No to me it just shows 2 different capital allocation strategies.

China picked manufacturing.

US picked datacenters.

The US is very strong in manufacturing. There is a lot lower percentage of the population working in the factories (thanks to automation), but there is just as much as there ever was if not more. It isn't high value/growth like data centers, but it is still there and strong

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vkou 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If 90% of the data centers in the world were hit by a nuclear bomb tomorrow, communication would be a shit show for a month or two, and then go on, as we'd fall back to simpler, less compute-expensive solutions. We'd also probably be net better off without all the adtech crap.

If 90% of the factories in the world were hit by a nuclear bomb, you'd find that your standard of living would immediately, and quite observably plummet.

You tell me which is more important.

The amount of internet technocrap we actually need to live comfortably is a tiny fraction of what actually gets built. Most of it is in service of adtech, the surveillance state, or shaving 0.5% off some rentseeker's fat margins (on his side, the savings aren't passed on to us).

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notahacker 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Whilst manufacturing has more practical value than much of what's in datacentres[1] it doesn't necessarily follow that it's the more valuable strategic play or route to long term economic growth (bubble or no bubble)

Food is more critical to us than Alibaba crap or even top notch smartphones and would be missed rather more if we had a nuclear exchange, but Chinese entrepreneurs would rather own factories exporting manufactured goods than rice paddies, and for good reason. The Chinese government would like to be self sufficient with food production, but unlike many less technologically developed countries it isn't. Most of those countries stay poor though. Food doesn't change or scale as much as manufacturing, which possibly doesn't change as fast or scale as big as compute. Plus in theory at least, some of the compute is being devoted to automating away dependency on offshore labour for manufacturing, although I suspect China is generally ahead in the manufacturing automation areas of AI anyway...

[1]I'd rather have kitchen appliances than novelty image generation, spamblogs or ad retargeting, but then again I'd also rather have access to knowledge and communications than plastic toys...

	▲	vkou 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> but then again I'd also rather have access to knowledge and communications than plastic toys My point is that you can get that with ~1/1000th the compute we spend. The truly useful parts of the internet are a tiny fraction of the tech footprint. There's more net value for us in Wikipedia than there is in ~a trillion dollars of the more vapid tech firms. And it runs on 3m/year in hosting costs. You are right that China has a food security problem, though. I am, however, assuming that its government isn't blind to it - the country is self-sufficient for high-calorie staples, and wouldn't starve even if all food imports stopped.

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cmrdporcupine 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, US picked services, financials, defense, and energy

China picked manufacturing, infrastructure, consumable exports

All the compromises here were pointed out by critics on the left many decades ago. Letting capital flee to where labour was cheapest eviscerated the entire US and Canadian northeast/midwest manufacturing sector and was policy driven from the right.

That and we decided that only the private sector should be responsible for building infrastructure and housing, and then wondered why the cost of building either skyrocketed in cost...

And yet now it's the (far) right freaking out and trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

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dmix 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That idea that you could have a) stopped globalism as lots of new giant markets opened up after the 1970s and b) be better off paying 2x for everything by banning everything foreign is just a fantasy. It’s just nostalgia fueled radical politics that both the far left and right latch on to.

The other part of the story that gets ignore is the administrative state exploding in the US/Canada post 1970s, where making new industry and development became very difficult making other countries more attractive while the cost of living exploded.

So instead of becoming competitive all we’re left with is these ideas of the government forcing domestic industry by using national security as an excuse to justify the backwards economics of it all.

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mghackerlady 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

the US picked those because it was cheaper to move the others to china. It again shows that capitalism will inevitably die without colonialism

	▲	cmrdporcupine 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah I think you added that before I edited my comment to say the same :-)

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mohamedkoubaa 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And yet we will do worse in both categories

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bdangubic 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

US is not even capable of building data centers (or anything else anymore). This is why all the planned capacity is waaaaaay behind schedule year after year, as if Elon is running the entire operation :)