, and HW is increasingly a commodity.

It’s the same thing elsewhere in the economy… it’s easier to set up a factory to sell something anywhere, but when you control buyers, you’re rich. The US is still the shopping powerhouse of the world… and even massive markets like China can’t consume as much because they just don’t have as much money.

What's stopping software from becoming a commodity?

Learning curves and compatibility.

Software is a lot closer to service work than hardware. It’s way less interchangeable and mostly sits “at the top” of the stack. DuckDuckGo Vs Google Vs ChatGPT shows why a lot of software isn’t a commodity, it’s a service.

And software that could be a commodity is often given away for free (Open Source).

The lower in the stack you are, the closer you get to commodity. Eg SQL databases - often somewhat interchangeable for different target features, but also language and expectations don’t match exactly, so there’s high cost to switching. That’s why Oracle now has to fight cloud providers, MSFT, and a ton of open source projects for business. Comparably, several languages (C, Java/Script, Python) have multiple compilers/interpreters with much better compatibility and little commercial options.

Compared to A Tier cities in some Asian countries?

Does Santa Barbara or NYC really look antiquated compared to Mumbai? Or Da Nang? Or Fukuoka?

Maybe if you're trying to compare Detroit to Shenzhen or Tokyo.

Fuka What you say to me?

Guess the play on words with Fukuoka wasn't funny.

u ok?

Santa Barbara is a small town with a college/tourist/military economy. New York is an outlier by US standards in every sense, but if you've ridden the subway there you know it feels old, even though it's one of the best systems in the world on paper.

Fukuoka is probably a bad example for your point. It almost makes Tokyo look antiquated by comparison.

Yes, NYC looks and feels like an aging, antiquated city to me. I'd put D.C. above NYC -- it feels cleaner, newer, more efficient. Even London somehow feels less aged than NYC. Sydney, Helsinki, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam are a tier up again, and then cities like Tokyo and Singapore look like they're from the future.

> Even London somehow feels less aged than NYC.

Because London was partially bombed and rebuilt within the last generation.

New York wasn’t. NYC was built a while ago, and a lot of that infrastructure and builds still work.

NYC looks older than Paris somehow, even though that shouldn’t make sense.

Paris was substantially rebuilt in the mid 19th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...

A lot of what you think of as "Paris style" is much newer than New York City. NYC has plenty of buildings older than that, and more importantly, its grid pattern is even older.

New York does have many newer buildings, while Paris deliberately prevented much modernization after that. Downtown Paris has no skyscrapers except the Eiffel Tower itself, but it does have modern business centers pushed off to the outskirts of the city.

Economic power is held by those that are difficult to replace. THe US gave up on manufacturing because it's low skill work that is easy to replace, just follow the lowest labor cost. Generally I believe that the countries with educated workers and capital will eventually hold all the power.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com