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| ▲ | sangnoir 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > There's a type of Western mind that gets distracted by their scale, and getting to build things we built a century ago Where in the US can one find the secret, cross-country high-speed rail built in the roaring twenties?! There's also a type of western mind that automatically dismisses the odds of a different country succeeding, based on nothing but the fact that they are using a different approach (on the surface). It's a kind if circular reasoning: our system is the best because we're the best, because of the system we have. To subvert the Simpsons - "the best so far" Edit: I'm far from a Sinophile, but there's a certain willful blindness, concerning an almost religious belief that the west will prevail because it's the west, regardless of all the systemic weaknesses that show up again and again. It would suck for a dictator-for-life leading the biggest economy in the world, but healthy minds would introspect to see how we can do better, like we should, right? I have no doubt out leaders will pick the wrong lessons, like social credit scores and pervasive surveillance | | |
| ▲ | mike_hearn 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Where in the US can one find the secret, cross-country high-speed rail built in the roaring twenties?! Nowhere because the USA has an excellent internal flight and interstate highway system instead. Railways were already becoming uncompetitive by the 1920s and now live on mostly in parts of the world where they already exist, where land is at a premium. The reason people think China will crash is that their system isn't unique, has been tried many times before and eventually always fails. That isn't circular reasoning, it's reasoning based on prior experience. China is still a communist country: we know how that story ends and why. Remember that for much of the history of the USSR people in the west were dazzled by its rapid industrialization and apparent achievements. First country to put a man in space! Many people in that era genuinely wondered if central planning was just a superior way to do things. In hindsight we can say that it wasn't: with enormous focus such economies were able to pull off heavy engineering projects at scale, but at the cost of ignoring consumer goods and with a dysfunctional economy that was brittle to its core. End result: when Yeltsin visited NASA in the 1980s he demanded a surprise inspection of a local supermarket. NASA didn't impress him, but the 30,000+ products for sale in a mundane shop blew him away. He was shaken to his core and cried on the flight home, asking himself what they had done to Russia's poor people. The USSR collapsed just a few years later, Yeltsin became president and moved Russia in the direction of a market economy. | | |
| ▲ | simgt an hour ago | parent [-] | | > Nowhere because the USA has an excellent internal flight and interstate highway system instead Both being impossible to decouple from fossil fuels consumption at current scale, essentially. > End result: when Yeltsin visited NASA in the 1980s he demanded a surprise inspection of a local supermarket. NASA didn't impress him, but the 30,000+ products for sale in a mundane shop blew him away I have no idea whether this anecdote is true, but it wouldn't be surprise me one bit for an always-drank dude who made the army shell the parliament of his own country. |
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| ▲ | corimaith 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | From an East Asian perspective what China is doing really isn't anything new and with the same pitfalls as the former Asian tigers. >our system is the best because we're the best, because of the system we have. This isn't what's happening at all. The causes and reasons why infrastructure and Western cities are so bad have been studied for decades and are well known, just as we've been studying what makes Tokyo or Hong Kong work so well. People are constantly critiquing the underlying system of incentives and entangled interests, you can hundreds of popular threads on HN, Reddit, MSM, hell even with Elon Musk's DOGE. The only time when I see the mythical self-convinced westerner evoked is precisely when critique of other cultures come in, often from cultures that feel a need to constantly defend themselves. | |
| ▲ | hbarka 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You don’t have to apologize, man. I was on a Pullman train once but it wasn’t quite a bullet train. I also rode a Western train named Orient Express. | |
| ▲ | Yeul 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | People forget that China existed before communism.
Hell only Mao's idiotic experiment only lasted a few decades. China has always been capitalist. It's why you can find a store run by Chinese expats in the middle of the Suriname jungle. |
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| ▲ | mschuster91 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > There's a type of Western mind that gets distracted by their scale, and getting to build things we built a century ago. The thing is, overcapacity combined with the 996 week and labor exploitation can be used to outcompete any Western company - especially the old ones, who are spread around the country. Look at the supply chain of the established (i.e. everyone but Tesla) companies... dozens of manufacturing plants, thousands of suppliers, almost zero vertical integration because "manufacturing batteries, ECUs or windshield wipers is not our core competency, let Bosch do that". The only car manufacturer in the Western world not following that is Tesla. They have only very few, but very large factories that vertically integrate as much as possible on site, which not only gives them the advantage of cutting out the middlemen and their profit margin but also allows for much, much faster iteration cycles when everything is done in-house with no bureaucratic bullshit associated with change requests. Typically, a car model, its design and parts are fixed for around 2-5 years after the prototype manufacturing run, no changes are possible at all outside of maybe the software, unless the design change is necessary to meet regulatory compliance or if it's something horribly defective. Then the model gets a "rebrush" integrating a few changes, which lives on for another 2-3 years, and then a fully new iteration crops up. Tesla (and SpaceX) in contrast, they do iteration times of weeks. The disadvantage of that model is of course spare parts logistics and repair training, because holding stock for hundreds of subvariants and iterations is all but impossible, and that shows in every statistic for Tesla's average body shop waiting time. And to come back to China's automotive sector - they're copying that model of iterative speed just as well. We've seen them come from piles of junk barely roadworthy (or not road-legal in Europe at all) a few years ago to be able to fight heads-on with the European car giants. | | |
| ▲ | makerdiety an hour ago | parent [-] | | Vertical integration, or a company claiming to take ownership of its supply chain, needs the democratic miracle that is exclusive security of supplies and their logistical distribution. No American company is ever going to militarily secure natural resources or a nanostate territory for its profits. And that's why all American companies (or any traditional, humanist company) will fail to achieve profits which ensure business survival. Don't ever go long on an investment in the democratic military-industrial complex, surely. Elon Musk's Tesla and SpaceX are like baby boomers disguising themselves as healthy young kids of the future. Don't be fooled or tempted by the likely spiked Kool-Aid drink. Partaking in the ideology of techno-commercialist futurism will yield a negative return on investment. As the conceptual dynamics of optimal manufacturing methods' soteriology, looked at through democratic aspirations, is nothing but booby trapped thinking. In other words, much more blunt words, Tesla's theoretical economics and strategy is a wannabe Mark Zuckerberg, especially when there's an impending giant rug pull in the investment arena. |
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