Moderation Questions

"Russia’s independent polling agency" Thanks for the laugh!

Unless, as you mentioned in your recap, he gets them embroiled in a war. Power corrupts in that they can't help but exercise it. Losing or stalemate a war ala Putin never helps. He already has China embroiled in a currency war with Western capitalism, which will end up phyrric at best at least within his lifetime. And while things have improved a lot, they're about to get hit with their first Western style major recession, which can cause civil unrest.

The Lipset hypothesis states that as average income rises, democratic reform becomes basically inevitable where authoritarian regimes rarely survive for long, while existing democracies almost never collapse.

this gets played up a lot in the west

but most middle aged chinese today grew up hearing stories from their surviving grandparents of the japanese occupiers skinning alive their neighbors or stories about peeling the bark off of trees to eat to fend off starvation - so the "oh no, my beachside investment property is failing" is not nearly enough of a downturn to make them believe that things are fundamentally broken

afterall, while mourning their losses in real estate, they are still driving these to go to work - something that would have seemed impossible even 20 years ago

The USSR and its collapse were a big deal back in my school days. That a lot of Russians had a positive view of Stalin was like common knowledge I guess. I mean we don't really draw that great a distinction between Stalin and Hitler so it was like another reason to hate Russians like we would Germans if they held similar views on Hitler.

I'm quite tempted to go off for a long time on Russian composers like Shostakovich and Prokofiev here. I raise my eyebrow quite highly at "few bits of music."

Hot take, Stalin's interference reigned in Shostokovich's experimental excesses and definitely made his music better.

Maybe more accessible? Who knows what could've been.

i think i found the film that radicalized vic

Right, but by "they" you're almost without exception referring to someone with party connections. Tale of two citities. Then out to the rural, a tale of two worlds.

Their culture is pretty conservative to begin with. So barring some sudden shock I wouldn't expect anything revolutionary. More evolutionary.

nope, i'm talking middle class chinese

cost of living is so low that someone making 25k a year is able to save and drive a 40k car

1 in 2 households own a car in cities (and that's due to amazing public transport more than cost)

1 in 3 households own a car in rural areas

345 million personal cars on the road
500+ million registered drivers

this all jives with what i've witnessed

people save, cost of living is nonexistent (taking a family of 4 out to dinner will cost like $5 at basic entry and around $25 total for a proper sit down experience)

they earn less, but not significantly less

it's super common for foreigners living in beijing to make about 1500 a month and not once ever need to budget or worry about expenses

i know it may shock you, but this is not what it's like anymore

I don’t have time for this. I have to go to rehearsal.

check out this drone footage of some random cities you've never even heard of

no these are not beijing/shanghai/guangzhou, these are places you probably never heard of before

hahaha for real

genuinely john, how is it possible that you think it's a world where almost nobody owns a car and yet also their biggest economic worry is that people have speculated too much in real estate investments?

how does that possibly jive?

Except for Bobby Fischer's brief reign (1972-1975), every World Chess Champion from 1948 thru 2006 was Soviet/Russian.

Botvinnik, Smyslov, Tal, Petrosian, Spassky, Karpov, Kasparov, Kramnik

In both 1970 and 1983(?), there was an event called "The Soviet Union versus The Rest of the World."

The top Soviet Grandmasters played the top Grandmasters from everywhere other than the Soviet Union

The Soviets won both matches.

my eyes are bleeding from trying to read this page

i think something really lost on americans when comparing income levels around the globe is that it's hard to understand that when you

spend $100 a year on health insurance vs $5k to $9k
spend $500 a year on car insurance vs $2,700
spend $40k educating a child with college vs $272k
spend $400 to $1,200 a month on renting vs $1,500 to $3k
spend $30 feeding family at decent restaurant vs $120

in general costs are more than 50% lower across the board

TIL that Stalin wasn't such a bad guy after all.

I guess he was right - one is murder, one million is a statistic.

I think Larsen and Fischer were the only ones who even put up any real fight. IIRC Larsen wanted to play top board and Fischer was like, whatever, you can have it.

By rating and recent results, Fischer should have been board one for the World Team.

But Fischer on board one would have been playing against World Champion Spassky. Fischer didn't want to play Spassky prior to a likely title match against him two years later.

I’m not saying China is poor or that nobody owns cars. Obviously that’s not true. You're reading what I said way more extremely than I intended. The middle-class gains you’re describing are real and I'm not denying them. What I’m saying in an economic sense is that broad consumption and structural risk can exist at the same time.

Car ownership and affordable living reflect real progress. But real estate became the primary store of household wealth, a major driver of growth, and the backbone of local government finance. When that much of the system is tied to one asset class, a prolonged correction really matters... even if people are still driving sports cars to work and eating out.

And the exposure isn’t uniform. Urban, state-linked families tend to have more assets and stability. Rural households, migrants, and private-sector workers have thinner buffers. So resilience varies by class and region. That’s the “two worlds” point I was making, which admittedly I went too far with.

What I’m suggesting is something closer to a GFC-style stress event, not collapse. The U.S. didn’t implode in 2008. But the aftereffects were long and politically significant: slower growth, asset repricing, shaken confidence, and eventual political realignment.

Given how central property has been in China, this looks like their first real balance-sheet slowdown of that scale. And in a system where legitimacy is closely tied to continued economic delivery, sustained strain like that can have significant political consequences.

We already saw during the COVID lockdowns that frustration can surface in China in ways that would’ve been almost unthinkable a decade ago. By our Western standards that may not look dramatic, but in the Chinese political context it was notable.

Tal was Latvian and was born before it was incorporated into the USSR.

Fair enough. But when Tal became World Champion in 1960 he was a citizen of the Soviet Union. To be more precise, I should have said that all world champions (save Fischer) between 1948 and 2006 were citizens of the Soviet Union.

Thanks for clarification.

i think that's fair

the real issue with property is that nobody owns anything, when they began privatising property, they still held onto the notion that only the state can own land... as a result, when you buy a house, you're not buying the land, you're leasing it for 70 years

the first of these 70 year leases will begin expiring in 2030 - and while the government is reassuring everyone they'll figure it out and decide on something fair, that has yet to be revealed/determined so there's a decent amount of anxiety on that issue - most people assume it'll just be a nominal renewal fee - but there's a very good chance some unscrupulous local officials could exploit this situation for gain and/or punish enemies

could be a big moment or another nothing burger that quietly fades away