We tend to think of prejudice in negative terms, but there are positive prejudices as well. I was just telling a friend that I’d trust a random Sikh more than any other religion/ethnicity. Just seem to have a very high proportion of good people. Also think well of the diaspora Chinese, as a rule, perhaps because I was raised by them to a certain extent.
Do you have any positive prejudices?
Feel free to use as an open thread. No vax/medical.
Until I went back to graduate school 12 years ago, I really had little exposure to post-modern thought. Let’s just say after getting my master’s I’m very familiar with it now. It just wasn’t taught in the 90s when I got my bachelors. But now? I got a rude awakening.
Post-modern thought is not a complete philosophy like say the Enlightenment or the Renaissance, or even Aristotle’s great efforts at systematizing human experience. Nor is it an ideology. What the totality of post-modern thought represents, both its Continental version and its Anglo-American offshoot, is a highly adaptable toolset to critique the modern world, to learn to understand it in very uncomfortable but real ways: a toolset that alters a persons perception away from preconceived notions they are often born and indoctrinated into at an early age, that will inevitably challenge their view of the world and the processes that dominate their lives. But it is not an ideology like capitalism—backed up by the fantasy of Chicago School economics, or socialism or Communism. It is incomplete, not a totality of ideas for living and creating government like the Enlightenment philosophers imagined.
That said, the collection of post-modern thought is a highly worthwhile corpus of texts to read, which soon becomes a very useful toolset to engage in modern and ancient texts, modern media, nationalism and government. At least, that’s been my experience. Yes, I know I kind of repeated myself. Sue me.
Perhaps an example will be efficacious. Let’s go with Foucault’s discussion of the nation owning a person’s biology. An excellent example from my own life is my father had stem cells harvested to rebuild the cartilage in his knee several years ago for a procedure in Mexico. He had the stem cells harvested in the US and they prohibited the export of them to Mexico. So he had to start all over. I can think of many other examples, such as female body autonomy in the United States. I would never have conceived of my own nation owning my biology, but when I consider that corporations can now patent DNA Foucault’s ideas first ring true and second increased my analytical rigor towards just how much power “they” have and how little choice I truly have. Not to mention how my choices are only growing less and less as we go full fascist and I grow older.
Why do I bring this up? I have no idea. It’s 2:11 AM central time and I can’t sleep. My unsleeping brain got stuck on Foucault so I decided to write this up. Maybe I should read some Foucault next time. That guarantees sleep.
Serious question. In your opinions, dear readers, which is a more accurate measure of an economy: nominal GDP or purchasing power parity? I lean towards PPP myself, as I’ve traveled so much (65 nations and counting) I’ve internalized what the local value of a currency can buy versus what a dollar can by at home. So, I can mentally compare. It just makes more sense than this amorphous nominal GDP. Am I wrong?
Nota bene: Measured by nominal GDP the USA is 25% of the global economy. But, measured by PPP it is 15%. PPP makes more sense.
You probably thought measles was a thing of the past. Along with Mumps, Rubella, Polio, Chickenpox and Heptatis B, kids are required to be vaccinated for it as a requirement of going to school. (So the little disease spreaders don’t act as disease vectors, which parents and teacher s know they do.)
We hardly see most of these diseases any more, because we make sure everyone is vaccinated, so they can’t get a foothold. (That’s part of why vaccines prevent so many deaths, and that’s why vaccine denial is bad.)
But Florida has decided the days of effective disease control are over:
Florida will end vaccine requirements to attend school, making it the first state to do so. The state’s surgeon general said every vaccine mandate “drips with disdain and slavery.”
This is batshit insane. I don’t care what you think about the Covid vaccines, normal vaccines prevented vast numbers of deaths and crippling disabilities. If they are discontinued, the diseases will spread and be given a chance to mutate. They’ll mutate to defeat vaccines, putting everyone at risk.
(The measles vaccine was approved in the US in 1963.)
I know it’s nice to think “everyone should make individual decisions about everything”, but that’s bullshit when it comes to public health issues, especially dealing with contagious diseases. I warned, repeatedly, that fucking up the Covid response (which was NOT primarily about the vaccine) would discredit public health “well it didn’t work for Covid, so it must be bullshit!”
Anyway, the age of rationality in the West was, overall, nice. But as a friend quipped (exaggeration for effect, I hope), “We’re at most 10 years away from witchcraft trials resuming.” (Ten is too soon, I think, I give it twenty.)
America is descending fast, and much of the Western world is going with it. The very idea of effective mass action has been discredited, and we are all going to pay for that, including the rich, who will find that they can’t completely protect themselves from the demons their malign incompetence has released.
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Someone asked me to back up my claim that since 1976 China has lifted more humans out of poverty than all of nations combined in the entirety of human history. Since it would be hard to go back to Greek and Persian times I made an executive choice (capricious no doubt) to begin with the year 1500.
Global population was estimated tobe between 450-500 million world wide and fully 90% lived in dire, subsistence poverty. You can google those numbers, they are everywhere. So, 50 million humans were not poor at this time. Way to go humanity!
By the year 1900 the worldwide population had grown to between 1.6 to 2 billion. Of those, fully 75% lived in dire subsistence or industrial poverty. Yes, the incipient industrial revolultion had lifted about a quarter out of poverty, some into a middle class, but most fabulously wealthy. At this time between 400-500 million people were not poor. Better but still shitty.
Now, lets talk about China between 1976 and 2018: their standard of living multiplied 26 times. While the United States lifted 28 million people out of poverty between 1945 and 1975, China lifted 800 million people out of poverty between 1976 and 2018.
Now, go back and do the math between 1500-1975 and compare world growth versus Chinese growth between 1976-2018. My claim may not be 100% accurate but it is damn close.
AI’s a weird industry. So far almost no one is making any money, certainly not the major Western AI companies: Anthropic and OpenAI. Every query costs more than the revenue it generates. The primary beneficiary has been NVidia: they’re making money hand over fist, and suppliers of data centers and power have big customers in AI. But AI itself doesn’t make money. (Not Western, anyway. Deepseek, which is 20 to 30 times cheaper, probably is.
The energy required for Western AI is huge, and it’s mostly dirty energy. AI requires mostly 24/7 energy, which means renewables are out. It needs nuclear or carbon intensive sources like coal and natural gas and turbines. MIT did a massive dig into this in March.
The researchers were clear that adoption of AI and the accelerated server technologies that power it has been the primary force causing electricity demand from data centers to skyrocket after remaining stagnant for over a decade. Between 2024 and 2028, the share of US electricity going to data centers may triple, from its current 4.4% to 12%.
AI companies are also planning multi-gigawatt constructions abroad, including in Malaysia, which is becoming Southeast Asia’s data center hub. In May OpenAI announced a plan to support data-center buildouts abroad as part of a bid to “spread democratic AI.” Companies are taking a scattershot approach to getting there—inking deals for new nuclear plants, firing up old ones, and striking massive deals with utility companies.
AI’s a lot more intensive than traditional methods. For example, AI vs. a Google search (granted Google search sucks, but that’s because Google wants it to suck.)
It’s long been noted that one of the biggest issues with climate change is that we can expect it to reduce the amount of fresh water available. AI gobbles that:
AI is also thirsty for water. ChatGPT gulps roughly a 16-ounce bottle in as few as 10 queries, calculates Shaolei Ren, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Riverside, and his colleagues.
ChatGPT 5 power consumption could be as much as eight times higher than GPT 4 — research institute estimates medium-sized GPT-5 response can consume up to 40 watt-hours of electricity
Whoa! That kind of puts paid to rising by 10% a year and other such assumptions. It doesn’t look like new models are scaling linearly.
We have a climate change problem already: lots of extreme weather, disrupted rainfall patterns and massive wildfires. The permafrost is bubbling and releasing methane and arctic temperatures are absurd (hitting 30 celcius in some cases).
Now if this tech was truly transformative, if it made everything so much better, maybe it would be worth it. But so far, with a few exceptions (mostly running thru millions of combinations to assist research) it seems like it’s better search, automatic image generation, a great way for students to cheat and may make programming faster. (There’s some dispute about this, one study found it made coders slower.) So far agents are duds, unable to even run a vending machine.
On the downside, even AI boosters claim it’s likely to put vast numbers of people out of work if it does work, wiping out entire fields of employment, including SFX, illustrators, artists, writers, customer service and perhaps most entry level jobs. We’re told AI has a small but existential risk of wiping out humanity. It gobbles water and energy and causes pollution.
What, exactly, are we expecting to get from AI (other than NVidia making profits) that is worth the costs of AI? Does it make sense to be rushing forward this fast, and in this way? Deepseek has shown AI doesn’t have to use so many resources, but Western AI companies are doing the opposite of reducing their resource draw. Eight times as much energy? How much more energy with GPT-6 use?
It seems like we’re unable to control our tech at all. This used to be the killer argument “well, there’s no controlling it, so why even try?”
But China’s AI uses way less energy. Apparently China can control it, and we can’t? So it’s not about “can’t”, it’s about “won’t”. Using less resources would mean less money sloshing around making various Tech-bros rich, I guess, and we can’t have that.
And all this for an industry where the primary actors, OpenAI and Anthropic aren’t even making money.
Perhaps we could be using these resources in a better way? China is spending their money on producing three-quarters of the world’s renewable energy, and ramping up nuclear power. Their carbon emissions are actually down. Their economy is growing far faster than ours. They’ve almost completely moved over to electric cars, they have high speed trains, and their space program is going gangbusters. All this while reducing rent by over a third in the past five years.
You don’t have to be an AI skeptic to think “maybe this is a misallocation of resources?” Is it really going to change everything so much so that it “makes America great again”? Is western AI so much better than Chinese to make that difference even if AI is as big a deal as its greatest boosters say?
Maybe the US and Europe should be concentrating on more than just AI? Not letting China continue to march ahead in almost every field, while putting almost all the marbles on one big project that they barely have a lead in anyway?
I don’t want to overstate this issue. The amount of energy and water used doesn’t come close to, say, expected increases in air conditioning. (Though if increases in draw continue to ramp up similar to GPT-5 we’ll see. And, the more energy we use, the more air conditioning we need thanks to fairly obvious feedback.) But still, what are we getting for it?
Just some things to think about.
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Since 1976, when Mao died and Deng Xiaoping took over, China has lifted more people out of poverty than all other nations combined throughout the entirety of human history.
It should be that almost always they do what they promise, and they meet their goals. An American-Chinese silicon valley type spent some time in China recently (I don’t agree wit the whole article, but you should read it), and among the bits that stood out to me was this:
In the US, when politicians make campaign promises, I never actually expect them to follow through. But Chinese leaders do—for better and for worse. The 2025 plans to build 1,350 Shenzhen parks or reduce China’s energy dependence aren’t mere propaganda. (Neither, tragically, was the one-child policy.) Accountability is built into China’s bureaucratic system through KPIs, and you can see the results firsthand.
This echoes what Naomi Wu noted: that the Communist party attains their goals, and that many of them are the smartest most capable people she knows. (I think the one child policy wasn’t a mistake, as it happens, though it probably continued too long.)
This chart is of average rent as a percentage of income.
As a westerner this is mind boggling. My entire life rent prices have just increased and increased and increased. So have housing prices. One of my big criticisms of China for years was that they had overly-relied on housing bubbles to fund their growth and that it was causing significant discontent. Every young Chinese person mentioned it as a problem.
So then they just… went and fixed it? And yes, it’s been painful, and led to some softness in the economy, but when it’s done, the economy will be much stronger. (See, “China is Transitioning, and So far successfully“).
China faced a challenge during Trump’s first term: he slapped export controls on chips. They didn’t have a significant domestic industry. So they built one. They knew that if America had done this with one industry, they could do it with all, so they set a national goal to become self sufficient industrially: to be able to make everything they needed. As this was happening, they realized housing was too expensive, so they made that part of the solution, they rotated investment out of real estate into industry.
To a Westerner who has lived their entire adult life under neo-liberalism, this is mind-boggling. Wait, the government can “just do things?” And when it decides to do things, it succeeds? It isn’t just bullshit?
I mean do things other than de-regulate and say “well there isn’t anything we can really do, this is just how the world is.” Do things other than just make the rich even richer? Do things other than constantly de-funding science and engineering and the humanities? Do things other than making medicine fantastically expensive? Do something other than blowing another asset bubble?
I’m 57, and I remember the world before neoliberalism, but I remember it as a child. In my entire adult life I have not seen a Western government capable of doing what China does: set an important goal which benefits the population as a whole and crush it.
China is winning because China deserves to win, because it is better run. I’m not going to whitewash it: there are a lot of things I don’t like about how China is run. But bottom line, it’s run more for the benefit of ordinary citizens than most Western countries, and those countries which seem to be run for the benefit of the population as a whole are running on legacy systems: the entire EU it seems, is considering gutting their social welfare systems to spend more money on American weapons. For my entire life things have been getting slowly worse in France and Germany, and quickly worse in the UK. In China, on the other hand, life keeps getting better for the majority of the population.
Are you worried about Democracy? You should be. But one simple threat is this: China isn’t a democracy and its actions clearly benefit the majority of its people more than the actions of American or British or EU governments benefit their people.
Democracy isn’t just a something word you wave around. If it doesn’t produce better results, people will stop believing in it.
China’s winning because the CCP gets results and the results it chooses to get are, much more often than in the West, good for the majority of its people. That means it deserves to win, and we deserve to lose.
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