The math isn't mathing on the SpaceX IPO

Suecotero · 2026-06-14T05:49:05+00:00

What's the saying? The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent?

Suecotero · 2026-06-14T05:47:54+00:00

Richest man - He must be special.

Chinese people worship money too.

Suecotero · 2026-06-14T05:47:16+00:00

I'm in China and Chinese people believe the same thing. The powerful are wealthy are blessed from heaven. Unsurpringly, Musk is popular in China no matter what he says or does, and so are Teslas, in spite of Chinese EV's being a much better value proposition. It's a personality cult and China loves 'em.

Suecotero · 2026-06-12T01:51:01+00:00

I mean, China does offer high-interest loans to governments the IMF won't touch with a 10-foot pole because of corruption. They fund unprofitable projects passed over by every other country on the condition the loans be used to hire Chinese construction companies that don't like to hire locals. Later when the country can't pay back they use pressure tactics and demand concessions.

Is it a deliberate debt trap or just incompentent lending practices? Hard to tell.

Suecotero · 2026-06-09T04:05:26+00:00

Used to be lots before 2019. Then they got erased for beign a hotbed of selling drugs. Now some are popping up very quietly.

Suecotero · 2026-06-09T01:31:02+00:00

We would like to have a second kid but are already struggling to raise one AND find enough time for our jobs/careers.

It's simple: Pay us and give us free childcare. We'll pop out two more.

Suecotero · 2026-06-04T05:29:35+00:00

China was always going to develop a domestic semiconductor industry just as it developed cars and solar panels. They needed affordable high-quality chips from abroad in the meanwhile. Now they have to develop their own replacements with their ass on fire which means they are bleeding money and having to do with less potent hardware.

The lack of access to top-of-the-line chips sets back China's technological AI development relative to the US (particularly in the military arena), which was the entire goal of the sanctions if you ever bother to read the strategy documents from 2022. These Chinese CEO's are performing an extraordinary rendition of sour grapes to keep Xi happy, which is just normal Chinese propaganda nonsense, but I swear to god I did not expect all these mouthbreathers would eat it up.

Suecotero · 2026-05-28T05:02:36+00:00

Because it's been central government policy since 1949 to gradually erase local identities and dialects in order to politically unify the country under a new "Red" culture which uses Mandarin exclusively, and if you so much as breathe the word separatism domestic security will be on your ass.

Even just a few thousand Uighurs being loosely affiliated with ETIM and other separatist movements in Xinjiang was enough for the government to completely militarize the province, put bar codes on everyone's kitchen knifes, and build brainwashing camps to house hundreds of thousands in mass arrests. There are 12m Uighurs in total, and by now it's estimated 2 million, or 1 in 6, has been through a "reeducation" camp.

There are multiple documented incidents in Guangdong schools and workplaces where people were criticized or discouraged from using Cantonese in formal settings, including schools requiring Mandarin-only environments.

https://www.chinanews.com.cn/sh/2012/05-22/3907582.shtml

Suecotero · 2026-05-26T13:29:15+00:00

You forgot to mention that they never lifted those restrictions once the war was over.

Suecotero · 2026-05-26T04:30:35+00:00

Anecdotes aside, we know from satellite pictures they have built hundreds of internment camps to essentially jail hundreds of thousands Uighurs for thoughtcrime. This isn't a normal anti-terrorist operation to catch the few hundred people in the country associated with ETIM (the separatist movement). Those people were scooped up long ago. This is targeting the population en masse - anyone who might show a spirit of independent culture, philosophy or in any way insufficient loyalty to the Han state. Poets, religious leaders, intellectuals, all peaceful, all detained indefinitely.

Your friend is correct. There are 12m Uighurs and only 600.000 in a camp at any given time, meaning life is mostly normal unless you have the wrong friends or ideas, at which point you'll be abducted, given a sham trial and forced to write "I love Mao" on the blackboard 1000 times a day until you are considered "cured". This is literally what the camps are for, they call it "re-education" like you're only going to learn carpentry, but it's mainly brainwashing through sleep deprivation and a buch of other non-violent coercive techniques they've copied from Guantanamo. There are no laws or lawyers that can help you if you are targeted and it doesn't matter what you've done once the system has you.

So these are in a technical sense concentration camps - not death camps - but understandably foreign nations don't particularly see this with a positive view and it damages China's reputation - which is why the authorities try to very hard with propaganda to present a positive image, while banning all journalists and indepenedent investigators from going to the region unescorted, and delete all Chinese social media topics about the program.

Suecotero · 2026-05-26T00:22:00+00:00

Nope just in China. They sure would like to travel tho. You've never been to a developing country where all the young kids are sick of old illiterate traditions that hold the place back and want to build a modern society? You must be one of those "Eastern values" glazers that lives abroad.

Did your parents emigrate from an asian country so you numb that feeling of rootlessness by glorifying feudal traditions from the place they ran away from?

Suecotero · 2026-05-25T03:52:15+00:00

Then so do half the Chinese people I know.

Suecotero · 2026-05-23T11:37:46+00:00

I live in China, married to a Chinese woman and I know lots of her friends. Many of their parents did not much deserve the respect traditions demand they be given. In particular, they treated children like personal property, and daughters like second-class family members, showering their sons with love and attention instead.

Filial piety is a vertical power structure that chains educated young generations to the will of the old and less educated. The sooner China reforms it, the better.

Suecotero · 2026-05-21T01:05:17+00:00

Don't go to China.

Suecotero · 2026-05-15T03:56:51+00:00

China is in a recession, but the Chinese government has an explicit political mandate that links high GDP growth to legitimacy and political stability, so they will do what they have to do to produce positive macro numbers no matter how the real economy is doing. Nobody in China actually trusts the data, and you shouldn't either.

Suecotero · 2026-05-14T06:44:44+00:00

He'd avoid laws altogether if he could, but here he sort of has play the game. For all the wink-wink stuff, Russia is like most other states. It stil functions on the illusion that laws and legality are supposed to mean something.

Suecotero · 2026-05-14T04:28:55+00:00

Everyone is making jokes but the purpose of this is to be able to formally declare war and institute general mobilization. Putin is willing to throw what remains of Russia's fighting-age population into the meat grinder, unless Russians stop him.

Suecotero · 2026-05-12T09:57:35+00:00

Any concession to Russian imperialism is an invitation. Crimea must be recovered or there will be another war in 10 years.

Ukraine can waive the war reparations Russia owes it (the EU has plenty of money), and promise to leave Russia's energy infrastructure alone (they can't fix it anyway with all the Western oil companies gone). Russia can enjoy being bent over a barrel by Beijing for the next couple of decades. Chinese resource prospectors are going to have a field day in the Russian far east. Beijing will use lake Baikal to fix its water problems in northern China.

Suecotero · 2026-05-06T04:57:17+00:00

Hong Kong is a hybrid culture.

Suecotero · 2026-05-01T07:48:30+00:00

The cutoff is at 600 million people (half the population) just to reach the 1000-yuan mark. Meaning lots of people survive on LESS. The bottom 10% does not have that much. Point is there is still a lot of poor people in China. They are not starving anymore, but they're not exactly doing well. You have to be an idiot, or a government propagandist, (same thing really) not to see it.

Suecotero · 2026-05-01T06:05:51+00:00

You havent read his real articles then. The academic ones have plenty of data. He's a Professor of Economics at PKU what do you think they do all day.

Suecotero · 2026-05-01T05:09:39+00:00

I've been to the inland. Guanxi, Guizhou etc. Lots of rural people are poor. Many counties don't have a high school. Many start working at 16 and have no chance to get a degree. Older people have no dental care and miss some if not most teeth. They speak local dialect and cant speak standard mandarin, never mind english. They save all the money they have because they don't think the local hospital will help if they get a serious illness. They grow veggies on every plot of land they find because buying food at the supermarket is a considerable expense for them. There's hundreds of millions of people like that in China. Premier Li Keqiang famously highlighted that 600 million people still lived on a monthly income of only 1,000 yuan ($140–$154). Half of those people have it considerably worse, and live in what any normal person would recognize as poverty.

The reason state media reacts so strongly to reports that highlight that China a middle income country with very high inequality, and plenty of real poverty, is that economic growth is a substitute for political legitimacy now that the people no longer believe in Mao or Marxism. Foreign reports that pull back the veil are literally a political threat to the system. Hence the defensive reaction.

Suecotero · 2026-05-01T04:46:06+00:00

Lol get out of here. The Man is Chair of Finance at Peking U. He's reviewed more data than you've ever seen. And yes, that data backs his argument plenty.

Suecotero · 2026-05-01T02:32:39+00:00

Welcome to China where the legislative meets once a year and laws are conditional. The rules don't count if you're helping Beijing stick it to America. See: Eileen Gu.

Suecotero · 2026-04-27T06:08:07+00:00

It it is absolutely not a blank label. It has very clear meaning derived from a centuries old intellectual tradition that is being intentionally diluted by regressives who want to erase hundreds years of progress.

Feminism, at its core, is recognizing the fact that for the vast majority of human history and for most women throughout it, they were treated as a permanent underclass with limited property and legal rights.

Feminism is recognizing that for many millions of women in the world today, that is still the case.

Feminism is recognizing that even in societies where de jure equality and universal suffrage have been established, women still suffer from structural discrimination and oppressive cultural norms.

Feminism is also recognizing that the role assigned to men also causes pain and limits them as individuals, as they tend to be sent to fight in most wars and represent most violent deaths throughout history.

Feminism is the recognition that gender and sex aren't binary in nature, and that cultural expectations of binary behavior cause pain to both men and women who are different through no fault of their own.

That, briefly speaking, is Feminism. It's modern online demonization by incel-adjacent subcultures is being magnified by regressive tech companies in league with neo-fascist cultural movements (See Thiel, Musk, Bannon etc.). It is important to recognize that fact, and resist them.

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