We are so fucked...

-railroads
-highways
-waterways
-?
-super bridges
-fiber optic lines
-?
-4g spots/towers

And since all this happened under Xi Jinping he is now become the permanent CEO of China...

or so thats what this documentary seems to be saying...

@billgates link?

@TheLazyDev this is a video in chinese. i just posted some screenshots

@billgates I was hoping for english subtitles ._.)

@TheLazyDev well you can see from the screenshot the subtitles are only in Chinese as well... I was hoping too cuz then I could watch this faster but...

@yizBoi China seems to be global super power after we outsourced all the work to them.... And now we're trying to catch up.... Aka the Slave is becoming the Master.

I fail to see anything unexpected here

@vertti Western countries are now technologically left behind and trying catch-up?

U know mobile payments, streaming tv, music? China has those years ago and apparently even Amazon's bots they had... years ago. Shipping... They own us now...

They invested in infrastructure... We paid for wars and outsourced production capabilities to them...

@billgates so far Chinese software engineering doesn't convince me at all. Frankly, it's shit. Their best and most used apps are so low quality that western people would never use them. I know this cos I use wechat daily and I've lived in china.

But yes sure most of the physical product production has been outsourced to them and they've become good at it.

The ones now investing in war are the Chinese

@vertti I can tell you if you used any real chinese apps (these arent in western app stores) especially alibaba's they're pretty decent. But more specifically, in terms of daily tech they are way ahead. we're just doing mobile payments, theyve had it for years.

And more specifically its the rate of growth. 5 years ago, mobile tech they were behind. Now they are at least head to head and in some areas better.

@billgates I think I've pretty much used them all. As I said, I used to live in china.

As they don't have democracy they can make political decisions quickly and get new tech applied to the society swiftly.

However, their software tech is still shit. Alibaba, Tencent, those companies are at the scale of Google. But their engineering is so far below Google and other western companies. Where's the Chinese operating system everyone uses? Where's the Chinese search engine everyone has as their homepage? Which chinese app all of the world is using as their #1 messenger app? Chinese email providers? Video streaming services? Cloud infrastructure providers?

I'm sure they're working hard on these problems but so far I don't see any real threat from that direction.

BTW my country has had mobile payments for a long time, our digital ID can authenticate to any government service etc.

@vertti ok then I guess it's just the US that's screwed.

For the apps, they would be QQ Music, Xunlei/Tudou (streaming video on demand), Baidu (Google equivalent), Taobao, AliPay, WeChat (basically Facebook now and what Messenger is trying to become and why FB wanted everyone to use it)

And this is just from an outsider. In actually not from China but I know a lot of their tech.

@billgates the only reason they have tech companies that have grown as large as alibaba and Tencent have is that they simply won't allow any foreign company of scale to conduct business in China. They simply make it illegal for foreigners to own and operate companies in China.

Their firewall even blocks internet access to whatsapp, Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, Google etc. because they're much better than what the Chinese have. And it isolates the Chinese to their own world as they want it.

None of the western people use those shit apps and services. For the most part they're bloated poor imitations of western services. We got far higher standards and so do the Americans.

@vertti I disagree with the jar part. You may not see it but from my point of view services like CrunchyRoll, Spotify are copy cats of tech China already had years ago. Of course the advantage in China is they don't need to negotiate.... Either you join our we'll pirate the contents...

@billgates Spotify is 10 years old. The Chinese have very little major innovations in software/web tech. Those that we western people use; zero.

If you haven't lived in china you may not know this, but their internet connections are fucking terrible. Worst that I've experienced by far. Even the most remote village in my country has a better connection. Maybe the spying network to monitor everyone's all internet traffic is too taxing for their infrastructure?

@vertti well I remember using QQ Music around 2002 so it's still older. While China may have a last-mile problem in terms of coverage, there's a lot of internet tech that I think they widely adopted first. And again the key is the growth rate. It seems they are going to take over the West tech wise... Maybe in a few years...

@billgates well, I can say that that's nonsense.

Sure you achieve sufficient scale only in the domestic market in China. But that's where it all ends. No one wants Chinese "innovations" elsewhere, cos there are better and more genuine alternatives available.

Thinking the Chinese will be producing all our tech is some fantasy that even the Chinese themselves don't believe in. The Chinese lack behind in virtually everything related to tech (web, software, space exploration, military technology etc.), except physical production in scale.

USA will continue to be the leader in these fields due to numerous reasons. Their position is currently unchallenged. It's currently simply a trend to hate USA and glorify and pointlessly hype China, at least where I come from.

@vertti they already are, clothes made in China, tech parts made in China, and shipping made in China. Most stuff we buy online, made in China.

That's the whole point of what I'm saying in this post. That's the whole trade imbalance thing. But because they make all this, have the manufacturing and transportation capabilities and the tech, they are positioned now to use it... If they haven't already.

And my bet is this trade war we just entered, China wins and Trump will come out crawling... But this is going beyond tech now

Sorry Missed the "except physical production".

Looks like new Ubisoft game...