• Bloobish [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    10 days ago

    Oh really? A country that has barely maintained let alone expanded it’s grid and telecommunications outside of small select patches of techno city states like Seattle, SF, and NYC is severely behind a country that spends wide swaths of its GDP improving it’s infrastructure???

    I won’t be shocked when the US collapses into the 22nd century’s own version of the fucking mad max land people think the Congo is, but this time it will be fully deserved for it’s self inflicted century of shame and all the while the world will be better off for it.

    • Jorge@lemmygrad.ml
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      4 days ago

      Hi. Sorry for a possibly stupid question, but why do you write 22nd Century? That is 75 years away, and I think the US regime will not last nearly that long.

      • Bloobish [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        3 days ago

        I’m more or less saying that by that time the US will likely have collapsed and balkanized into feuding militarized states of warlordism, if I’m optimistic maybe the West and some Eastern Coasts will be “stable” but likely only by aligning themselves with international powers such as China.

    • Gucci_Minh [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      10 days ago

      There was this tweet that was sarcastically asking why Mississippi has a higher GDP per capita than Chongqing and the Americope was insane, saying that shuffling money around was more productive than actually making things, no hint of irony or self awareness whatsoever.

      • Beaver [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        10 days ago

        It was especially funny seeing all the “lots of colorful lights doesn’t mean prosperity” responses. Which is kinda true… until power becomes so expensive and unreliable in Mississippi that the concept of wasting it on lighting up buildings at night becomes unimaginably ostentatious.

        • Gucci_Minh [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          9 days ago

          Yeah the coloured lights are because Chinese urban planners really like gaudy flashy stuff, and Chinese PR is run by people who have no idea how to do effective propaganda so they just keep posting the colourful buildings. Beneath all that flashiness is a shitload of real infrastructure that they really should be advertising instead. You’d reach much more people talking about how you can just call 12345 and get a pothole filled in a day than going wow look at our LEDs that westerners will dismiss as a potemkin village anyways.

          • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
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            9 days ago

            Honestly i think it’s a good sign that the Chinese are so bad at doing propaganda directed at the West. In order to effectively convince Westerners you have to understand how we think, and that in itself requires that you become at least partly infected by our cultural mind virus. So it’s good that the Chinese are so far removed from our toxic ways of thinking that they can’t even put themselves in the shoes of Western audiences. The more alien our cynical, misanthropic, sociopathic, hyper-individualist culture is to the Chinese people, the better for China.

            • Gucci_Minh [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              9 days ago

              True, but they’re also really bad at doing propaganda for internal consumption too so I don’t know if that’s the cause specifically. It is a good point you bring up though because despite the

              cynical, misanthropic, sociopathic, hyper-individualist culture

              It seems like whenever people trainpost about Chinese high speed rail it gets really good reception on Western social media aside from the obligatory reddit-logo copypastas. Maybe I’m just more hopeful for Westerners than they are for themselves but it does look like there are pockets of good people out there, just very disenfranchised and alienated.

              • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
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                9 days ago

                It seems like whenever people trainpost about Chinese high speed rail it gets really good reception on Western social media

                But how much of that is because high speed rail is seen as just another “treat”?

                • Gucci_Minh [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  9 days ago

                  Fuck it lol I’ll take it, if public transit gets widespread support because people can frame it as treats, it is better than not having public transit and the current paradigm of “I’d rather sit in traffic for 4 hours a day than sit next to the poors”.

      • Bloobish [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        10 days ago

        That feels like a viable outcome, and then the AI bubble bursts leading to a bunch of rotting warehouses and further unemployed tech bros causing a recession that outpaces 2008’s in devastation and there’ll be no way to escape that one (at least for those unable to rent a personal jet and emigrate to Europe/Asia)