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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The reality is that China was completely devastated after the war, and rebuilding was not an easy process.

    Yeah, not buying that argument at all. Practically every country was devastated after the war, China’s hardly unique in that regard. Why would it take fifteen full years for China’s postwar woes to culminate in an acute famine? Makes no logical sense, and stinks of excuse-making.

    The paper I linked shows that the policies proved to be correct on the whole, and life expectancy increased dramatically as a result.

    Mao wanted to reform China, and tens of million of deaths was the price he was willing to pay. It’s a lot easier to make great strides when you don’t give a fuck about your own people. I’ll reserve my admiration for leaders who manage the feat without inflicting untold human misery on the their own citizens.





  • No one knows what story she’s denying, or what images she’s claiming are fake. The most likely possibility is that someone is preparing to release a story on the links between her and Epstein. It’s standard practice in journalism to contact the subject of a piece, inform them of the contents of that piece, and offer them an opportunity to comment. A request for comment on an upcoming story seems a likely trigger for this reaction. The entire speech strikes me as a thinly veiled threat, essentially saying “If you publish your story I will sue you for defamation.”






  • Hah, what profits?? Chinese auto makers have been massively subsidized by the Chinese government for the last several years. Any profits on their balance sheets have been propped up by those subsidies. The Chinese government has already indicated that those subsidies will be ending, because they’ve created a supply glut that China cannot absorb domestically and cannot offload internationally. No country on the planet is going to allow the wholesale dumping of heavily subsidized Chinese autos into their domestic market since it would damage or destroy any local auto manufacturing industry.

    Carney’s decision to allow a nominal amount of Chinese EVs is smart because it’s a net win for Canada no matter what happens. It gets Canadian soybeans shipping to China again, while the number of EVs being allowed is too small to have an outsized effect on the Canadian auto industry. That’s just the basic first-order stuff, there are huge potential upsides down the road. This acts as a trial balloon to see whether the Canadian market has an appetite for Chinese made autos. I suspect yes at first just based on price, but those prices will rise as Chinese subsidies draw down. If Canadians show a willingness to buy Chinese made autos, Canada can float expanding the import limit in exchange for some percentage of local manufacture.

    The US auto industry is pulling back from Canada, so Canada is making deals with South Korean auto makers. We’ve seen what happened when Canada put too many eggs in the proverbial US basket. Replacing those US auto makers with a variety of foreign makers (Germany, South Korea, maybe China down the road) is just pragmatic risk mitigation. It gives us a better local manufacturing base while ensuring we’re not overly beholden to a single foreign trading partner.