If he comes out and says "Hey suckers, we're a platform centered around gathering every bit of information we can about you and bundling it up for the highest bidder." some people might actually start to wise up to the fact that Zuckerberg sees every single one of us a source of income and nothing more.
First off, nearly every company sees every single one of its customers as a source of income. Acknowledging they need to make money is not the same thing as caring about nothing but revenue. A company like Facebook, where keeping customers engaged is the only way to keep them using the product, would not do well if it catered only to the clients providing actual revenue.
Facebook is a platform centered on providing content to users so they use the product. If they are successful with this central strategy, the secondary strategy of maximizing advertising dollars can be successful. Both are obviously very important to the company's success, but don't confuse which one is more important.
Why are you so stupid to talk about Donald Trump when the problem is the system he works for? How are you better than the people you talk down to when you are both transfixed by the bouncing red ball, even if for different reasons?
It is easy to complain about not having good enough choices, but for important decisions you need to learn to find differentiation even if you feel two sides are nearly identical. You may believe both parties are part of one big corrupt system, but you are blind if you don't see real differences in peoples' lives based on who is in office.
Have you done anything in your life to fix any of the problems you claim exist?
Yes, I have donated money to political campaigns and have been vocal in social media (including when using my real name) about my position in an effort to inform and persuade others. Although evidence for an upper middle class non-business owner like myself would be far different than for a wealthy business owner; for instance a donation from a wealthy man would be indistinguishable from lobbying while my thousand dollar donation would not.
How many execs are motivated by philanthropy instead of profit?
The average ultra high net worth philanthropist donates just over 10% of their net worth over their lifetime. According to Trump's figures that would mean if he was just average, not exceptional, he would be on track to donating $1 billion dollars over his lifetime. And while we don't know how much he has donated over his life, according to research done by the Washington Post he has donated $5.5 million to his own "charity" and $2.3 million elsewhere since the 80's.
Even if Trump doubles his charity over the next perhaps 20 years of his life, he would have donated less than 2% as much as the average ultra-high worth individual. If you rule out his own fraudulent charity, the figure drops far under 1%. It is quite clear Trump has never cared about anyone but himself, including his own kids before they came of age, so it's unclear how anyone could believe otherwise.
School vouchers used to promote competition improved education for Sweden.
It is a bit of a stretch to consider Sweden's voucher program a success. Your link is paywalled so I don't know anything about it's findings but another decade of data (your report is from 2005) has been less than kind to Sweden's voucher program.
That illustrates one big problem with some of these privatization efforts. For any new program it is often easy to show immediate benefits by focusing on low hanging fruit, so it usually takes decades to understand the real impact of these changes. Luckily we now have examples in Sweden and South Korea to show the dangers of mixing a profit motive with education.
Taking advantage of dumb policies is not the same as believing they are good ideas. I personally take advantage of plenty of tax deductions and government incentives that I believe are idiotic in terms of public policy.
Do a google search trying to find Trump complaining about offshoring before 2014, and if you can find anything you are better at research than me (or at least better than what I can do in 5 minutes). And Trump cannot claim he simply kept those criticisms private or among close friends, because he has very publicly complained about government action and inaction since the 80's.
Thinking that Trump cares about offshoring for any reason other than it got him more votes than supporting it is just naive.
Do you think Trump actually realized he was supposed to give up all his business interests when he became president?
He probably didn't know what the emoluments clause was until just recently. And now he is banking on a republican congress not challenging him on it. In 2009 the republicans pushed the justice department to review Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize without congressional approval, so they are certainly willing to push the issue when it suits them. Trump will absolutely break the emoluments clause repeatedly, likely multiple times per day in office, if he has any financial connection to his company. But no one has ever been prosecuted based on this clause; mostly because past presidents have went out of their way not to break it.
The congress will likely have plenty of ammunition to begin impeachment proceedings even before Trump's first 100 days; it will be up to them whether they want to exercise those powers. They almost certainly would rather have Pence as president, but also wouldn't want to piss of Trump's voters by beginning the process too soon. It will be an interesting four years.
So, Joe reduces his water usage to save costs, or digs his own well, purifies the water, and sells "Standard Water" to his neighbours
Joe used to have a well out back, but so does everyone in his neighborhood so it didn't take long for the water table to drop to unmanageable levels. Each family kept digging deeper wells, but it is now prohibitively expensive to power pumps to bring water to the surface.
After 2 years of working hard, she is the youngest employee to move up in to management, where she assists her fellow co-workers with receiving better pay by improving their skills
All management in his daughter's company are from the elite class whose parents could afford private schools. She can barely read anyway, so advancement opportunities are non-existent. She aspires to marry an educated husband someday but this happening to a working class woman is uncommon.
He used the laws to his advantage while operating a business? Wow, color me surprised.
Not every business owner exploits every person they can to make as much money as possible. There are others who still take advantage of every tax incentive, but vocally lobby politicians to change the rules. Trump on the other hand has done nothing in his life to fix any of the problems be claimed to care about on the campaign trail. It was all just campaign rhetoric; he was just doing what it took to win. While all politicians do this to some extent, you can at least see people like Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton walking the walk in their professional and personal lives. Trump on the other hand is a pure opportunist.
Do you take advantage of any/all tax deductions you can claim?
Yes, but I also vote for candidates who will almost certainly raise my taxes because I think it's the right thing to do. You can play by the rules to ensure you are on an equal playing field as everyone else but still publicly try to promote a better way. Many wealthy people, like Warren Buffet for instance, do just that.
Trump visibly flopped all over the place even during the campaign season because he had no convictions backing up any of his positions. He has been vocal during his "thank you tour" that many of his statements were just tried out during campaign rallies and he stuck with the ones which gave the most applause. He is a con man through and through, and unfortunately we currently have a climate where it is very hard for the common person to identify misleading rhetoric or even complete lies.
Any side blaming AI is a retard as AI does not even really exist in a functional form.
AI doesn't have to become Skynet to exist in a functional form. Since the term was first coined and the first professionals started devoting time to the field, AI has included everything from finite state machines to full general intelligence. We may be far off from machines gaining human level intelligence, but natural language processing and pattern recognition are already at levels where many human jobs are at risk. And just as digital piracy is far easier than actual theft, displacing jobs with digital AI systems will be done at least an order of magnitude faster than in past centuries. Once the first call center bot is as effective as a human or the first automated car is as safe as a human driver, tens of millions of jobs could be wiped out in under a decade.
AI may not fundamentally change the nature of employment in the next 20 years, but it is certainly possible. Dismissing it as you do is just burying your head in the sand.
So its the fault of "I'm going to build a wall and stop illegal immigration" that we have more illegal immigrants?
By looking at previous actions instead of campaign rhetoric, you can easily see Trump gleefully supports outsourcing. There are plenty of business owners who have found ways to make money supporting US manufacturing and jobs, including in the apparel industry, and you will not find Trump among them. He cares about making money and stroking his ego.
Trump has no interest in anyone but Donald Trump, and the more people I talk to who are oblivious to this fact the more clear it is how demagogues gain power.
It's called education, and self motivation. Unfortunately, we seem to be lacking in those qualities as a nation these days and the more nimble and aggressive third world countries are hammering it home. This is a problem that the free market could easily solve, given an opportunity to do so.
I'm curious if you have any examples of the free market creating nationwide scale positive changes to education in modern history. You mention aggressive third world countries hammering it home, but that is with massive government spending on education and research. The US catapulted ahead in education because of massive government spending after World War II. Various European countries with great school systems also relied on strong government investment. South Korea is one example where there is massive private spending on education, but this is merely an example of how the free market can pervert a government's earlier successes in education.
While I overall agree that education is the key to America's future economic success, it seems naive to think there would be a free market solution when every single historical success story was built on massive government spending.
It is a common myth that tuition rises because of increased student aid or loans. The real reasons have more to do with lower state subsidies and the general trend of higher prices for service which require highly educated staff like professors, doctors, and lawyers.
You are correct that low-price rentals would rise in price under an UBI system if more housing is not created, although very slight subsidies / tax breaks would solve that problem easily. And utilities may go up slightly, but only for non-renewable sources of energy. Since those are on a global market, they would be very minimally impacted.
While you have illustrate some minor negatives to providing more money to the poor, you leave out the benefits of the increased market for goods and services it creates. This boost to the economy not only helps the poor, but also those working in the service economy. It even boosts the revenue of the business owners who are ultimately paying for the UBI threw higher taxes, mitigating some of the impact of those taxes.
This isn't about some means tested program which requires a large amount of administration. You just need to modify the tax brackets so more people get a credit from their federal taxes and that's it. Maybe an extra $50 million or so to manage sending checks / direct deposits. Probably less than one hundredth of one percent of the money would get eaten up by administration costs.
We would spend more money tracking the effectiveness of the program than we would administering it.
No, the few property management companies will collude to raise the rent to eat all the guaranteed income. The same thing happens when you raise the minimum wage: rental prices go up.
In the world you think you live in, companies like Uber and AirBnB would have never gotten traction because there would always be a cabal of rich people ready to collude and price them out of the market. It's a good thing we don't live in your imaginary world.
As soon as you give people more money, the upper classes will obtain it eventually.
Yes they will, right after the poor have been fed, housed, and given a reasonably comfortable life with that money. Sounds like this kind of wealth redistribution is a win win the way you describe it.
I'll say it again -- if it's not worth a living wage to an employer, it's not worth doing.
You should change your statement to "if it's not worth a living wage to an employer, the employer has no right to employ someone to do it." That is at least a cogent argument. One I disagree with, but at least it's logically sound.
Otherwise your statement means the following is true: "Paying someone to do my laundry is not worth a living wage to me, so my laundry is not worth doing. I'll have to buy new clothes I guess."
If the work isn't of enough value to the employer to pay a living wage, then it isn't worth doing at all.
There is plenty of work worth doing that isn't worth minimum wage to most people. How many of your household chores would you pay someone $0.10 to do? If you're willing to do it yourself, then it is certainly worth doing. The only next step is to find the agreed upon rate in which someone is willing to do the work and you are willing to pay. Unless the government gets involved that is.
Not every job is meant to be, or as a practical matter capable of being, a primary source of income to live on.
But yours is, right?
Almost no one who truly believes a lucrative profession is somehow owed to them is going to have much value in life. I don't believe my job deserves a living wage without giving back my employer an equal amount of value. I found a career which pays well. If it starts not paying well, I will find a different one. If I can't find another career, I will take advantage of our society's social safety net (I also support a vastly increased welfare state).
But insinuating that people are owed a living wage simply because they are breathing is ridiculous. I want to live in a society where everyone, regardless of their mistakes, has a decent life, but that doesn't mean it has to come from their employer.
I'd be surprised if working from home was actually more environmentally helpful. I would think the cost of heating / cooling an entire house for one or two people would require more energy than it takes to commute to work. If your spouse is already home with the kids I could see the green argument, but otherwise I would have thought going to the office to be the green option.
After typing that I went to Google as found this which does back up my assertion. Most search results do state the opposite, but since none of the ones I read even mention increased costs of heating / cooling your home they seem suspect.
Tell me something, how do you think that the USA got to be such a large economy even though it has less land mass than China and fewer people than China? Could it be because the people in the USA are free to have a protest without the threat of being run over by tanks? I think that might have something to do with it.
So, yes, I can imagine a China that can be the world's greatest power by adopting freedoms much like that in the USA. Alternatively China could surpass the USA if the USA adopts economy killing policies like those in China.
China does not have to be nearly as efficient at using its human resources to surpass the USA. In fact it can operate at 25% of the US's efficiency and still surpass it as the world's greatest power.
I completely agree that on average US citizens will be more productive, innovative, etc. than the average Chinese citizen until they massively rebuild their society, but they don't need to do that to surpass us. They simply have more than four times the people we do, so they can afford a lot of inefficiencies.
Yes, we haven't seen this since Japan roared past us economically and militarily in the late '80s.
I never said I thought this scenario was likely, just that it is absurd to claim you find it difficult to even imagine it as a possibility. I can easily imagine the possibility of getting in a car accident tomorrow even though there is less than a 1 in 10 million chance of that happening.
Waste is not the biggest discrepancy between those figures. They do not consider purchasing power parity differences between the US and China. This is very important because a Chinese soldier makes far less than a US soldier, among other cost savings. China's PPP GDP is 87% higher than its nominal GDP, so China's military spending is arguably closer to 67% of US military spending. That is without even considering wastefulness.
These are all good reasons why China will not become the greatest nation in the world. I almost entirely agree with them. But can you really not imagine any possible scenario, even at a near zero probability, for China to rise above those current disadvantages? Because if you can imagine such a scenario, you ultimately agree with my statement.
If you see people you disagree with as having the mental capacity of a turnip, you might only have made it to cabbage yourself.
This is a huge problem with our society right now. Regardless of how absurd an opinion is, calling it out as absurd can cause others to brand you as intolerant. All opinions are not created equal.
I find it difficult to imagine any scenario that makes China the "world's greatest power."
Then you have the imagination of a turnip. You literally cannot imagine a scenario in which the nation with the largest population in the world and a GDP on track to surpassing the USA in around 10 years could become the world's greatest power? I'm not saying any of this is certain, or even likely, but not even being able to imagine the possibility is dumbfounding.
Slashdot Mirror
If he comes out and says "Hey suckers, we're a platform centered around gathering every bit of information we can about you and bundling it up for the highest bidder." some people might actually start to wise up to the fact that Zuckerberg sees every single one of us a source of income and nothing more.
First off, nearly every company sees every single one of its customers as a source of income. Acknowledging they need to make money is not the same thing as caring about nothing but revenue. A company like Facebook, where keeping customers engaged is the only way to keep them using the product, would not do well if it catered only to the clients providing actual revenue.
Facebook is a platform centered on providing content to users so they use the product. If they are successful with this central strategy, the secondary strategy of maximizing advertising dollars can be successful. Both are obviously very important to the company's success, but don't confuse which one is more important.
Why are you so stupid to talk about Donald Trump when the problem is the system he works for? How are you better than the people you talk down to when you are both transfixed by the bouncing red ball, even if for different reasons?
It is easy to complain about not having good enough choices, but for important decisions you need to learn to find differentiation even if you feel two sides are nearly identical. You may believe both parties are part of one big corrupt system, but you are blind if you don't see real differences in peoples' lives based on who is in office.
Have you done anything in your life to fix any of the problems you claim exist?
Yes, I have donated money to political campaigns and have been vocal in social media (including when using my real name) about my position in an effort to inform and persuade others. Although evidence for an upper middle class non-business owner like myself would be far different than for a wealthy business owner; for instance a donation from a wealthy man would be indistinguishable from lobbying while my thousand dollar donation would not.
How many execs are motivated by philanthropy instead of profit?
The average ultra high net worth philanthropist donates just over 10% of their net worth over their lifetime. According to Trump's figures that would mean if he was just average, not exceptional, he would be on track to donating $1 billion dollars over his lifetime. And while we don't know how much he has donated over his life, according to research done by the Washington Post he has donated $5.5 million to his own "charity" and $2.3 million elsewhere since the 80's.
Even if Trump doubles his charity over the next perhaps 20 years of his life, he would have donated less than 2% as much as the average ultra-high worth individual. If you rule out his own fraudulent charity, the figure drops far under 1%. It is quite clear Trump has never cared about anyone but himself, including his own kids before they came of age, so it's unclear how anyone could believe otherwise.
School vouchers used to promote competition improved education for Sweden.
It is a bit of a stretch to consider Sweden's voucher program a success. Your link is paywalled so I don't know anything about it's findings but another decade of data (your report is from 2005) has been less than kind to Sweden's voucher program.
That illustrates one big problem with some of these privatization efforts. For any new program it is often easy to show immediate benefits by focusing on low hanging fruit, so it usually takes decades to understand the real impact of these changes. Luckily we now have examples in Sweden and South Korea to show the dangers of mixing a profit motive with education.
Taking advantage of dumb policies is not the same as believing they are good ideas. I personally take advantage of plenty of tax deductions and government incentives that I believe are idiotic in terms of public policy.
Do a google search trying to find Trump complaining about offshoring before 2014, and if you can find anything you are better at research than me (or at least better than what I can do in 5 minutes). And Trump cannot claim he simply kept those criticisms private or among close friends, because he has very publicly complained about government action and inaction since the 80's.
Thinking that Trump cares about offshoring for any reason other than it got him more votes than supporting it is just naive.
Do you think Trump actually realized he was supposed to give up all his business interests when he became president?
He probably didn't know what the emoluments clause was until just recently. And now he is banking on a republican congress not challenging him on it. In 2009 the republicans pushed the justice department to review Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize without congressional approval, so they are certainly willing to push the issue when it suits them. Trump will absolutely break the emoluments clause repeatedly, likely multiple times per day in office, if he has any financial connection to his company. But no one has ever been prosecuted based on this clause; mostly because past presidents have went out of their way not to break it.
The congress will likely have plenty of ammunition to begin impeachment proceedings even before Trump's first 100 days; it will be up to them whether they want to exercise those powers. They almost certainly would rather have Pence as president, but also wouldn't want to piss of Trump's voters by beginning the process too soon. It will be an interesting four years.
So, Joe reduces his water usage to save costs, or digs his own well, purifies the water, and sells "Standard Water" to his neighbours
Joe used to have a well out back, but so does everyone in his neighborhood so it didn't take long for the water table to drop to unmanageable levels. Each family kept digging deeper wells, but it is now prohibitively expensive to power pumps to bring water to the surface.
After 2 years of working hard, she is the youngest employee to move up in to management, where she assists her fellow co-workers with receiving better pay by improving their skills
All management in his daughter's company are from the elite class whose parents could afford private schools. She can barely read anyway, so advancement opportunities are non-existent. She aspires to marry an educated husband someday but this happening to a working class woman is uncommon.
He used the laws to his advantage while operating a business? Wow, color me surprised.
Not every business owner exploits every person they can to make as much money as possible. There are others who still take advantage of every tax incentive, but vocally lobby politicians to change the rules. Trump on the other hand has done nothing in his life to fix any of the problems be claimed to care about on the campaign trail. It was all just campaign rhetoric; he was just doing what it took to win. While all politicians do this to some extent, you can at least see people like Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton walking the walk in their professional and personal lives. Trump on the other hand is a pure opportunist.
Do you take advantage of any/all tax deductions you can claim?
Yes, but I also vote for candidates who will almost certainly raise my taxes because I think it's the right thing to do. You can play by the rules to ensure you are on an equal playing field as everyone else but still publicly try to promote a better way. Many wealthy people, like Warren Buffet for instance, do just that.
Trump visibly flopped all over the place even during the campaign season because he had no convictions backing up any of his positions. He has been vocal during his "thank you tour" that many of his statements were just tried out during campaign rallies and he stuck with the ones which gave the most applause. He is a con man through and through, and unfortunately we currently have a climate where it is very hard for the common person to identify misleading rhetoric or even complete lies.
Any side blaming AI is a retard as AI does not even really exist in a functional form.
AI doesn't have to become Skynet to exist in a functional form. Since the term was first coined and the first professionals started devoting time to the field, AI has included everything from finite state machines to full general intelligence. We may be far off from machines gaining human level intelligence, but natural language processing and pattern recognition are already at levels where many human jobs are at risk. And just as digital piracy is far easier than actual theft, displacing jobs with digital AI systems will be done at least an order of magnitude faster than in past centuries. Once the first call center bot is as effective as a human or the first automated car is as safe as a human driver, tens of millions of jobs could be wiped out in under a decade.
AI may not fundamentally change the nature of employment in the next 20 years, but it is certainly possible. Dismissing it as you do is just burying your head in the sand.
So its the fault of "I'm going to build a wall and stop illegal immigration" that we have more illegal immigrants?
By looking at previous actions instead of campaign rhetoric, you can easily see Trump gleefully supports outsourcing. There are plenty of business owners who have found ways to make money supporting US manufacturing and jobs, including in the apparel industry, and you will not find Trump among them. He cares about making money and stroking his ego.
Trump has no interest in anyone but Donald Trump, and the more people I talk to who are oblivious to this fact the more clear it is how demagogues gain power.
It's called education, and self motivation. Unfortunately, we seem to be lacking in those qualities as a nation these days and the more nimble and aggressive third world countries are hammering it home. This is a problem that the free market could easily solve, given an opportunity to do so.
I'm curious if you have any examples of the free market creating nationwide scale positive changes to education in modern history. You mention aggressive third world countries hammering it home, but that is with massive government spending on education and research. The US catapulted ahead in education because of massive government spending after World War II. Various European countries with great school systems also relied on strong government investment. South Korea is one example where there is massive private spending on education, but this is merely an example of how the free market can pervert a government's earlier successes in education.
While I overall agree that education is the key to America's future economic success, it seems naive to think there would be a free market solution when every single historical success story was built on massive government spending.
It is a common myth that tuition rises because of increased student aid or loans. The real reasons have more to do with lower state subsidies and the general trend of higher prices for service which require highly educated staff like professors, doctors, and lawyers.
You are correct that low-price rentals would rise in price under an UBI system if more housing is not created, although very slight subsidies / tax breaks would solve that problem easily. And utilities may go up slightly, but only for non-renewable sources of energy. Since those are on a global market, they would be very minimally impacted.
While you have illustrate some minor negatives to providing more money to the poor, you leave out the benefits of the increased market for goods and services it creates. This boost to the economy not only helps the poor, but also those working in the service economy. It even boosts the revenue of the business owners who are ultimately paying for the UBI threw higher taxes, mitigating some of the impact of those taxes.
This isn't about some means tested program which requires a large amount of administration. You just need to modify the tax brackets so more people get a credit from their federal taxes and that's it. Maybe an extra $50 million or so to manage sending checks / direct deposits. Probably less than one hundredth of one percent of the money would get eaten up by administration costs.
We would spend more money tracking the effectiveness of the program than we would administering it.
No, the few property management companies will collude to raise the rent to eat all the guaranteed income. The same thing happens when you raise the minimum wage: rental prices go up.
In the world you think you live in, companies like Uber and AirBnB would have never gotten traction because there would always be a cabal of rich people ready to collude and price them out of the market. It's a good thing we don't live in your imaginary world.
As soon as you give people more money, the upper classes will obtain it eventually.
Yes they will, right after the poor have been fed, housed, and given a reasonably comfortable life with that money. Sounds like this kind of wealth redistribution is a win win the way you describe it.
I'll say it again -- if it's not worth a living wage to an employer, it's not worth doing.
You should change your statement to "if it's not worth a living wage to an employer, the employer has no right to employ someone to do it." That is at least a cogent argument. One I disagree with, but at least it's logically sound.
Otherwise your statement means the following is true: "Paying someone to do my laundry is not worth a living wage to me, so my laundry is not worth doing. I'll have to buy new clothes I guess."
If the work isn't of enough value to the employer to pay a living wage, then it isn't worth doing at all.
There is plenty of work worth doing that isn't worth minimum wage to most people. How many of your household chores would you pay someone $0.10 to do? If you're willing to do it yourself, then it is certainly worth doing. The only next step is to find the agreed upon rate in which someone is willing to do the work and you are willing to pay. Unless the government gets involved that is.
But yours is, right?
Almost no one who truly believes a lucrative profession is somehow owed to them is going to have much value in life. I don't believe my job deserves a living wage without giving back my employer an equal amount of value. I found a career which pays well. If it starts not paying well, I will find a different one. If I can't find another career, I will take advantage of our society's social safety net (I also support a vastly increased welfare state).
But insinuating that people are owed a living wage simply because they are breathing is ridiculous. I want to live in a society where everyone, regardless of their mistakes, has a decent life, but that doesn't mean it has to come from their employer.
I'd be surprised if working from home was actually more environmentally helpful. I would think the cost of heating / cooling an entire house for one or two people would require more energy than it takes to commute to work. If your spouse is already home with the kids I could see the green argument, but otherwise I would have thought going to the office to be the green option.
After typing that I went to Google as found this which does back up my assertion. Most search results do state the opposite, but since none of the ones I read even mention increased costs of heating / cooling your home they seem suspect.
Tell me something, how do you think that the USA got to be such a large economy even though it has less land mass than China and fewer people than China? Could it be because the people in the USA are free to have a protest without the threat of being run over by tanks? I think that might have something to do with it.
So, yes, I can imagine a China that can be the world's greatest power by adopting freedoms much like that in the USA. Alternatively China could surpass the USA if the USA adopts economy killing policies like those in China.
China does not have to be nearly as efficient at using its human resources to surpass the USA. In fact it can operate at 25% of the US's efficiency and still surpass it as the world's greatest power.
I completely agree that on average US citizens will be more productive, innovative, etc. than the average Chinese citizen until they massively rebuild their society, but they don't need to do that to surpass us. They simply have more than four times the people we do, so they can afford a lot of inefficiencies.
Yes, we haven't seen this since Japan roared past us economically and militarily in the late '80s.
I never said I thought this scenario was likely, just that it is absurd to claim you find it difficult to even imagine it as a possibility. I can easily imagine the possibility of getting in a car accident tomorrow even though there is less than a 1 in 10 million chance of that happening.
Waste is not the biggest discrepancy between those figures. They do not consider purchasing power parity differences between the US and China. This is very important because a Chinese soldier makes far less than a US soldier, among other cost savings. China's PPP GDP is 87% higher than its nominal GDP, so China's military spending is arguably closer to 67% of US military spending. That is without even considering wastefulness.
These are all good reasons why China will not become the greatest nation in the world. I almost entirely agree with them. But can you really not imagine any possible scenario, even at a near zero probability, for China to rise above those current disadvantages? Because if you can imagine such a scenario, you ultimately agree with my statement.
If you see people you disagree with as having the mental capacity of a turnip, you might only have made it to cabbage yourself.
This is a huge problem with our society right now. Regardless of how absurd an opinion is, calling it out as absurd can cause others to brand you as intolerant. All opinions are not created equal.
I find it difficult to imagine any scenario that makes China the "world's greatest power."
Then you have the imagination of a turnip. You literally cannot imagine a scenario in which the nation with the largest population in the world and a GDP on track to surpassing the USA in around 10 years could become the world's greatest power? I'm not saying any of this is certain, or even likely, but not even being able to imagine the possibility is dumbfounding.