Just a poorly made and poorly received joke about aggressively not caring about the problems fifa/the world cup are facing. Sure, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, but we’re not always playing hockey, ya know?

How would you even know about this? What are you, some kinda nerd?

We might be wise to see the real headline here: American intelligence is getting… stupid. As more resources get poured into near-literal witch hunts, wildly unreliable tools become routinely abused, competent staff continues getting cut, and some absolute dipshits keep filling decision making roles, the ability to keep some pretty intense existential threat vectors at bay looks to be getting very uncomfortably diminished. I’m no fan of the American intelligence community myself, nor of any state in general anyway, but we might want to consider the consequences for all of us if a generally competent intelligence community protecting a state with an apocalyptic amount of nuclear weapons starts getting… stupid. I’m worried enough about the instability in Russia and Putin’s growing paranoia.

Oh, damn… so have yall seen some of the crazy shit people have been doing with home automation these days? Setting up a whole ass brewery with such precision on temperature, pressure, and specific gravity in their own house.

Yeah, I think that really is the foundational tension in China; the internal power struggle of a deeply authoritarian CCP versus the cooperative stance needed to gain/build political capital worldwide. As it stands, their system will resist any legitimately populist movement and disincintivize honest efforts to dismantle harsh authoritarian policies and violent state oppression. You don’t maintain power (or your life) in a quasi-dictatorial party without keeping those who benefit from the system happy.

It’s certainly an opportunity in global soft power for the CCP, but I think the headline here is better framed as a shift in global economic power, specifically in tech. The current American government is certainly fucking things up for American soft power globally, but the political capital built up over the decades just can’t be ignored as that just doesn’t disappear overnight. Not to mention the human rights violations in Xinjiang, government corruption problems, aggressive naval maneuvering, and recent isolationist past that the Chinese CCP needs to overcome to become a serious contender as the new number one. They’re kinda making their way through it, but it’s definitely not inevitable, and too many short-term and long-term metrics are working against them. This particular situation could certainly be a solid foundation to build on, but the CCP and many Chinese vulture capitalists have a history of shooting themselves in the foot for short-term gains.

Yep, I keep forgetting about Chinese EVs. However, and pretty much exactly to your point, I think the US and western corpos are gonna have a much harder time keeping out Chinese RAM versus the relative ease of keeping out very conspicuous (in more than one way) Chinese EVs. The US government can make trade protectionism work, but that requires serious investment in domestic production in the same targeted sectors that get tariffed and uhhh… well. Happy early birthday, Chinese renewables, I guess?

Pretty sure the primary driver is the cheap labor. The poor working conditions kinda go hand in hand with that. However, with a shift toward domestic Chinese firms directly dependent on domestic Chinese labor, that gives the workers there a ton more leverage versus when it’s western corporations that can threaten to move elsewhere. A win for Chinese workers is a win for all of us.

Man, China as a country is certainly poised at this point to really pull some wild political optics with this move. Their manufacturing quality has been noticeably improving in recent years and their tech industry has a huge opportunity to show up western firms by undercutting the shit out of them in consumer NAND and DRAM. It would be wise of them to take QA extra seriously over the next couple of years to make themselves the “heroes” of the people by delivering better quality and dramatically lower prices than those bloated western companies. Hell, I’m even possibly in the market for it soon if the price is right. I have a feeling western corpos will continue snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and not notice that some of these Chinese corporations already quietly got their shit together a while back and probably won’t shoot themselves in the foot this time. This could be the optical turning point for China as an economic power.

Hopefully the Chinese people can continue making progress in fighting the CCP bourgeois for better labor rights, especially with western corporations losing access to terrible enforcement of already inadequate CCP labor laws. The Chinese workers will start having a hell of a lot better bargaining position with this development and the ACFTU/CCP can get fucked.

I wonder how cost effective this will be in the long run considering how much they’ll have to deal with corrosion. I imagine the maintenance will become pretty overwhelming in a year or two.