How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but four times bigger. Is that a world where “Designed by Apple in California, Made in China” still makes sense? What will be America’s competitive edge in that scenario?

What seems most likely to me in the future is that the US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now. Dominating finance and services won’t mean anything when both the IP and the physical products are being produced somewhere else.

Also, the UK hasn't dominated finance for a century and has never been dominant in services, so it doesn't seem like an apt comparison.

Not where it matters. China has a much larger under-employed population base than the US has. They still have a few hundred million peasant farmers whose children can and are getting educated and moving to the city. Their pool of labour is growing while the US's is stagnant.

Not that it needs to grow -- over the last decade or so China's factory employment has been relatively constant while output has surged dramatically. Their factories are rapidly automating.

I think so too prior to the Trump tarrifs. Now their influence abroad is picking up steam again, with former WW2 enemies now becoming trade allies. I think this has reinvigorated their opportunity.

The race between manual labor and machine labor is heating up anew. We don't yet have humanoid robots but they're on the design table, so it may be time to fasten your seat belt.

And those children will be burdened with caring for their elderly parents, often alone, continuing to keep internal consumption low. They are automating and moving up the supply chain, but have a long, long way to go as a nation.

PS: For those of us in software who wonder whether an economy without IP could exist, entire software industries exist without copyright protection, one trick for example is to provide the service behind the cloud, so customers never have access to the source code; meanwhile OSS, which is based on preventing restrictions on sharing, is the eighth wonder of the world, which has proven that IP is unnecessary to software.

You also do know how many companies moved their knowledge to China on purpose right?

The knowledge on how to build things, is learnable even if you don't just 'hack' everything.

And there is a lot of signaling happening, that china has surpassed American and European companies in R&D. CATL for example.

Whatever China did or still does, its a land with 1.4 Billion people vs. 340 Million.

Also we achieved, around the globe, a level of expertise around so many topics, that we do not talk about huge differences. If an engine from china is a few % less efficient than the high techv ersion from germany, but the labor cost is fundamental different, than you just loos.

And the prices are significant different. So significant, that if USA doesn't change, it will not be able to compete.

Even a 104% tarif does not change the competitivness of China in a lot of areas.

All of this is only a problem in capitalism btw. and with the upcoming robot revolution, the 'richness' of manufacturing will never again go to the workers ever. This time is over. We need to figure this out

China will surpass USA from a GDP Point of view in 2035.

China surpassed Germany as industry machines export in 2018.

The thing is .. there's a point here, but it's not at all tied in with physical products. People are obsessed with one side of the ledger while refusing to see the other. Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues. Things where the state is unavoidably involved and having better, more decisive leadership and not getting bogged down in consultations, would make a big difference.

The UK stepped on its own rake because it was obsessed with tiny, already vanished industries like fishing. Fishing is less profitable for the whole UK than Warhammer. It's not actually where we want to be. While real UK manufacture successes (cars, aircraft, satellites, generators, all sorts of high-tech stuff) get completely ignored. Or bogged down in extra export red tape thanks to Brexit.

To improve reality, we have to start from reality, not whatever vision of the past propaganda "news" channels are blathering about.

No it's not, even if it were true. Is it really that hard to admit that the Chinese people are industrious, smart, ambitious and have extremely high education level? And that the state has directed the development of the country wisely in the past 40 years?

All of this is old, tired news. They're leading in many areas now, so at least in the fields where they lead and innovate, they couldn’t have "stolen" anything.

If you would like to get more up to date:

1. "China has become a scientific superpower"

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/06/12/...

2. "China Is Rapidly Becoming a Leading Innovator in Advanced Industries"

https://itif.org/publications/2024/09/16/china-is-rapidly-be...

3. "How Innovative Is China in Nuclear Power?"

https://itif.org/publications/2024/06/17/how-innovative-is-c...

I suspect they will squander the opportunity the US unforced error has provided, but we'll see.

Word for that, hubris

I’m not sure if you’re just speaking on what you experience or because of this post but the OP is a clothing guy so it makes sense he will look at it from a clothing (including shoes) perspective.

I agree though, if Americans truly do see Asia as just the cheap clothing factory continent they’re sorely mistaken. All you have to do is to just look at TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) and realize that if you were impacting just that company alone you would get a slap in the face as a country, all (~70%) the major chips come from there.

I am aware the US is developing a Semiconductor factory in their own country but it is not done yet and it will not go as tiny in nms as TSMC already is.

Ha ha ha. I was this naive once. This just isn't our reality. You would have to have a functioning education system AND a population with adequate emotional regulation. Do we even have the pieces anymore?

Why spend a decade researching something when you can just hack into American companies and steal their R&D about the same topic and then build from that? Saves a ton of time.

It's a pretty great strategy (for them) and works well.

https://money.cnn.com/2014/05/19/technology/security/china-h...

>The kind of spying China is accused of can yield valuable information and give the country's businesses a much-needed boost. Westinghouse spent a significant amount of money designing the special pipes that are the defining feature of its AP1000 pressurized water reactor. Stealing those plans means that a Chinese nuclear plant builder might be able to skip costly research and development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_espionage_in_the_Unite...

>In 2016, the U.S. Justice Department charged China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN) with stealing nuclear secrets from the United States.[36][37] The Guardian reported: "According to the US Department of Justice, the FBI has discovered evidence that China General Nuclear Power (CGN) has been engaged in a conspiracy to steal US nuclear secrets stretching back almost two decades. Both CGN and one of the corporation’s senior advisers, Szuhsiung Ho, have been charged with conspiring to help the Chinese government develop nuclear material in a manner that is in clear breach of US law."[38]

Just two instances of many.

They play the long con and have pretty much stolen from every industry to further their own.

Right ... so about that, here's Morgan Stanley's report on humanoid robots from a couple months ago:

Investors will notice that 73% of the companies confirmed to be involved in humanoids and 77% of integrators are based out of Asia (56%/45% out of China, respectively). A common refrain we hear from investors is the lack of Western firms to add to their humanoid portfolio outside of TSLA and NVDA. In our view, this is important information in and of itself as it represents the reality of the current humanoid ecosystem which we expect may need to change materially over time (see the West's current experience with EVs which has significant supply chain overlap with humanoids). Our research suggests China continues to show the most impressive progress in humanoid robotics where startups are benefitting from established supply chains, local adoption opportunities, and strong degrees of national government support.

https://advisor.morganstanley.com/john.howard/documents/fiel...

This sounded completely insane to me. I tried to look up numbers and found that Games Workshop brings in > 0.5 billion in revenue (!!), compared to all of UKs fisheries at 1 billion-ish (profit margins are, as you'd expect, pretty favorable for the plastic figurines that they don' even paint for you).

Thanks for this interesting fact.

They have been caught doing this for decades.

Don't be so sure, this has become much less clear. For example, in this article: "The Centre for Economics and Business Research, which in 2020 predicted that China would overtake the U.S. by 2028, revised the crossover point two years later, to 2036. This month, the British consultancy said it will not happen in the next 15 years."

https://www.newsweek.com/2025/01/31/china-us-compete-biggest...

But most of that revenue goes to JKR, whereas most of the fishing revenue may end up in "working class" people's pockets.

I am sure JKR has to pay taxes still, which goes back to the government.

There are 3x as many fishermen in the UK than employees of Games Workshop, and much more again if you count the number of related fishery jobs.

At the end of the day, politicians and voters alike respond more to employment than nominal monetary figures. A broader employment base is generally better for social and political stability than explicit wealth redistribution (e.g. tax + entitlements). The latter is what economic theory tends to emphasize--i.e. equivocate incomes based on state wealth redistribution schemes--but such economic theory is how we got Trump, Brexit, and a host of other ills. Economics hasn't figured out, yet, how to price the constituent inputs that produce political and economic stability. GDP, Gini, per capita income, employment rate, etc metrics are gross approximations that work well until they don't (though they're still better than rhetoric and handwaving). But to be fair, social and political theorists haven't solved that problem, either; at least, not with a rigorous quantification model.

See "America needs a bigger, better bureaucracy":

> I believe that the U.S. suffers from a distinct lack of state capacity. We’ve outsourced many of our core government functions to nonprofits and consultants, resulting in cost bloat and the waste of taxpayer money. We’ve farmed out environmental regulation to the courts and to private citizens, resulting in paralysis for industry and infrastructure alike. And we’ve left ourselves critically vulnerable to threats like pandemics and — most importantly — war.

[…]

> If government spending isn’t going to pay government workers, it must be going to pay people who work in the private sector — nonprofits, for-profit contractors, consultants, and so on. In other words, state capacity is being outsourced. But this graph doesn’t actually capture the full scope of the decline, because it doesn’t include outsourcing via unfunded mandates — things that the government could do, but instead simply orders the private sector to do, without providing the funding.

* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-...

Mentions the paper "State Capacity: What Is It, How We Lost It, And How to Get It Back" (22pp, so short):

* https://www.niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/br...

And the book Bring Back the Bureaucrats: Why More Federal Workers Will Lead to Better (and Smaller!) Government:

* https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/templeton-press/bring...

Does JKR personally own the copyrights, or have they been sub-licensed to a corporation in (e.g.) Ireland?

Oh, boy, let me tell you, the 'State capacity' of the United States, when it comes to doing things that aren't making war on its own, or other people, was both rotten to begin with, and won't survive another four years of this regime.

Dysfunctional as the UK is, it's government is not stuck at a triple point of learned helpelessness, intentional sabotage and paralysis (the US is currently, among other things, doing its best to bring cured diseases back), and a deeply negative-sum culture.

I've heard that the United States was a magical land of milk and honey in this respect, back when 'competent bureaucracy' wasn't a swear word in it, but I understand that ended ~45 years ago. (With a few surviving holdouts, like the Fed)

Velocity is one of those critically important concepts that often gets left out of these discussions because it's hard to understand if you haven't formally studied economics because it's all about second order effects. But it's a big part of understanding why, historically speaking, maximizing corporate profits doesn't seem to correlate all that well with overall prosperity trends.

Warhammer requires designers, moulding experts, warehouse staff and so on.

Games Workshop is a public company, in case you want to look up their accounts for the comparison.

https://bigdatachina.csis.org/measurement-muddle-chinas-gdp-...

This isn't just a UK issue:

"Fishing is a relatively minor economic activity within the EU. It contributes generally less than 1 per cent to gross national product."[0]

and if you look beyond fishing, agricultural policy as a whole is - not sure how to put this politely - not easy to understand:

"The CAP is often explained as the result of a political compromise between France and Germany: German industry would have access to the French market; in exchange, Germany would help pay for France's farmers [..] The CAP has always been a difficult area of EU policy to reform [..]"[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Fisheries_Policy [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy

Comparative advantage means countries benefit from specializing in producing goods or services where they have the lowest relative opportunity cost - not necessarily where they're the best overall. Even if China focuses on technology (and this is far from decided), America can still thrive by specializing in other areas where its relative efficiency or unique capabilities are better.

Examples: Germany specializes in high-precision manufacturing, India does well with software development, IT services, and medicines, Australia exports minerals, natural resources, and agricultural products, etc. Everybody brings something to the table. The world economy cannot possibly get worse by adding 1B people doing top-level work.

> Ricardo's theory implies that comparative advantage rather than absolute advantage is responsible for much of international trade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

BTW these would have been great ECON 101 discussions to have before the election.

This can not be overstated. China is on the verge of the largest population collapse in human history.

By 2080 China's population will drop by 600 million. If that trend continues, by 2150 China's population will drop to 280 million.

Other asian countries such as South Korea and Japan are on a similar trajectory.

Even a simple metro ticket.

You can also smile at the CCTV cameras, which are in groups every 100m or so within cities.

We need to distinguish between paying over the odds to keep industries which are essential to have in an antagonistic scenario, from loss-aversion and nostalgia for industries which don't provide as much employment as they used to.

Completely barking mad.

https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-rejects-eu-plan-tie-defen...

It remains to be seen how different 2010's China—with 90% of the population being under 60—is from 2050's China—with only 69% of the population being under 60.

https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2050/

The Harry Potter World theme park in London has over two million visitors annually. That tourism must be more economically significant than fishing for cod.

What an amazing argument to tax the rich!

What good did it do for us? At the time everyone was running around rubbishing and laughing at the "outrageous" claims of 10% GDP loss, and where are we now?

And whilst nobody wants to risk being starved to submission, it's also equally important to promote more profitable sectors, and tax accordingly, so that we can support our more strategic sectors. I wouldn't say we're doing a good job at that for what its worth.

This is a nice way to put it.

Anticipate a world within your life time where China is the dominant economic, technological, military and cultural super power.

Anticipate jealousy, anticipate fear, but know that as Americans who have been top dog for decades there is nothing wrong with not being the best.

Additionally anticipate a changing world view less focused on the view that freedom and democracy as the only possible way to lead and anticipate that despite the fact that China is a communist country and centrally controlled they don't want conflict and they don't want total war.

China and the US are not perfect. The US needs to accept this fact and it needs to accept that another is about to take it's place as the top dog.

Post-Brexit, there's now increased incentive for Games Workshop to build their next factory in the EU.

(Games Workshop is one company, but this applies to every manufacturing company in the UK.)

Well, we'll see that and raise you the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

The EU could get rid of this idiocy overnight, except - well - France.

(I have nothing against the French, I've visited France dozens of times and have many friends there.)

"Once a month the European Parliament moves from Brussels to Strasbourg at a cost of £150m a year as lorries transport paperwork."[0]

"Top EU official brands Strasbourg shuttle 'insane'"[1]

"EU parliament’s €114m-a-year move to Strasbourg ‘a waste of money’, but will it ever be scrapped?"[2]

[0] https://news.sky.com/story/meps-on-the-move-madness-of-stras...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/05/eu.politics

[2] https://www.euronews.com/2019/05/20/eu-parliament-s-114m-a-y...

But that isn’t what I asked.

Personally I don't 'agree' with brexit, but it's the reality that we're in. In typical british fashion we're trying to stay friends with the EU, even though they basically hate us, while also trying to do trade with the rest of the world. Predictably we can't really do much of 2 without 1 becoming a problem (and vice versa). However 1 is currently our biggest trading partner (as a bloc, US as a country) so what have we done? Sat in the middle not doing anything radical hoping we can be best friends with everyone.

It's not the Labour party that's campaigning to repeal this act.

China's per capita purchasing power will increase rapidly if RMB becomes the world's preferred reserve currency.

Trump seems to be doing everything to speed up the former and as a result is also speeding up the latter.

A few months ago, I'd have said soft-power and goodwill built over decades with the rest of the western world, which roughly equals China in population size. Instead, I agree that the US is staring down a "managed decline" like the UK, but hopefully not as steep.

Well, to some extent that's the case with manufacturing. You're bemoaning the loss of IP, which is catastrophic when that's all you have and your wealth is built on a gentleman's game of words and paper.

China, meanwhile, has built out factories, a knowledgeable workforce, and an extensive supply network. Back to startup terminology, there's a "network effect" in manufacturing of all the little parts that make up bigger things. You can drive around town and try out different parts, and make an invention here or there and improve things incrementally. There used to be a thriving ecosystem around the big U.S. domestic car manufacturers, not just for the cars themselves, but all the thousands of parts that go into them.

In other words, like many older hackers who grew up in the "information just wants to be free, man" world that spawned open source, the dig that China is "stealing IP" doesn't really hit me that hard. I'm impressed that they've gone to the next step of actually using it to make physical stuff, and I wish we did that more.

However, if we got a free trade agreement with the US would the inverse be true, EU companies are better off moving to the UK due to brexit? What about just a FTA with all commonwealth countries (why haven't we done this??)?

"London Beats New York as the World’s Leading Financial Center in the Latest Ranking"

in 2015 before the glory that is Brexit.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-28/london-be...

Game-over.

I strongly suspect the US cannot maintain its outsized per capita wealth, on the back of the reserve dollar, in a world where China has an economy twice the size. Just as the UK couldn’t when the US economy overtook the British empire and the dollar replaced the pound as the reserve currency.

The question, instead, is how we’ll be able to adapt to that new reality. And I suspect we’d rather be Germany in that future than the UK.

Go to any top-N American University, pick a random STEM faculty and count the number of Chinese (nationality) post-grads, post-docs and faculty. Alternatively, look at the trajectory of science publications coming out of Chinese universities vs the US. Underestimating China's brain-trust is doing oneself a disservice.

A FTA with the USA would come at a significant price — the UK would be pressured to accept low-quality American agricultural produce, and lower many other standards from their current European level. If it does this, that reduces the global value of British exports.

Here is my take on this:

For those things, you probably need a lot of technical training and/or advanced degrees.

For fishing you just need to be more or less healthy and be able to follow instructions.

Most people are more or less healthy and are able to follow instructions. A small subset of those has advanced technical training and/or advanced degrees.

Therefore, fishing becomes important because a lot more people can do it, and those people vote.

I'm not saying it's what happened to the UK, but we asked for what we needed, got turned down and then left.

I wrote this not long after (10y ago) and I think this view is still unpopular now as it was then (for reasons beyond me):

  I fully expect Baidu and other tech giants on the Chinese shores to try and push the boundaries of technology. Silicon Valley (and the US) in general has always been the hot-bed of innovation. But with enormous increase in wealth in China (and to an extent in India), I can see these companies being more and more ambitious. Not long ago Andrew Ng of Coursera and Stanford AI Lab fame joined Baidu to further their rival to the 'Google Brain' project. 

  Xiaomi has long been positioning itself as a company with design chops of Apple, engineering chops of Google, and e-commerce chops of Amazon, all rolled into one-- and I can see where they are coming from. If they manage to pull it off, I guess that's when we'd start seeing the proverbial "Death of Silicon Valley" as in, it loosing its strange monopoly and strangle hold on tech world in terms of both talent and innovation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_espionage_in_the_Unite...

The vast majority of us were over that decades ago. Please catch up for the sake of all humanity.

I blame Peter Zeihan for this kind of thinking. His views are immensely popular in the very powerful and influential circles. And he constantly derides China's capabilities. Since 2014 he's been saying it's going to collapse any day now. He still says it.

If you haven't already done so, read up on TARGET2[0], things could get somewhat spicy if a Eurozone country were to leave the EU.

[0] https://data.ecb.europa.eu/publications/ecbeurosystem-policy...

Tourists must wait at the ticket window. Foreigners aren't usually asked to show the passport unless they look Chinese.

. This is what stops revolutions and civil wars.

Personally, I'm always dubious of the rich and famous genuinely finding unmet cases for charitable organisations. Especially when they've made a fortune outsourcing being morally dubious to others - she can save children because others are paying her to be allowed to sell low quality merchandise almost certainly made in exploitative conditions.

She's not alone, there's many more e.g. Messi donating lots to children's cause through his own charitable organisation after gladly being a global ambassador for unhealthy snacks targeted at children.

Not quite. USA is big enough to be able to be self sufficient if they keep mexico and Canada tightly bound via NAFTA or military might. UK have no option but to trade. UK was rarely able to feed and fuel itself after the industrial revolution.

They have been projected to pass the USA in GDP for a long time now. We'll see if it happens. Their demographic trends are not favorable, but the US seems to be testing out how many self-sustained wounds its economy can survive.

It might help to understand that the resistance you have faced is probably driven by deep-seated biases and stubbornness.

I had no idea that Warhammer was such a huge industry - they must sell almost 600 sets a quarter.

The loudest voices calling for a scrap are exactly the people you DON'T want deciding what human rights you'll be "allowed".

And incitement to violence is, and always should be, unprotected speech - your silly "two tier kier" is informing me greatly that you're on the "they locked them up for hurty words!" bandwagon.

I'm sure that the US still has many edges over China in high-end technology. I remember I read a research article back in 2012/2013 which listed all fields that China were lagging behind, including pharma, computer chips and some other stuffs. It's a fairly long list. I'm sure China managed to catch up in some of the fields but I doubt all of them.

Impossible to say, as it was swamped by the pandemic. My guess as to the fatalities due to Brexit is also untestable as a result.

The city at the center of the Missouri and Mississippi if it were in europe would be a major civilization. In the US its saint louis. The US, CA, and AU have an option few countries do -- at any point they want nominal gdp growth all they have to do is open the door.

I agree with you though that china's incredibly impressive.

1/100th the amount of smiling at the CCTV cameras compared to the UK then.

Point is: The best and brightest go where they think their life will be most fulfilling. Up to last year that was California for tech and New York for culture.

Even the Chinese think china is oppressive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_ping#:~:text=Tang%20ping%...

All things considered, most Chinese would prefer to stay in China, and if you're rich there you've got it made.

(It was also not as absolute as people in the West think. There were exceptions for rural China and minorities.)

Malaysia is handicapped by the resource curse (lots of oil) dysfunctional government and race politics that serve to drive out everybody who is not ethnically Malay.

> If government spending isn’t going to pay government workers, it must be going to pay people who work in the private sector — nonprofits, for-profit contractors, consultants, and so on. In other words, state capacity is being outsourced.

The money is going to social security payments. Social security went from <1% of federal spending at its outset to more than 20% of federal spending today. Medicare and other assistance programs are a similar story. Most of the money from these programs goes to paying benefits rather than administrative costs, which is generally regarded as a good thing. But they're also what together now constitute the majority of federal spending.

Meanwhile there is another reason why the number of government workers has gone down: Computers were invented. Things that used to be done by hand are now done by machine, and then you don't need as many clerks and bookkeepers to manually process paper records. This is also generally regarded as a good thing.

The points it makes about unfunded mandates and NIMBYs holding everything up with meritless lawsuits are valid, but the "ministerial review" it proposes is the existing permitting process. The problem is we have unfunded mandates and NIMBY lawsuits on top of that, which could simply be deleted and replaced with nothing.

This really seems like the fundamental misunderstanding:

> And guess who’s responsible for monitoring Medicare spending? Bureaucrats. So that’s at least a 2300% return on investment in bureaucracy!

If you only look at the most efficient thing a bureaucrat could be doing, look how efficient bureaucrats are!

Meanwhile the government is still paying thousands of people to process paper records because although computers were invented many decades ago, only parts of the government have discovered them and there are still many things you have to do by bringing physical documents to government offices to be processed in person even when those things have no legitimate reason not to be a government website.

What we need is not to have more bureaucrats, but rather to finish computerizing the things that have no reason not to be so the existing government employees can do the high value stuff instead of wasting time shuffling paper that should have been bits.

Fishing distributed about 1 billion in household income in the uk.

Fishing supports about 12.000 direct jobs plus 5.000 in related industries in the UK.

Warhammer has about 3000 employees GLOBALLY. Trickle down is not really present here.

Businesses that do not distribute wealth in the general population are much less relevant than those that do. Taxes are nice but businesses are good at avoiding them ( especially via Ireland ), whereas income tax is the major supporter of our states.

That's a long way from advertising unhealthy snacks.

Lego isn't made in dubious conditions, so for toys she's already above average.

If the statistics aren't very wrong, it doesn't seem like a solution.

Is there any fishing going on in the Black Sea at the moment? (genuine question)

All I remember was Cameron asking to expel jobless immigrants, which confused the EU as Britain was already allowed to do that.

This is an outstanding article on the subject: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/03/the-population...

None of those are state capacity issues.

Those are "State is pointing a gun at anyone who would fix them" issues.

Friendly reminder that 95%+ of the UK railway system was built by private for profit companies, with state involvement being primarily limited to not preventing it from happening.

All of these issues are 100% self inflicted by the state getting in the way.

All that needs to happen for them to fix themselves is to stop actively preventing private individuals from fixing them.

Take this Eitas Visa for example, this is literally just sowing resentment towards the EU in the UK. It benefits nobody and is totally insane, it's just making people hate the EU. Same with not being able to use the digital passport machines at airports.. why?? We're a pretty secure country, we have digital passports. Brexit happens and now every time I go to Europe, which is a lot I've got a 50/50 chance of waiting 3 hours at the border for someone to stamp my passport while the digital gates have no queue. That means I now have to arrive 3 hours early every time just in case. If I bring a tool for work I need to spend weeks of paperwork on something called a carnet so I end up buying there and throwing out.

At the moment we're trying to give security backing for Ukraine and you're asking us to give up our fishing rights for the honour of helping secure Europe.

I get it, actions have consequences, but the thing is that only a minority voted for Brexit, most of us didn't. Each year you're disenfranchising a new generation of would be Europeans with this path. To me it's all dreadfully regrettable, the whole things a mess.

It's impossible for us to 'come to our senses' while we get treated like this in my view.

In the US, parenting time is up 20-fold, from a few hours per week to 24/7 adulting.

Companion to that is that free-range land has shrunk from many sq/mi to a few sq/yds. Car culture and trespassing culture has eliminated the irreplaceable environments where adult-free, peer time nurtured mental health and abilities.

As near as I can tell, parenting and childhood is irreparably broken in the US.

We certainly seem incapable of recalling what sustainable parenting once looked like.

On rare occasion someone will recall that kids once roamed all over. Maybe that gets connected to less mental health issues. Either way it's all forgotten moments later.

yes, while fishing vessels fairly rarely broadcast AIS, there's plenty of turkish, bulgarian, and even three russian fishing vessels broadcasting AIS in the black sea right now. No ukrainian vessels that I can see, but again, AIS is fairly rare for fishing boats anyway.

For example, what about the people who work in Warhammer adjacent companies (plastics production, importing and labelling to name just a few, but also freelancers in publishing, illustration and design ) who would not appear in the 3000 Warhammer employees, but who earn the majority of their livelihood from Warhammer.

For a period my brother dated someone from the family that supplied grey plastic to Games Workshop - they probably had over 100 permanent employees, and were a 'small' regional company.

"AI Overview

It's difficult to provide a precise number of Asian countries where farmers don't earn a living wage without specific, up-to-date data and a clear definition of "living wage." However, many Asian countries face challenges in ensuring farmers receive sufficient income to cover basic needs."

I will assure you, from being an eyewitness, its worse.

For what it's worth I'm not sure if the number is actually 10%, but I'd hazard that it's more than 5/6.

US, Canada, Europe are demographically cooked too, but they (partially) solve this problem with immigration, that is not an option for China and the rest of Asia.

And if you could guarantee that they'll never catch up in the others, we'd all feel a bit better about the permanency of American superiority.

Absent that guarantee, we need to bench test those scenarios and be prepared with plans that best serve American interests should those scenarios come to fruition.

The elite/ruling class need to be replaced with the more capable and smarter ones

US citizens often fail to realise that earnings of an industry are almost irrelevant, it is how much said industry distributes into society that matters, both for people and the state.

Classical industries like mining and steel distribute a significant percentage of their revenue.

Digital businesses does not, neither does warhammer.

The interesting point is, that in the end the value of the money digital good as as well as plastic toys are measured in is based on physically realised wealth: Without physical businesses, the money warhammer is evaluated on would be ethereal.

We should be doing that right now.

Today kids live entirely in adult curated, adult populated boxes. I'm not inclined to blame ipads for that.

https://www.history.com/articles/industrial-revolution-spies...

Unless they manage to get to the US they return, because they would not be safe from harassment anywhere else.

and on balance it changes demographics dramatically, that also shapes US policy in the future. It will be harder for USA to continue to be bloody warmongering machine with Military industrial complex dictating the policy and bombing countries and blowing up civilians around the world.

The likely answer lies in the fact that this would mean China & America are both high-income countries. There are likely to be other countries looking to be "the next China" to ascend the income ladder. As is now, rich countries will outsource work to those poorer countries.

This doesn't have to be zero sum.

The moment oil producing gulf states decide to stop buying USD bonds, they will receive "democracy".

The whole intent to fight Iran is not only to protect Israel, but also to choke off China's major oil supplier. If Iran folds into US control, it will be easier to choke China in terms of energy supplies

They've had 30 years to make it work, and have failed.

Also, even after the marshall plan, Germany kept its existing advantages in industry in large part simply by actually encouraging them to exist. The UK has no industrial policy and actively shed most industries in the 1980s, relying instead on direct investment and deliberately not growing domestic companies.

And then today all the tarrifs are suspended (down to 10%) so it's hardly like there's a reliable advantage there.

iirc Trump did say he wanted EU to accept our livestock to reduce the trade deficit, leading Lutnick to memorably proclaim "They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak!"

You are not trying to secure Europe, you are trying to sell something to Europe. We would rather build capacity to make whatever you want to sell us ourselfs.

I agree we should work closely together, more so after US started dancing naked around burning brides. But everyone is looking into how to secure themselfs, without depending on 3rd party, and from EU's perspective UK is on the outside (even if not as crazy as US has become).

With respect to "career success" you can have 50 million people in your country with IQs >140 and there's still a limited market to sell to. There are diminishing returns on capacity - you can have business analysts or call center folks with the IQ of Einstein and they'll be limited by the systems they are placed in.

The other side of this is that just because you are smart doesn't mean you are capable of doing well in the real world. Recall how there are a lot of "dumb rich people" and "smart poor people".

The stuff they’re putting out these days is really quite good.

I remember Poland stopped us from getting it (supposedly).

The french didn't want us to exempt from financial regulation that was primarily targeted at the euro even though we use the pound.

Various nonsense, that people at the time felt strongly about (keeping the pound, not giving benefits and a council house to people as soon as they arrived, or some such exaggeration)

And the more of that that happens, the better for the economy overall. The less of that that happens - implying more of it ends up in JKR's proverbial dragon hoard, not doing much good beyond being an impressive pile of wealth for the dragon to sleep on top of - the less good for the economy overall.

The offer from the EU for a youth exchange program was rejected by the UK.

The fish thing looks like anti-EU nonsense. The anonymous source "hinted", whereas the people speaking on the record denied it.

Starmer ruled out joining the customs union, so blame him for the tool import paperwork.

> but the thing is that only a minority voted for Brexit,

So with such a failure of democracy, it's no wonder that the EU would require changes to the voting system (for example) before Britain can rejoin.

The EU doesn't want a half-in half-out Britain. It had that for decades.

it almost seems like we're trying to clear immigrants out of the chicken plants to make room for laid-off graphic designers.

It’s literally the policy of this country to sentence white men to harsher custodial sentences with more chance of a custodial sentence than any other group, simply for the crime of being a white man. Are these the sorts of people you think should decide our rights?

If the government would do what people have been voting for for decades and end mass immigration and take real action on this ridiculous and purposeful misuse of the human rights act, then nobody would want to redact it.

But they won’t.

My impression is that Chinese culture has very little appeal elsewhere (at least in the West). They can't seem to be able to (or care to) package it in an appealing way. Sure, they're being catered to in films and video games but I see very little organic interest in Chinese culture, especially compared to Japanese or Korean culture.

Is it even possible in terms of resources? there are limits to growth and it may not be feasible for 1.5 billions people to consume and pollute as much as an average American.

Also are the US willing to lose their supremacy peacefully?

Re the fish;

>But in an interview with POLITICO, the minister said EU member governments were unlikely to sign off on a security deal with the U.K. unless negotiations are also resolved on other “sensitive” issues, including access to British waters for European fishing fleets. A deal on fish would also help in “building trust” between London and Brussels, she added.(1)

It's just a combination of low turn out and a 52/48 marginal split, it does not mean we have a failure of democracy, that's a bit of a stretch.

(1) https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-eu-defense-pact-really-do...

My comment on another thread about how China is now a developed country was downvoted by some HNer who swallowed some Guardian anecdote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43627315

Exponential growth is a hard concept to internalize.

I can't say what's more difficult to manufacture - millions of identical bricks that snap together, or a huge range of different, detailed designs which fit snugly together but don't lock.

Just the first thing on the home page: https://www.warhammer.com/en-GB/shop/Deathlords-Mortarchs-Ma...

I wonder how deeply connected all this politics of nostalgia is to the fact that birth rates have been declining for decades and populations are older.

Given the older population and the country’s history as a bygone empire I bet nostalgia is thicker in England than the US, but US side there sure is a lot of it.

A lot of MAGA is about making the country the way it was when boomers were kids (50s, 60s) to prime age adults (80s to early 90s).

There’s even a hint of genX nostalgia too. A while back I was hearing some IDW type railing about how “woke” killed comedy and it hit me that there’s a strong undercurrent of nostalgia for the 90s when comedy and pop culture were all about being an edgelord. The fact that edgelording is "out" is blamed on "woke" and they lament that "comedy is dead" etc. I'm not sure how much "woke" has to do with it. I think... well... edgelording is just out.

Change reminds people of their mortality and it always generates a backlash. You’re not young anymore.

So then you won't be wanting our troops there for peace-keeping, something only ourselves and France have even offered. Nor any of our finance, we can stop giving billions a year to Ukraine as the EU want to take over?

Seriously it's ridiculously isolationist to be thinking like this. Not working with us just because we left your club is beyond mad.

It's not something that will be forgotten easily. British people on all sides were against reducing food standards.

1. DJI, CATL, BYD, ByteDance, HighFlyer/DeepSeek

It's never been about protecting Americans...

When rich people get large amounts of money they don’t hoard it like they did in Roman times.

That money either goes into the stock market or to a bank. If it’s in the stock market that money is being used in investments that further economic growth. The portion of the leftover money that’s in the bank is then lent out by the bank to others in the forms of loans and so on for purchasing houses, starting business and so on.

The idea that the pile of wealth is simply hoarded to be slept on is out of date and not representative of modern economics.

Also, as for JK Rowling specifically, she had donated a significant amount of her wealth to charity.

Clearly you are not aware of the extraordinary range of Lego pieces.

Perhaps you should have considered that like in Art, the first step to proficiency in anything really is mimicry.

Do you honestly think private enterprise could raise the financial and political capital to build a new regional rail line through a major city like London or Manchester?

I suspect this will simply make labor more expensive on top end of the talent curve

In so much as generalizing a nation can still leave large exceptions, wars of conquest are useless to America: it hates running occupations, and it's own citizens are not going to move abroad in sufficient numbers to provide a labor force to utilize the conquests.

The point of OP and what people don't get is that it's far easier to shift policies to brace for tough situations when you have a uniparty system and you're willing to make sacrifices. No 4 year administration is in any way incentivised to enact policies that only become effective after the next election. Note that I'm not saying that undemocratic systems are the solution.

The US pre-WW1 was an isolationist nation with few I'd any exports, not the global manufacturing powerhouse it became afterwards.

Things change and always change.

Uh...excluding the very recent cuts this year under Trump; the number of civilians in the US Federal work force has gone up fairly steadily. [0]

We had 23.592 million civilian employees in Jan 2025. 21.779M in Jan 2021, after being largely stagnant overall the previous 10 years. That's a net change in excess of 1.8M employees under Biden.

I do find it interesting that it appears that employee count was flat, or even down under Obama, but until COVID, there was a steady increase under Trump v1.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USGOVT

Yeah, Americans are going to go back to working in factories. But not for low wages, because errr ummm actually it’ll be robots doing the work! So where will Americans be working? Errr ummm well… in the factories! (??)

This decade: "We're not the ones trying to steal your fishing jobs!"

Next decade: "It's not our fault there aren't fish!"

There does seem to be some sort of cycle in play: first a slave-driver-type economy creates a whole lot of wealth, then people get human rights, then they stop being driven like slaves and coast off the accumulated power, but forget the basic principles of wealth creation in the process (see also "good times create weak men" etc) and just spend all their resources arguing about who gets the wealth that is there instead of creating more. And I'm not saying that in an individualist framework - the reason individuals can't do it is a problem with the whole society, not with those individuals.

As you state they haven't been "only" copying for a while and my problem with people keep repeating this "logic" (mea culpa) is precisely what's at stake right now: designing and "creating" is critical, but I'd argue that civilization is not made my design or one-off (or limited) editions. Civilization is the ability to innovate in mass production, in doing so, consistently in lower and lower costs. China excels (and will continue to excel) while they continue to appreciate this. The "service sector" world stopped caring about this.

Just from a quick search, within a year Games Workshop offer about 3000 different model kits, each of which will contain ~1-4 unique moulded sprues. There seem to be at least 50 new kits each year, possibly 100, otherwise what's available rotates around the older kits.

Lego have produced about 15,000 different sets since 1950, and a huge number of the parts are shared between sets. (That's the whole point of the toy, no?)

https://tradingeconomics.com/china/employment-in-agriculture...

You could just as easily massage statistics to call the US a nation of gig workers or something, but neither is productive or informative.

Also, the structural inequalities of Chinese society dwarf the West, meaning that the Chinese middle class gets a lot more bang for their buck: ridiculously cheap delivery services, taxis, and other services.

It seems to be the new image of America as some kind of wounded animal who is acting aggressively to protect itself from China. It might not be the case but perception is important and in my opinion it’s changing fast and in the wrong direction.

It’s almost like Americans are now begging for low tier jobs or something.

China didn’t invent the iPhone or chat gpt. But they excel at optimizing.

Can you explain this a little more? Why does having a trade deficit make your currency more valuable? My naive assumption is it would put more dollars in other countries, so they don't need them as much, making dollars less valuable.

It's changing though. Wu Kong Black myth and even the top grossing film of last year was chinese animation. See the comments under the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsiAYjyiIBM. The film was apparently incredible.

The core culture of China is actually foundational to much of Asia. The stuff you see coming out of Japan and Korea is surface level aesthetics built on top of this foundation. You're probably thinking Nintendo, KPop and anime.

Once China makes the aesthetics just as good as other parts of Asia I can see China becoming a cultural power house. Even the mythology surrounding China historically in terms of say one thing like Wuxia is better than anything out of Korea, Japan or the west in my opinion.

Really in the end people are more attracted to the aesthetic presentation of everything. Japan does this really well while China has always been unskilled, crude and rough on the edges. But this is changing at a nearly breakneck pace.

In broad terms, this is related to the error the USA made. Manufacturing in China was a very profitable deal for the USA. A lot of companies view labour first and foremost as expense, wealth as as the goal, and power in wealth— so it's not surprising as a whole the industry opted to "contract out" labour across the globe.

A lot of power lays in labour though. Money doesn't produce, invent, move, feed, etc— money is only good if someone will take it at the amounts you have it to do that specific labour you need for you.

I see it as one side of a coin. The yin to a yang.

China is moving up the value chain also, they are being forced to by their demographics, and they are investing heavily in the change ATM (just like they started investing heavily in green energy 10 years ago) so I don't think they will make the same mistake as the Americans are making right now.

The manufacturing isn't easy, sure, but it's more or less a solved problem and not at all reflected in the cost.

So when GP says priced like Lego, they just mean that - priced based on something completely different from the cost of materials, manufacturing, etc.

Am I missing something about modern economics?

> the US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now

The US and UK are totally different animals at the height of their "empire". The UK currently has little land and alot of it is devoid of minerals(sans coal). They achieved most of their might subjecting other countries and extracting resources from their colonies. Once the colonies and the rest of the world objected the British empire began to crumble as the colonies broke off from the UK.

Contrast that with the US which if it were to jettison its "colonies" (Puerto Rico, Samoa etc) you would see very little drop in GDP. The US has vast swaths of land which is excellent for farming, energy extraction and contains valuable minerals. It has widespread and diverse populations with wildly different ecologies and climates. In addition to a huge amount of resources it has a kings ransom of some of the best universities in the world(stanford, harvard, MIT, etc) and a highly educated society with living standards just below some small asian and european countries. The US also has a peerless military (we need hypersonic weapons however) and many aircraft carriers and nukes as well as world renown special forces groups. And lastly of the top largest 100 companies in the world, 65% are US based and this despite the US only having 4.2% of the worlds population, looking at GDP per country is almost comical as the US has 30T compared to the next largest economy China(19.5T), 3rd place is Germany at 4.9T.

Brexit worked out fairly badly for rich folks. I'm not sure how well it worked for the folks who were voting for it, but it's possible "take the rich folks down a few notches" even if it lowers the median income, if you yourself don't earn the median income, is still seen as worth it.

Also in places where Chinese electric cars are not being blocked they are really taking off. In 20 years for billions of people the most common car will be a Chinese one.

China is able to build nuclear reactors while the US is floundering.

The Chinese may well be the first to produce electricity from fusion.

People come back from Shenzhen now to the US and say that the US now feels less advanced.

The US certainly leads in some areas. But not longer all areas and things are moving toward China.

I look at my tiny townhouse that my Dad could built in 6 weekends with his buddies and zillow needing seven digits to display the price and very well thinking “what a fucking real estate bubble we live in currently.”

They have their own straight-C-plus high schoolers they can train in finance.

I'm a US American living in Asia. I can't tell you with 100% certainty that in terms of technological progress, China is far far ahead of the US.

The nominal gdp is my father's time was lower and yet he could buy a house and support a family of four on a single salary as an immigrant in his early 20s.

Four times bigger absolutely will not happen; China's demographic disaster is already baked into the cake. Forecasts suggest China's total population will be around 1.5x the USA by 2100, but the average age / working age population will be in the USA's favour.

Of course. That way they can sell you the official paints.

Fortunately, it seems they’ve dropped that you’re required to use the official paints if you want to enter a sanctioned tournament.

> …China equal to America on a per capital basis

Hmm, what number do you mean will be equal? Income per capita? If the Chinese system paid Americans the same as the American system does, why would Nike operate its sweatshops there? Kind of tautological, no?