America has institutional Alzheimer’s

You can’t do this Lei! How will you pay for all of it?!

Lei: MMT duh. Money is made up by sovereign authority and the state is never going bankrupt. Why are we limiting state capacity for crying bankers? A national economy can’t all be the private finance controlled market yo!

Wealth tax for all wealth above $1 million. 100% tax at $100 million, substituting capital gains. But the taxation mechanism won’t be in the form of money payments. Instead the state collects wealth shares. Whenever the assets are liquidated for cash the state gets a claim.

30% Shareholder Equity Ownership Cap for Publicly Traded Corporations
Legally Mandated Codetermination +
50% Employee Ownership of Midsized and Larger Firms (dilutable to 35/35 employee/management split if publicly traded)
Court/Regulatory Body to Dissolve+Restructure Debts Above Certain Value

Universal At Birth Child Investment Grant
Universal Basic Savings Account (default deposit account for all welfare transfer and stimulus payments)
Sovereign Wealth Fund
Hard Price Controls On Higher Ed
National Department of Science & Industrial Innovation (Put NASA, NSF, DARPA, and NHS under this)

Very (EVIL) Socialistic things Lei would do to fix America.

Single Payer Healthcare
State Owned Construction Company (build national HSR network, plug housing shortages)
State Owned Energy Company (renewables go *ZOOM*)
Convert Social Security + Unemployment Insurance Into Universal Basic Income

What’s most amusing about this study is that despite these dismal findings for the US it’s *still* underestimating PLA capabilities. The study identifies jamming capabilities as essential to blunt PLA offensive capability *but* China is almost certainly fielding better counter-jamming now.

You are either busy formulating new tools to understand the Chinese condition in the 21st century or you’re busy turning into a craggy senior crank railing against new unyielding realities as you’re rapidly left behind in the endnotes of historical recollection.

The “China debate” is functionally dead. There isn’t much intellectual exploration left in the old terms that set the table for the last half century. Everyone has dug into their positions and will live or die on their hills. China discussions will continue but the new terms haven’t yet formed.

So yeah, this is what a typical conversation inside the upper echelons of SV culture looks like. That’s the worldview they maintain in private while operating their public politics. The stuff you see on Twitter isn’t fringe or caricatured. It’s in fact mainstream in their elite techbro bubble.

“What China essentially has is a hierarchical Confucian system…in a world of modern technology…they’re in very deep trouble”

“6000 Christians have been slaughtered around the world in the name of Islam”

“Radical left putting masks on…what’s the difference between you and the KKK”

“Xi has no clue what’s going on…walled off…they’re all too scared to tell him anything”

“Their demography is collapsing…they don’t have enough fertilizer to grow enough food with the land they have”

“I’ve traveled all around China…let me tell you the Chinese people are patient until they’re not”

More snippets if people want to get a sense for how the flow of this conversation went:

“Meeting the pope next week as part of a group to advise on AI…we need guardrails”

“Europe is dead man walking”

“Western civilization vs authoritarianism”

“China is in the process of collapsing”

At a cafe somewhere in Silicon Valley listening to two seemingly very well connected technologists (one might be in VC) doing big name drops of people and orgs they’re connected to while talking “Omni-use technologies”, “Species ending event”, and “Building the future of western civilization”.

@rajakorman.bsky.social took over this account I see

When “look at this is look at me” attention seeking becomes more important than reality itself culture ceases to breathe. What’s left is a naked unbound id racing toward oblivion by brainstem overload, a cognitive euthanasia hiding behind the veneer of culture’s lifeless husk.

Rereading Fukuyama’s old “End of History” essay right now and the contentions in it have aged even more poorly than the zeitgeist meme version of his thesis.

(Also in retrospect it really stands out how appropriately juxtaposed Wang Huning is as his intellectual counterpart).

No matter how much people want to turn politics into a religion politics is not a church. The practical outcomes always speak for themselves.

‪Trump is not the primary counterparty for China’s global trade strategy. He is the foil for China’s global trade strategy. The sooner people understand this the more accurately they will be able to gauge how any “talks” will go. ‬

Would be so funny if Japan weaponized their US treasury reserves before China did.

In order to have a liberal democratic society you must first be able to maintain a *society*. Liberal democracy that fails this prerequisite is a hood ornament without a car.

A lot of white people are completely oblivious to how often they badger nonwhite people about political morality in what clearly looks like pernicious passive aggressive efforts to pressure nonwhite people into moral agreement and political alignment, and how tiresome that is.

Chinese kids starting college today have only ever known America as a country that’s out to kneecap China for their entire formative years. Don’t think Americans who like to concern troll political morality at China grasp how comically bankrupt they look to younger generations.

The biggest issue for American global competitiveness is that so long as public discourse fixates on morale management and cheerleading national political psychology will continue to lean towards self esteem grasping and complacency. It’s an “I surrender while pretending I’m not” mindset.

This is a big comprehension gap between how people in China and America understand economic sentiments they hear about from the other side. Their understanding of what “bad” is are worlds apart because in America precarity has become the default baseline while in China default baseline is growth.

When Chinese people talk bad economy they usually mean “business is slow, working long hours for little extra gain, future income growth prospects feel dim” but for Americans it’s more “Might lose my job, can’t find work, how will I pay mortgage healthcare and credit card debts”.

Racism is America’s kryptonite. It breeds complacency and a loser mindset. It’s always another group’s fault America is failing. Cry and whine about “cheating” to duck ownership of their own deficiencies and dumb undisciplined choices. Demand self esteem points with cheap talk. Stunted worldview.

The US is losing the contest for the 21st century because Americans keep thinking it’s a China vs US direct power match when the actual contest is China’s standing with the rest of the world vs the US’s. The farcical self harming plays will continue until Americans realize this.

The good and bad of Trump ultimately is that he’s a fantasist. He will be most susceptible to changing his mind when one fantasy sold to him by one advisor doesn’t pan out and he’s looking for someone else to give him a new fantasy to grandstand fake victory narratives with.

Don’t know what the big deal is with the paperclip AI doom allegory (paperclip AI is told its purpose is to make paperclips so starts turning everything into paperclips including humans) we already have this with the moneyMAX pricevalueMAXXX FINANCEMAXIMUM liberal market economy.