The bet is also that conquering and occupying territory, which made some sense in the twentieth century when wealth was correlated with geography, has been shown to be consistently not worth the cost any more. What exactly are the Huns going to take if they show up in Palo Alto?
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Google will build whatever search engine the Chinese want, if they're the ones doing the invading. For starters. They're already doing that and the bullets aren't even flying.
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Replying to @antoniogm @mims
That is ludicrous on so many levels I hardly know where to start. Will there be Chinese overseers walking the halls with guns, ensuring that the engineers don't write buggy code? On what planet does this make more sense than writing their own search engine?
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Every twenty-first century occupation of territory, with the exception of the Crimea where it was welcomed by the population in question, has been a spectacular disaster not remotely worth the cost.
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That's true between rational actors of roughly the same level of economic development. You're telling me that wars of conquest will never happen again, because computers and Internet? The US is currently embroiled in something like a half-dozen wars overseas, to some extent.
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Replying to @antoniogm @mims
I'm saying that wars of conquest no longer make any economic sense, and make the conqueror weaker rather than stronger, and therefore are incompatible with "barbarians" "taking what they like." When they happen it will be purely for religious and cultural reasons.
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That's right. It's not rational anymore. But I think one of the big flaws in how the capitalist West thinks about the world is not understanding that things like honor or feelings of historical wrong outweigh any utilitarian calculation for many peoples.
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Replying to @antoniogm @mims
Sure, but you're moving the goalposts -- at first this was about utilitarian barbarians who could be paid off and who wanted to take things, not a culture driven by wrongs and insults to their honor, remember?
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No, no...you put the Chinese in Palo Alto based on money. IMO, if they're there, it's because they nursed their historical grudge about being colonized, Taiwan, etc., and decided to become global hegemons rather than just messing around with fake islands in the S. China Sea.
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Replying to @antoniogm @mims
? I am pretty sure if you look back in this thread you will find that the first instance of the word "Chinese" came from thee, not me.
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I picked the only realistic invader in the foreseeable future one can imagine. Realistically, I think it'll be generations before anyone can touch the US homeland, which is why I'm on team US (vs. team Europe) in terms of surviving the coming apocalypse.
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