You aren’t wrong, but having worked in China as well as the states (and a short stint in Switzerland), I think east Asia (china, Japan, Korea) has that even worse, probably due to Confucius. As China is looking more and more like the future, I fear that this gets worse before it gets better.

90 million people, and fairly well educated and industrious at that. Iran is not some tribesmen at low development in Afghanistan, they would actually be a solidly developing country on par with China if they weren’t heavily sanctioned and held back by the clerics and revolutionary guard.

The leader of the KMT going to Beijing shouldn’t be read in too much. They haven’t been in power for a long time and their whole support for “one china” is why they remain politically unpopular in Taiwan.

I don’t think most Americans lied the previous strikes so much as they were neutral to them. Weapons of mass destruction arguments themselves fall off as meh to most people these days, especially those who remember Bush 2’s run. “Oh north Korea might have nukes? Ok…Iran also you say, so what?”

We not committed at all to an expensive war every few years with Iran. Rather, we should do what China is doing and unwind our dependence on middle eastern oil (or a low world price for while pumped domestically) and just move on to new and better transportation tech.

We will go from 8 billion humans to maybe 1 or 2 billion humans, but that is probably going to happen either way. Poor countries will be obliterated, rich countries are likely to see tanking living standards. Long term humans go extinct (or are superseded by some sort of singularity successor) and the earth recovers in a few thousand years as if we never existed.

The best land for solar farms tends to be in the desert where there isn’t enough water for industrial use.

But we already have land set aside for industrial use, why not make use of it? Desert isn't free land either. There is a whole ecology there.

Desert ecologies are often boosted by solar (turns out animals spend lots of time in the shade so they aren’t roasted, and solar panels are shade). Industrial areas, at least where I live, tend to be pretty dynamic with respect to structures, I guess you could do it, but you would have to redo it a lot.

Manatees like when you leave a freshwater hose leaking into the saltwater. Ecologist tell you it is bad though because the animal develops a dependency towards human intervention that might not be a long term phenomenon.

Where I live the industrial areas are pretty much two elevations across the entire lot. You get the warehouse where it is a massive building with a flat roof of a single height. And you get where the trucks pull in and back into the warehouse, also a bunch of flat cement with fixed height requirements one could trivially deck with solar.

And when I looked at industrial areas in denmark, or at least in the vicinity of copenhagen, I saw pretty much exclusively that outside actual oil refineries. Just a ton of warehouses, flat roofs, truck yards. Again already with some solar, just only implemented to the extent to supplement a buildings utility bills, using only a small fraction of that massive flat roof, not to produce an excess of energy. I dare say most industrial property the world over looks more or less like that: rectangular building, flat roof, truck yard.

Ya, it was just one winter where people actually died, it was recent though.

I’ve seen two interns through to FTE jobs at a FAANG, both were at least second generation immigrants (so citizens I guess, though I never asked). So kids are still getting jobs, they come from reasonable universities, I haven’t seen UW resumes yet (my Alma mater), for some reasons those kids are all scooped up before I can take a look (I work at an office in Seattle so I find it weird that we can hire from the local university).

the weird thing is seeing american kids from a top 20 american school (duke, carnegie melon, etc) mixed with a much larger majority of h1bs from absolute no name schools. its almost like the bar for americans is higher

I guess it’s different since I mostly deal with interns. But I haven’t noticed a lot of H1s being hire at my FAANG, at least ones that are obviously F1?

We aren’t an AI tech group or anything like that. I was on a Z (working) visa in China for 9 years though.

I knew an H1 in another group from an obviously second rate school in China and a masters from a no name in America. He was pretty successful in his career so I guess school brand doesn’t mean that much. Likewise when I was in China some of the PhDs from second rate Chinese universities also did very well.

Americans are more expensive. More pressure to justify yourself these days.

no they get paid the same

100% is

Isn’t this more a function of how the American construction market is just really messed up somehow (corruption?)? In China, actual things get built fairly cheaply and quickly. You just don’t see workers hanging around watching one guy dig a hole like you do in the states. I would guess that automation is the only way out of the mess we are in, since just throwing more money and people at the problem just seems to make it worse.

What’s different about the market in China that enables this?

The usual answer is slave labor, like in the middle east. But some combination of an extremely poor job market with laborers that can't leave, and can't do anything else.

Could you expand on the corruption claim?

Trades seem to have high barriers to entry and have stringent unproductive working rules. I’m not really sure, but does to make sense that construction prices have risen so much so fast without even considering the cost of materials? The public sector is much worse, of course, where a short jaunt tram at LAX costs more than a 75 mile HSR run in China. We obviously aren’t competitive in building things anymore.

Somewhat related, but I know construction is the one of the only industries that has gotten less productive in the past 100 years. You'd think more machinery and such would make it more productive, but no.

I think part of that is safety and labor cost, but I think another part is that construction is contracted almost always.

This assumes the American system survives intact until then, which is likely, but no longer feels guaranteed. Let’s see how the midterms go, if Trump is able to get away with throwing out results in states that don’t like him, we are in serious trouble.