Lack of planning? All private companies, departments, and individual teams plan for the projects that they implement. All public city, county, and state organizations plan for the projects in their area. Decentralized planning may look like no planning to someone from China. But, that's certainly far from true. There's lots of planning going on. It's not controlled from some central location. One of the benefits of this model is that it tends not to overbuild and overspend when the need isn't necessary, such as what happens with central planning. Local municipalities and businesses tend to build what they need and are economically punished when they overbuild.

China has abject poverty in most of the country next to places that are wildly rich that are used for propaganda videos. In comparison, the US has done a much better job spreading the wealth from coast to coast.

Saudi doesn’t have its own supply of good tech labor. China does. China doesn’t have the same incentive to create these enclaves as Saudi.

These Chinese EVs are hitting the market at $8,000-10,000 new. The cheapest EVs in the US currently are about 3 times as much with the average EVs 5-6 times higher. At those prices, the Chinese EVs would be wildly popular. They'd arguably hurt the US automakers, which is why we're not allowing them into the market today.

Universities have a limited number of students they can admit during any given year. If 30% of admissions go to foreign students, those are seats not available to local students whose family taxes fund the school. The University of Washington was giving preference to foreign students in enrollment while also taking state and local funds from taxpayers. Quality local students were finding themselves unable to get admitted to the university. Taxpayers were outraged and forced the legislature to take action. The legislature then required the school to increase the percentage of local students admitted.

A few years ago, the University of Washington was admitting so many foreign students that it was noticeably hurting local admissions. The state legislature ending up passing a law limiting the number of foreign students that could be admitted considering the school is publicly funded by the local citizens for the purpose of educating the local population.

The US is also a society that actually cares and talks about it's racial issues. China is deeply racist. On top of that, China doesn't talk about or even acknowledge it's racism. China may attract people from other countries. But, it struggles to keep these people for any length of time.

The usage of English is a huge advantage for US. It's the default business language across the world due to the legacy of the British empire. India works in English in their own country. They actively learn it for their own use. It's easy for workers from India to move to the US since they already know the language. China has five different languages. They're all difficult to learn. The use of English doesn't go far in China. Workers from India are not going to flock to China the same way they flocked to the US.

The US is a prosperous first-world country that's had money for a long time. It's prosperity is more uniformly distributed across the country. You don't see the wild economic differences in the US that you see in a place like China.

Those are all advantages the US possesses before looking at the differences in government, which are huge.

So this is Geniza from between the First and Second Temple? Sorry, just had to ask. :)

00000000 I'll see your luggage and raise you nuclear armageddon.

50% of coal gas is (or was) Hydrogen. Conversion from Town Gas to Natural Gas meant converting to mostly methane.

BMW still make parts for motorcycles last sold in 1955, apparently

Jassy verified the layoffs had nothing to do with AI.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.axios.com%2F2025%2F10%2F...

Bullshit. We lived through it, dumbass.

Elon finished the acquisition of Twitter about a month before ChatGPT was released. Elon immediately fired about half the company. This absolutely shocked the industry and led to countless predictions of imminent technical and business failure.

But what actually happened? Twitter struggled for a month or two. Then it was fine. Most importantly to tech executives: the company continued running reasonably well with roughly half the number of employees.

That blew the minds of C-level tech executives.

That highlighted the fact that companies had hired way too many people during the pandemic. Further, they could make just as much money if they fired a significant percentage of their employees instead.

So, these companies started firing people. Every year since 2022, tech companies laid off a percentage of their workforce for no real reason. Financially, they were doing great before the layoffs. After the layoffs, they look even more profitable. Regardless, the companies still mostly run fine with at most the occasional outage every now and then (I'm looking at you Amazon).

The fact that these companies can blame the layoffs on AI is just an added bonus. These C-level executives love AI and spending money. You need a reason to tell shareholders for spending obscene amounts of money on a technology. The layoffs are the excuse for the AI expenditures, not the other way around.

Greetings from Y2K!