Comment by isoprophlex
7 hours ago
We are fucking ourselves over with our unbridled neoliberalist, hypercapitalist "lmao the market will save us" approach to doing literally everything based only on short term gains: from politics to economics to infrastructure to education. As this article is a fine example of.
Yeh I think this is less of a story about Chinese exceptionalism and more a story of structural issues in the west (I will always admire the Chinese technocrats but lets not get ahead of ourselves).
Fossil fuel barons and vested interests have sabotaged the energy transition at every opportunity possible. They've spent billions on it, just look at today's UN conference on plastic waste falling apart.
And then there is the NIMBYs who are seemingly allergic to electricity pylons. These folks don't deserve one tenth of the attention that they receive. Treating housing as an investment/retirement fund was a mistake.
Hopefully this grows into a wake up call, I'm looking forward to watching the terminal decline of the oil industry in the 2030s.
It's absolutely a good example of how putting literally every egg in this cultural basket is not a good strategy. Americanism is two things: money > all else and individual > other. We have taken the first to its extreme and the alligators indicate the second one is not far behind.
We all suffer the results.
Machine learning is far more efficient at allocating resources than the market; the market creates inefficiencies just by existing as a middle ground between the production of goods and their order. And the development of capitalism depends on the production of capital at unceasing and accelerating speeds. So, a capitalism stripped of the market is more true than one bounded by it.