PRESIDENT TRUMP: "You don’t think we can. You don’t think we do that to them? We do. So we do a lot of things." https://singjupost.com/transcript-maria-bartiromo-interviews...

China spends the normalized equivalent of America’s defense spending on suppressing their own citizens.

From a western standpoint, this is amazingly helpful because it’s a form of Chinese self destruction and waste.

>> ... spends the normalized equivalent of America’s defense spending...

I'd be interested in seeing the numbers for that claim broken down if you can cite them. From napkin math it seems hard to make the budgets line up, unless we're doing a very large purchasing power parity adjustment?

There exists such numbers/information circulated mainly inside Chinese (language) media/social media in form of "screenshot" but no links. Screenshot as a way of hiding source is a common format for this type of information because the links will disclose the media that spread the information. Then normal (Chinese) audience will know the credibility of the information. Give you an example, "epoch times" is a common source of such type of information. The nature of the media is well-known to Chinese audience.

The real equivalence to US defense budget in term of size is actually the infrastructure construction budget. While both budgets boost the economy , infrastructure budget improves the life of local people. Now as the most cities in coast areas run out of project to build, the over capacity cultivated in early years is poured to other directions: rural areas, undeveloped provinces, and even overseas especially Africa and Latin America. It's amazing that China changes very fast year by year as I visited some rural areas.

Ionically this behavior of infrastructure building sounds like Chinese MAGA to me: mind our own business, focus on improve ourselves instead of spread values to other countries.

Why would the Chinese self destructing be “amazingly helpful “ to the West? This sounds like spiteful vitriol.

I think vs spending it on defense spending which would further make us mil parity difficult.

The current government of China becoming more friendly to the rest of the world would help the West (and the rest of the world).

This is not jingoism. The PRC has not been around very long and it's already conquered a neighbor, fought multiple wars for land, and continues to build up its military to subjugate Taiwan.

Being replaced with a liberal democracy would DEFINITELY be an improvement, even if these tariffs won't do it.

Jesus. What a steady consumption of American neocon propaganda can do to a human brain! It's so sad!

Do you even know what that word means? Do you think that Taiwan is gonna be just fine if the US packs up and leaves tomorrow? That things will work out great for the people living there?

You can call it whatever you want. People who have fled shitty regimes have a much better sense for propaganda than you do, evidently.

> Do you think that Taiwan is gonna be just fine if the US packs up and leaves tomorrow?

I do. The World will be just fine as the American empire fades and the US becomes just another country. Even for the American people, for the average persons, it will be an improvement.

Wow, that's a level of faith that even the people of Taiwan probably don't have in their neighbor :)

I'm struggling to see which is worse, using AI to police their own people, or using AI to genocide in Middle East.

> China spends the normalized equivalent of America’s defense spending on suppressing their own citizens.

I don't believe you.

> From a western standpoint, this is amazingly helpful because it’s a form of Chinese self destruction and waste.

As a Westerner, as a human, I reject this zero-sum mentality.

This is a mistaken belief. Sure you get all those negative aspects to being degrees, just like you get them under all other conditions … Chinese, Russian, Israeli espionage over the last ~80 years, anyone?… but you cannot actually get diversity without isolation that permits actual diversity to emerge.

Diversity is not pouring oil into water and using the polluted oil-water in lieu of oil and also in lieu of oil. If you want actual diversity you need differences that are separated from each other. It is precisely what has been collapsing for the last 80+ years, actual real diversity, precisely because unique separate groups and clusters have been shattered, scattered, mixed, and polluted.

Even AI is now accelerating this collapse of what is really a form of human biodiversity, or should it be called cultural diversity, as AI is causing a conformity of thought. There are several reports and papers on that phenomenon already.

It’s absolutely ridiculous to claim that somehow those factors will increase over the prior situation simply because we increase actual, real diversity of unique things; not this fake, fraudulent, delusional diversity that has forced on us like a toxic sludge dump that has destroyed human diversity as everyone increasingly consumes the same “content” slop and eats the same food slop, and has the same cultural and musical slop.

Nit-pick: smuggling is when you import goods into a country without informing the relevant government bodies. When it comes to GPUs, it's one country that has declared an export ban. Chinese port authorities wont care if you declare you're importing a container with 16000 Nvidia GPUs as that's still legal.