Kyle's Files: China Bears, Talking Books, Snoop Lizard
1. Tweets'n'Things™
All the stuff [psychology mostly, before becoming Ram Dass] I was teaching was just like little molecular bits of stuff but they didn’t add up to a feeling anything like wisdom. I was just getting more and more knowledgeable. And I was getting very good at bouncing three knowledge balls at once. I could sit in a doctoral exam, ask very sophisticated questions and look terribly wise. It was a hustle. Ram Dass
The flower is on its way to becoming refuse, but the refuse is also on its way to becoming a flower. This is the nonduality principle of Buddhism: there is nothing to throw away. If a person has never suffered, he or she will never be able to know happiness. Thich Nhat Hanh
A person understands himself not through thoughts, but with actions. It is only through making an effort that a person will understand his worth. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I do not like the idea of happiness — it is too momentary. I would say that I was always busy and interested in something — interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happiness. Georgia O'Keeffe
Although I’m fascinated by the tech, you should probably try to dodge machine-recommended content as often as possible, because the models are not trained on labels like “is conducive to realizing my ambitions”. Your time is precious—search with intention! @DamonCrocket
Ought implies can. Immanuel Kant
Some people create or discover new things. Some enforce social norms. There is little overlap between the two. Paul Graham
blackpill on markets is that the nonmarket mechanisms that smooth out frictions produce meaning and a sense of community as a biproduct like working in the fields prevents obesity and every time we solve a new product with markets we shave away another fraction of our humanity ... it gives me no pleasure to report this, partly because i love markets but especially because markets are only going to become more pervasive and efficient because we cant afford not to be competitive @eigenrobot
If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking. Leslie Lamport
2. China Bear Zeihan
What many in the world see as a threat - the rapid rise of China in economic, military, and demographic terms - is nothing more than two hundred years of economic and demographic transformation squeezed into a searing four decades, utterly transforming Chinese society and global patterns of trade…
That’s Peter Zeihan writing about China in The End of the World Is Just Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization. He continues:
... as well as the Chinese demography. No matter how you crunch the numbers, China in 2022 is the fastest-aging society in human history. In China the population growth story is over and has been over since China's birth rate slipped below replacement levels in the 1990s. … The country's demographic contraction is now occurring just as quickly as its expansion, with complete demographic collapse certain to occur within a single generation. China is amazing, just not for the reasons most opine. The country will soon have traveled from preindustrial levels of wealth and health to postindustrial demographic collapse in a single human lifetime.
He claims that China’s labor force and overall population peaked in the 2010s and could be half of it’s 2020 size by 2050, and that it could get worse with deglobalization:
That particular bit of arithmetic doesn't even begin to take into account what will happen to global (and Chinese) mortality levels once globalization is firmly in the rearview mirror. Most of the world (China included) imports the vast majority of its energy as well as the inputs used to grow its food. Most of the world (China included) is dependent upon trade to keep its population not simply wealthy and healthy, but alive. Remove that and global (and Chinese) mortality levels will rise even as baked-in demographic trends mean birth rates will continue to fall.
There are still a lot of really smart people very bullish on China, but it does seem like that camp has gotten gradually quieter over the last few years. Recent news of economic and political trouble continues to show how having a leader with too much consolidated power can weaken a country.
Chinese fascism has worked to this point, but between a collapse of domestic consumption due to demographic aging, a loss of export markets due to deglobalization, and an inability to protect the imports of energy and raw materials required to make it all work, China's embracing of narcissistic nationalism risks spawning internal unrest that will consume the Communist Party. Or at least that's what happened before (repeatedly) in Chinese history, when the government could no longer provide its people with the goods.
Elsewhere he elaborates on the importance of economic growth, and the risks of not having it:
The Chinese Communist Party's only source of legitimacy is economic growth, and China's only economic growth comes from egregious volumes of financing. Every time the Chinese government attempts to dial back the credit and make the country's economy more healthy or sustainable, growth crashes, the natives start talking about making lengthy strolls in large groups, and the government turns the credit spigot back to full
What does turning the spigot to full mean? Spending more on everything, everywhere, all at once:
The Chinese government assigns capital to everything. Infrastructure development. Industrial plant buildout. Transport systems. Educational systems. Health systems. Everything and anything that puts people in jobs. Excruciatingly little of it would qualify as "wise capital allocation.
The goal isn't efficiency or profitability, but instead achieving the singular political goal of overcoming regional, geographic, climatic, demographic, ethnic, and millennia of historical barriers to unity. No price is too high.
Many might be reading the above and wondering what Zeihan thinks the US has been doing for the last three presidencies. Some helpful context:
China regularly prints currency at more than double the rate of the United States, sometimes at five times the U.S. rate. And whereas the U.S. dollar is the store of value for the world and the global medium of exchange, the Chinese yuan wasn't even used in Hong Kong until the 2010s.
Another way he gets at this:
Since 2007, the year everyone started talking about the Chinese taking over the planet, the supply of yuan has increased by more than eight hundred percent.
Nobody wants the yuan, which makes the insane supply even more … insaner:
Outside the mainland, the Chinese yuan is only popular in Hong Kong, and only because Hong Kong serves as the financial intersection between China proper and the rest of the world. Anywhere else, the yuan nearly nonexistent. The Chinese economy, even by the boasts of the most ultranationalist of Chinese, is still significantly smaller than the American economy, and yet the Chinese money supply has been larger than America's for a decade - often twice as big. So of course the yuan is a store of value for no one. Capital flight out of China to the U.S. dollar network regularly tops $1 trillion annually.
Even China has admitted their current growth situation means they won’t surpass US GDP any time soon. Zeihan describes another reason to doubt China in a footnote:
One of the (many) reasons I've never had confidence in the Chinese system is that the Chinese... don't. A few years back, the Chinese government loosened restrictions the Chinese on financial transfers in an effort to establish the Chinese yuan as a global reserve currency. It backfired. Within six months the Chinese citizenry had shuffled more than $1 trillion in assets beyond the reach of the Chinese government. Beijing quickly aborted the plans and slammed the transfer system shut.
This combined with other troubles, means trouble:
China's financial system, paired with its terminal demographics, condemns it to not being consumption-led, or even export-led, but lending-led. That makes China vulnerable to any development anywhere in the world that might impinge raw material supply, energy supply, or export routes--developments Beijing cannot influence, much less control.
Elsewhere Zeihan has pointed to China’s terrible geography as a problem. There are very few areas where they can productively farm, and then huge mountainous regions make it absurdly expensive to transport whatever they can grow. They have good relationships with about zero countries, definitely not on their borders (I guess they’ve militarily messed with just about every one of them). Zeihan seems fairly confident about this whole thing:
Not to belabor the point, but the absolute financial blowout that is China has generated the largest and most unsustainable credit boom in human history both in absolute and relative measures. The Chinese will exit the modern world just as they entered it: with a big splash.
The only question is when.
Recent events have made him predict that China’s downfall is coming soon, like this decade.
Ray Dalio is a famous China bull. He’s said that at least part of this is because of his investments. Some are worried about China’s AI dominance. This seems to be getting disrupted by new sanctions.
If you have an opinion here, counterpoints to anything above, or anything worth sharing, please reply to this and let me know.
3. The Book of Form and Emptiness
The Book of Form and Emptiness, the most recent novel from Buddhist nun Ruth Ozeki, often felt like narrative meditation to read. The story centers on a thirteen-year old boy names Benny. Benny's dad dies, shortly after he starts hearing objects talking. Meanwhile, his mother is trying to stay sane enough to meet the minimal parenting requirements. The book beautifully deals with grief, mental illness, and… the feel of the world? Here is a passage from page 4, narrated by the kid:
It's really important not to get upset because then the voices will get the upper hand and take over your mind. Things are needy. They take up space.
They want attention, and they will drive you mad if you let them. So just remember, you're like the air traffic controller - no wait, you're like the leader of a big brass band made up of all the jazzy stuff of the planet, and you're floating out there in space, standing on this great garbage heap of a world, with your hair slicked back and your natty suit and your stick up in the air, surrounded by all the eager things, and for one quick, beautiful moment, all their voices go silent, waiting till you bring your baton down.
Music or madness. It's totally up to you.
That description of agency in how you "hear" the world comes very close to a “show, don’t tell” version of a lot of meditation instructions. How we attend to our experience determines, to a significant degree, whether we experience chaos or order.
Different things have different personalities. A water bottle and hair net will say different things. The things around us vibe, they promote a certain feeling within us. Sixty pages after that first explanation of talking things, he tells us that organic things communicate, too:
Oh, and here's another thing. In case you get the wrong idea, it's not just the Made stuff that talks. I think maybe it's easier for the Made things because the voices of their human makers still cling to them, like a smell that clings to your clothes and you can't get rid of. But Unmade things like trees and pebbles speak, too, only their voices are different. Unmade things are usually a lot quieter and don't shout as much, and they speak in lower registers. I don't know why this is, but maybe the Book can explain it. All I know is that it took me a while to learn how to tune my ears so I could hear the Unmade things over all the noise that the Made things were making.
That resonates with me so clearly. It reminds me of that Bob Dylan line “money doesn’t talk, it swears.” To hear the subtle voices of the unmade requires tuning in. Your phone doesn’t need anything but your compliance to be heard.
The Buddhist influence is felt throughout the book, and shoes up in a few great poems. Here’s one Zen poem that I’d like to not forget:
Great is the Matter of Birth and Death.
Life is transient. Time will not wait.
Wake up! Wake up!
Do not waste a moment!
One of my favorite storylines in the book is the mom trying and failing to follow the equivalent of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. She’s struggling deeply and, because of her job, has a house that’s filling up with trash. She eventually writes a desperate letter to a fictional Marie Kondo, who reads the letter in her monastery and is deeply troubled by it. Here is the faux-Kondo’s thought process after receiving another disturbing letter, which serves as a kind of tragic description the real Tidying Up (and other step-by-step self-help stuff) is so popular:
Why the nagging fear that they were not enough? That they were falling behind. That they could and should be better? No wonder they wanted simple rules to govern the way T-shirts should be folded, children raised, careers managed, lives lived. They needed to believe there was a right way and a wrong way - there had to be! Because if there was a right way, then perhaps they could find it, and if they found it and learned the rules, then all the pieces of their lives would fall into place and they would be happy.
Such delusion.
One of the core things Buddhists don’t want is delusion, it’s one of the first things the eightfold path tells you to stop doing. Not harming others is another big one, so this is pretty concerning for her:
Was Tidy Magic simply feeding that delusion? Creating yet another false standard of unreasonable perfection? She wanted to tell them, Your life is not a self-improvement project! You are perfect, just as you are!
And of course perfection isn’t stagnation.
The Book of Form and Emptiness is also about books. Quite a few scenes take place in a library and, within the library, the bindery - the place where books are bound. Toward the end, the boy is talking to the librarian about the bindery being closed down, and she points to one of the more beautiful things about physical, bound, aging, books:
“I guess with the Internet, they decided words don't need to be bound anymore. Personally, I don't agree. I think words prefer being committed to paper. They need boundaries. Without some discipline and constraint, they can just go and say anything they please. But I suspect I'm a bit old-fashioned."
3. Miscellany
I watched the movie Nope recently and really liked it. This video analyzes the sounds and differentiates between terror and horror. (YouTube, 15min, major spoilers)
Horror movies can be good for mental health.
Snoop Dog narrates one of the craziest scenes from Planet Earth and David Attenborough calls it “Better than the original.” (Twitter video, 1.5min)
Bo Burnham’s meta reaction video reminds me of some of the thought spirals I’ve entertained. (YouTube, 3min)
"I'm still surprised by the lack of public discourse around the impacts of Apple's iOS 14 changes - all in the name of privacy - that are leading to massive adverse effects to SMBs and innovative companies everywhere. They might bear as much blame for a recession as inflation." (Twitter thread, overstated, but hits something that was missing from the whole online tracking debate)
Good Grief: This American Life series on grief
Muhammad Ali dodging 21 punches in 10 seconds in 1977. (reddit video)
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Thank you for reading, it's an honor to be in your inbox. If there's an idea in here you liked, maybe forward this to someone who might appreciate it.
<3 Kyle
