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ronya posted:https://twitter.com/Sino_Market/status/1742344792456241430 The restrictions in that policy would have been amazing and were incredibly on the nose. Yeah it would've tanked a bunch of major chinese gaming companies because they're literally just running casinos by another name, but it would've been unambiguously a good thing. Unregulated gambling, especially when targeted at children is an absolute scourge and for a very brief minute there I was optimistic that China taking a stand on it might have some positive effect outside of China, too, but lol so much for that.
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# ? Jan 5, 2024 02:26 |
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# ? Jun 8, 2024 07:28 |
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Yeah, I was actually optimistic about that too, because groups using the gaming industry as a stealth vessel for gambling windfall and "complacency deregulation" was one of the few Moral Panics that withstood scrutiny and turns out to be actually real and just as loathsome and damaging as you might think in practice, even if you ignore every predatory concern about it and only care about how much its making video games suck. It sounds powerfully cynically minded to even assume that they'd purge and roll back any part that inhibited Line Go Up, but keep the poo poo in place that stifles creative productmaking by making it more impossible to assess where and when you run afoul of mercurial, heavy handed content oversight
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# ? Jan 5, 2024 03:11 |
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English language deep dive: https://www.pillarlegalpc.com/en/le...Game-Stocks.pdf for those interested
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# ? Jan 6, 2024 06:15 |
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ronya posted:it is certainly possible to say that actually these debt loads are generally profitable and just have a very long payoff period! but this is perhaps not Beijing's assessment of the status quo. The push toward high-quality development is premised on the tacit acknowledgment that a lot of recent investment has not, in fact, been high-quality development. The push toward local government austerity is premised on the notion that local governments have been spendthrift. The perspective in China itself is perhaps more strikingly neoliberal and skeptical of govt spending than you might guess relevant: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-08/chinese-city-official-spent-21-billion-on-vanity-projects https://www.scmp.com/news/china/pol...d-and-ran-heavy in case any officials missed the memo, it's now publicised via prime-time television: https://twitter.com/Byron_Wan/status/1744544252632371468 Expelled last year: https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202311/08/WS654ae880a31090682a5ed053.html
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# ? Jan 9, 2024 10:10 |
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Votes starting to come in from Taiwan 🇹🇼 https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-taiwan-election/ 6% precincts reported DPP - 43 % KMT - 34.8% Ko Wenje - 22.2%
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# ? Jan 13, 2024 10:47 |
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Last polling had it around 39/36/22 and it looks that will be very close to the final result. Legislature is still up in the air I believe.
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# ? Jan 13, 2024 12:18 |
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94% of precincts in DPP 40.4% KMT 33.4% Ko Wenje 26.3%
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# ? Jan 13, 2024 13:07 |
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Charlz Guybon posted:94% of precincts in So what does this mean? I'm not very knowledgable on Taiwan politics to know which party is considered good or not.
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# ? Jan 13, 2024 13:15 |
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dpp wants independence from china. kmt wants to smooth relations with china. it’s obviously more complex than that and you should research it. but those are the toplines for each of the big parties. abelwingnut fucked around with this message at 13:21 on Jan 13, 2024 |
# ? Jan 13, 2024 13:18 |
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Kchama posted:So what does this mean? I'm not very knowledgable on Taiwan politics to know which party is considered good or not.
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# ? Jan 13, 2024 13:23 |
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Yeah, Xi is permanently mad at the DPP, won't talk to them because of his Qing imperial ambitions.
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# ? Jan 13, 2024 13:29 |
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KMT got shredded in the presidential, despite TPP's attempts at being a stalking horse, let's see how the local elections turn out.
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# ? Jan 13, 2024 13:49 |
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Lai wins. Based.
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# ? Jan 13, 2024 14:23 |
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my understanding is that Taiwan has unclear constitutional processes for cohabitation government and so it's going to be prone to uncomfortable gridlock again on the upside, it may tempt China into kicking the can down the road further, even as the pro-Beijing tendency increasingly ages out of a generationally unitary-Chinese-identity bloc and toward a more Finlandized "only we can talk to
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# ? Jan 14, 2024 15:37 |
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Post 08 they did try to fix some of those problems but I don't think they fixed all of them Issues like "we, the legislature, choose your premier, your chief of staff and liaison to us, to be someone you loving hate because we can" I don't think can happen anymore.
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# ? Jan 14, 2024 16:22 |
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pre reform the legislature also enjoyed basically no electoral legitimacy, which crimped some of its ambition (from an external perspective, anyway); that's less so post reform results are for a divided LY as well though (which IIRC implies the KMT underperformed polling?). third party members would have to be really short-sighted to endorse any legislation that lets the KMT reverse asset seizures substantially, since they currently subsist on siphoning KMT votes themselves at least the fistfights will be entertaining
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# ? Jan 14, 2024 16:38 |
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ronya posted:my understanding is that Taiwan has unclear constitutional processes for cohabitation government and so it's going to be prone to uncomfortable gridlock again
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# ? Jan 14, 2024 19:42 |
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386-SX 25Mhz VGA posted:I am far from knowledgeable about the region, but isn’t China’s basic strategy just to continue raising its people’s material conditions to the point where it’s by far the wealthiest country in the history of the world, achieving a hegemony over the region if not the world, and Taiwan is just inevitably subsumed into that hegemony without need for military conflict? I get the sense they don’t really care about this poo poo as long as nobody is interfering in that longer term strategy. Broadly yes, but the experience of Xianjing and Hong Kong shows that when the locals don't just accept the inevitability of Han CCP supremacy then they aren't afraid to bring out the big stick and crack some skulls. On the economic side there's two angles to it: on the one hand China wants and expects to be the wealthiest country in the world, which it can achieve. On the other hand on a per capita basis China is still very poor and as a low ambition goal it wants to avoid being stuck in the largest middle-income trap in the history of the world.
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# ? Jan 14, 2024 20:02 |
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Alchenar posted:Broadly yes, but the experience of Xianjing and Hong Kong shows that when the locals don't just accept the inevitability of Han CCP supremacy then they aren't afraid to bring out the big stick and crack some skulls.
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# ? Jan 14, 2024 22:39 |
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Pretty famously China cracked a lot of skulls in Beijing itself when they were daring to protest the government. It's certainly an idea floating around that if China under a non-democratic regime can keep consistently improving people's conditions, they won't mind so much that they have no real say in the way they are governed, but in practice I don't think you can really know for sure what the government really prioritizes. Xi seems to really favor his own specific brands of nationalism. There are fairly large issues with China's prosperity not being distributed equally, and as China's overall economy stagnates and growth plateaus, anybody who ascribes to the theory of raising the living standards indefinitely will have to reckon with what happens when things stop raising. It's also not that easy to tell how grateful the general population are overall when anyone who is not content with the situation is heavily suppressed and quieted. I guess if you want to really look into the idea of that sort of benevolent dictator approach, Singapore is a lot further along.
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# ? Jan 14, 2024 22:54 |
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386-SX 25Mhz VGA posted:Makes sense! So rationally they’d just want to keep the boat from rocking too much (e.g an independence declaration or some kind of military confrontation with the West) while they run up the score of per-capita conditions to the point where it’d be stupid not to come into the fold? But irrationally the PRC is still controlled by humans who could blunder and get caught up in some stupid bullshit and kneecap themselves while pushing Taiwan away Well this is another area where China's 'we just want to be left alone and get rich' line collides with the reality of what China knows it needs to do to achieve that. China is resource poor and the bulk of the economy is based on importing raw materials to run industry (and agriculture!) and exporting manufactured products. To do that it needs trade lanes open. So China's strategic position looks a lot like Imperial Japan's in 1940, and there's a lot of broad parallels with how the dynamic is playing out with the US. China's worst case scenario is one in which the US encircles it with a ring of allies who are in a position to block trade flows and provide basing for US forces. Much like 1940 Japan, it needs to secure the first island chain and wants to be in a position to contest the second island chain. So much like with Russia and Ukraine, if China perceives that the Taiwan-US relationship is progressing to the point where it will enable the US to encircle it then the risks of a resort to military action to forestall that go up significantly.
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# ? Jan 14, 2024 22:55 |
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between early Xi seen as Chongqing economic reformer to New Development Philosophy national-security-as-a-prerequisite-for-development (formalized by 2021), I would pinpoint the indicative shift with the 2015/2016 Hong Kong disappearances of booksellers not because it was consequential in itself, but because it wasn't: if you run about disappearing essentially irrelevant niche intelligentsia at a pre-NSL time when it's still publicly much commented on, it shows that a markedly lower tolerance for dissidence speculatively the notion of a peaceful rise that would accrete the Chinese sphere in an uncontested fashion evaporated after the Umbrella protests (in Hong Kong) and Sunflower movement (in Taiwan) and Kunming attacks (by Xinjiang separatists, sometimes called China's 9/11). All of this happened in 2014.
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# ? Jan 15, 2024 03:45 |
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Caixin sure likes poking the bear https://twitter.com/polijunkie_aus/status/1746692431125577853 The article is very long (and is essentially celebrating the successful prosecution of corrupt officials, mind; this is not dissident agitprop or journalistic expose. It evidently still struck a nerve though). Excerpts via baidu translate: quote:The Death of Suspect Sun Renze ... quote:Deadly Seven Hours ronya fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Jan 15, 2024 |
# ? Jan 15, 2024 03:56 |
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Alchenar posted:On the other hand on a per capita basis China is still very poor that's not true
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# ? Jan 15, 2024 06:00 |
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depends if you think Mexico or Malaysia count as very poor per capita, I guess (Mexico is the go-to for American mental reference, and Malaysia is amongst the richest of the so-called Newly Industrialized Countries) ronya fucked around with this message at 06:07 on Jan 15, 2024 |
# ? Jan 15, 2024 06:04 |
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they're objectively not "very poor" e: all 3 of the countries mentioned are near the top of the world bank's "upper middle income" countries. china has the 3rd highest gni per capita of any country outside of the "high income" category and is right on the edge of breaking through to the high income category other indices might have them a bit different ranked but none of them will put china in the "very poor" category and i understand that mexico is a go to comparison for americans, but mexico is on the high end of upper middle income, and china still has a 27% lead on gni per capita over mexico fart simpson fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Jan 15, 2024 |
# ? Jan 15, 2024 06:06 |
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One might say that the goal of a moderately prosperous society has been achieved after a century of the Party, even. Ahem. Still, Malaysia does not set out to be a regional hegemon. Means are measured relative to goals, you might say. I would not agree with Alchenar's claim on the whole, being that the security-and-development angle has explicitly replaced the development-is-the-top-priority angle for some years already
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# ? Jan 15, 2024 06:17 |
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fart simpson posted:they're objectively not "very poor" You're doing a bit of a bait and switch here. The Gini coefficient I'm pretty sure is a measure of relative wealth inequality, but people were discussing per capita measurements. Chinas gdp per capita is around 12,000$, about on par with Russia, or depending on the website is between Russia (15,000$) and Mexico (11,500$). For reference, the gdp per capita for the US is over 70,000$, Canada is over 50,000$. *Lithuania* is 25,000$, Japan surprisingly is only, 33,000$. Finland and Germany are near Canada. Of course this is the per capita value, but this implies chinas largest issue is still nonetheless its wealth gap between its richest and poorest areas. Additionally the Gini coefficient isn't the perfect measurement and at a glance at Wikipedia seems to have issues. The example from Wikipedia is that while Bangladesh (gdppc 1700$) and the Netherlands (gdppc 42000$) had the same coefficient (0.31), no one would suggest that Bangladesh wasn't in fact a poor country. China as a whole has money, but there's hundreds of millions of people in China who don't.
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# ? Jan 15, 2024 15:15 |
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no, im not. im using gross national income, which is a sort of modified gdp that the world bank and other organizations use to define income tiers per country. not gini coefficient. im not pulling one over on anyone; alchenar is simply wrong
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# ? Jan 15, 2024 15:27 |
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fart simpson posted:no, im not. im using gross national income, which is a sort of modified gdp that the world bank and other organizations use to define income tiers per country. not gini coefficient. im not pulling one over on anyone; alchenar is simply wrong I see, I thought you were phone posting and meant to write "gini" instead of "gni".
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# ? Jan 15, 2024 15:39 |
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Raenir Salazar posted:I see, I thought you were phone posting and meant to write "gini" instead of "gni". nope. china is about 2 years off from entering the "high income economy" category as per the world bank.
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# ? Jan 15, 2024 15:55 |
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another handy mental comparison is 1980s Japan, which doesn't typically strike folks as poor
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# ? Jan 15, 2024 17:06 |
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ronya posted:another handy mental comparison is 1980s Japan, which doesn't typically strike folks as poor
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# ? Jan 15, 2024 17:21 |
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Because yeah that's the fundamental problem, China's not so rich and powerful that the people of Taiwan would feel like they're getting a good deal; at least with Hong Kong you can appeal to the fact that if you were wealthy, your wealth might have new and novel ways of getting wealthier within the new market economy of the PRC; and for most people appeal that they would cease to be a British Imperial possession and reunited with the motherland. For a time anyways. Until the reality sets in. For Taiwan its basically already a de facto independent country and while it may have problems its clearly quite wealthy, its wealth and intellectual resources would probably (at least as far as the Taiwanese perceive the case to be) be taxed and redistributed to help other parts of China instead of China's national wealth invested into Taiwan. The mainland is probably decades still away, assuming it manages to overcome the difficulties its facing now or will face, from being able to make this sort of offer to Taiwan. At best it could rely on the previous argument up above, about "reuniting" people while promising that nothing would substantially change; that promise is no longer credible.
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# ? Jan 15, 2024 17:26 |
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I also like "Indonesia strapped to Poland", as an idiom I've used before ITT
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# ? Jan 15, 2024 17:28 |
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ronya posted:I also like "Indonesia strapped to Poland", as an idiom I've used before ITT That's a pretty dumb comparison, because it's assuming wealth distribution, infrastructure and technology are evenly dispersed across all of China. If you to somehow divide the eastern half of China from the western half into separate countries you would suddenly have one very rich country and one very poor one. I don't have any figures to prove it, but I'd be willing to bet the average wealth and standard of living in Shanghai, Shenzhen, etc. meets or exceeds the standards in Taipai, and probably a lot of Western cities as well. That's the problem with comparing Taiwan and China, China's a little bigger than Taiwan.
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# ? Jan 16, 2024 01:31 |
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e: nah
ronya fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Jan 16, 2024 |
# ? Jan 16, 2024 02:59 |
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Stringent posted:...I'd be willing to bet the average wealth and standard living in Shanghai, Shenzhen, etc. meets or exceeds the standards in Taipai, and probably a lot of Western cities as well.. Does this include everyone in the cities or only those with hukou?
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# ? Jan 16, 2024 03:15 |
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DiscretionOverValor posted:Does this include everyone in the cities or only those with hukou? Good question, like I said, I don't have any figures to show so your guess would be as good as mine.
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# ? Jan 16, 2024 03:24 |
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# ? Jun 8, 2024 07:28 |
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Stringent posted:That's a pretty dumb comparison, because it's assuming wealth distribution, infrastructure and technology are evenly dispersed across all of China. If you to somehow divide the eastern half of China from the western half into separate countries you would suddenly have one very rich country and one very poor one. Isn't that exactly what Ronya just said?
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# ? Jan 16, 2024 03:43 |