Pakistan, except in that case government incompetence with the electric grid has forced people to get solar instead: https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/01/climate/pakistan-solar-boom

I think he relies a lot on shock factor in his social media posts to get people to understand the importance of adopting better health habits. People tune out when you simply tell them to have healthy habits. If this wasn’t the case, we would all be listening to the American Heart Association and living with perfect health. However, when you tell people that their unhealthy food and bad sleep cause their sperm to die, then they start paying attention.

I do think his work on building systems for human longevity is ultimately a net good for the world. The work he does today can be universalized after socialism for all workers, such as providing yearly resort trips for workers to go detox and get healthy. Until then, the path he is forging is probably the best path for longevity possible without changing the economic system.

This quote is from Bryan Johnson, yeah? Props to him for demonstrating the solutions that should be universalized to improve everyone’s health.

Mexico is building a ginormous railway to bypass the Panama Canal.

Would it not be easier to just rotate the solar panels? A self-driving van on a campground with other people sounds like a very bad idea.

The Kuomintang has the same historical experience as the CPC. So then the question becomes, why did they pick fullthroat liberal democracy instead of preserving some meritocratic elements? The key difference is once again capitalism.

I think a fall in China’s population by ~200 million by 2100 is very reasonable. Some amount of population decrease is already locked in because of the previous years of 1.2 children per woman.

Here’s an article that forecasts this based on a slow increase from China’s current birth rate of 1.2 per woman to a normal 2.1 per woman, which will result in a population by 2100 of 1.2 billion (200 million lower than China’s current population of 1.4 billion): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-population-could-shrink-to-half-by-2100/

It is best to ignore the catastrophic projections of China’s population falling to 700 million by 2100, which are based on the 1.2 per woman birth rate not changing at all, which is completely unrealistic because China will and already is implementing pro-natalist policies.

The competition aspect is sort of inevitable with a large population. People always want to be making more money than their neighbor, and if you have a shit ton of neighbors, then you have a lot of people to beat. I don’t really know what can be done about this.

That does not explain why Taiwan also has a useless government just like the USA, except that the Taiwanese politicians also beat each other up in Congress on TV.

In a bourgeois liberal government, your performance does not matter, only your fealty to capital while lying to the people.

Here’s a previous discussion on Lemmygrad on the topic: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/230769

Here’s a great article on the topic: https://goodsforthepeople.substack.com/p/the-great-chinese-famine-one-child

TLDR: Historically, China, like India, had constant famines due to having way too many people, such that any small natural disaster that wiped out a few rice fields would kill a couple hundred million. China implemented the One-Child Policy in order to prevent these India-style issues of having too many people fighting over too few resources, which could have destabilized development. In a way, young people are liabilities because they must be given jobs (ideally better jobs than those of their parents). If the country’s economy is not adapting fast enough to give them those jobs, then they become a source of instability.

From the perspective of the Mao era, there was no guarantee that China’s economy would rise as quickly as it did, so from their perspective, this was a very logical choice. The demographic transition model (that birth rates naturally fall as industrial development increases) that Westoids use to denigrate China’s One-Child Policy did not exist as a cohesive theory back then, so there were no examples to show that the problem could fix itself and did not require an enforced One-Child Policy.

When I talk to my relatives in China, they still think that the Chinese population is a little too high. They would actually prefer for it to fall by ~200 million so that competition is less intense and there is more to go around for everyone.

Also remember the Parenti quote about western media’s constant negativity. If China did not implement the One-Child Policy, western media would be constantly complaining about Asiatic hordes and India-like deprivation in China due to too many people fighting over too few resources. In the past, Western media straight-up did this, creating tons of Asiatic horde propaganda cartoons in the U.S.

Since China has implemented the One-Child Policy, they instead complain about the historical cruelty of the policy.

Vietnam is basically following China’s playbook but just 10 years behind. Like China, they allowed foreign capital to come in order to build their industry. Once they have good manufacturing, they will increase socialist aspects again.

I personally despise this framing because it explains nothing. The preponderance of engineers in China’s government versus lawyers in the U.S. government is a symptom of the difference between capitalism and socialism, and not the cause of their difference. Chinese politicians are elected based on their performance in building socialism, while U.S. politicians are elected based on how well they lie while taking donations from capitalists.

If this is not recognized, then Westoids will keep trying to “fix” their government in useless ways, because simply trying to elect more “engineers” is not going to fix the underlying system that makes all US politicians sell out to the capitalist class.

Good work! May Cuba one day become fully self-sufficient with oil.

Fair, I’ve heard similar annoyances about GPT 5.5. I think I hope DeepSeek reinforcement-trains V4 a bit harder and, in two to three months, comes out with an earth-shattering V4.1.

Unfortunately, DeepSeek V4 is not a full frontier model able to beat OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s latest yet, so there is a bit yet to improve.

The U.S. made the same petrodollar deal with them that they did with Saudi Arabia. The UAE has way too much money in U.S. stocks to have any choice other than to stick by the U.S. and Israel.

This is really good! A great resource to send to previously Zohran-susceptible liberals to advance their global analysis.

Why the fuck is this suddenly a federal crime? Do federal prosecutors only wake up to combat worker revolts?

My bad, sorry.

Removed by mod

Iran needs money (since the US has sanctioned them to kingdom come) to preserve the value of its currency and its balance of payments, and this is a good way to do so. What did you expect Iran to do? Fight the U.S. without getting any money in return?