Your analogies are completely non-sensical.

Von der Leyen was hand-picked by Klaus Schwab

Schwab is the second most popular bogeyman of internet wackos after George Soros and doesn't have much formal power. So I'm gonna need some credible evidence for that.

In what way has "China already won"?

I am not OP and obviously "winning" reduces too many dimensions into one. But I will say that from my recent two visits to the country that I was pretty astonished by the speed at which they are building things. Cars, Buildings, Tech Hubs, Factories. You blink twice and a new tech company plops up somewhere making high end drones or humanoid robots or CNC machines or innovative 3d printers. It feels like there is an absolute abundance of electrical and mechanical engineers in that country and funding to match. I am not making any comments on the politics of it all, but I have not seen this anywhere else in the world - perhaps it exists but I am not aware of it.

For some of us, it mimics late 19th century europe where the rate of innovation perhaps was only matched by the lack of regard for cost, safety or need.

I think we are closer to seeing the Chinese Hindenburg than Arpanet or Moon voyage or some other bewildering humanity joining initiative.

Its inarguable that the industrial revolution brought tons of wealth quickly to the UK. But one, having past it all, has to wonder if the child work force, insanely cramped victorian houses, constant deaths due to smog, polluted water etc could not have been entirely avoided by reducing "innovation" speed.

Is the existing suffering of the Chinese system worth the economic growth? For its own middle class, the answer is probably yes. But systemic conditions like limiting the universities places to top 30% students, means you have a permanent underclass that cannot join the white collar jobs.

Is that required to have a cheap, hardworking manufacturing and construction industries? Maybe. But reinventing a class system that has a few steps removed from slavery as an "economic miracle" and "neck breaking speed innovation" feels a bit icky when they could take 5 years longer and treat people better.

We are arguably close to post scarcity, and instead of building post-capitalism instruments (like libraries could be imagined as), we are just perfecting the economic conditions of capitalism which require an inordinate amount of cheap labour and state violence.

Billionaires are building bunkers instead of museums, they can see the end game of this system they benefit from and its not a good one. Like I can't understand whats the point of winning "the economy" if we end up in a post nuclear hellscape of ecological collapse, but number must go up I have been told.

I do not think it was necessary for it to be that bad for the industrial revolution to happen. Possibly displacing agricultural workers through the agricultural revolution and enclosures accelerated it?

It is certainly not necessary for economic development now. You probably cannot give people in less developed economies the same pay and working conditions, but you can provide the basics and relatively decent treatment.

Agreed, but on other dimensions China is still 150 years behind the West. It’s important to keep this progress in perspective.

Go on, on which dimensions is China 150 years behind the West?

History, philosophy, literature, journalism, art, education. The list goes on.

Creativity, innovation, freedom? 10 guys in a room can't compete for long against hundreds of millions or billions pursuing their own separate interests. Sure, they can steal, but they can't create to the same degree if at all.

I recently read a survey of 14 promising new technologies: AI, EV's, drones, robots, batteries, et cetera. China was leading in 13/14, and is only 4 months behind on the 14th, AI.

Why is all the newest and best technology from China, outside a few specific fields?

While we’re asking rhetorical questions, why is China’s cultural development behind tiny, poor European countries?

Why is there still demand for Chinese student visas at universities in the USA?

Many reasons that have nothing to do with creativity, innovation, or freedom.

> In what way has "China already won"?

The US has depleted their missile stockpile and can no longer defend anybody. Countries in the Middle East are moving away from the US and forming their own alliances. Taiwan knows that the US cannot do anything to help them. South Korea also knows. The US has weaponized the US Dollar, forcing countries out of the SWIFT system if they don't do what they are told. As a result, the CHIPS system has become the alternative. China understands better how the economy works, with the Belt and Road Initiative. The US government doesn't understand how the economy works, and is run by a bunch of complete m orons.

You've said a bunch of things that don't really equate to "China already won".

> You've said a bunch of things that don't really equate to "China already won".

There is no path for victory for the US, where it remains the world's reserve currency. China will become the world's reserve currency by 2032.

You are simply in denial. Everything that I wrote points to China winning.

> China will become the world's reserve currency by 2032.

China doesn’t want this for the same reason that some Americans currently in power don’t want the USD to be the world’s reserve currency - it comes with an export and trade cost.

There are also many structural and political reasons why the Yuan can’t play this role not least of which are transparency, the peg and monetary supply independence.

Folks can keep their heads in the sand for pretty long, as long as they look just at progressively smaller circle around them and ignore rest of reality.

The momentum China already gained, and gaining more every day is well beyond anything in the west. Plus if you consider the position they are rising from, its properly meteoric. Nobody knows future, but its rather easy to continue projection with current, or even a bit slower pace and within 1 or 2 decades, situation will be pretty clear from any objective perspective.

Above is purely technological/process progress. Add US making enemy of whole world in one brilliant move, something that is practically irreversible in upcoming decades, and situation is clear. Military (without ammo) alone won't give you much negotiating power. LLMs can be replicated elsewhere with rather little cost, and soon some small bleeding edge advantage will be largely meaningless for most practical tasks.

It doesn't even matter what near future brings, this is settled and no amount of denial from US or self-patting is changing that.

Reserve currency status entirely depends on whether the issuing authority has the ability to drop a munition (literally or figuratively) on the head of anyone who dares to counterfeit the currency.

China's military and soft influence are improving but until they get that good, USD will remain the reserve.

Because, imagine the scenario where the US simply counterfeits the renminbi. What is China's recourse? Spicy statements by Wang Yi in toothless international forums?

This has to be the funniest thing I’ve read for a while. China still has two exchange rates.

So did the US (into gold), once, at a time when it was already the world reserve currency.

It’s meant in the sense similar to “omae wa mou shindeiru” (“you’re already dead”), i.e. that defeat has already become unavoidable.

I’m not sure I agree with “already won”, that’s an extreme position, but there are consequences to all the things s/he says. It may be a death of 1000 cuts, or it may hit a tipping point, but the us is certainly walking blindly down the “let China win” road.

As a joint us/uk citizen, even I would prefer to deal with China than the USA these days. Predictability is really useful in business, and narcissistic man child presidents aren’t predictable.

Every single point you've made is either straight up untrue or comes with caveats. I hate to quote Trump but, in light of Brandolini's law: "Wrong."

China understanding the economy appears to include them understanding that an economy consists of producing and trading goods and services, not a cancerous stock market. You can't invest in their stocks because that would be bad for their economy.

Look around and visit any country, you'll see chinese made and sold goods inundating everymarket, build infrastructures.

It used to be chinese made goods sold by local or western companies. Nowadays bar a few exceptions these are chinese goods sold directly by chinese brands/companies.

And many of those products are not only good they're becoming good in ways nowhere else can do.

Because, unlike the other superpower, they don't seem to be losing?

The USA is repeatedly punching itself in the face over and over though, so it's not a fair fight.

Their culture prioritises economic outputs not entitlements.

We should keep open to the option that they might both loose.

This is being heavily downvoted, but it's dangerously close to true.

In ten years the downvoters will not only agree with this, but have moved on to "and that's a good thing".

I mean..."close to true" is another way of saying "false". It could easily have been phrased in a way that was actually true and gotten plenty of upvotes instead.

Imagine if China said that about the US in 1950.

You are comparing the US today with China 1950. That's already pretty telling. It's not a 1:1 comparison but close in some aspects.

That's my point. China was so far behind and caught up. Even if we accept the premise that the US is behind today (debatable) "it's over they won" is an inaccurate statement.

Go do some research on China - it's economy is in the toilet and its leadership has destroyed much of it's success, foreign capital and companies have fled to India, Vietnam, Mexico, Indonesia.

Your lament of "Oh no China is the best in the world and only getting better!!!" is long long out of date.

With 2 billion people you’re absolute power. Internal market with middle class size of whole United States. No need for wallstreet and American style financial engineering. Producer of 80% goods for Europe. I mean buying something mainstream not made in China is barely possible. Technically there are some challenges like plane engines or lithography. But they’ll nail it. Trust me.

Their population is 1.4 billion and falling.

The TOS computer was better, it had a better computer-like voice.

You should check out all of the voices available on macOS. They still have the original, robotic sounding MacinTalk voices from 1984, such as Fred. They’re fun to play with.

Personally, I think Majel Barrett is my favorite computer voice of all time.

The US already depleted its missile stockpile, these missiles cannot be replaced because the US needs Rare Earths. China doesn't have to wait, the US defeated itself already

Not always that you see two wildly wrong claims made in ostensible opposition to each other

It isn't though. For example, the very article we are discussing.

Last time I looked they had broken copy/paste behaviour which dates back decades

If said copy paste behavior allows any app to snoop on any other apps' clipboard content without control, then it's been broken for decades.

Sounds similar to Rust programmers

Not necessarily, it just guarantees that China will win.

Unclear.

How much is China learning from open models? Or the other way around, how much is the US losing worldwide mindshare by refusing to allow non-Americans access to bleeding-edge models and letting China fill in the gap? (Playing catchup with Mythos is still catching up, etc.)

> How much is China learning from open models?

The last batch of open weight models releases by Chinese companies are on par with the performance of US-based frontier models, even though they are designed to run on pretty unimpressive hardware.

This is very misleading. There is no Chinese model currently that is on par with Fable or Astra. Kimi K3 is pretty good, but it's not that good.

Furthermore the Chinese models in that class are appropriately large. K3, for example, is a 2.8T-parameter model. Qwen 3.8 Max, another comparable model, is 2.4T params. Even with MoE, these are not "designed to run on pretty unimpressive hardware". Stuff like Qwen3.7-27B is, but it is also not even in the same ballpark as Opus, never mind frontier.

The alternative is Sam Altman winning.

which would be better

Sounds like a classic case of Repetitive Stress Injury. You could try balancing it out by using your left thumb to scroll through articles about Artificial Stupidity.