I would imagine Cupertino is panicking ahead of their big iphone event

There are about 20 cities in China with at least 5 million people and each of them have specialty cuisines they are known for because the food culture has been developing for thousands of years. In the west, you only really get a handful of those available at Chinese restaurants. The western Chinese dishes (General Tso’s chicken, etc.) were created during brutal repression of Chinese communities in America after the Chinese exclusion act when Chinatowns were in survival mode building neighborhoods and modifying their food so that it would appeal to westerners so they were less likely to burn everything down and murder them. If you’re interested, one place to start is to try the Ten Great Noodles of China (中国十大面条). It’s a fun cooking adventure if nothing serves them in your area but you have access to a Chinese or maybe Pan-Asian grocer.

the wikipedia talk page on this is pretty interesting. The controversy outlines how India is low-key 2 different civilizations mashed together: the indo-aryan and the dravidian peoples. The talk page seems to suggest as much because the Tamil referred to Bharat as the “northern country”, and this seems to be the case up until the English came in and did things. I wonder what the reaction from the Dravidian-speaking parts of India will be.

I don’t think we should cheerlead a mad max united states or its collapse. That would create an extraordinarily dangerous situation for the entire planet. I think instead what we’ll see is a decline in global power projection and in the dollar. It’s going to be an incredibly painful situation in america as a result. So much consumption is built-in because of car culture and how spread-out and unwell the population is. Having a sharp decrease in living standards would condemn a vast majority of the country into poverty, and they will basically be forced to move to cities. So I think you’ll see some kind of eventual re-industrialization with these formerly middle-class suburbanites now living in rough urban conditions. The rich will probably see some kind of managed decline - sell the cape cod house, no european vacations, etc. There is a trend towards rich dense villages in the suburbs that will accelerate. So ultimately I think it will look like rich people kind of clinging on in their wealthy village centers trying to hang on to their lifestyles, and urban areas of huddled masses desperately trying to build some kind of real economic base. As for rural areas, I do think things could get violent and there could be insurgencies of MAGA-type people trying to bottom-up rebuild their country. I’m especially worried about how white supremacy will play into this, Tulsa style, since we’ve seen how bad this is during times of relative prosperity.

I mean, this is just one guy’s perspective. But pretty much no matter how you cut it, a transition to a multipolar world is going to be a rough ride for america. Eventually, it will be good in that there will be a more balanced economy with a reasonable trade and fiscal deficit, less dependent on services. The question is whether that transition will be so painful as to create a Weimar-esque environment and the world has to deal with a nuclear yankee reich. However, I think this is an extreme scenario, since there would be substantial domestic pushback. Or at least I’d like to think…

This is rich coming from a Qatari publication

Apparently, some readers here do not realize how much intellectual property China has stolen from the US over the years. Much of what they create is based on Western development, and then refined. Somewhat like reverse engineering. Why do so many Chinese come to live in the US? Because they see it as LaLa Land.

top comment from the wapo article covering this. although some commenters did astutely point out that perhaps this should not have been a surprise and maybe people who aren’t white have intelligence after all.

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probably color revolution in Russia followed by balkanization into western vassal states ripe for pillaging

climate change is literally a planet-sized problem. solving it will require nothing short of epic public investment in infrastructure, technology, and changing patterns of production and consumption. That’s not going to happen fast or fairly enough under a neoliberal, unipolar world order. Changing that will be a slow grind over the next 10-30 years, carried out by countries outside the imperial core. Building a mass movement to rally behind that change in the global order is probably a good path forward, like a radical anti-war movement in any NATO+ country.

Another idea specifically for america would be to radicalize urbanism and transit nerds to build a movement for dense public housing and transit to replace suburban sprawl. that idea could be extended to other things like veganism, biodiversity conservation, etc. where you help radicalize a left-ish movement that moves in the right direction for planetary longevity.

cheers to the Grayzone for this true accolade of speaking truth to power

I saw some of the news that you mentioned on graphene as well. that would be incredible!

This is exciting to see. The semiconductor industry is only possible through a truly global supply chain that is of unfathomable complexity. China is probably the only country on the planet capable of something like semiconductor autarky. With China being locked out from the high-end stuff by the west, it’s going to be a matter of when, not if, China winds up achieving semiconductor superiority, and whether that will be before or after reunification with Taiwan. After all, Taiwan represents just 2% of China’s power, based on population.

I’m familiar with the industry and the ASML sanctions are probably going to hurt the most based on the CPC bragging about SMEE’s ability to produce 28nm DUV machines domestically before such a machine has actually been proven to exist. China has been stockpiling the ASML DUV machines for some time now in anticipation of this and making enough improvements to them to make 7 nm production feasible (the limit of DUV), which will buy them some time for SMEE to play catchup. Catching up though, is going to be an absolutely herculean task for China to have domestically-produced EUV. China will not be able to compete on the cutting-edge of technology until this is achieved. With 7nm DUV, they should be able to produce sophisticated enough pieces to eventually build EUV light sources, and the export controls on rare-earth metals from China will make it much more expensive to produce the high-tech necessary for ASML to ship more EUVs.

Still though, EUV took decades of basic R&D in the west with armies of PhDs at the national labs tackling the problem, and another couple decades to commercialize the technology. It was essentially one of the last basic research efforts that the west actually pursued. Until now, the Chinese semiconductor industry has been focused on scaling production instead of pioneering high-end process nodes. I’m honestly expecting some movie-worthy espionage schemes will be hatched at TSMC to accelerate domestic development of this technology. It’s gonna be a banger to watch this technology war play out over the next 10 years, or maybe it will be quicker, we’ll see.

The west’s brain-dead investment strategies have basically left technological progression of semiconductors after basic research ran out of steam to Nvidia, Apple and other western firms working with ARM, TSMC, and ASML to advance SOTA with all state support coming from Taiwan. I’m sure China and her people are aware of the situation, and the sheer speed of technological development we will see come out of China as a result of this national focus will be mind-blowing.

This was my childhood 🥺 damn i’m old now

It’s nice to see traitors get what they deserve

MrWeebl is the best thing that ever came out of the UK.

I’ve learned a decent amount about this in the past. Like others have said, it’s about living somewhere without a legitimate grocery store (no fresh produce) within some radius, so the residents just wind up buying junk from the convenience stores. The sinister twist is that they actually have tried interventions where stores with real food are opened up in underserved areas, but they all go under because the residents are so hooked on junk. Furthermore, they have been eating convenience foods for so long that they no longer know how to cook for their families. It’s a truly bleak reality.

Yes, these stores sometimes still carry rice and beans, as well as frozen fruits and vegetables. But the options are limited and you have to be extremely disciplined. Here’s a blog that suggests that. Spot-checking dollar general, out of 28 pages of frozen items, I saw 6 frozen vegetable options (and 0 fruit options), and these were probably intended to be side dishes. As for rice and beans, Americans don’t really eat those because the western diet is crappy. This shows up in epidemiology studies as the “Hispanic Paradox” because Latinos are the only people in America who regularly eat a healthy bedrock of the diet: rice and beans.

Once again, this problem is a baseline crappy western diet teaming up with an undereducated demographic (some spots have < 50% high school graduate population) that is usually working 60 - 80 hours a week to barely make ends meet, combined with a lack of fresh produce availability, and you get food deserts where people are just trying to make it to tomorrow buying the junk in front of them because it’s one of the only sources of solace in their lives.

Gabriel García Márquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a banger

The London and Paris metro stations are even older and don’t look half as bad. To be fair though, the picture is Chambers Street station, which is renowned as one of the worst in the system. There are some nice stations for rich people though, like in Hudson Yards

I can’t believe the Australian state exists, as in the “concept” of the Australian state. The idea that a bunch of people from a faraway archipelago in a completely different climate would come to annihilate the original people of an entire continent on the opposite side of the planet that could hardly be more different than their homeland is nuts. The whole thing just feels like some kind of fever dream of historic fiction, but yet it exists. What are they even doing down there? It’s like if Fordlandia in the Amazon rainforest actually worked out. So incongruent

Arthur Verocai - Arthur Verocai