My counterpoint is that it’s not possible to buy appliances which last for decades anymore, because the entire industry has changed. Consumers eventually don’t have a choice

You can round it down to Milton Friedman as the ideology and Jack Welch at GE in the 80s as the implementation and figurehead, but the original seeds were in the SEC mandating quarterly reporting as part of regulation after the great depression.

We can all agree to blame Jack Welch as shorthand though, I think.

It's not real. Companies routinely lose money for years in pursuit of long term growth. But for some reason people love to use this as an explanation of everything wrong in our country.

1910s Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.

Minority shareholder rights, you can be sued for not maximizing profits see Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. (1919).

I swear I've been reading about overbuilding in China since, like, 2012. And I've definitely used it in arguments myself. Not only China hasn't collapsed, but it has improved massively since then, as far as I can tell.

> I would just be careful to discount the capitalist West.

I would. It's showing the weaknesses and limitations of its ideology.

> You’d have to be blind to ignore the massive overbuilding of property in China, which they are now demolishing. All of that wasted capital.

So what?

> Authoritarian regimes with controlled media always seem successful… Up until the USSR collapsed there were many prominent people in the West saying it was the superior system.

The West is literally de-industrializing and can't seem to built shit except slowly and expensively. Industry after industry gets hollowed out as China takes the lead.

Do not make the mistake of reasoning about US vs China from the experience of US vs USSR. China doesn't have a command economy, outproduces the US, and controls many key industries. The US is resting on its laurels, and its people cope by thinking of the few industries where it's still ahead, but those are dwindling.

> The market test - meaning floating prices and the response to them - is a superior way of allocating capital.

That's not truth, it's a dogmatic assumption.

China has been able to exploit a dogmatic belief in the free market to siphon the real capital out of the West and into itself (industry and know-how) in order to achieve dominance. The US elite is content to have paper. We'll see how that works out.

> We need to see how all of this plays out

If you're rooting for China. If you're rooting for the US, by then it will be too late to course correct.

> You’d have to be blind to ignore the massive overbuilding of property in China, which they are now demolishing.

Is it all being demolished, or is 95% of it being moved into?

Because all those ghost cities that China was building that the news kept bitching about... Are now all full.

Meanwhile, in the West, we have a housing shortage. Who looks the fool now...

> You’d have to be blind to ignore the massive overbuilding of property in China

Isn't the same now happening with the US with the massive overbuilding of AI capacity? Seems like a tightly centralized capitalist system is not that different from a communist one.

> why isn't the west's own supply chain options as immense?

They used to be. Since roughly the 80's, policymakers have decided it is better for the shareholders to outsource most of that industry overseas to China and India and etc, where the labor is cheaper.

Note that workers and especially union members actually have every incentive to keep that production domestic, but shareholders and CEOs profit when they can cut labor costs and the typical Western consumer values cheap products more than the health of domestic industry.

Western industries have been supported by subsidies, tax incentives, bailouts, low interest rates, and a dozen other things from the gov't but the same policies reward outsourcing and financial engineering more than actual production capacity.

> why isn't the west's own supply chain options as immense?

The US explicitly chose to be a service economy. China explicitly chose to be a mercantile economy.

The US can absolutely switch paths, it will just take a long time and will require pushing millions into poverty. But we're on track to do it.

40+ years of deliberate policy choices to prioritise growth through finacialisation rather than domestic industrial production

The West (with particular emphasis on the USA) got infected with this insane ideology that the best way to restore democracy to China would be to "corrupt" them with capitalism. Hence open them up to international trade, allow joining WTO etc. With prosperity the people would demand democracy.

You can also see this in the German approach to energy trade with Russia.

This toxic idea needs to be put to bed. All it did was feed and enrich foreigners at the expense of locals and create supply chain dependencies that made themselves hostage.

There are lots of reasons, but also, having 1.4B people under the same government that has more-or-less aligned strategic goals help. Like supply chains within Japan, from what I've seen and experienced, are pretty strong. However, the options will always look smaller compared to a gigantic organism across the pond.

The beneficial owners of the US economy sold our industrial manufacturing base to the Communist Party of China because the price was good. China got our hard power and US capital owners got to break the back of the US labor movement. A win-win deal for the ages.

The West only represents a minority on this planet. China alone has 1 billion people.

The last 200 years has been an aberration and it is currently in the process of being corrected.

> I don't think the current US administration has any strategy

I 100% believe the strategy is to enlarge the Trump family's wealth, and it's been a wildly successful strategy (in the past year he's been able to create billions in wealth for his family [0]). At least this vaguely ties Trump's success to the success of the United States in a limited capacity. Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him, but it's clear all policy decisions being made are being done so based on their capacity to improve Trump's situation.

We've been headed this direction long before Trump, from both parties, increasingly American policy is about what's good for American companies and in particular the people who own them. Now that pool has just shrunk a bit.

0. https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-family-business-visualize...

I think it's the same problem as the past administration and most members of congress- they're just too old to care about 50yrs from now. I don't think they're actively against the 50yr+ future, it's just that the world is changing too fast, and they're falling back to what they know- competing with their peers for power, money, and status. They only have some inkling of actual empathy for the communities their grandkids are in at a personal level, and just have the "throw money at it" mentality for the bigger issues like healthcare, since that has been their MO for the last couple decades. Instead of taking leadership positions and driving change, they seem to just want to squabble and create fiefdoms and have others do the work.

Exactly right. Democrats have the desire to do big things, but not the capability. Republicans have the capability, but no desire.

Without getting overly political, it is nihilistic because one of the major US parties got so high on its own supply of lies that the people currently running it FORGOT they were lying. You're looking at a similar situation to many authoritarian or fascist political systems in which they way to get ahead in no way involves doing your job, but making sure Stalin or Mussolini is happy with you. This started in the US in the mid 1990s when GOP leadership bought in on power being its own end and is now on full display.

People have all sorts of mythologized reasons for why the USSR failed, because while it often produced immense amounts of goods and services and well educated people in certain areas (sometimes beating "the west" by a good margin for one or two years at a go), it also made long term advancement contingent on the party and not the real world and became incapable of handling major changes.

We're witnessing that now in the US with perhaps one of the most incompetent governments in history that is also burning down the non-political institutions of expertise that for all their faults and mistakes, at least had educated and motivated people that cared about their purpose.

Current US strategy is to get South America+Canada resources and call it a day. They looked at global geopolitics and it looked too complicated for them.

Or, to play Devil's advocate, people called in the rabid dog because they felt they had been sold down the river starting in the 1970s. The hollowed out industrial towns weren't good places to grow up, and when they did manage to go to college and play by the rules the ladders were already in a fast retreat up the walls..

Damned if you. Damned if you don't.

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You are 100% correct on that, I fully expect that importing cheap GPUs and NPUs will be banned in the US, or tariff'd so heavily that it doesn't matter should they become available. But that will just allow Nvidia to fall behind until they get surpassed like AMD passed Intel.

A move like that will seriously hurt our ability to train and raise new software developers and the domestic game market.

Bringing a car in is hard. Bringing a GPU in is easy.

The fact that we banned the better products out of spite doesn't mean they're not better products.

Imagine if in 2010 the USA had banned itself from using computer hardware more powerful than they had at the time. Where would they be in the AI race? That's the situation the USA is heading for.