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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
America's broadband watchdog has told telcos they cannot use government subsidies to buy any more Huawei or ZTE equipment.
The FCC is also mulling extending this ultimatum to include the continued use of the Chinese manufacturers' gear, meaning cellular and internet providers will have to replace their installed Huawei and ZTE boxes, as well as vow not to purchase any of the kit, if they wish to receive funding from the US government.
Specifically, the five-member commission voted unanimously on Friday to bar US telcos from using cash from the Universal Service Fund to purchase stuff made by either of the Chinese telecoms giants.
The USF is an $8.5bn nationwide fund that subsidizes telcos that provide service in rural and poor areas, schools, and libraries. Even the larger network providers tap into this piggy bank, so the crackdown on Huawei and ZTE purchasing reaches right across the market.
[...] The decision comes on the heels of what was seen as a reprieve of sorts for Huawei when, earlier this week, the FTC granted a third extension on the trade ban on the switch slinger, letting certain US companies continue to do business with the biz. One of those corporations, Microsoft, just announced it was going to be able to continue selling its software to Huawei.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 25 2019, @10:00AM (13 children)
Why? It's not that much smaller.
That illustrates the dangers of extrapolation. History indicates everything is going as it has before. Every developed world country went through a period of high economic growth at the same places that we're seeing with China now, and is growing at a much slower rate now. So it's reasonable to expect China to slow down as it achieves developed world status for the same reasons the rest slowed down. Growing a developed world country's economy is hard, particularly, when there are all sorts of other things (such as social safety nets, defense spending, rent seeking, etc) to distract from that goal. But growing a developing world country's economy is easy for governments to do. They already know what works, it mostly just involves staying out of the way and implementing basic economic and legal reforms to improve private sector activity and reduce government corruption.
My take is that in the end game when almost everyone, including Africa, is developed world, China will have a share of the economy crudely proportional to its population at the time, which will probably be about an eighth to a tenth. But the countries that will stand out will be the ones with better technological, legal, and cultural infrastructure. The US could be (but not necessarily will be) competitive with China in that future despite a modestly lower population.
(Score: 2) by ilPapa on Monday November 25 2019, @03:37PM (8 children)
Maybe someone here who has a background in mathematics could explain to khallow how much bigger 1.4 billion is than 330 million.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 25 2019, @04:41PM (7 children)
(Score: 2) by ilPapa on Tuesday November 26 2019, @03:34AM (1 child)
Not if we keep anti-immigration as an official policy it won't be.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 26 2019, @01:14PM
How anti-immigration is that official policy?
(Score: 2) by ilPapa on Wednesday November 27 2019, @05:52AM (4 children)
I thought of your comment when I saw this story today:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/27/us/us-birth-fertility-rate.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes [nytimes.com]
(Note: The story is about how the US fertility rate has been in decline for 4 years and has hit a new low.)
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 27 2019, @02:39PM (3 children)
Sounds like Chinese fertility has hit a "new low" too and that low is lower than the US one. On this Wikipedia list [wikipedia.org], US fertility is 1.8 births per woman, Chinese fertility is 1.6 births per woman.
(Score: 2) by ilPapa on Wednesday November 27 2019, @03:16PM (2 children)
Good point. At that rate, China will only have three times as many people as the US as soon as say, the year 2400.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 28 2019, @12:07AM (1 child)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 28 2019, @12:17AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25 2019, @06:35PM (3 children)
424% is not a small difference, nor is China becoming defacto the world economy a particularly big extrapolation. They currently make up about 19% of the world economy, and are at a fraction of their potential. You will find in every single projection (e.g. - IMF data) that China is going to be increasingly dominant in the world economy. The only question is how dominant, and that's largely going to be determined by India. Such a peculiar future!
Also, you cannot understate China's growth. About 50 years ago as we were putting a man on the moon, Chinese were starving to death by the tens of millions. This [wikipedia.org] is a table providing historical economic estimates from the IMF. Even in 1980, China was the second poorest nation in the world with any estimated value. Even India's economy was nearly twice as large. Now just 40 years later, that's all changed. China is now the largest overall economy in the world, and rapidly advancing in per capita wealth. And this is only in 40 years, the blink of an eye on a historical scale. If what China was doing was so easily replicable, every single country in this world would be doing it.
As for what comes next, we live in an era of mass media, mass manipulation, political corporations with revenues greater than most nations, a population that is likely becoming literally [wikipedia.org] dumber (so far as IQ can measure), and political positions becoming ever more radicalized and mutually exclusive (probably due to a mixture of the other reasons). I'm not sure the systems that worked in the past can still work so well in this present.
While bordering on heresy, it might not be inconceivable to consider that the Chinese are indeed doing some things right. One of the reasons that Jinping has gained effectively ubiquitous support in the country is because he clamped down on corruption with an iron fist. Probably going to be tough to ever see any progress once we've normalized the ideas of e.g. presidents granting extremely favorable treatment to corporations and then running around accepting tens of millions of dollars in "speaking fees" after their presidency ends. Hopefully Bloomberg doesn't get Bernied. He may end up bought, but it's not going to be with money. We'll never make any progress putting people into office whose price is lower than what corporations can offer, which is immensely high.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 26 2019, @03:01AM (2 children)
So is most of the rest of the world. Currently, China makes up 20% of the world's population. That will decline significantly by 2100.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @06:57AM (1 child)
Two things.
1) Economic potential and realized economic gains are not the same thing. There is 0 indication for now that Africa will ever become a major world player. Presumably it will at some point (since not long ago the same could be said of China) but there is no imperative forcing people to positively progress. It could be 40 years from now, or 400 years from now, or indeed perhaps never. See, for instance, Liberia. It's a beautiful, bountiful, and resource rich land that was not only founded by former US slaves and provided extensive support and funding, but also adopted a near identical political system to that which the US had at the time (~1850). Suffice to say it's development took a rather different path from 1850 than the US did.
2) Our population projections rely on a variety of correlations that are increasing. Education, secularism, income, liberalism, etc correlate strongly with reduced fertility. The data for this argument are compelling. For instance this [statista.com] is a list of fertility in the US by income. Those who are poor are pumping out children at a rate about 50% faster than those who are wealthy with adisconcertingly smooth inverse relationship between fertility and poverty. You also see similarly compelling relationships between religion, education, and even politics. [thecut.com]
So it seems the correlation is accurate. But correlation is not causation. Just go back several decades and all of these correlations completely collapse. So why might this correlation exist today? What happened over the past several decades? The answer seems self evident. Look at cultures that are likely to negatively affect fertility: feminism, identity politics, gender-bending, etc. Which group(s) of people are most actively embracing these ideologies? It's the exact same: liberal, educated, wealthy, secular, etc. China's population decline was caused by government mandate. It's now reversing, all be it slowly. The western population decline has been caused by cultural issues, and those issues are only becoming more severe.
Something population projections also seemingly do not consider is demographic replacement and inflection points. Groups adopting views that negatively affect fertility will naturally trend towards extinction. Groups adopting views that positively affect fertility will naturally trend towards domination. E.g. - Sweden saw it's national fertility average increase something like 20% (relative to what it was before) from 1998 to 2008. Of course nothing really changed. It's just that Swedes named Lucas, Erik, Anna, and Elsa who still have the same low fertility became a relatively smaller chunk of the national population than Swedes named Mohammed, Aisha, Azim, and Saladin who have a higher fertility. And as time progresses, the latter group will become an ever large part of the population while the former group will become an ever smaller part. The global implication of this is that we're not currently seeing sustained population decline, but rather approaching an inflection point. Low fertility groups will die off while high fertility groups will reproduce. As the former are dying faster than the latter are growing, we will decline. Then we reach an inflection point and growth returns, just with a very different distribution of groups. الله أكبر
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 26 2019, @01:21PM
Except, of course, that they're following the same trajectory as all the countries that eventually did become developed world - increasing wealth and infrastructure, empowerment of women, etc.
There doesn't have to be such an imperative. It's a natural consequence of the dynamics pioneered in the last few centuries.
No, they do not. My take is that this holds all the way back to prehistory.
Fails when enough of the next generation fails to adopt those views.