If you think of Musk companies as vehicles to extract money from state and federal governments, then everything falls into focus. Carbon credits, government launches and the Quixotic quest for Mars, and soon Tesla robots sold to the DoD and DHS. I'm only half-joking.

Fair point. It's hard to support Tesla's valuation as a car company, it may be even harder to support as a robot company. You have to wonder what might have been if they'd spent that Cybertruck money on battery research.

Is there anything China isn't far ahead in? Maybe capitalism was a failure.

Market cap and it's not even close. Turns out financialisation is the classic you-get-what-you-asked-for-not-what-you-wanted of capitalism. We told the optimiser to make number go up, and number has certainly gone up. China's number? Not as up.

I think it could have gone differently if we gave our economic system something to optimise other than itself, but then we wouldn't have centibillionaires, so... swings and roundabouts I guess?

Who cares which country has a higher market cap? That's a capitalist concept, of course the capitalist country has more. I'm talking who has the more advanced technology.

>Maybe capitalism was a failure.

China is hyper-capitalist. They're living proof that capitalism has won.

China is a mixed economy with some capitalist parts and some socialist parts just like us. Their mix is just a bit more effective than our mix than our mix and they have higher scale.

It's more effective at depressing wages and at shovelling other people's money at whoever the politicians want to win. They are also much better at hiding debt -- in manufacturing companies, in banks, and in provincial governments. A lot of their successes lose money but they are awesome at hiding it and they might well outcompete Western companies and thereby cause a lot of harm.

What do you mean “hiding it”? Are you suggesting Chinas manufacturing capacity is entirely fraudulent or cooking the books? Or that the state is providing subsidies? Because if its the latter… have you seen the brouhaha over Amazon HQ2? Or seen the number of tax credits/incentives doled out by US cities to companies that “promise” jobs but don’t even deliver them? (but keep their subsidies).

> They are also much better at hiding debt

Through bonds? or SVPs to fund the building of datacentres?

China is capitalist on a state level, that's where they are winning. The US lets things get mired in red tape and special interests because nobody wants to take responsibility for growth.

In China, I imagine that if your company does something relevant to the five year initiative then you get a lot of red tape cut for you.

> China is capitalist on a state level, that's where they are winning. The US lets things get mired in red tape and special interests because nobody wants to take responsibility for growth.

i.e. in China, the government controls capital; in the US, capital controls the government.

> China is hyper-capitalist.

China is one party system, where CPC controls and owns production, policy, finance and even consumption levers.

> CPC controls and owns production, policy, finance and even consumption levers.

These terms are useless for distinguishing anything -- what you said can be said about literally any capitalist state.

> China is one party system

This is also relatively uninteresting. There have been many countries where a single party has nominally remained in power for about as long as the CCP has. That Deng Xiaoping's coup occurred without nominally dismantling the party makes the "one party system" distinction a superficial one.

> These terms are useless for distinguishing anything -- what you said can be said about literally any capitalist state.

CPC mandates and gets seats on highest boards of companies, combines IP research across civil military, is both producer and consumer of products etc. Look at China's civil military fusion policy on the latest iteration of how they are doing this. In china there is no separate 3-4 branches of govt like in most places. CPC controls all legislative, executive, judiciary, military and private company boards and financial capital.

Again, just about everything you said applies to the U.S. state and its relations to private firms. Regardless of all that, profits accrue to private owners, investment decisions are determined by profit, and labor is hired and disciplined via market relations. All of the political relations you listed only marginally modify capitalist relations; the law of value still operates.

One emperor in US state doesn't control legislative, executive, judiciary, military and private company boards and financial capital. The way you have to look at China it is an empire with bit of communism and capitalism. If the mandate of heaven is favorable emperor controls everything, otherwise power diffuses a little among the emperor coterie.

It's not like US is not capitalist in anything: it's still state-of-the-art in software, which preoves that the problem is not with capital markets.

It just probably overregulated hardware manufacturing out of existence with unionizing and other too strong regulations.

Agreed. The children yearn for the mines and the 12+ hour shifts in factories.

Or in a more charitable light maybe capitalism just isn’t the only system that’s capable of reaching certain technological development.

Marketing, sales, finance.

Free speech.

Unless you are protesting ICE of course.

LLMs...

You acting like china isn't capitalism

Making good cars. They can make cheap ones, maybe acceptable ones, but not good ones. They are not there yet. Of course, the general populace doesn’t really care, and the vast majority of the market is not driven by this, but still.

> Making good cars. They can make cheap ones, maybe acceptable ones, but not good ones.

Did you just get out of your Time Machine from a decade ago?

No, I drove them, and also knowing how they sacrificed safety for example by integrating a lot of safety critical systems for the sake of price.

You’ve driven every car from China? WOW!

That's why the whole NCAP safety table is topped with Chinese vehicles then.

My experience in a BYD is they'd be in very high demand across the U.S. if it were possible to buy them here.