re: " the money's taxed when it gets transferred to the actual people that own the corporation, anyway" - not as much as you make it out to be. Large US corporations keep a pile of their profits outside the US. In theory this money would be taxed when it would be re-patriated to their US-based investors. In practice the corporations wait for the next Republican president to pass a tax holiday during which money transferred from outside the US to the US-investors is not taxed. GWB did that, Trump did that in his first term too.
Could you please expand on this: "after Congress raided the Social Security account..."? What do you mean by that? AFAIK, Social Security contributions stay within the Social Security Fund - they cannot be used by US government to pay its bills.
> Could you please expand on this: "after Congress raided the Social Security account..."?
I'd ask you, and others reading my previous comment, to scratch this off as a bad choice of words on my part and replace it with:
"by moving to a pay-as-you-go policy for the SSTF, Congress made the point that Social Security is just another tax."
Previously I used "raiding" as a far-fetched metaphor for several different processes which are too complex to discuss here and it would distract from the main point: instead of complex itemization, SSFT & MCFT would be better off as parts of general taxation.
> AFAIK, Social Security contributions stay within the Social Security Fund - they cannot be used by US government to pay its bills.
True in theory, but if we look at how surpluses are handled and how they depend on a manually controlled interest rate we'll see a different reality.
How would massive inflationary printing solve the fact that at some point in the future there will not be enough people working to support people in retirement? (I think inflation would make the problem worse, as the current amount of money in the Social Security Fund would lose its value. But I could be wrong.)
Printing could fund entitlements at the cost of diluting purchasing power for everyone (including retirees). But Social Security is indexed to inflation, so it would pay out more as long as the government chooses to fund it through whatever means are available. Effectively this would continue to fund retirees while taxing all nonretirees, especially those who don’t own assets. Not a great situation and it would have political consequences, but it is theoretically possible.
I think we have enough people to theoretically support retirees (Japan does it with worse TFR), the problem is that declining relative wages makes it politically difficult, as lower earners would share a disproportionate burden. And retirement is just one issue of many, we are trying to run a giant resource-hungry country on a service economy. We’re only able to get away with this by using our aging military resources to force other countries to accept our role as a global middleman. It isn’t sustainable.
I now understand what you mean. This is how post-WW1 Germany tried to pay its WW1 "fines" which were pegged to gold [0]. The result was hyper-inflation - and 2 years later when this scheme was thrown out the currency stabilized. Most likely the same would happen in your scenario - the retirees would come ahead for a while, but only for a short time. So I do not think this is a solution for retirees (no matter their large political power)
These days currencies have no real assets behind them. One cannot expect to be able to purchase real goods / services indefinitely with a fictional construct (fiat currency)
It’s more complicated than that, as Germany’s punitive war debt was designed to cripple it and it didn’t have many options. It’s actually fairly difficult to create hyperinflation without being trapped in an extreme situation. But I agree that it’s generally a bad idea to put yourself at risk of it.
Fiat isn’t necessarily backed by nothing, that’s a misconception. It’s backed by the strength of the underlying economy, the perceived value of claims on the nation’s resources and services, the political stability of the nation, and the need to hold that currency for trade. The problem with fiat is that when those things are in decline, the lack of hard assets can cause a rapid devaluation, as the “invisible assets” backing the currency are now devalued. This compounds the decline.
Ok ok. I can’t wait to see how 2026 and 2027 will shake out. Trump’s choice to replace Jerome Powell will drive short term interest rates to zero because, among other things, US pays around $1 trillion / year in interest for its debt.
Getting these rates to 0 will require the Fed to print massive amounts of USD. Let’s see then how the USD is backed by something other than thin air.
(BTW - lots of countries managed to achieve hyperinflation: Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Russia and my home country of Romania in the 90s. It is not that difficult)
If they lower rates too much, they will have a problem finding buyers for Treasuries, so they are somewhat constrained. We’re not living in the pre-Covid era anymore, and people have better options than low % US Treasuries. The only way I can imagine ZIRP again is if a deflationary crash were about to hit. That might happen (eventually it will happen) but I am not foolish enough to bet on the timing.
The awkward US system is fairly robust against hyperinflation because the government can’t just print money directly. The one option for doing this, minting a “trillion dollar coin” and depositing it with the Treasury, is extremely risky because of the potential impact on normal Treasury funding. I would only expect this as a last resort when the economy is already heading towards disaster.
I suspect that true hyperinflation is an artifact of nations with wrecked economies trying to sustain themselves on fiat. Once you reach that point it’s already too late, so hyperinflation is a symptom, not the cause. In effect it’s a default on debts and a collapse of the monetary system.
In Azure - which I think is at Google scale - everything is dynamically linked. Actually a lot of Azure is built on C# which does not even support static linking...
Statically linking being necessary for scaling does not pass the smell test for me.
I never worked for Google, but have seen some strange things like bit flips at more modest scales. From the parent description, it looks like defaulting to static binaries is helping to speed up troubleshooting to remove the “this should never happen, but statistically will happen every so often” class of bugs.
As I see it, the issue isn’t requiring static compiling to scale. It’s requiring it to make troubleshooting or measuring performance at scale easier. Not required, per se, but very helpful.
Exactly. SRE is about monitoring and troubleshooting at scale.
Google runs on a microservices architecture. It's done that since before that was cool. You have to do a lot to make a microservices architecture work. Google did not advertise a lot of that. Today we have things like Data Dog that give you some of the basics. But for a long time, people who left Google faced a world of pain because of how far behind the rest of the world was.
Azure's devops record is not nearly as good as Google's was.
The biggest datasets that ChatGPT is aware of being processed in complex analytics jobs on Azure are roughly a thousand times smaller than an estimate of Google's regularly processed snapshot of the web. There is a reason why most of the fundamental advancements in how to parallelize data and computations - such as map-reduce and BigTable - all came from Google. Nobody else worked at their scale before they did. (Then Google published it, and people began to implement it. Then failed to understand what was operationally important to making it actually work at scale...)
So, despite how big it is, I don't think that Azure operates at Google scale.
For the record, back when I worked at Google, the public internet was only the third largest network that I knew of. Larger still was the network that Google uses for internal API calls. (Do you have any idea how many API calls it takes to serve a Google search page?) And larger still was the network that kept data synchronized between data centers. (So, for example, you don't lose your mail if a data center goes down.)
Does AWS have a good reputation in devops? Because large chunks of AWS are built on Java - which also does not offer static linking (bundling a bunch of *.jar files into one exe does not count as static linking). Still does not pass the smell test.
In AWS, only the very core Infra-as-a-Service that they dogfood can be considered "good", Everything else that's more Platform-as-a-Service can be considered a half baked leaky abstraction. Anything they release as "GA" especially around ReInvent should be avoided for a minimum of 6 months-1 year since it's more like a public Beta with some guaranteed bugs.
In AWS, only the very core Infra-as-a-Service that they dogfood can be considered "good" - large chunks of which are, by the way, written in Java. I think you are proving my point...
which just means Java isn't affected? or your definition of not not counting bundled and not shared jars as static linking is wrong, since they achieve the same effect.
The only lesson that China can learn from Russia is to not invade their neighbor. It did not work out at all for Russia; if China invades Taiwan it will not work out for them either.
Well, recognizing Taiwan as an independent country for starters. The countries that recognize Taiwan are not recognized as independent states by China.
If anything, these actions will make Taiwan even more opposed to unification with China and will strengthen their resolve to oppose China.
For China it would have made more sense long term to first "incorporate" Taiwan into their country and only after that start turning the screws on both Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Naw, now Taiwan will have a few years to realize being 1C2S is no big deal, kids in HK are going to mainland to party, next gen is going to be even more integrated thanks to patriotic education. In 5-10 years you'll have patriotic HKers lol at TWers being brained for for prefering Gaza solution over HK solution. Which realisitically is really what the offer is now.
The Taiwanese support for pro-independence actually skyrocketed in 2019. I don't think anything bad happening to Hong Kong activists would be a good look for China.
Yes in 2019, look what's happening to TW politics now, green fatigue, DPP anti PRC rhetoric secured a couple elections but now the island new gen is increasingly jaded and post political because they realize the DPP Anti PRC card isn't improving their QoL. VS a few years post getting crushed, HKers also post political who realized they can simply live much better lives by embracing mainland (SZ) and not be such nativist/supremecist. Reality is democratic and shitlib politics is structurally failling everywhere, if the authoritarian gives you a priveledged deal, many TWer might eventually take it. Just look at HK reaction to recent fire, HKers lamenting how much more SZ and mainland tier1s have their shit together. The vibe is changing. PRC needs carrot and stick for TW, like how it's always been. Let's be real, in a post TW crisis there will be winners and losers, TWers need to see how winners are treated (tier1 affordtable life style) and how losers are treated (Gaza). Nevermind DPP just banned XHS because they realize they're losing culture war to mainland.
When look past liberal world order propaganda, aka the libtard bubble, a lot of geopolitical reality seem to bias toward PRC, not because PRC is extra prescient or competent (even though they kind of are) but because libtard delude themselves into false models of how world works.
Pertaining to topic, current reality is HK isn't going to be rebellious stain on 1C2S like LIO types wanted, it's thoroughly cowed and new gen of HKers are going to be patriotic as fuck. For the simple reason that patriotic education / indoctorination actually works really well as statecraft tool. TW democratic disallusionment is growing YoY, and eventually they're going to have to reckon between being privledged cowed like HKers or becoming Gaza - it wasn't Israel begging for ceasefire and Israel has less autonomy over Gaza than PRC over TW in a cross strait scenario.
Wow. That's a lot of modern keywords you have there. Now I am curious about your brain/point of view.
1. When you say "libtards," do you mean non-authoritarian democracy believers? If not, then what does that mean exactly?
2. How do you see Taiwan's sovereignty in the next few years?
Will the CCP kill many, and put the rest into re-education camps, or will that be entirely unnecessary?
Liberal world order / zombie democracy gud types. My brain / pov is just boring realism and recognizing a lot of strategic trendlines is going in PRC favor.
TW fine until mid 2030s, tldr is that is around crossing point where current baked in procurement / strategic investments will give PRC potentially unassailable geostrategic advantages vs US+co. If shit hits fan it will likely be around then.
CCP / at least Xi will be magnanmous because he's just a dove / nice boy. But war is war, no one really controls escalation, gaza is not first choice (especially for softie like Xi) but when ability to do a TW gaza, it is on the table and sometimes inevitable result from escalation dynamics.
How postwar TW gets treated depends on nature of capitulation, i.e. hearts and minds vs pacfication, if PRC paid high price in blood then domestic audience will want blood. But most of effort is patriotic education, i.e. school curriculum pro PRC material and next gen sentiment will automatically shift. Mass reeducation wasn't neccessary in HK who was broken relatively bloodlessly, and now new gen of kids shaped from PRC textbooks are going to have different brains than those shaped by British whose position is going to continue getting clowned on in public messaging until it becomes new norm. But would the extra intransient elements be whisked to mainland for re3ducation, probably - explicitly endorsed by PRC french ambassador at one point.
Ultimately how TW seperatist gets treated is matter of petty PRC bloodlust and local TW bloodlust. As with political jockeying during upheaval, anticipate a lot of pro seperatist TWers simply getting bumped off by local internicine factional violence for getting TW into shitfest in first place. The amount of organized crime influence in TW is too damn high, and all of them know they can instantly transform from gangster to legitimate political power post occupation by getting on Beijings good side, and some are actively being groomed for the role via United Front, see triad leading Chinese Unification Promotion Party (CUPP). They're going to be bashing skulls on behalf of Beijing.
TBH whatever comes, comes. What I want to see in context to what I think is coming: IMO US/PRC bipolarity. The most favourable result for the world is to have 2 alternative, comprehensive tech stacks to develop from instead of depending on whims of single hegemon who controls entire tech tree. PRC/US/developed west will be fine, as in they can collapse/decline so far, but not to subsistent developing country levels due to capita accumulation. They can continue to jockey for podium positions. All the poors need to buy cheap Chinese renewables and capital equipment and up their development game which has never been more accessible. For the big players, peaceful transition / handover of regional hegemony / spheres of influence but that's a tall ask.
If say China failed to “Gaza” Taiwan - because, well, China has never successfully launched a maritime invasion in its long history - would your world-view change? Or are you a ride-or-die Central Committee man, every other thought is impossible, the province of us “liberal retards”?
Person B claims Bay of pigs failed / maritime invasion hard.
Person B argument retarded because US doesn't need to invade to Gaza Cuba.
Person B is admitting they lack 101 subject matter knowledge, to even bring up maritime invasion (because that's the context PRC/TW scenario is presented in lay news) is kind of so stupid it's not even wrong when talking about razing TW into Gaza.
TLDR PRC doesn't need to invade TW to Gaza it. They can now do it trivially from mainland fires. That's the current military reality. There doesn't need to be single foot on the ground to starve island with 90% energy and calorie import needs, and there's functionally nothing US+co can do about it, at least not for next 10+ years where procurement is locked in, and assuming PRC MIC somehow regress. So when I say PRC can Gaza TW, I mean statistically, with the currently correlation of forces across the strait, PRC can conventionally level TW like Gaza, without any amphib effort, just like US can simply glass Havanna from CONUS. That should not be controversial statement if you understand the actual #s involved. I mean delulu libtards are free to think delulu impossible thoughts, but some of them are, in fact functionally in the realm of impossible.
I personally would like to see East Asia more unified and less reliant on an increasingly unstable country like the US. They will collectively have to rely on foreigners more in the future anyway due to low birth rates as Japan already does. A lot of people serving food were Chinese when I went there. About 50% of the tourists were also Chinese.
I think the sentiment is nice but historic greviences still strong. Utlimately the problem isn't more or less reliance on US security hedging but force balance being so lopsidded in PRC that US don't matter. Reminder TW use to have the largest airforce in East Asia. At somepoint (that we're probably well past), US not capable of east asia security gurantee. And whatever you think about recent PRC/JP tussle, and ignore takaichi picking fights with RU over sakahlin and SKR over dokodo within last few weeks, JP having maritime/territorial disputes with all her neighbours despite beign loser of WW2, where her borders should be prescribed by treaty, is going to lead to messy situations.
I would not like to see East Asia more unified. The current boundaries are fine and the US treats Japan quite well while China/Korea are not ready to tone down resentment yet.
Full unification is similar to the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere (大東亜共栄圏). The foundation would probably be some ideology centered around the area’s 3000+ years of shared Buddhism and Confucianism, rewarding wealthy multi-lingual business families more than the average person.
Something more realistic and beneficial to you (assuming you are Asian in an English-speaking country) would be world unification .
The West would probably cut economic ties with China like they cut them with Russia. For the simple reason that economic ties would help their enemy.
Invadin Taiwan would have a huge negative impact in China. Another poster in this thread, in the process of contradicting himself, said that the longer PRC waits the stronger they become. The conclusion then being that the best course of action for China is to never invade Taiwan. I fully subscribe to this conclusion.
lol it's not contradictory, there are specific PRC strategic milestones that shifts TW scenario, or a broader push to boot US+co out of east asia and gain PRC asian hegemony from potential gamble to forgone. And that's what PRC ultimately wants, their own Monroe. There's a few components left that more or less secures this in next 10/20 years where balance of forces makes US posture existentially unfavorable. The intersection period is mid 2030s-2040s where basically broader strategic balance is baked in, it's just matter of watching relevant trend lines cross (or gap extend). Realistically that's when we can expect things to pop off. The best course of action is for PRC to NOT JUST INVADE TW, but use TW as cassus belli for broader east asian war with US+co to dismantal postwar hemisphereic US security archictecture. The conclusion is, TW is basically PRC's legitmate excuse to shoot US hardware for meddling in domestic Chinese civil war card, it's simply too good to squander right now. Now ultimately international law doesn't matter in WW3, but it helps to have legimate reason to start a constrained WW3 in a way that would cause third parties to sit out (why meddle in ongoing Chinese civil war) and ask why not be net winners while US and PRC and most of east asia "lose". Ultimately for PRC it shouldn't be enough for them to gain TW, but US must also lose east asia.
Ukraine could easily be protect if there was a will to do so in the West. Very few people want to go die fighting for a country they can't even point to on a map so the the most effective solution to defending Ukraine is off the table.
Not sure about "easily" but I believe the idea at this point is to not escalate, drag out the war and win on economic grounds. Of course dragging things out also comes at a huge price for Ukraine but the EU/US seem to have accepted that as the price to be paid despite the moral posturing.
This is definitely not the sort of "protection" I would rely on.
I agree that it is just dragging on and that is what I meant by describing the alternative as easy. Sending money and weapons is just leading to more death and destruction and no victory for Ukraine.
I don't think Ukraine can win with the way things are going unless the West joins the fighting or Russia collapses. Waiting until Russia collapses will quite possibly be a long time which will result in a Pyrrhic victory for Ukraine. They will have an entire generation of dead men at the rate things are going.
On the flip side though see how badly things are working out for Russia. I think EU will not do business with Russia for a generation. Russia is really fucked.
PRC sees the writing on the wall and, being the pragmatic bunch that they are, will probably not invade Taiwan. Unless Xi really controls the country 100% (this I do not know since I am not a Chinese observer) and goes crazy like Putin did.
PRC never advertised a timeline outside of implying national rejuvenation (which can't happen without reincorporating TW) by PLA centennial by 2049. If you depend on western propaganda like Davidson Window 2027 then you can keep thumb twiddling. What's likely going to happen is some inciting event or some engineered out of blue casus belli.
PRC doesn't have any capable enemies in the west, including US, that can prevent PRC from turning TW into a Gaza. Which PRC can do with purely mainland based fires at this point. The force balance is too lopsided off PRC shores now. PRC's fleet of PL191 can basically level all of Taiwan urban areas in a few months, weeks considering other munition stockpiles. They can build a few hundred more chasis and frankyl TW->Gaza would take a couple weeks. Otherwise every inch of TW is within a few minute strikes from mainland, so resupply is out of question. There's nothing preventing TW from becoming Gaza except Xi is kind of nice bro.
He's nice enough all things considered, nelson mandella kind of person in LKW words. It is statistically remarkable how dovish he has been given size of PRC military now, all historic hegemons even local were up to more violence by this stage of rise.
There really aren't anything substantial, nothing the west can sustain anymore let alone in 5/10 years or 2049. It may very well be PRC is poised to be the least biggest loser, aka relative winner. IMO we're in stage where the longer PRC waits and accumulates the harder they win and frankly there's shit all west is able to do about it (on procurement side over next 10-20 years) with gap extending in PRC favor.
Most left wing movements and organisations in the West drew strength from the existence of strong socialist states, both materially and ideologically. These kinds of groups were a balancing force against the right wing/capitalist direction, which is inherently undemocratic, having as its logical endpoint the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few.
I think the true decline begun earlier though, around the Thatcher-Reagan era, with the erosion of all kinds of state ownership and control of our economy and broad attacks on organised labour.
Is quite an assumption to make left wing movements and organizations in the West the defender of democracy. And another assumption to make the right movements the enemy of democracy. Also, take it from me who lived 15 years in communist Romania - the socialist states were very weak relative to the West.
Concentration of wealth and power was (and is) the highest in communist dictatorships - literally a handful (i.e. less than 5) people control pretty much everything in Cuba. North Korea is ruled with an iron fist by 1 guy - that is some concentration of power, right? In Communist Romania / East Germany power was concentrated in 2 people (a couple). In USSR power was concentrated in the 7 members of PolitBuro. In China power used to be concentrated in the hands of Mao Zhedong, now it seems it is concentrated in the hands of Xi Ping (but I could be wrong about Xi Ping. Maybe he shares some power with other people). I could go on forever, baby!!!
Capitalism has its problems but capitalism is quite fine all kinds of political systems - see German capitalism before, during, and following Hitler's rule.
I tend to believe that Communism provided enough of a threat to the Western elites that they felt forced to keep their countries visibly better. Not ready to defend this argument right now, I just think it does hold water.
There's a very common line of thinking that goes like this:
From the end of WWII until the fall of communism, the public in the West (as opposed to the elites) enjoyed much better treatment, and prospered more than ever before or since. This would include both fiscal gains, and the public's opinion being truly taken into consideration. This is mainly because the elites were afraid of people turning socialist / communist, so they gave them a reason to actually be invested in the system. Once that threat of communism evaporated, the elites could proceed to gut the majority as in the previous centuries with no fear whatsoever.
My comments:
I'm not sure I agree with that, though, too simplistic. On the other hand, I also think that people have a rose-tinted view of what "democracy" always was - with enough money / media control and a bit of time, you can convince the majority of anything, anywhere. Letting people prosper does make it easier. Maybe it did play a bit of a role. A counter argument is that (independent) media coverage made the Vietnam war unpopular, and then the US pulled out because of that, a miracle of democracy which never really came close to happening again ever after.
But I think the USSR itself murdered any real chances of communism's further spread in 1968, when they invaded Czechoslovakia. (The Hungarian thing in 1956 isn't nearly as important because of country's undeniable previous Axis affiliation; few had sympathy for that back then). The US and west in general couldn't get rid of their Woody Guthries, and their Klaus Fuchses, until USSR did it for them through sheer idiocy. But after that, was communism really a threat?
But I do think that the 1950s policies were affected by the war (+ Korean war) even more than communism itself. All these traumatized vets, desensitized to violence, were now back home, and the elites were truly afraid. But that doesn't seem like it brought democracy in today's sense of the word? There's a reason why feminism regressed in the 50s - letting men be little despots in their own (cheaply bought) homes was the least the government could do. But that seems to have lasted only until the mid 60s, then the Vietnam thing happened, ... Let's not go further.
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