Comment by ganeshkrishnan
12 days ago
US is spiralling down and I feel like I am in a Truman Show with egregious presidential behaviours, dragging the world into wars which it doesn't need, banning chips, even sanctioning open source (RISC) software.
And this is further making the rest of the world enraged, china more so. Today they released Open source Deep Seek which beats GPT 4o in coding problems.
The train has left the station and the US is stuck. On the wrong platform. With no ticket.
Haha sure.
Let me guess, the train is to a third tier Chinese city no one is interesting in going to, on tracks that the local government can't afford to pay the construction financing on, let alone future maintenance.
I'm sure you're right that third tier Chinese cities are awful.
But major Chinese cities are very far ahead of America in terms of infrastructure. Similarly DJI is very far ahead of any of its competitors.
Banning Chinese things because of politics is one thing. But pretending it's because they're inferior is just ridiculous.
Ah yes, the city built yesterday is nicer than the city built 100 years ago. And the point is?
China funded all that pretty infrastructure on massive local debt that the fees are not covering. Will be interesting to see how that works out long term.
Edit: I love China. I love the chinese people. I loved Shanghai of the 2010s. I've worked with a ton of amazing chinese developers in the Bay Area that were stranded after tiananmen, and I'm sad for their tragedy but they were definitely a boon to the USA. I don't think Americans are superior to Chinese in any way. I also don't think a new building/infrastructure being nicer than old buildings/infrastructure proves anything anyone who upgraded to a new car from an old one doesn't already know.
Which is an ironic comment to make, considering the difference in high-speed rail development in China vs in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_the_United_... (TL;DR: China's high speed rail network is the longest and most used in the world, as well as cheaper than the US's)
Why build all that infrastructure when the same use case is already being met with airplanes? The USA serves it's tier 3 cities much more efficiently with a few plane routes than building an entire high speed rail would.
Again, China's high speed rail utilization is not even able to pay for it's initial build out, and is very under utilized as it goes to tier 3 locations that don't justify it. Will be interesting to see how it plays out once 'maintenance debt' (technical debt but for infrastructure) gets added to the 'build out debt'. If those tier 3 cities turn tier 1 it will look like genius investment, but I don't see it happening.