Re: John Wayne Flunks MATHS Class.
While i agree to most of your points, let me add some more.
China has been buying up any kind of company it could get its hand on, one of the most remarked was robot company KuKa in germany. Funny enough, all those much criticised "blackmail" credits to fund co operative projects like ports in malaysia, plywood factories in africa (along with the necessary roads/infrastructure) shows some kind of friendly or at least somewhat symbiotic takeover, much in contrast to landgrabbing and extortion via "free trade agreements" that are mostly detrimental for the african "partners".
Human rights/ social credit/surveillance and other correctly criticized points dont change the fact that china always plays the long game, and most of it in a way that "sneakily" gives the impression of a friendly slow but steady invasion instead of the usual western approach.
Chinas hybrid approach to everything, always changing the current milestone target without losing focus on the long term goal and whenever hitting a wall like the forced pseudo sell out of TikTok, finding a way around has not been met with a working counter strategy yet.
Seppuku sanctions dont work at all here. Never have, never will. Economic hunger strike is met with amusement, maybe inconveniencing short term but not to be taken seriously at all long term. While china has been investing in schooling and "producing" engineers for decades, western countries have dried out their potential and "optimized" for overexpensive education and abysmal wages, reducing the quantity of engineers, programmers, whatevertechlers immensely. Outsourcing everything and his dog to low wage countries also destroyed a lot of any ability to be competitive long term.
I can remember the 1980ies, the sheer tech optimism, awe and inspiration coming from then still superior "american" technologies, like the C64, Amiga, IBM down to electronic games from Atari, Coleco, MB, a time when the USA was THE name for almost everything futuristic, technological wonders, THE stuff to have.
Well, nowadays, whats left and where is the daily high tech expected to come from ? Even in special effects and impressive movies, china has outrun the US productions.
Instead of relying on building walls of any kind, reverse the neoliberal short term lunacy and build up again. Economic warfare can only lead to a delayed demise but wont save "the free west" in the middle to long term.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
