[QuickTidal]

Hey Abyss, I split this off into the discussion forum as I felt it might be annoying people that it was in the happy thread. Let me know if that's offsides.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 30 January 2025 - 05:38 PM

[QuickTidal]

I feel like I come across as really dejected and disillusioned with what our status quo has become in Canada, and again I'm not trying to defend China on any of the human rights abuses they have perpetrated in the last 60+ years, or are currently committing (the main thrust of my initial comments really do surround the advances they make despite their govt)....but the fact that I'm middle aged and my wife I together make quite a bit more money (adjusting for inflation ) than my dad did supporting us on his single salary while my mom stayed home in the 80's in big house in Oakville (already a wealthy community at the time) with a pool, trips, extra life stuff, two cars [one of them a sports car]...and we basically have to penny pinch each month to make sure that we have enough to buy food and whatever else, live in a modest house in an outlier smaller community more than an hour from the city..and things like the cost of summer camps for the kids is causing us deep anxiety about paying our bills this month...tells me that something DRASTIC has changed in our country. I was sold a lie that if I worked hard and made enough that I could live decently...and if it bothers me I cannot imagine the people lower on the that ladder. It's no wonder the misinformation campaigns appeal to so many, it's giving them emotional answers to their shittier than promised lives that allows the powers that be to skate by doing what they have aways done.


I want Canada to be a leader in things like Clean Energy...but I feel like we never ever will, and we roll around in the political-will muck instead. And it's just so dispiriting.

[the broken]

I wonder...


Deepseek has been out like three days, It's far too soon to make a judgement, and even if it is, it doesn't mean that much by itself. It's only a big deal because people are reacting 'wait, China did something well That's not true, that's impossible' when even if it is true, it's only a big deal if you think anything not from the US must necessarily be inferior by default. It is normal to not be at the cutting edge all of the time in all things.

China is pretty opaque by design, it's hard to determine what the truth is. It's difficult to make comparisons when so much information is not available. It's easy to go. wow, that's so great' when you don't see the full consequences. It might be that the assumed consequences are overblown, but it also might be that they're not.We don't know, because of all the censorship.

The West allows people to complain about how oppressed they are, the CCP does not. So it's difficult to say that we have the full picture one way or the other.

They build things fast? Consequences (that we know about? Massive Forced displacement.

Good Covid Lockdown? Even if you assume their numbers are real, sealing people in their homes for months has a host of negative consequences like that urumqi appt fire.

Climate Change? China builds more new coal plants than rest of the world : NPR

Foreign visitors will usually go to the rich prosperous places, visiting a tech hub and calling that representative is like going to Silicon Valley and calling that representative of the average person, it doesn't mean much by itself.

I'm pretty wary of 'getting things done is all that matters, no matter how many dissidents are crushed in the process'. That's how you get dictatorships.

[Cause]

I think one of the truest metrics we can examine is how people vote with their feet.

People from the Middle East, Africa, south east Asia, India, Central America and southern America want into Europe Canada and the us.

We don’t really need to examine the why (economic reasons, rights, freedom, security) but we can see the effect.

How many westerners, Arabs, Africans are immigrating to china for a better life?

Americas greatest immigration mistake isn’t the southern border it’s that it has the opportunity to steal nearly every great mind in the world with a green card and tells them no instead.

That west will lose its dominance yes, but it’s not going to be eclipsed anytime soon. America could be better and so can Canada, the uk and Europe. Competition may be what’s needed to provide the impetus to do so.

In the meantime I don’t want to work a six day work week with 12 hours a day. I don’t want to be disappeared by the government or re-educated. China absolutely can build, they make all our iPhones thanks to Foxconn and suicide nets but they also have a reputation for building apartment towers that are so substandard the concrete can be broken by hand.

If china does have a strengh it’s that it’s one party leadership and president for life let it plan long term. Far longer than the wests maximum of 4-10 years. Case in point trump is dismantling and replacing everything Biden did. When trumps gone the pendulum may swing again.

Chinas glaring weakness, Xi Jinping must increasingly hold the reins of power tighter and tighter. His hand picked generals and politicians get removed and replaced. What will the next ten, twenty years be like who can say?

[the broken]

Quote

If china does have a strengh it’s that it’s one party leadership and president for life let it plan long term. Far longer than the wests maximum of 4-10 years.

Theoretically, but for this to happen the dictatorships have to put their countries interests ahead of their own. I don't know that we've seen a dictatorship actually have any good long term plans. Mostly they just purge their rivals/dissidents/random people or create disastrous agricultural reforms.

[Tiste Simeon]

Copied and pasted from "Another Angry Voice" on FB:

Quote

It took me a day of trying to finally receive a DeepSeek access code. The delay was understandable given the massive interest in this new open source Chinese AI language model, and the cyberattacks the company has been suffering.

It seems to work extremely well, unless you ask it about things like Tianmen Square, Taiwan, or the umbrella revolution in Hong Kong, which results in responses that neatly accord with the Chinese Communist Party line.

It’s hardly surprising that a China-based tech company would comply with Chinese censorship rules, but it’s far from the main story, which is that a Chinese company has developed one of the most efficient AI language models on an infinitesimal fraction of the budgets of US tech companies, despite a US-imposed embargo on Chinese imports of the most powerful Nvidia H100 AI chips.

According to DeepSeek they only spent $5.6 million developing their R1 language model, which is a drop in the ocean compared to the hundreds of billions being sunk into US-based AI companies.

Donald Trump just announced a £500 billion investment in AI, which suggests that the US is vastly overpaying for whatever benefits they think AI is going to deliver for them, when a Chinese company can develop a language model that outperforms US models on all kinds of metrics for a fraction of a percent of what they’re paying.

The launch of DeepSeek-R1 instantly wiped a trillion dollars off the value of US stocks, especially tech companies and the makers of AI chips Nvidia, which lost $593 billion in stock value in a single day, making it the biggest one day loss for a US company in history.

Analysts have been calling it China’s "Sputnik moment", in reference to the Soviet Union taking the US by surprise by launching the first space satellite in 1957.

DeepSeek hasn’t just rocked the US tech market by producing a competitive product at a tiny fraction of the cost, it’s also proven the failure of US tech sanctions on China.

Restricting the sale of the most powerful chips to China has backfired by seemingly forcing them to develop comparative technology much more efficiently. Given the collapse in Nvidia’s stock value on the back of this, it’s hard to imagine that they’re delighted with the US government’s market intervention to prevent them from supplying China.

Then there’s the fact that DeepSeek is operating as an open source venture which is the antithesis of the anti-competitive nature of capitalist US tech giants who seek to guard their technological advancements through patent law and rent-seeking behaviour to ensure the maximum profit extraction.

Because DeepSeek is cheap, efficient, and open source, it represents a hammer blow to US profit seeking. Why pay $billions for a US product when you can work off what the Chinese have developed for free?

As Richard Murphy put it in his post on DeepSeek: "If China can develop efficient tech at low prices and put it into widespread use through open-source diversification while maintaining a fee base for access to more advanced searches, then the whole myth on which the next generation of US wealth extraction was being built has been shattered."

Furthermore it’s proven the ineffectiveness of US tech sanctions on China, and made a fool of Trump at the beginning of his second stint as President.

Just last week he flanked himself with a load of tech bros for his inauguration (the Nazi saluting one and others) and announced an astronomical investment in AI, only to have a small Chinese tech company pull all their pants down for the whole world to see.

Further giant leaps forward in the Chinese tech sector seem inevitable, but the US response is harder to predict.

Trump has already been pushing a deeply protectionist agenda of tariffs and trade sanctions, however trade sanctions on tech components have clearly failed to eliminate competition from China.

The US could still try restricting freedoms within the US to try and stamp out Chinese competition, as they’re trying to do with TikTok.

The US are desperate to keep non-US competitors out of the social media market by hyping up the supposed "security threat" of non-US ownership, so could they try to artificially protect the profits of US tech companies by citing spurious "security threats" to ban Americans from using Chinese AI technology?

If they do attempt this kind of market manipulation to protect the profits of their own tech companies, it’s highly likely to backfire (if banning the use of open source developments is even feasible at all).

Forcing US businesses to pay through the nose for proprietary US-based AI advancements while most of the rest of the world follows the vastly cheaper open source approach of the Chinese would create enormous burdens and turn the US into an expensive and uncompetitive walled garden.

Just like the US embargo on selling advanced chips to China has backfired spectacularly, protectionism simply isn’t going to shut down further Chinese advancements.

The only workable option is for the US to try to outcompete their Chinese rivals, but it’s hard to see how that’s possible when US tech developers work on the capitalist principal that advancements are made in order for them to extract $billions in personal wealth, if Chinese companies can develop comparative tech for a tiny fraction of the cost, then give it away open source.

[QuickTidal]

Taiwan is interesting as there's a bit of info that's always left out of that conversation. So China believes that Taiwan is part of China, right? And this was indeed at one point accurate, it was (since something like 1683)...but at some point in the late 19th century the Japanese took it over (and had nominal control over it THROUGHOUT the Sino-Japanese wars with China that began in Manchuria and resulted in heinous shit like the Rape of Nanjing, and atrocities in WWII), and after that in the 50's the division between mainland China and the Republic of China (or Nationalist China) pulled back into the island now known as Taiwan. China has been arguing ever since that Taiwan are part of China, right?

Well the bit they don't tell you is that because the govt of Taiwan is essentially The Republic of China (ROC for short, ROC: Taiwan now officially) and was for most of its existence under the Qing Dynasty and that govt was once located on the mainland of China prior to the Japanese invasion, so actually Taiwan thinks IT owns all of China. They just don't fight for it because they don't have the military to contend with the PRC.

So we kind of get get half the story. Yes, China is bad for all these years later still claiming Taiwan when they should have let it go, and keeping it as such a core interest is deliberately tyrannical...but we fail to recognize that officially...like at the top govt level officially, Taiwan 100% believes IT is the real China and all of mainland China is historically theirs stemming from the Qing Dynastic origins and the fact that the original govt is the one that morphed into theirs. It's far messier than the surface level view would have people believe. Noe, this doesn't excuse things like Tibet, or South China Sea, or Hong Kong and all the other manifestly expansionist shit the current CCP pulls...but Taiwan at the very least, has nuance.


It's interesting to see the focus on the Tiannamen Square crackdown in what ended up being the bell toll for the end of Denigst China (under a man who was divisive to say the very least and got worse as time went on), and the ringing in of a more subdued and calm part leadership. In that not long after the incident in 1989 (a few years post mortem) Jiang Zemin was made leader of the CCP based on the fact that his reaction in Shanghai to protests was to put an end to them peacefully with little to no injury (and AFAIK zero deaths). So people there, even higher up in govt KNEW Deng's govt was in the wrong for what they did (there as a political purge that occurred in the years after 1989 and though Deng was not immediately among them, he stepped down as he knew the bell was tolling for him), and the backlash to how they handed the Student protests across China was to put a man in charge who handled the protests much more like the West does, they just don't openly admit that. Jiang was in place for a decade and was seemingly decent friends with Clinton and had a warm relationship with the US at the very least. Now, Jiang still held the party line about the incident, but he accepted Clinton's dressing down of the whole thing from a Western view and moved on from it. Here's a good interview with someone who was present during the US/China visit in 1997 that gives you a view of who Jiang was, especially compared to the current leader of the CCP. And I think that Jiang is the reason that China went from the hardliner Dengist/postMao era to the current one...this is not to say that Xi is better or even good, but to say that the reasons China is where it is today on the world stage seems to stem from Jiang's openness and belief in China being less closed and more open to change.

Xi Jinping seems to have retracted a bit with his core interest shit, and my hope is that once he decides to leave (most of these leaders do about 10 years before leaving or getting turfed), someone like Jiang will be in place to do more of what he started, and maybe the West and East can work on better partnerships.

the broken, on 30 January 2025 - 07:12 PM, said:

Climate Change? China builds more new coal plants than rest of the world : NPR

Interestingly, CONTEXT is everything. The TL;DR is China is adding more coal capacity, yes, but its plants are running less often. China is building coal because you can't replace reliable generating capacity with solar and wind as fast as that, and its needs as a nation for energy still exist and must be met. The notion that you can switch that fast has been disproven repeatedly. One day there may be a form of affordable storage which makes this feasible, so as they still use and build coal plants, they are simultaneously beefing clean energy plans into being the best on the planet so that the trade off when the time comes won't be as drastic or great...it's not a zero sum game where they can shut off the coal and start clean for everything. We as a global community need to realize that the weaning off of fossil fuels will take DECADES of infrastructure changes to make the transition. And Canada being a major polluter and having not only done nothing much in clean energy in that same time (FFS the carbon tax alone is a contentious issue), have not ceased our coal and oil industries either...

the broken, on 30 January 2025 - 07:12 PM, said:

Foreign visitors will usually go to the rich prosperous places, visiting a tech hub and calling that representative is like going to Silicon Valley and calling that representative of the average person, it doesn't mean much by itself.

Right, but I'm not talking about foreign visitors. I'm talking about the actual dispersement of the vast majority or Chinese citizens (like 94% of them), who live by and large in two economic hub provinces on the east of the Yangtze River delta, with many cities therein. The notion that much of China is squalor and medieval rural awfulness is just incorrect. It might have been correct in the 80's, but the growth since then has been fairly well documented. Is it perfect? No, but the notion that it's the same as it was even 20 years ago is simply wrong.

[Cause]

It’s my understanding that Taiwan maintains they are the rightful government of china not because anyone in Taiwan seriously believes this or thinks it could ever happen but because this is in fact a preferable polite fiction to mainland china.

If Taiwan claims to be the rigtnful government of china as opposed to a breakaway state it is in some sense a tacit agreement of the one china policy.

Does it make sense? No, but someone it keeps tensions less hot.

[the broken]

Huh... If the impressive part of Deepseek is its low cost, that seems very vulnerable to accounting tricks or just lying about how much things cost. That Angry Voice thing seems like propaganda,it's all 'sanctions aren't working, so please please lift the sanctions'

I'm not Canadian, but Google tells me they have some of the cleanest electricity production in the world at 83% non emitting, and committed to go further? Doesn't seem like they're doing nothing.Canada 2022 - Energy Policy Review.

Geographic dispersal alone isn't enough to indicate prosperity. It's not the same as it twenty years ago, but it doesn't mean that being a low end migrant worker is actually a good place to be.

[Abyss]

Catching up a bit... I acknowledge my western bias, and/or reluctance to admit that China is surpassing Canada on many fronts... but on the flip side Canada's population is substantially less likely to be disappeared because they said something critical of their government. Criticize the two party system all we like as we're headed into an election, that is something that will never happen there ('local elections' are pre-approved candidates). I'm never arguing Canada good China bad. I'm arguing China worse.


The baby food thing... yeah, i saw all that too. And if i had a baby or two on hand i still wouldn't want to feed them made-in-china food. I'm aware of all the arguments that they're better than they were. I agree, but not about their conduct, i think they're better at spin and redirect. The population in caves thing thing is still a thing. They saw how the situation was being spun and they spun it back... those villages are are still there, and where they're not, the people didn't leave because they wanted to. Their purported success is at their people's expense, and they do this knowing they have people to spare.

[the broken]

Honest Question: Where is China surpassing Canada? Manufacturing, I presume, but that's because they're doing the manufacturing for everyone else. What else?

This is not a trick question, I genuinely want to know.

[QuickTidal]

the broken, on 03 February 2025 - 10:43 PM, said:

Honest Question: Where is China surpassing Canada? Manufacturing, I presume, but that's because they're doing the manufacturing for everyone else. What else?

This is not a trick question, I genuinely want to know.

We went through it on the other part of the thread in "happy".

Clean Energy drive for one. We are nowhere near their advancements, and are still AFAIK on the Fossil Award list top for our oil sands alone.


Transportation (Public transit in China is about 4x the amount that we have put in in Canada).


Technology, we barely even register on the map of this to be honest...but their EV car industry alone is a decade ahead of us, with infrastructure to match. Our infrastructure is piss poor for a country trying to be all EV by 2035, theirs is way ahead.


I think those are the pretty big ones anyways. I'm sure minor rebuttals could be presented, but the undeniable truth is that China is the global leader now.

[QuickTidal]

Cause, on 31 January 2025 - 05:33 PM, said:

It’s my understanding that Taiwan maintains they are the rightful government of china not because anyone in Taiwan seriously believes this or thinks it could ever happen but because this is in fact a preferable polite fiction to mainland china.

If Taiwan claims to be the rigtnful government of china as opposed to a breakaway state it is in some sense a tacit agreement of the one china policy.

Does it make sense? No, but someone it keeps tensions less hot.

I think lots of people in Taiwan think they are the real China. It's ingrained into their national identity. That said, you are correct. It's all polite fictions all the way down to keep tensions at bay.