context

yes, the u.s. national wage index was about $6k in 1970 and about $70k in 2024, which is the last year the social security administration has reported the wage index

sure, many companies offer stock to international investors and there are several funds focused on the chinese equity market. even blackrock has one. what they'll be worth after xi presses the communism button is anyone's guess, though.

I'm not gonna click the link, so what does this guy say?

1. land is state-owned so they don't have to pay market value for land acquisition, which averages $12 million per mile in the u.s. compared to $400k in china

2. environmental reviews and regulatory compliance averages $9 million per mile vs. $180k in china

3. parasitic capitalism, which he calls "supply chain", which averages a 22% markup on constructions costs for u.s. projects for another $8.3 million difference

A standard US highway project contracts separately for geotechnical survey, design, earthworks, drainage, concrete supply, asphalt production, paving, signage, electrical, and landscaping. Each contractor carries its own overhead, profit margin, bonding requirements, and mobilization costs.

4. he says chinese highways are designed for 20 year service life while u.s. highways are designed for 40 year service life, so there's another $6 to $9 million per mile lower up front cost from lower material requirements. it was designed this way with the high speed rail project in mind, knowing that freight transport would be shifted primarily to rail when the highways were reaching the end of their service lives.

so mostly central planning and not having to deal with private property rights

the will to change by bell hooks and trans liberation: beyond pink and blue by les feinberg are practically required reading for hexbears

links to old book club announcement threads for those two:

https://hexbear.net/post/3940446

https://hexbear.net/post/200536

because they don't buy it. it's mostly tribute from oil companies from their offshore leases. royalties for the leases have been paid directly in oil since 1998.

many americans will experience the collapse simply as "one day the mcdonald's ran out of hamburgers and they never got restocked"

the sheriffs are a few gangs at least

there should be a separate comm for sinbadposting

you can have it all

my empire of dort

i will vote you up

i will make you sort (by new)

well, normally it takes a good 6 to 8 weeks for the processing to go through at quantico and dispatch some agents

this bit is where the article really takes a turn into pure liberalism:

The assumption is that if you send people checks, they’ll find meaning in hobbies and community. They’ll paint. They’ll garden. They’ll finally write that novel. This is ahistorical bullshit. We don’t have to speculate about what happens when economic function disappears from communities. Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s research on “deaths of despair” tracks the rising tide of suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease mortality concentrated in less-educated, formerly manufacturing-dependent populations. The mechanism isn’t just poverty. We lose any sense of economic purpose, and with that, social status and a perceived future. Communities organized around industries that left, where what replaced the jobs was opioids, domestic violence, and a life expectancy that dropped year over year in the richest country on earth.

yeah, the mechanism wasn't "just" poverty, but it was mostly the crushing poverty. implying the opioid epidemic is the result of people simply being too bored or something is quite the take.

basic income won't work because it doesn't change the class interests involved, and so the rent-seeking class will always use their power to cut amenities, reduce basic income payments, and extract as much of the payments back into their own coffers as possible.

such a bizarre sleight-of-hand. case and deaton weren't looking at the results of basic income programs, they were looking at the results of long-term unemployment in a capitalist system.

The psychological consequences of permanent economic precarity corrode social coherence regardless of whether the rent is paid.

the fuck does this even mean? if the rent is getting paid reliably, that's not economic precarity. the "precariat" are experiencing economic precariousness precisely because they're having trouble reliably paying the rent! why do they have to pay rent!?

strangely, my "drugs" shirt doesn't raise as many questions, even though i feel like it doesn't directly answer any of them