switchboard_pete

giving somebody a gift card for a product or service you think they specifically will enjoy is objectively more personal than giving them cash, yes

i see you realized that building factories isn’t free

congratulations

If you actually responded to what I said rather than deflecting you might learn something.

restate your point if you fluffed it up the first time, but no, what you provided initially was devoid of anything worth responding to

You keep repeating yourself rather than look at what I’ve already said.

because what you’ve said is nonsense that doesn’t address anything i’m saying

let’s keep this real simple: do you agree or not with the fact that spending resources to set up a factory in location A means you, right now, have fewer resources to spend setting up a factory in location B?

if no, where do the additional resources come from in the here and now? and, more importantly, why has china not already constructed an infinite number of factories?

I directly responded to the comparison to US offshoring that you made to explain why this is different.

and your argument boiled down “us bad china good”

If you took ten seconds to think about it, having any financial component makes my point correct and yours incorrect.

genuinely, what are you talking about?

• you can’t invest in factories abroad without by definition investing less in factories at home because resources are finite
• us outsourcing started with “it’s just supplemental” too, so you can’t use that as a bulwark against any notion of further outsourcing

and you’re coming at me to say that if money changes hands then that’s not the case?

my guy i already had the last word of consequence like 5 posts back when you stopped actually responding to things i was saying in a coherent way and started arguing with china

since then it’s all been for the love of the game

If you have constant demand for the good

quite literally, you’re now arguing with your own hypothetical

“As long as your demand is growing” -> not constant demand

but it doesn’t matter because i foresaw your difficulty with this one, and addressed both the case of constant demand and growing demand

all you do is just regurgitate the same nonsense over and over

maybe check your post history i think the call might be coming from inside the house on this one

you are comically bad at backing up a worldview you evidently hold so strongly, and it’s utterly fascinating to me

Having more apples doesn’t make your existing apples less valuable.

having a surplus of apples means you value an individual apple less, yes

that’s how the concept of “having things” works

As long as your demand is growing ALL your factories are just as valuable.

so if 20% of your factories are now somewhere else, whereas before it was 0%, then the share of value taken up by domestic factories has decreased, as has the share of demand they’re managing to satisfy by domestic factories

if china completely stops building new factories at home, and in 30 years 90% of their factories are abroad, and 10% are at home, would you say their industrial base had been “hollowed out”, even though the absolute number of factories at home is the same?

If you can’t even understand what the article says then there’s no point having further discussion.

i pointed out that there was no point discussing this further when you said that china was wrong about their own economy, but for some reason you insisted on it

It’s not an economy where the market makes decisions where labor and resources are allocated. The government decides that and the market acts as an allocator within that context.

this is like saying “the government doesn’t decide that; steve from the finance department decides that”, or “the market doesn’t decide that; a distributed network of private investors decides that”

if the government bases their decisions off the market, then the market is the one making those decisions, just like steve is making his decisions based on what he’s been told to do from the government, and just like investors are making their decisions based on what they think the market is telling them to do

you can quibble about how the same market effects will produce different results, but the result is still a market economy

i’m genuinely so excited for your next fruit analogy that accidentally explains why you’re wrong

If I have two apples and I buy a third apple then I’m not less invested in the two apples I already had. Let me know if I need to explain this in simpler term for you.

you just gave me an example that proved my point

if you have two apples, you can afford to lose one of those apples less than if you had three apples. try again.

you also probably wouldn’t spend a decade obtaining an orange if you were only interested in your two apples forever and ever.

you also replied to the bit that i explicitly called out as not relevant, which is hilarious

“if you only have time to go to one shop, then going to the grape shop means you can’t go to the apple shop”

did it get through to you? are you about to reply telling me that any shop that sells grapes would realistically also sell apples or something? that seems in line with the quality of debate you’ve been providing thus far.

Well China doesn’t say that, and linked you an article explaining what China actually says.

literally linked you a source referencing china explaining their own economy

and again, the interpretation you linked to isn’t mutually exclusive with “market economy”

China is increasing capacity to supplement the domestic capacity.

being less dependent on a thing automatically makes you less invested in a thing, but this is besides the point

if you spend decades of effort ramping up manufacturing in one location (away), then that’s decades of effort you didn’t spend ramping up manufacturing in another location (at home)

i literally cannot fathom how you’re so furious to be wrong that you’re still arguing contrary to that

I’m arguing that Chinese understand how their economy works better than an ignorant internet troll.

well china say their economy is a market economy, and you say otherwise, so i guess this puts you firmly in the ignorant internet troll camp

This is not a long thread, go back and read it instead of making vapid replies here.

your last three replies haven’t even been making an argument. they’ve just been quibbling over some definitions you’re wrong about, and shooting yourself in the foot by making my case for me.

what are you even doing here?

If by that you mean China spends decades building out manufacturing capacity and setting up supply chains then sure.

i’m sitting here arguing that china has invested more than zero in setting up external manufacturing, then suddenly you forget what your point is, and emphasize just how much china has invested in setting up external manufacturing

you’re so absolutely rabid to just disagree with anything i say, you’re willing to render the chain of your argument completely incoherent to do it

yes, china spending decades building out supply chains for external manufacturing inherently means they’re less invested in domestic industry, or they wouldn’t spend decades to do it

I’ve literally provided you with the source explaining the context of markets within the Chinese economy and explained why your understanding is superficial.

you’re arguing with china’s interpretation of their own economy by providing a non-mutually exclusive definition

good job

then you’ll see that I’ve addressed your nonsense already

again, combined with the “LMFAO” above this is completely incoherent

maybe work on addressing the argument i’ve spelled out to you multiple times rather than falling back on the tried and true “well your reading comprehension is bad” like we’re 12 year olds arguing in the youtube comments section

if you’re so sure you’ve addressed it, quote it, and i’ll do the reading comprehension for you and explain to you why the thing you quoted isn’t actually addressing anything

Foreign direct investment is not the same as deindustrializing your own country

and as i said at the outset, “we’re just investing elsewhere” is how us outsourcing started

“they’re not doing it at the expense of hollowing out their domestic industry” is a completely baseless claim when following an equivalent timescale the same would have been true about the us

What do you think economic efficiency is?

ratio between resources expended to resources produced

The expectation is that you engage critically so that you can match up the source with the part they are talking about.

they were using the source to argue that china is intentionally moving away from private ownership. the source saying that the move is unintentional is absolutely materially relevant, and it’s laughable that you’d accuse me of failing to engage critically when you missed that.

Please try your best to engage in good faith and not make things up.

if you want, you can try restating the argument you were trying to make before you slipped and typed out a ramble about how the us is bad

The original topic was investment

money isn’t the only thing you invest when you set up a manufacturing base

Resources being finite has fuck all to do with where manufacturing happens.

china invents capability to snap fingers and materialize manufacturing capability out of thin air

The state makes the decisions where the resources should be allocated however.

i’m not willing to have this debate with you over whether china is a market economy when i’ve literally provided you a source that quotes china calling itself a market economy

It’s always adorable when people use terms they have very shallow understanding of.

you mean like when you said china wasn’t a market economy, despite china saying they were a market economy? and then when you accused me of using terms i didn’t understand then providing a description of those terms that showed i’d used them accurately? what point do you think you’re making here?

The point I’m very obviously making is that the state has very different goals from private capital

you’re trying to make that point by pointing to a shift away from private capital, which is a completely meaningless statistic because the shift away from private capital wasn’t intentional so doesn’t imply anything about an economic plan going forward

i literally spelled that out for you last time and you still chose to deliberately miss it

Again, you’re thinking from a perspective of a market economy which China is not.

no, i’m thinking from the perspective of resources being finite, which they are

also, i don’t think you know what a market economy is. china literally calls itself a market economy

I’m sure that saving countless millions of lives and preventing people from becoming sick and turning into a strain on the healthcare system is actually very good for the economy.

the meme of “countless millions of lives” aside, you making this argument means that you accept that china shifting more to state-capitalism than regular capitalism isn’t intentional, so i’m not sure what point you’re trying to make

The difference being that China is not neoliberal

i’d respond to this paragraph but you really haven’t made a coherent argument past “us bad china good”

At the level of entire countries this logic can break down.

no, because resources are always finite. the resource doesn’t have to be “money”.

It is not, generally speaking, more economically efficient to deindustrialize your own country

china is literally taking money that they could invest in domestic industry and investing it in industry overseas

i guess now you get to explain why they’re doing that if some form of economic efficiency isn’t the answer

The thing they wanted you to see were the statistics, not the guesswork and editorialization from that article.

“don’t look at that bit of the source i just chose to show you” would be an astounding bit of mental gymnastics

ask them what happens when a guy walks into a women’s restroom and says they’re a trans-man but is lying and isn’t actually trans?

A lot of companies should have sunk in covid and been consumed by more prepared ones.

either way, mass company failure due to covid doesn’t imply anything about the split of china’s economy going forward

it occurs when it’s economically more efficient to move industry out of your country than to keep it in

unless you’re suggesting china will willingly run the bulk of its industry with decreasing efficiency over time for the sake of keeping lower paying jobs domestically

These developments look increasingly structural. The authorities’ stance since 2020, including regulatory tightening and zero-COVID lockdowns, appear to have inflicted long-lasting damage to China’s private economy, the dynamism of which was a defining feature of its economic miracle in the past four decades. Nearly 20 months into China’s COVID reopening, the private sector has yet to bounce back, despite many pro-private business utterances and gestures from China’s leadership.

i’m not sure private businesses failing over covid is a good thing for an economy

“it’s just supplemental” would have initially worked to describe us industry shifting out

investment is finite, so if you have the choice between a and b, investing more money in a is by definition investing in a at the expense of b

i can’t source it and it’s tangential but i do remember hearing about some study that looked at people’s reactions to their cancer diagnosis

• some people react with melancholy
• some people react by entering into a strict regime to give themselves that maximum chance of surviving, like heavily controlled diet, exercise, etc.
• some people react with outrage and denial, just refusing to allow the fact that they have cancer alter their lives

and the outcome was that the second groups had better outcomes than the first, but more interestingly, the third group also had better outcomes than the first