South Africa (Union of South Africa at that time) after the Second Boer War. The defeated Afrikaners were given an equal say in the new Union and hitherto unknown educational and economic benefits.
Rapid industrialization financed by the Empire brought the Afrikaner farmers out of poverty, which enabled them to form Labor unions focused solely on establishing preference for white laborers - which in turn dictated that the black laborers through wage suppression had to bear the cost of overpaid white labor. And thus apartheid was born.
I suggest looking up the works of professor Niall Ferguson who’s been a strong advocate for a decoupling with China for almost two decades as this 2009 article shows.
Like I said I hope I’m wrong, but fear I’m not. We have put lip service in this for a long damn time. China’s gone too far this time! It’s time we build here!
It seems to me like especially in times of crisis we say we’re going to completely change. And we decide and decide and know if for sure and then don’t. We’re starting on a diet on Monday and using a cheat meal Monday evening. No way we going to let big banks make a bunch of profit and put the economy at risk again. Wait what this will keep them from making a shit ton of money again? We can’t do that tell the banks to help us write this.
End of the day I hope at the minimum we pull back some vital things like legal said. I mean it didn’t make sense to ever start that shit in the first place. But a big breakup? I ain’t seeing it. We love cheap goods. And we love cheap labor. Coming out of an economic downturn do I think businesses and consumers will nut up and have some short term pain to stick it to China? Not in the least bit. I think we will say a lot and maybe even make some really tiny moves.
Good examples, but the USA ground Germany and Japan into little more than dust while demonstrating what an economy and population properly mobilized for war can achieve. We inflicted upon them a defeat so complete that you are hard-pressed to find comparisons without going very far back into history. Special thanks to the Soviet Union and their fine work on the Eastern Front, by the way.
The ash settled, and something great sprung up very fast, even as the occupying army remained. Well, something great sprung up wherever the occupying army wasn’t part of the Soviet Union, at least.
Mongol intentions towards their uncooperative enemies would have been more akin to a stone dropped in water, if my understanding is correct.
Because the USSR was a threat. Otherwise, who knows what the UK (we know how Churchill felt about Germany) and France would have done. Poland and other Eastern European nations as well.
But I get your point about how we may not be the good guys, but relatively speaking, we are the nice guys.
We are not free of sin or bad actors among us, but we are not a bunch of assholes unified around the idea of keeping assholes like us in power, which is how I’d describe the CCP right now.
I doubt complete severing of economic ties with the CCP; but I do see us reassessing critical and essential supply chains, especially those that may involve critical medical equipment (like PPEs, pathogen protective mask, ventilators, etc). There has been the suggestion that stockpiles may not be the total answer (a lot of equipment was found to be almost useless); but have a way in which manufacturing can be ramped up on short notice.
Another lesson that I hope we will soon learn is the best way to ramp up an economy after such an event. I have no doubt that we will do some things wrong…and some things right…but we should learn.
One thing we should NOT have to do is create another huge, federal bureaucracy as a knee-jerk response to this pandemic. Some Governors are showing that what you really need is planning, coordination and leadership…not another bloated, federal bureaucracy.
Oh…and it appears that most States are about 10-15 years behind in the Technology needed for Unemployment processing. While no office was meant to process the numbers that many States are seeing…the archaic technology just made it all that much worse.
I actually worked on the failed attempt to do that in the State of Maine. It was an eye-opening experience on the unusual nature of incentive in state government. Consolidating systems and implementing software like this is challenging, but imminently do-able for any organization. All you really need to do is follow the implementation methodology and do the work on your end.
The unelected bureaucrats seemed to have their own bad ideas about how they should go about implementing this software, and tens of millions of tax dollars were spent on a project that dragged out for years to accomplish nothing. Then the governor who proposed it left office, and all mention of the project quietly disappeared from the state’s website. Only brief mention in meeting minutes can be found now. I even overhead a story on Maine NPR last week bemoaning our old software system, without any mention made of the failed boondoggle to fix if a few years ago.
California actually filed a lawsuit against SAP, calling their product “faulty” when the city failed to implement the software that somehow manages to reliably process roughly 40 percent of the world’s business transactions. That’s almost like suing Dell, accusing their computers of being bad at mathematical calculations.
I’m sure not all state governments are this organizationally incapable at everything they do, and hopefully we start demanding that they perform their jobs. We are learning tough lessons on the cost of complacent, inefficient government. I don’t have anything bad to say about how my governor handled the crisis, but hopefully we come out of this with a better sense of state government priorities.
For instance, it would be nice if we could have smooth roads and it would be nice if my friends who lost their jobs could file for unemployment and begin collecting benefits in an expedient way. I don’t think Mainers will care much for electric car incentives (especially on our roads), figuring out how to bring more taxpayer-dependent immigrants to Maine, sorting out the details of the plastic bag and straw ban or any of the other recent legislative priorities.
We need government to fulfill basic functions first.
There are none so blind as they who will not see!
The Constitution of the once now disappeared USA has been suspended. Be afraid very afraid! Do not believe what is said check it for yourself!
You should look up the DMV software project in Minnesota called MNLARS.
We spent 186 MILLION DOLLARS, over 12 YEARS, and ended up scraping the software because it was so bad it was not worth fixing.
A few years ago it could take months to get tabs for your car. That did not stop LE from ticketing people for outdated tabs.
Now I am only a Mechanical Engineer, and have only taken C++ programming, but it does not seem like a data base type software should take 186 MILLION to develop. Not only that, but the 186 MILLION bought a system that was so bad it was just scrapped.
It really depends on the scope. I’ve worked on a private sector implementation that ran the parent company, one of the worlds’ largest, 1.9 percent NPS for nearly a decade. It was wildly successful as well, realizing billions in savings over time as a globe’s worth of information and business processes are now properly modeled. I worked for a relatively small division of this company operating in N. America, only 3.4 Billion per year in revenue.
The operating budget for the implementation team was $10,000,0000. Per month. For years on end.
Consultants don’t come cheap, especially if you want them to come to you. Neither do licensing fees.
It actually hasn’t but, it has been worse than what is being asked of us now. Was slavery Constitutional? What about internment camps for Japanese Americans during WW2? Those things, and many more like them, did not destroy us but social distancing for a few months will?
I believe the beginning budget for the project was 30 million. It kept getting pushed out, and the budget expanded. IIRC, we could have bought off the shelf software that would have met our needs for 50 million.
The whole thing is a lesson about the fallacy of sunk costs.
That’s how a lot of these things die a slow death. Maine was attempting to implement off-the-shelf software with some customization. By the time I came on the project they were already a year behind schedule. It became clear to me within a week or two that the project was actually still in the requirements gathering phase, even though the government bureaucrat would get up in front of the executive branch people and say that we were actually in an acceptance testing phase.
Bullshit. There was nothing viable to test. They didn’t even have the IT infrastructure in place or any project to do so. Their entire solution was centered around the idea that government employees would enter all of their own data. Two years into the project, I was seemingly the first person to ask “how”?
After a few days’ legwork I learned that approximately 4,000 of the state’s 12,000 employees do not have access to a computer on which to do transact this stuff. Fixing it would have been a mult-million dollar IT project. This was not news anyone seemed eager to deal with.
Someone else had to have seen this before me, and I wonder where they ended up. Oh well, I don’t think any of the unelected bureaucrats ended up losing their jobs, which would have happened if the project was successful. So that’s a big win for them. A lot of contractors got paid too, including me. At least those 10s of millions didn’t go to some partisan silliness, like a tax cut.
A whole helluva lot of “wasteful govt spending”, is really subsidizing the workforce. People “earning” a salary for poor performance or for projects that don’t pan out, or are not needed in the first place. But, it gives people a way to earn a living which in turn helps the economy.
I’d still call it quite bad, and you can only say that it helps the economy if you compare it to lighting the money on fire, burying it underground or something like that. If you don’t take the money from productive people in the first place they will spend it where they see fit.
That seems like anti-economics to me. There’s no value being created when you just pay people so they can have a job. Enough of that and you get to the point where you pretend to work and the government pretends to pay you.
For the MNLARS project, people were shown to have been negligent and or corrupt. There were hearings. IIRC, civil and or criminal cases (can’t remember all the details) were brought forth by the state.
Idk, IME there are a lot of people out there that would be on “normal” govt assistance, or not making nearly the money they are if not for “wasteful govt spending” giving them jobs. And the money isn’t wasted, it’s just overpaying for the end product.
Private industry doesn’t want to hire the bottom 50% because those workers aren’t good/motivated/efficient enough to turn a profit. So they get employed where profit isn’t the #1 and only goal.
It’s a little bit of a redistribution of wealth (just like any welfare), but I’d prefer to look at it as akin to a work requirement to recieve welfare benefits.
This is a piece of it. But a bigger piece of it is they don’t want to pay those workers when they can find equal or close to equal value for much less. It’s why they build things overseas and employ illegals. Private industry will hire good and motivated people for many jobs. But if they can hire 12 good and motivated people for the price of one they are going to do it.
Keep them ceo salaries through the roof going to need a lot of profit. It’s precisely why I don’t see a breakup with China. Big businesses are going to need massive incentives to break up. They won’t do it out of the goodness of their heart just like they didn’t increase average wages here anywhere near in comparison to the higher ups. Fuck off poor people in America, but don’t fuck off poor people overseas. Work for us!
You really don’t think the bottom line consequences of a global pandemic, massive supply shortages and a likely global depression presents an incentive for private companies to change their behavior?
Really?
Everything comes with a cost, sometimes it is “hidden”. An example from my career would be the trend in offshore programming we saw in the 00’s. After a few years of satisfying the bean counters with cheap offshore programming, the value brought by domestic programmers who are literate in American business language and practices became much clearer. Less rework, less testing, better outcomes in the real world.
All of a sudden the low-cost option wasn’t such a no-brainer, because of tangible-real world consequences. You have to start taking into account the bad outcomes that can happen, and then decide if it adds value to spend more up-front to avoid another rare but disastrous outcome.
Some will surely want to keep the cheap goods flowing, the old supply chains intact. I don’t doubt that at all. But will anyone, anywhere ever consider goods from China to cost the same that they did two months ago? Of course not. The cost of goods from China just increased dramatically, even if they’re still selling the steel at the same price they did two months ago.
Smarter people than I are busy at work calculating how much this is costing, and the bill will be both staggering and unprecedented.