Subj : Re: Your opinions on communism
To   : michael goodwind
From : Kirk Spragg
Date : Sun Jul 07 2024 10:23 pm

 mg> Player of Games - Felt a little too focused on the local/micro and not
 mg> enough on the macro
I get what you are saying however I did enjoy that story for what it was - special circumstances being their usual sneaky selves & using the main character's talent for understanding and winning games to break apart a totalitarian society. I was interesting seeing how said society started coming apart at the seems it becomes more and more difficult for them to ignore the fact that their great games on which they model their awful society could be won by an alien from another culture.

 mg> Use of Weapons - Felt too focused on the individual and less on the
 mg> broader canvas that he found himself in

Doesn't help that the main character is completely unsympathetic & hard to
relate to.

mg> Inversions - Didn't even feel like it belonged in the series, I'm never  mg> a fan when scifi goes all fantasy/medieval and I believe this one was  
mg> the one with the cat people? Just felt out of place
I don't recall reading that one.

 mg> All very good points and the last one is something overlooked so often
 mg> when people claim that China is relatively debt-free compared to the
 mg> west, ignoring or being ignorant of the fact that China's debt is
 mg> distributed federally, provincially and municipally instead of just at
 mg> the federal level. Putting all level of debt together China's on par or
 mg> worse with most western nation in pure numbers but seemingly much much
 mg> worse in terms of sustainability.  It really does look like a house of
 mg> cards that's starting to crumble.  There is a youtube channel called
 mg> tl;dr News that has some good short pieces on this.  They are stuck in
 mg> this spiral, partly exaccerbated by Ping's semi-religious hatred for
 mg> western consumerism, trapping them in this reliance on a low-wage export
 mg> driven economy.  I haven't heard of any reasonable solution so far to
 mg> get them out of this quagmire, have you?

The only suggestions I've heard of is that China needs to follow the west in liberalizing their economy and society so that they can work on providing high value financial and technical services. The former would require changes to how they run their economy - none of this currency manipulation and fixed exchange rate rate nonsense thank you very much. The latter won't work if the CCP continues on with is atrocious privacy and human rights record. Would you trust cloud services or technical consulting services offered by an individual or company domiciled in a state that can and will obtain your data whenever they feel like it?

.... A deaf ear is the first sign of a closed mind.

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