thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them] @ thethirdgracchi @hexbear.net

ἐγὼ τὸ μὲν δὴ πανταχοῦ θρυλούμενον κράτιστον εἶναι φημὶ μὴ φῦναι βροτῷ·

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I don't think it would behoove like, Vietnam, to develop a nuclear program right now. You only need nukes if the United States thinks you may be developing nukes (which means then you 100% need nukes) OR you're somebody like the DPRK or Cuba under immense global sanction. Malaysia getting a nuclear program would just be a waste of money and effort. Indonesia doesn't need a nuclear triad.

I mean luckily for them, neither Pakistan, India, or Iran are located in Southeast Asia. I think this "nuclear free" zone just applies to ASEAN countries, none of whom have a nuke and (presumably) none of whom have plans to acquire nukes.

"There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn"

I mean it actually used to be the Secretary of War. The United States only started calling it the Secretary of "Defense" in the post-war shakeup. It's a Cold War artifact.

Being put in temporary exile is still humbling, no? He's back because the party decided he could be back, and he sure won't try what he did again. Besides, the United States has double the number of billionaires as China with one fifth the population. Also I'll post again the classic article. https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/

If the "several countries" here does not include Iran then what the fuck are we even doing, folks. I assume after their fantastic performance during the brief Pakistan-India war everybody even remotely outside the NATO-sphere is looking at the J-10, but I have to imagine Iran is priority number one.

Yeah of course, it's not easy feat, and by pretty much every metric the party has done an incredible job. Like I feel like if you had to rank the party's governance of China, they're up there with the Han or like the Tang under Taizong. I'll be very interested to see how long the CPC can go without having some sort of like massive reogrganization/internal revolt. Like I guess you can count the Cultural Revolution sort of? But I want to see if the CPC ever gets its Wang Mang or Au Lushan moment, where it becomes like the Early CPC period and the Later CPC period.

I don't think it's unfair to assume that if AI poses any sort of "threat" to communist power over China they will act, and act fast. The Chinese response to covid-19 was absolutely not business brained, and only bungled in the end primarily because the rest of the world made lockdown untenable and the business freaks in Shanghai fucked over the rest of the country. AI is legitimately useful for many things, and it's not unreasonable to spend a lot of money towards that field. Look at what China is doing with robotics, for example, leagues ahead of the West. For every "China can't stand Tencent having a bad day" there the counterargument of "China nukes Alibaba's payment IPO and humbles Jack Ma" or "China evaporates the entire field of private tutoring." The CPC can and has done big moves in the past, and I don't see any reason why if the party saw AI as something legitimately threatening their interests they wouldn't stop it. Backtracking on gaming limits for gatcha boxes is a not an existential threat level thing.

Yeah China's got a lot of problems that seem like they have really easy solutions if the party was just willing to move even just a little bit away from its current frame of mind regarding production and trade. Alas.

Want to share an article I read in the Financial Times over the weekend. Really lays bare the reality of the global situation, where even the most ghoulish financial columnists can no longer deny the shifting global power dynamics to China. The whole article is worth reading, but I'll share some choice quotes here.

In the aftermath during the 2010s, the world tilted irrevocably towards the east. Today, it is hard to avoid the impression that it is tilting further China’s way. The contrast between the turmoil in Donald Trump’s America and the mood of calm progress exuded by Beijing is striking both in style and substance.

And take a look at how they admit that even the "massive real estate meltdown" a few years ago that most Western commentators said would cause "China's collapse" has been handled with relative grace.

As for China, it undoubtedly faces substantial macroeconomic challenges. Growth has slowed and youth unemployment is in double digits. In 2020-21 Beijing deliberately stopped the most dramatic process of urbanisation and private property accumulation in history, redlining further credit to its most inflated private developers. Unsurprisingly the ensuing real estate slump has produced a lasting hangover. But the remarkable thing is that, unlike in Europe and the US in 2008, this has not morphed into a systemic crisis. If China’s annual growth rate stabilises at around 5 per cent, it will have to be counted as the most successful soft landing in the history of economic policy. If further stimulus is required, one would expect the policy process in Beijing to be laboured, but to result in an intelligible outcome.

Also some fun riffing on AI:

The White House favours gutting any effective regulation of artificial intelligence, even as more and more experiments confirm that existing large language models are not safely aligned with acceptable political and social norms. China’s platform giants are ploughing huge resources into AI too. The results are no more predictable. But if there is any prospect that AI development poses a threat to the social and political order Beijing deems acceptable, can anyone be in doubt that it would be halted in its tracks? That is what the humbling of the platform oligarchs in 2020 betokened. What analogous guarantee is there in the west? The contrast is stark. On the Chinese side technocratic, top-down managerialism to please any centrist pining for the 1990s. In the US, policy as post-truth reality TV.

Overall a good look at how some of the ghoulish businessmen understand view the world at this moment in time; certainly not encouraging for the United States.

I have terminal newsbrain so I read shit like the Financial Times and other conservative British press brainrot like the Economist.

Trump should've spoke German, these letters capitalise words like German for sure. Dude is in love with capitalisation.

Anecdotally my partner gets motion sick from cars and also needs to be shotgun or else they get really sick, and they do not get motion sick at all from trains.

The same "can do" attitude that lead to them losing every single one of those wars? No thank you.

You can run Deepseek R1 on your local machine

Hey, she's just following the orders of the bond market and the Invisible Hand, ok?

We need our favorite 21st century Italian Marxist on here pronto

It's the only offer on the table. Trump has changed the game, every country is getting tariffs. Vietnam is not willing to play hardball with their largest export market.

What products can the United States sell in Vietnam that will displace Vietnamese industries? Virtually nothing. Everything the United States makes is far too expensive or useless to be of any benefit to Vietnamese consumers, nor is American manufacturing at all a threat to Vietnamese manufacturing. The United States exports mostly agricultural products like soybeans and cotton to Vietnam, as well as some cameras and probably some computer chips. Total exports are around $10 billion (compared to Vietnamese exports to the US, ~$115 billion). So even if that doubles, that's not really doing much.