Political Posts

[Sinbius]

Lousy demographic...well Europe and US too have lousy demographic right?

 

Lousy geostrategic location...it's the country with the most long term investment about global trade...

 

Lack of resources...Has a way better work force than europe and US...

 

Lousy leadership...have you looked at Biden and the FED (they are both a big joke) or what's happening in UK or Europe?

 

There is no country without big sins and structural problems...because human nature is always the same...

 

Edited October 19, 2022 by Sinbius

[crs223]

US's most fundamental problem is political polarization?  I'd say a more fundamental problem for the US is declining work ethic, which compounds.  But maybe every generation says that.  Maybe decline in rule of law (at least in CA).

 

I'll watch the China Decline video... I wonder how they explain this:

 

 

 

[james22]

2 hours ago, Sinbius said:

There is no country without big sins and structural problems...because human nature is always the same...

 

Sure, but Western culture has real advantages.

[james22]

1 hour ago, crs223 said:

US's most fundamental problem is political polarization?

 

Call it a lack of cultural confidence, if you prefer.

 

I'm trying to keep this as apolitical. Obviously, both sides believe (as I do) the other the problem.

[Spooky]

1 hour ago, crs223 said:

US's most fundamental problem is political polarization?  I'd say a more fundamental problem for the US is declining work ethic, which compounds.  But maybe every generation says that.  Maybe decline in rule of law (at least in CA).

 

I'll watch the China Decline video... I wonder how they explain this:

 

 

 

 

It is one thing for China to catch up to the West by copying previous advancements and stealing intellectual property but it is another for them to innovate from here to surpass the West. Have we seen that their central / top down planning economy can successfully innovate / compete with the US in terms of innovating new productivity enhancing technologies? Does an open society with free speech result in more innovation? Also, it seems to me like under Xi they are starting to deviate from the reforms and policies first initiated under Deng Xiaopeng that resulted in their spectacular growth and returning more heavily to marxist / isolationist ideology which will not bode well for their economic growth from here, especially given their demographic headwinds. For all their faults, Western democracies and the US seem to be making better decisions than autocracies / closed societies like China and Russia. 

 

 

[Spooky]

4 minutes ago, james22 said:

 

Call it a lack of cultural confidence, if you prefer.

 

I'm trying to keep this as apolitical. Obviously, both sides believe (as I do) the other the problem.

Personally I think the US' biggest challenge is their under investment in public education over the last 40 years.

[Viking]

2 hours ago, crs223 said:

 

What would you say is Chinas most fundamental problem?  And the US?

China: as economy gets bigger: resource allocation

- property bubble blowing up for 20 years is great example of this

- centrally planned economy works great at early stages of development; does terrible in large, sophisticated economy

 

US: ripping of basic fabric of democracy; it is fragile and very difficult to sew back together. My guess is founders of the country are likely rolling over in their graves at what is going on in country today (on both sides of the aisle).

[Spekulatius]

Regardless what you believe to be correct, i think it is not a good idea to invest across political fault lines i the future. I think it did not matter as much in the past, but it sure looks like it's going to matter now.

 

If you are located in China, it is probably better to invest in China, or get your money out in  safe place. If you are located in a western country, it is not a good idea to invest in China.

 

Besides that, I think Keith Smith aka @Packer16 has shown some evidence (white paper?), that investing in countries with autocracy's delivers subpar returns on average. I mean even the return in Chinese stocks are nothing to write home about, the rapid increase in GDP notwithstanding. That's true even before the Chinese stocks crashed in late 2021.

 

Even if you do a gross sanity check on the situation, why do you believe that investing alongside this neo Maoist is a good idea? Makes no sense to me. There is not way to get rid of him either.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3196532/congress-delegates-embrace-communist-party-slogan-pledging-support-xi-jinping?module=lead_hero_story&pgtype=homepage

Edited October 19, 2022 by Spekulatius

[Dinar]

39 minutes ago, Spooky said:

Personally I think the US' biggest challenge is their under investment in public education over the last 40 years.

I vehemently disagree.  Lousy public education is a huge problem, but that is not due to underspending.  In NYC, the per pupil budget is $40K per kid in public schools, (of which only $10K reaches the school), meanwhile Catholic schools charge $6K per pupil.  

[maplevalue]

  

 

Comments on China around 25:30

[Castanza]

13 minutes ago, Dinar said:

I vehemently disagree.  Lousy public education is a huge problem, but that is not due to underspending.  In NYC, the per pupil budget is $40K per kid in public schools, (of which only $10K reaches the school), meanwhile Catholic schools charge $6K per pupil.  

Yeah I agree with this. Private schooling is the way forward. Public sector has become too political with the Unions involved and it's hurting the education quality. Even private school in inner cities with lottery admittance far out perform public schools in "well to do areas". 

[james22]

3 hours ago, Spooky said:

Personally I think the US' biggest challenge is their under investment in public education over the last 40 years.

 

I don't believe investment is very much related to education at all, rather the content of what is taught. 

[Spooky]

I'm not American so I don't want to get political about it but the facts are that the US : 1) is lagging behind its developed peers in terms of investments in public education as a percentage of GDP and public spending (and this spending has not kept up with inflation over time); 2) educational outcomes have been sliding relative to its developed peers over the last three decades as shown by rankings in math and science scores; 3) in terms of early childhood education, the United States is one of six countries that does not report any educational spending in the OECD.

 

Given the rise of AI and automation in the future, work forces are going to need to be more skilled and educated. There is a lot of human capital in the US that could be better utilized.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_spending_on_education_(%_of_GDP)

 

https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics

 

30 minutes ago, james22 said:

 

I don't believe investment is very much related to education at all, rather the content of what is taught. 

 

Government's should definitely view this through the lens of public investment (as with all government spending ideally) - measuring the ROI of the amount spent against and objective metric / outcomes. My personal view is that we should de-emphasize the content of what is being taught but rather teach people how to learn / think critically / overcome mental biases.

 

[Dinar]

2 minutes ago, Spooky said:

I'm not American so I don't want to get political about it but the facts are that the US : 1) is lagging behind its developed peers in terms of investments in public education as a percentage of GDP and public spending (and this spending has not kept up with inflation over time); 2) educational outcomes have been sliding relative to its developed peers over the last three decades as shown by rankings in math and science scores; 3) in terms of early childhood education, the United States is one of six countries that does not report any educational spending in the OECD.

 

Given the rise of AI and automation in the future, work forces are going to need to be more skilled and educated. There is a lot of human capital in the US that could be better utilized.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_spending_on_education_(%_of_GDP)

 

https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics

 

 

Government's should definitely view this through the lens of public investment (as with all government spending ideally) - measuring the ROI of the amount spent against and objective metric / outcomes. My personal view is that we should de-emphasize the content of what is being taught but rather teach people how to learn / think critically / overcome mental biases.

 

Spooky, why do you think that this is a good metric?  If Zimbabwe has $500 per capital GDP and spends $50 per capita on education and US has $60K GDP and spends $5K per capita on education, we are underspending?  

How reliable is your data anyway?  Spending does not equal quality, why do you think so?  In Newark NJ (USA), spending per pupil was tripled and the outcomes did not change.  

A lot of people send their kids to private schools, is parental spending  captured in the statistics you have sited?  If so, how?  Universities in the US are mostly either tuition or privately funded, how do you adjust for that in your statistics?  

Bottom line: 

a) Statistics you site are very likely to be grossly incorrect

b) Your assumption that if one spends 1% of his income on education and someone with 100x the income spends 0.5%, the latter underspends is hard to justify/understand

c) Your assumption that more money equals better outcomes is questionable, to say the least.  I will bet you that one thousand dirt poor Chinese/Indian/Russian immigrants going to a crappy schools with falling plaster will drastically outperform a high income private school in the US.   

 

You do not want to get political but you parrot the talking points of the left and the teachers' unions without thinking.  If you do not want to get political, do you research, and use critical thinking that you rightly state schools should teach rather than advocate policies that the left has argued for, implemented and saw fail for decades in the US.  

[crs223]

My fourth grader has never had homework.  Had a parent-teacher conference yesterday.  teacher gave me a six page handout on doing math with “feelings”.

 

(wasn’t as bad as i’m making it sound — basically the idea is to estimate to get close then fine-tune — but the message is clear: de-emphasize the rote algorithm)

 

We’ll see how this works out in 20 years. Wonder if they still do homework over in China.

 

I’ll spare you all my thoughts on the lack of discipline from parents nowadays.

 

Anyhow… this is the source of my China angst.  I worry we are wussifying the next generation.

[Dinar]

3 minutes ago, crs223 said:

My fourth grader has never had homework.  Had a parent-teacher conference yesterday.  teacher gave me a six page handout on doing math with “feelings”.

 

(wasn’t as bad as i’m making it sound — basically the idea is to estimate to get close then fine-tune — but the message is clear: de-emphasize the rote algorithm)

 

We’ll see how this works out in 20 years. Wonder if they still do homework over in China.

 

I’ll spare you all my thoughts on the lack of discipline from parents nowadays.

 

Anyhow… this is the source of my China angst.  I worry we are wussifying the next generation.

You are 100% correct, sadly.

[Sweet]

Agree with Spek, don’t think it is wise to have money in China.  It could disappear quite easily and I don’t need help losing money 

 

Disagree with comments about the US and education.  Not everyone needs to be highly educated.  I think risk taking and entrepreneurial spirit in the US remains strong and they will remain the innovators and leader in the global economy for decades provided the politics calms down.

Edited October 20, 2022 by Sweet

[lnofeisone]

On 10/17/2022 at 10:43 AM, Pelagic said:

This is one of the clearest videos of what an operation in this war looks like that I've seen. And also reinforces just how useful consumer grade drones can be on the modern battlefield.

 

You can turn on English subtitles for a decent translation.

 

 

There are some grewsome and very NSFW videos you can find on reddit and telegram channels. Shows everything frontal assaults to ambushes to damage inducing (to armor and soldiers, the latter is the worst) artillery hits to granade dropping on soldiers in trenches by both Russian and Ukrainian drones. I've been watching the evolution and looks like the Russians have adopted many of the Ukranian tactics wrt to drones beyond just observation. 

[crs223]

46 minutes ago, Sweet said:

Disagree with comments about the US and education.  Not everyone needs to be highly educated.  I think risk taking and entrepreneurial spirit in the US remains strong and they will remain the innovators

 

I think we have both.

 

US strength relative to China is capitalism (although China has plenty of entrepreneurs).

 

Chinese strength relative to US is in discipline/education — although i am totally unqualified to have an opinion on this as I don’t know anything about china except what my biases sources tel me.

 

Both strengths are “fundamental” and “compound”.

[Viking]

1 hour ago, Sweet said:

Agree with Spek, don’t think it is wise to have money in China.  It could disappear quite easily and I don’t need help losing money 

 

Disagree with comments about the US and education.  Not everyone needs to be highly educated.  I think risk taking and entrepreneurial spirit in the US remains strong and they will remain the innovators and leader in the global economy for decades provided the politics calms down.

investors KNOW relations with China are the best they will be with the US/West right now (looking out 5-10 years). In other words, political and economic relations are only going to get worse. So as an investor you are trying to guess how much worse they will get (magnitude) and how fast (timing)… Investing is hard enough without having to overlay those two variables on top of everything else.

Its kind of like an investor after WWII was trying to decide if they wanted to invest in the Soviet Union (yes, sounds stupid today and that should tell people something). After WWII the political and economic relationship with Russia kept getting worse year after year and decade after decade. Good luck with that.

—————

The pact that China and Russia so publicly signed pre-Ukraine invasion could go down as one of the most significant geopolitical events of the next 50 years. Not unlike when the iron curtain came down. China/Russia (perhaps Saudi Arabia) = authoritarian block = have declared game on with the West. 

Edited October 20, 2022 by Viking

[Cigarbutt]

8 hours ago, crs223 said:

 

 

Bullish post about the US (despite some noise)!

In 1988:

It was felt that Japan would overtake the US (GDP wise and all).

In 1988, a book was published (similar to a litany of similar others). The title was Yen!: Japan's New Financial Empire and its Threat to America and included the following:

Growth in Japan in the 80s was led by credit growth linked to centrally driven "window guidance" (very similar to modern China's centrally-driven bank credit growth). The recent Fed-Treasury macroprudential framework is bizarre but is a comparative advantage versus a monopolistic central plan. 

[Spekulatius]

The schools in the US ( I have lived in 3 states and my son went to school in all of them) are not necessarily bad,  but the dispersion is huge. You can find crappy schools and quite good schools in the same town, sometimes even just a few miles from each other. It’s not the funding either. In the town in CA where I lived , i looked at the funding of schools and it often turned out that the schools with lousy stats had more funding than the schools with good stats.

 

Most of the differences is just due to demographics of the students that go there. In California at least, the schools with a high percentage of Hispanic students have low overall grades. It‘s not due to funding either since schools in the same town with less funding often get better overall scores.

 

Besides CA, I have lived in Long Island, where schools have excellent funding and well paid teachers and it shows. There were issues with drugs and bullying however. We are currently living in suburban MA and the schools are funded well, but not as well as LI, However, I prefer the demographics here and the drugs and bullying are much less an issue.

 

Anyways my son has to work quite hard. Plenty of homework too. He is doing some college grade studies in math for example in his honor class in math.

 

It also was mentioned here, that you don’t need to take AP and other tests to get into college. While that is technically true, you can’t really get into a good college that way. Maybe if you excel in some sport that the college is looking for. Otherwise it means probably community college.

 

 

Edited October 20, 2022 by Spekulatius

[Dinar]

36 minutes ago, Spekulatius said:

The schools in the US ( I have lived in 3 states and my son went to school in all of them) are not necessarily bad,  but the dispersion is huge. You can find crappy schools and quite good schools in the same town, sometimes even just a few miles from each other. It’s not the funding either. In the town in CA where I lived , i looked at the funding of schools and it often turned out that the schools with lousy stats had more funding than the schools with good stats.

 

Most of the differences is just due to demographics of the students that go there. In California at least, the schools with a high percentage of Hispanic students have low overall grades. It‘s not due to funding either since schools in the same town with less funding often get better overall scores.

 

Besides CA, I have lived in Long Island, where schools have excellent funding and well paid teachers and it shows. There were issues with drugs and bullying however. We are currently living in suburban MA and the schools are funded well, but not as well as LI, However, I prefer the demographics here and the drugs and bullying are much less an issue.

 

Anyways my son has to work quite hard. Plenty of homework too. He is doing some college grade studies in math for example in his honor class in math.

 

It also was mentioned here, that you don’t need to take AP and other tests to get into college. While that is technically true, you can’t really get into a good college that way. Maybe if you excel in some sport that the college is looking for. Otherwise it means probably community college.

 

 

Spek, I agree with everything that you are saying except for the last paragraph.  There are different standards for regular kids/white&Asian vs black/hispanic/transgender/gay.  I for one, cannot understand how Stuyvesant HS (a specialized high school in NYC where you need to take a test to get in) in NYC is 1% black when the city is 40% black, while Harvard freshman class is 22% black when the country is 12% black.  

[benchmark]

46 minutes ago, Spekulatius said:

The schools in the US ( I have lived in 3 states and my son went to school in all of them) are not necessarily bad,  but the dispersion is huge. You can find crappy schools and quite good schools in the same town, sometimes even just a few miles from each other. It’s not the funding either. In the town in CA where I lived , i looked at the funding of schools and it often turned out that the schools with lousy stats had more funding than the schools with good stats.

 

Most of the differences is just due to demographics of the students that go there. In California at least, the schools with a high percentage of Hispanic students have low overall grades. It‘s not due to funding either since schools in the same town with less funding often get better overall scores.

 

Besides CA, I have lived in Long Island, where schools have excellent funding and well paid teachers and it shows. There were issues with drugs and bullying however. We are currently living in suburban MA and the schools are funded well, but not as well as LI, However, I prefer the demographics here and the drugs and bullying are much less an issue.

 

Anyways my son has to work quite hard. Plenty of homework too. He is doing some college grade studies in math for example in his honor class in math.

 

It also was mentioned here, that you don’t need to take AP and other tests to get into college. While that is technically true, you can’t really get into a good college that way. Maybe if you excel in some sport that the college is looking for. Otherwise it means probably community college.

 

 

This is spot on. 

 

[benchmark]

10 minutes ago, Dinar said:

Spek, I agree with everything that you are saying except for the last paragraph.  There are different standards for regular kids/white&Asian vs black/hispanic/transgender/gay.  I for one, cannot understand how Stuyvesant HS (a specialized high school in NYC where you need to take a test to get in) in NYC is 1% black when the city is 40% black, while Harvard freshman class is 22% black when the country is 12% black.  

This is because Harvard is doing wholistic admission and looking for 'characters/charisma', which asian kids apparently lack  , but black/hispanic and other minorities have plenty. There was a law suit a few years ago on this.