ffmpreg [none/use name]

I’m going to assume you live in Shanghai

HAHAHAH someone actually mistook me for a 沪爷 i am actually insulted

you are preaching to the choir my man, i live in a shithole mid tier city where col mostly exceeds median income and the government spent its money on land financing and vanity projects instead of getting its shit together in a real way. i bought houses in ~2017 (cant remember) and 2020 and got laid off in 2020 and again in 2023 so again, i am literally your textbook scenario.

i am in the group of people i was shitting on earlier that you are apparently so concerned about: the stupid fuckers who jumped on the fomo train post 2017 because that is when they really started pumping the market. in reality, the housing market had already crashed in most lower tier cities across the country post i wanna say 2015ish and the 17-19 was imo a giant dead cat bounce before the dump (obviously t1 does not apply here). home buyers i have interacted with generally fall into several different categories across this timeline. the first group, unsuccessful prole transplants, had either bowed out by 2017 or were just renting and planning to move back home; these guys remain basically unaffected because they dont have houses. the second group are the successful prole transplants; these guys basically hunkered down and got house(s) before 2015. they are less affected than later groups because they bought early and in less developed areas and were not categorically wiped out: they just stopped winning as hard. the third group is me, the stupid fomo fuckheads who fucked themselves. this group is probably the most eclectic and encompasses basically everyone who fell victim to the fomo or was some kind of aspirational striver. most people here come from an urban background (simply because most rural guys don’t make it this far), local or transplant, and they fucked up specifically because they were never able to figure out if the house was supposed to be a speculative or material asset. no doubt the government didn’t help by tying educational districts to housing to pump the numbers but these guys decided not to play it safe and ultimately people here wrecked themselves because they had just enough rope to hang themselves with and so made the plunge. even then, they are not completely fucked (unfortunately) unless they leveraged the original house that they started with. the last group are the pure speculators. no explanation needed. as for the local government, are you actually suggesting they are going to shut down the subway? my city has been screaming bloody murder over the budget since covid and yet the fucking ornamental flowers are somehow STILL getting replaced every two weeks and the streets are STILL getting washed on rainy days and this has been the case in pretty much all the places i have been to in the past two years. are you saying that the environmental and sanitation departments have more pull than the transit guys? as an aside and as some commentary on the purely speculative group, the people near me who have taken the biggest haircuts these past years have been the bosses and the bankers/finance/insurance people, with a lot of bosses letting go of property they’ve accumulated to service debts for their (lol) real estate affiliated companies and the banking dudes losing up to 90% (!) of their total compensation. if this is a bad economy i want it to fucking get worse tbh.

fundamentally, the difference is that you can fuck around all you want in china but you will basically never find out so long as you don’t gamble ALL the property you already own, and even if you do, you might be underwater for the rest of your life but you are not going to be homeless dying in a ditch somewhere. this is what the 社会主义巨婴 netizens could not comprehend about american capitalism but are slowly coming to terms with. all the 润人电子宠物 left not because they were forced onto the execution threshold, but because they were unserious people who were unable to accept the fact that they had fucked up and had to face (less than life threatening) consequences for their stupidity.

to further illustrate my point because i am just that pissed about this: i have a friend who is actually another textbook, perhaps even more textbook case than me: parents own property in neighboring city, bought first property before shit started getting expensive, bought second property because her kid had shit grades and needed to go to school EVEN THOUGH the house was riiiiight at the edge of her ability to service and her kid had awful grades and wasn’t interested in learning anyway. the house i think has dropped like 50%? of the value she paid and i’m fairly sure she is sleeping with her boss (at the expense of time with her kid) to service the second mortgage. do you know why i have zero empathy for this lady? because if i pulled this shit in america i would be dead. in america i didn’t even have any debt obligations and i was already living in my car on and off. that house she bought is objectively a luxury purchase (that is to say, coming from superstructural stimuli as opposed to material) and i think a lot of people on this forum would agree with this and that her current predicament is unnecessary and entirely self imposed. you can bitch all you want about how im depriving the poor migrant workers of their chance at class mobility but if you were to offer me a henanese pigsty vs some sketchass parking lot near skid row with gunshots going off every 15 to 45 minutes, i’d take the pigsty in a fucking heartbeat.

latest line of propaganda being pushed on the Chinese internet, I suspect, in response to the kids breaking the internet calling for a revival of Cultural Revolution just a few weeks ago

this is such a garbage take lol, if this was the case why hasn’t shit like 群丁 been taken down after over a year? because the cpc wants to incite anti tibetan racism? surely the cpc propaganda angle explains why 牢a’s stream was banned by bilibili management a week after the original execute threshold upload.

you can conspiracize the other side too: the 芳华 incident is a redux of the 吴京 bobblehead meme, necro’d some obscure and irrelevant cultural artifact from half a decade ago that no one actually cared about and pumped the numbers with artificial engagement, resulting in extremely mid flash in a pan memes with staying power only so long as the money kept flowing.

it’s funny because 牢a was actually not particularly popular before, he was affiliated with 大角鼠, 瓜哥, 红幻 and the other wh40k nationalists but didn’t get much exposure because his content was mostly just telling anecdotes and urban legends he heard from working with homeless people in seattle (embellished for the audience obviously). the video that went viral and the originator of the execute threshold meme was an entirely realistic account of the american health care process for a comparatively major disease or injury. LITERALLY all he did was describe how your standard american would go from primary care to a specialist to treatment and the role health insurance played in the process and approximately how long this whole thing would take. while he did make belittling comparisons to how the entire thing was like getting hit with shadow demon’s (a dota hero) shadow poison ability (which is where the execute threshold meme comes from, you’re gonna get hit hard after 3 stacks regardless), compared to his other dumb stories it was actually very down to earth and dare i say realistic.

the tangping movement has actually been losing momentum because everyone just relocating to back to their hometowns or lower cost cities which are actually no longer miserable and have reasonable cost of living to salary ratios. there is a dialectical process going on here because underdeveloped interior cities are benefiting from this at the cost of the coastal ones, which has been a stated goal of the cpc for a while, but obviously there are interest groups on the coast (entrenched export oriented manufacturing) that would prefer either staying in place or moving out of the country to somewhere cheaper altogether. i would say that the youth, while unhappy about the job market, benefitted a lot from the housing market getting taken down (to give xhs the benefit of the doubt, lets just assume salary growth has been nil over the past 5 years, but housing prices dropped like 30% while durable goods also went down in the double digits. are you really going to be that mad?). it was only really the petit bourgeoisie that had investment properties that got hit hard: it’s not like you’re going to be losing any wealth if you only have the one house that you’re already living in or if you were already renting. coincidentally, a lot of those same petit bourgeoisie got rich off of cheap exports over the past two decades and are being forced to either upvalue, relocate or die, so the doomerism that xhs is describing is mostly just a malaise of the extremely vocal would be parasites. unsubstantiated, but the actual proles have been getting assfucked ever since the infrastructure boom began in 2010 and tend to be on platforms like kuaishou and tiktok, wouldn’t trust bilibili with anything considering the demographics of its management and its userbase even if they used to be social rejects. though tbf tiktok and kuaishou lean a bit too far in the other direction…

i too can spend 15 minutes on an llm and refocus the conversation back on my original points without having to meaningfully engage with any of your ideas but most people would accuse me of bad faith in that scenario. fortunately for everyone i am no longer online enough to effortquote bevins or whomever and then spend 4 paragraphs talking about how this definitively proves THE MARSHALL PLAN DOESNT WORK and then end with a concern trollesque ‘i just want to educate people’

you asked for external pressures, i gave you reasons as to why the rmb cant be internationalized, and you responded with ‘just print the money and give it to people’

i understand the sentiment but it is hilarious that you are confused as to why people feel like engaging with you is a waste of time when all you do is turn their engagement into a personal soapbox

btw this is how you know xhs is chinese, the last line of defense is always gonna be ‘you dont understand china’

its a pretty good rhetorical dead end tbh, americans should pick it up

how is china going to internationalize the rmb according to your plan if 1. the marshall plan took place under circumstances much more favorable to the americans (europe destroyed and needed to reindustrialize) than china now but 2. still almost fell apart despite natomerica being basically an ideologically cohesive fascist international with mostly aligned geopolitical interests outside of europe proper and 3. the primary driver of dollarization, military keynesianism is not an option because 3a. proxy wars are bad actually and 3b. the actors this time around are in post ideological limbo and 4. bancor like international settlements are also impossible because multipolarity by definition means that political consensus is at a minimum which means that 5. you will just run into the triffin dilemma with mmt characteristics as the us has once the rmb has internationalized

as for unemployed chinese people, a lot of them have homes in villages to go back to and there is the equivalent of chinese public housing (not section 8) for cities

suspect pak/saudi (nuclear) agreement was reached to balance out iran getting nukes as a result of this inevitability

pat their chest when committing to impossible goals

pat their head to come up with unrealistic plans to reach those impossible goals

pat their butts on their way out of dodge when it becomes apparent that the goals were impossible to begin with

did pettis just 180 on like the past 15 odd years of his economic orthodoxy? wtf am i reading?

japan’s been hedging since at least before ishiba was elected, korea was the wildcard but that’s been settled by lee replacing yoon. just waiting on the pinoys now

if i were china i would be more than happy to let iran close the strait if it ensured that the americans would be goaded into a boots on the ground campaign. russians would get a blank check in ukraine (well, i guess the EU might be pressed to do something…) and the chinese likewise for westpac.

inshallah, let this be the one time medvedev isnt just trying to stir shit up talking out his ass

people are just conditioned to recognize ‘things happening’ as major qualitative changes happening on a timescale amenable to an average human (shorter than an election cycle, longer than a car crash)

shit needs to be either hitting inflection points or going asymptotic constantly because everyone lives on the second derivative for some reason

wholesomeness of the wifepill protects him from elons gaze

chat is this true? someone get the apology form

this unpredictability further exacerbates instability in the world.

天下大乱, 形势大好

looks like how i would imagine a high supersonic wake to look like but you usually can’t see wakes… maybe it is condensation

also the compression at the end is interesting, assuming its just getting pushed together by ambient pressure but ive never read anything about super far field effects like that (probably a solved problem/not interesting)

It first of all implies a level of rational thinking and conscious decision making that just doesn’t exist in reality.

i’m not here to argue theory of mind but imo it’s pretty arrogant to make the assumption that only ‘organisms’ that exist around human level complexity are capable of ‘rational thinking and conscious decision making’ when we aren’t even able to quantitatively assess the mechanisms behind the concepts in the first place.

security is defined as the structural ability to guarantee returns. it appears as things like shipping lanes, consistent legal frameworks, property rights, and the ability to enforce thereof. this applies to the imperial core and the areas where it performs extraction. you can see empire destabilizing regimes that threaten extractive capacity through nationalization or labor laws, but you don’t see empire destabilizing their own cobalt mines by giving workers fpv drones and off days. capital that does not prioritize a significant degree of baseline stability will get optimized out, which leads into your second point:

you can’t build an empire through meme stocks; in fact, financialization heralds the end of empire, which is why you see so much of it today. the abandonment of productive investment (as in, investment that produces things as opposed to investment that produces a return) is necessarily precipitated by systemic conditions that make other forms of accumulation easier. moving into rentierism, speculation and asset inflation does not contradict my earlier claims regarding stability (no one said anything about an endless pursuit of stability), as under the initial conditions established by the MC phase of accumulation, things are stable enough. this is what i meant by going up the hierarchy of needs, i think david harvey calls it capital switch. because financial short termism plays out as economic cannibalism where the logical end state is an imperial core that has been hollowed out by all the value being reallocated upward, capital is eventually forced out by socioeconomic collapse towards a more stable and conducive environment.

i’m not sure if you were intentionally misinterpreting security, but if i were to make a similar logical leap along your lines of reasoning then capital should by all means be flooding into real estate on the donbas border right now. a dualist us/china relationship has precedent in the genoese iberian condominium that was eventually superseded by the dutch internalization of both production (of which security is a prerequisite) and finance. the dutch were able to do this because returns, security and political control were all vertically integrated into a more coherent imperial core. moreover, the condominium was a historical aberration: spain lacked the administrative capacity while the genoese financiers were structurally restricted from political autonomy. neither is true in the us/china situation, which is why dualism will inevitably give way to competition. the ambitions of the american gerontocracy have little to do with it, the logic of capital is the primary driver of the transition.

all you’re really doing is creating a new hegemon that is totally focussed on a big domestic population consuming all the spoils of the world but with a hammer and sickle on the flag instead of stars and stripes

this is the correct analysis. the triffin dilemma still applies under the XHS strategy and shortly down the line we will have a 1.4 billion strong great satan equivalent. there are accelerationist arguments to be made that this is actually the fastest route towards communism, or at least world revolution, but that’s neither here nor there.

do you say that maybe we should instead work within the dollar system for now (while poking at it here and there) and hope that raising the development of the whole planet will create the material conditions for the dollar system to be undermined?

the historically prevalent ‘strategy’ (it should be thought of more as a natural phenomenon) within western capitalist development has been to bait (usually you just have to wait) the hegemon into a conflict while courting its capital with higher returns on investment.

capital also has a sort of hierarchy of needs, of which security is among the more basic. this is why a us/chinese dual hegemon system where china acts as the productive host for the american financial parasite is an unstable dynamic equilibrium at best: capital will inevitably choose stability and security over higher returns in the long run. this was demonstrated most notably by the elimination of the iberian (dual genoese/spanish+portuguese) system by the dutch (all three of the atlantic powers actually), who were able to better economize on security of production (starting from bog standard piracy, the most primitive of accumulations) within its system of political economy. later transitions did not deviate from this trend, but rather climbed up the hierarchy of needs with respect to where capital would place the imperial core.

this is where the higher returns come in, and can be seen in the dutch/british transition as well as the british/american transition. the fact of the matter is that the mechanics operant within financial hegemony are only able to parasitize the third world due to third world countries’ atomization and relatively tiny economic size. when faced with competitors of equal or larger size, investment loses much of its lethality, perhaps the most hilarious example being the glorious revolution (iirc the dutch ended up owning like 40% of english debt and still got btfo’d afterwards). while it occurred without the presence of a global reserve currency (debt was in pounds), it also occurred without one of the parties being able to leverage ~30% of global production to such a comprehensive degree. the point is that capital will naturally flow towards new ascendant and coherent cores, cores who will notably NOT all in on a maximalist push against the extant system until they are forced to do so.

last thing i would like to note is that there is much precedent for overproduction and depression being a precursor to financialization, which itself is commonly linked to a perception of hegemonic ascent (as good marxists we obviously all know financialization is the most obvious symptom of hegemonic decline). we see it in dutch shipping pre 1650, british steel pre 1870, and obviously gilded age amerikkka. transition periods are stochastic almost by definition, and it would be prudent to discount anyone quick to jump to hard conclusions.

with the sino/us geneva agreement in danger of breaking down due to chips/rare earths dispute, one wonders if china bottlenecking RE will finally allow the US to rediscover industrial policy. it’s pretty clear that chinese dominance in REs allows them to crush any competitor on the free market at will, with the disturbing implication that the XHS strategy of using fake money (but i repeat myself) to build out supply chains in peripheral countries, at least in this sector, could be less than optimal. it was dicey for strategic necessities in the first place, but for something with as much capital overhead as REs the risks become noticeably starker.

it appears that the necessity of security of production, once subsidized by western technological and financial superiority, is once again asserting itself as hegemony erodes. the ongoing russian drone fiasco provides illustration in this regard (i think someone else actually mentioned factories being a more valuable target inthread). the working assumption is that no one is dumb enough to halfass things in this situation (the actual working assumption is nothing ever happens), but i wouldn’t rule out the funniest outcomes of building processing in australia/greenland or failing to protect monopoly power from non-government corpos.

But the US can mobilize unemployed/underemployed domestic resources and put them into better use.

like i said, it’s a political problem, not a technical one. to utilize those resources is likely politically toxic as of right now, which is why we don’t see any movement thereof. like, if real life were a map painting game, the one billion americans meme is probably not such a bad idea for the US in the medium term, but it’s constrained less by how fast the US can birth/import 600 millionish burgerlings and more by the willingness of the american ruling class to create conditions that can sustain that level of spawn. how fast the culture at the top changes is anyone’s guess and it’s a race to the bottom on both sides of the pacific.

in any case, as good marxists, it is understood that political solutions are usually downstream of material changes. considering the current rate of nothings happening per week, i think it is not overly optimistic that we will begin to see the quantitative changes accumulating into some sort of transition stage toward qualitative transformation in the next 2 to 5 years. whether or not that transformation is something actually conducive to the human race, again, remains to be seen.