Only so many ejects your body can take

Don’t you shit on cooks. Cooks are the lifeblood of any large organized group.

China achieved this at the cost of rising income inequality, though. Entirely part of Deng Xiaoping’s plan (“some regions get rich quicker than others”), but if left unchecked it would’ve been pretty disastrous. Fortunately, recent years have seen a reversal in this policy and it’s the less rich regions that are growing more quickly now.

The EU is trying to tax German and American car manufacturers… This was the best way they could come up with.

BYD will just circumvent these tariffs by going all-in on hybrids for the EU market anyway. It’s a silly game.

National security! Think of the children! Shale oil is good for the economy!

Wait, I’m confused.

I don’t think China’s goal has ever been financialization. Doctrine treats excess financialization like a cancer that inhibits progress towards socialism.

The solution is really a move towards increased currency independence through something like mBridge - by facilitating transactions in local currencies, it increases efficiency in financial markets and makes a single reserve currency more difficult to justify.

Edit: from the BRICS side, this is the only solution. India will never support a reserve currency that India does not have an outsized influence on, and neither will China.

If China figures out the scaling challenges with renewables (storage, etc.), it’s pretty easy to see a path where Europe flips entirely.

Europe’s energy transition is the story that’s being overlooked because of their sudden loss of cheap gas.

Dollars for gold is an obvious outlet, no?

The New York Times is incredibly lazy. They found a nice headline and filled the story in to match. Many such cases

Just like we extract and refine oil from the tar sands, right?

Wait, you mean Canada just takes the brunt of the environmentally exploitative resource extraction and the US reaps all the benefits of refining it into a usable product?

Legitimate expressions of grievance do not preclude outside agitators, though.

Everyone’s discontent, but not all issues end up organizing.

The easiest way to end the war is by forcing a coup. There’s no way Ukrainian citizens are desperate to keep throwing people at the meat grinder to please their overlords in Kiev. I’m fairly confident that’s why Zaluzhny got sent away and Zelensky has been cleaning house in his security detail.

Props where they’re due, Zelensky’s an absolute monster for staying in power and surviving this long into the conflict.

Russia is about to become China’s Canada and… I think that’s ok?

America’s Manufacturing Productivity Problem: US Manufacturing Productivity Has Been Stagnant for 15 Years. Industrial Policy Must Aim to Fix That.

An interesting article showing an interesting phenomenon.

Mao Zedong may have been the father of modern China, but Deng Xiaoping is the architect. The economic liberalization strategies adopted by him have enabled China to navigate the perils of capitalism without relinquishing power to the bourgeoisie. This is ideology in the making.

Faculty senate of Emory college calls for no-confidence vote for president

So did the US just dissolve the prestige of the USD for $6 billion?

Seems… Short-sighted?

Is power consumption a leading metric for economic growth? China notched 7.4% electricity consumption growth in March YoY. They’ve been fairly correlated in the past, with the caveat that growth in services generally leads to contraction in electricity consumption.

I’m notching up my GDP growth estimates for this year from barely above 5% to a healthy 5.5%+. There’s a lot of internal development that’s not getting reflected, and so something is clearly happening in China. But what?

996 is a tech thing. It’s unsurprising that, in fields where China is widely recognized as lagging behind the US, more work and longer hours are valued over workers’ rights.

China’s economy grew 5.3% in the first quarter, beating expectations

Real estate continues deleveraging, and yet 5.3% GDP growth YoY.

Retail sales growth continues to be sluggish (3.1% vs. 4.6% predicted) and CPI is coming in cool (0.1% vs. 0.3% predicted). My theory for this is that China is actually seeing costs drop more quickly than CPI metrics can keep up. Traditional big-ticket household spending categories are housing, transportation, and education. Housing prices are obviously on the decline, but transportation costs are also decreasing due to the combination of cheaper EVs and an expanding HSR network. Education costs have been clamped down on after the crackdown on private tutoring, while average education outcomes have been raised by the crackdown on gaming. Meanwhile, traditional recurring costs like food and energy have been pushed downward by increasing trade with Russia as well as the rise of cheap solar.

It may be time to revisit the notion of ever-increasing consumption value as being important for economic growth. In this case, you can get the same quality of life with substantially less money. Why spend more to pad the top line retail sales number?