China’s Two Sessions meetings have ended, and it would be a real stretch to say that they mark a major change in Beijing’s economic policies. Beijing set a GDP growth target for 2025 of 5%.
This of course wasn’t a surprise, especially as the weighted average of the provincial GDP growth targets set in February came in at around 5.2%. That is why most analysts assume that this target was effectively decided months ago.
Li Qiang noted that this would be an especially difficult year. In most countries, we would expect GDP to be higher when conditions are good and lower when they are bad, but his point was that whatever the conditions, China had already determined its economic growth rate.
This shows how different the concept of GDP is in China than elsewhere, where GDP growth is an output measure, calculated at the end of the period after the economy has done what it has done.
In China, it is an input measure, determined at the beginning of the period.
One way of understanding this is by considering that to the extent the part of the economy that operates under hard-budget constraints (i.e. cannot sustainably engage in non-productive spending) is unable to achieve the growth target – and it clearly can’t – an increasing amount of economic activity will shift to those parts of the economy that don’t operate under hard-budget constraints, which means that economic activity is increasingly transferred to government and to favored sectors that receive unlimited funding from the banking system.
This in turn means that a meaningful part of economic activity this year will again be in the form of non-productive investment funded by debt, and that is why for all the recent talk of reviving the private sector, activity in the Chinese economy must continue to shift away from the private sector. This excludes favored sectors, of course, whose ability to access cheap credit is implicitly or explicitly guaranteed by local governments or SOEs who want to see production expand even if this results in losses.
And because non-productive investment by definition cannot generate sufficient growth to service the debt, we should expect to see another sharp rise in China’s debt-to-GDP ratio this year.
China’s economy in 2025, in other words, will look a lot like its economy in 2024.
I would add that Trump’s tariffs will likely have no impact this year on reducing the US deficit, and so will also have no impact on reducing China’s surplus. We should consequently expect a lot of confused stories this year about the “resilience” of China’s export sector.
Pettis makes some predictions based on the recent two sessions
when he says this:
This excludes favored sectors, of course, whose ability to access cheap credit is implicitly or explicitly guaranteed by local governments or SOEs who want to see production expand even if this results in losses.
reminds me of what people used to say about fracking during ZIRP. Or social media I guess. Drill more wells, get more users, even if you’re losing money on each one, investors would throw money at whoever was losing money on the most units. Hard to say how this worked out. The US is supplying Europe with fracked gas now, probably whoever expanded production back net is making money now, but bankruptcies in between may have meant that the investors who funded it never got any return.
favored industries include solar panels and batteries, and as Tooze has commented, it feels weird to say there’s too many solar panels, from a certain perspective clearly there aren’t enough. But obviously you have overcapacity if there’s more production capacity than sales. The world needs to phase out coal, and many countries including China need to drastically increase per capita energy use. THe way to do that right now is AMerican gas and CHinese solar panels, way to do it in the future is Chinese batteries, CHinese solar panels, and nuclear plants that are probably also Chinese though I’m hoping the American companies can get their shit together.
So it’s kind of weird to think that this can still be part of the “non-productive investment” that Pettis is talking about. Because, yeah, the price people are able to pay for these things may not really be paying for the investments that are being made to produce them.
But it’s easy to take the Chinese planner’s perspective, and say obviously this is the future so it has to be made in China.
right, only question is whether the rest of the world accepts that or decides to compete in a race to the bottom.
Man, I love it when getting recognized for my skills has benefits
For the record, this is about me being so bored at a family high tea in a restaurant I decided to actually enjoy myself, ordered half the tea card over the course of the meal, and made extremely detailed notes about each and every tea’s aroma, flavor, and aftertaste profile at various steeping times, with or without the teabag remaining in the pot, ect.
This got to the point where it got our waiter’s attention, and, despite knowing next to nothing about tea himself, intrigued him to the point of regularly dropping by our table just to check on the progress of my experiments, my report, and to ask questions about it all, as well as answering cheerfully to my interrogation about all the steeping conditions I couldn’t control for in the kitchen (tea amount per pouch, water temperature, time from pouring the water until it gets to the table to estimate how much it had cooled before adding the teabag, ect.)
In the end I, a complete stranger, offered to send him, a complete stranger, the finished report after he expressed interest in using it in the future to improve his customer service and recommendations, and he enthusiastically accepted, as well as offering to present me some tea of choice at the end of it all.
Which is how I walked out of the restaurant with a takeaway box containing several extra servings of jasmine green tea at the cost of only two “extra pots of tea” with compliments from our waiter.
Let no one ever tell you bartering isn’t alive and well.
LMAO HE SENT ME AN EMAIL ASKING ME IF I’VE DONE MORE THOROUGH TESTING ON THE GREEN JASMINE AND WHAT THE RESULTS WERE
This sounds like the plot of a rom com
Okay you say this but the email actually also said he hoped I’d come back some time so???? I guess???? He’s cute enough for it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In the end I, a complete stranger, offered to send him, a complete stranger, the finished report after he expressed interest in using it in the future to improve his customer service and recommendations, and he enthusiastically accepted, as well as offering to present me some tea of choice at the end of it all.
This absolutely is scary because these are perfect conditions for a kangaroo to come right out of those trees and fulfill its life’s mission to fuck up your car
I don’t know what country this is in but I’m sure there’s some similar wild animal there just waiting to give the driver a savings-eliminating mechanic bill
medical literature about intersex people be like “there are problems that can be caused by forcing surgery on babies. luckily we are solving this by forcing surgery on even younger babies. it is vital that this baby CANNOT be left alone to develop normally. here is our 36 step guide on which surgeries you should force on which babies. also some people have said that forcing surgeries on babies might be "harmful” so consider that too I guess"
and the paper is from 2024 and it’s tiny sliver of acknowledgement of decades of intersex activism is considered modern. truly the state of intersex healthcare is fucking dire. worse than you are thinking.
“Every language is valid, regional dialects are a normal and natural part of the evolution of language even on a national scale, the names that other English-speaking countries give things are just as valid as yours” I say to myself through gritted teeth as I listen to Americans describe breakfast foods
Ok so I was going to launch into an explanation of how breakfast sausage is just a type of fresh sausage which, like many types of fresh sausage, can now be purchased sans casing to save you the trouble of removing it from the casing yourself…
…but then I started wondering what meat they put on breakfast sandwichs in AU if they don’t use breakfast sausage and it turns out they DO use breakfast sausage, at least at McDonalds, which brings me to why I’m actually here:
What the hell is this
That’s a big brekkie burger what’s confusing
what the fuck why is it called that
It’s big, you have it for brekkie, and it’s a burger
It’s THE most descriptive name for a McDonald’s product, it doesn’t even have “Mc” in it.
Why the fuck would you eat this ? It’s like… Seven meat and an egg ?! Are you guys some kind of werewolf or ?
We’re not all eating at McDonald’s for breakfast every morning if that’s what you’re implying
extremely confused at the people being confused about this. because as an american that looks like something they’d serve in america. people would buy this.
tbh I assumed that America invented them and they just gave it an Aussie name over here
DNA is just like “nooooo I lost my other half oh well I’ll make an identical copy” like some creepy mad scientist building a robot copy of his dead wife
im gonna post two versions so that i dont have to reblog,, heres the original one with the real colors
and heres one with adjusted colors so that its less eye-straining
definitely one of my proudest designs!! there are some details i wouldve liked to add, but i was feeling fatigued after a while of working on the design aspects for guest 666… nonetheless, i hope you like it!! :D
and heres one with
adjusted colors so that
its less eye-straining
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Super fucked up that I can’t be a master-level expert in knitting AND woodworking AND silversmithing AND embroidery AND soap making AND spinning AND -
“Who would ever want to be immortal? Can you imagine the loneliness, knowing that there’s no one else like you, cursed to outlive -” shut up!! Some of us have shit to do and aren’t cowards!!
Immortal, but trapped under the weight of centuries of unpainted minis.
This is an interesting thing. Looks like testimonies of people who left the MAGA movement- how they got into it and why.
Leaving a cult is really hard, so I really respect the people who are speaking from this place.
Yes, actually.
Look, I know people want to react to the ‘leopards eating faces party’ with a big fat 'told you so,’ but these are ex-cultists who are reaching out to people who may need an exit with a soft landing.
People who are deeply in a cult are afraid to leave it and MAGA is no exception! There’s a fear that once you leave, you won’t be accepted by anyone, so they stay even if they no longer believe in their rhetoric.
A very intelligent person can fall for a cult if they feel that it can offer them something they’re missing. The outside world is perilous and you can be safe here. Your friends will reject you now that you’ve joined us, but we will accept you. Decisions are hard, we can make them for you. The secular world has broken you, we can give you new life through christ.
If you read some of the testimonies (and so many of them are young people) you’ll see how much of it is 'I didn’t see it, it took someone I love to show it to me, I can’t unsee it now.’ We’ve all done things we regret. Some regrets are bigger than others. I would rather forgive them and allow them to do good work than berate them for a decision they made when compromised by anxiety.
Hello. I usually write silly monologues in Japanese, but I have something I really want to tell you, so I’m going to write in English. I’m using a translator, so I’m sorry if the sentences are strange or unpleasant.
First of all, I want to express my gratitude as this is the first time my illustrations have received such a response. Thank you for finding my illustrations. It’s the first time that so many people have looked at my illustrations and responded to them, so I’m so happy my head feels like it’s going to explode. I want to keep drawing more.
However, although I have a lot of desire to draw, I caught a cold and I’m not feeling well, so I may not be posting for a while. 🤒However, I’ll post again when I’m better. Although it’s an older illustration, I’ll post an illustration of indigopark break and the icon I used before. ☕️
Everyone, please take care of your health and don’t push yourself too hard (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧
life becomes so beautiful when you start cooking rice in liquids other than water
put that basmati rice in the cooker with coconut cream and chicken stock and an entire onion that you’ve diced and sauteed with garlic until transparent. and some salt and pepper. Trust me
“Uncle Benadryl’s one minute rice” one minute what? awake? left to live?
this is one of my favorite videos on the internet, and it kills me that the source has been silenced by youtube’s copyright system, so I’m putting it here!
I have seen a version of this on tumblr before, but the audio in that one is just a little bit off because that person edited it back in themselves
but today, I am proud to present the original video, sent to me by Crispy Crungy, who gave me permission to upload it here and share it with you all!
Ok I don’t mean to be doing this too often but I literally just wrote a paper about this so I thought I would comment! The English translation is The Cursed Woman but the original French is La Femme Damnée. “Femmes Damnées” was the title of a Baudelaire poem from his acclaimed 1857 book Fleurs du mal, which was known, among other things, to be a collection that famously dealt with the subject of lesbians. The poem tells the story of the desires and passionate love between two lesbians: Delphine and Hippolyte. As a result of this poem and of the book as a whole, the terms “fleurs du mal” and “femme damnée” became lesbian monikers of the turn of the century. Though some have deemed the term “damned women” to be accusatory of some moral dissonance, the poem it is derived from is actually quite sympathetic to the condition of lesbian love as it is a love which is unable to fully flourish in that time. Regardless, the translated title of Tassaert’s painting is misleading, as the original French is less accusatory and more identifying. The title is more accurately “the lesbian.”
I don’t normally post photos or talk about the protest actions I participate in, but I was at the Chicago Stand Up For Science rally on behalf of my job recently and this sign took me out at the knees.
ive said it before and i’ll say it again but carrying a weapon does not make you safer, it gives the person assaulting you a free weapon. i know we live in a time where fear is profitable and the cute pink stun guns make feminism sexy but they do not work like you think they do.
there is an extremely slim chance you will be able to deploy the pepper spray/taser/gun in a way that does not harm you at all. pepper spray blows back, guns miss, tasers slip. there is a much much larger chance things go poorly and you end up getting hurt worse than originally intended because now your assailant is pissed and more heavily armed.
im not talking out my ass here, i’m a case manager at a homeless shelter for addicts. we have a lot of violent behavior. none of our staff carry any sort of weapons. we are trained to de-escalate or remove ourselves from the situation. i have worked there over two years without being harmed despite intervening in many fights and having weapons pulled on me.
there is safety in numbers. there is safety in well lit streets and staying on your phone and knowing when to scream and run. there is no safety in “personal defense items”.
it’s an illusion. it’s a mental game. a weapon is a safety blanket that will sooner kill you than stop someone else from doing so.
we are also not in PVP grand theft auto. as scary as things seem, humans are not out there re-enacting the purge 24/7. there are lots of people who benefit from you being afraid of everyone you pass on the street. a lot of those people will try to sell you things to keep you safe. don’t fall for it.
It’s fantastic actually, I love living in a place where a big chunk of the random population isn’t just carrying around dangerous weapons. A weapon turns a shouting match between strangers into a violent confrontation. The last time I was attacked was several years ago now, I was punched by a drunk man on a bus, and let me tell you there is no weapon in the hands of anybody (including me) that wouldn’t have made that situation much worse. I would be a lot more scared (and in a lot more actual physical danger) living somewhere where people just carried weapons down the street to defend themselves from the other people just carrying weapons down the street. The last time I handled a gun was hunting on the farm and I like it that way.
I just had ‘how to avoid dog bites’ training at work- and we were essentially told, there is no version of this where you win, regardless of weapon. So even in a fight in which the aggressor isn’t even able to pick up the stun gun or knife; you still lose.
I assume the same policy applies (at least partially) with dogs as it does with humans - do not become the aggressor, do not attack. Because if you attack, you better be prepared to keep attacking until they can’t come at you. You better put them on the ground and make sure they don’t get back up.
People (and dogs!) are more likely to disengage if the fight isn’t escalated. You pull out a weapon - you’ve just escalated this whole situation, big time.
I carry a knife in my work pants, because I open boxes, and need to poke weird things, and various other work related bits and pieces - this is the only way I’m legally allowed to carry it in Australia. I’ve never had a problem with police about this, probably 50% because I’m a small skinny white woman, and 50% because I’m clearly dressed in a work uniform that would make sense for me to have a knife or other items (steel cap work boots, cargo pants, reflective jacket etc).
When I lived on a farm the farmers all wore pocket knives on their belts into town and nobody gave a shit about it. Farmers use pocket knives for stuff, I don’t think it would’ve occurred to a cop that it would count as a weapon unless they were looking for a reason to have trouble with you. (But to be fair, a pocket knife would also be a terrible defensive weapon. By the time you’ve gotten the fucking thing open, your nose is already broken.)
That is so true. The simple truth of the matter is that there aren’t too many fights where carrying a defensive weapon is going to change the playing field. An inexperienced user, even one who’s taken self defense courses, is liable to panic and hurt themselves, but even if you know exactly what you’re doing and you’re calm and competent under conflict, the weapon is much more likely to be a hinderance than a help. Either you already have the upper hand in the conflict, in which case all a weapon is gonna do it help you grievously wound someone you didn’t need to wound, or you don’t have the upper hand (the other guy is bigger/better trained/less inebriated/outnumbers you), in which case they’re much more likely to end up with the weapon than you, and by drawing it you’ve escalated the fight to ‘dangerous weapon’ territory. Congratulations, those three dickheads following you down the street threateningly and calling you names are now three dickheads with a knife who may or may not decide to stab you since you made this a knife fight. The only situation in which carrying defensive weapons is a good general life policy is if you are actively looking to start a fight.
I mean, I live in a rural area- not uncommon in the slightest for someone to have a multi-tool or pocketknife on their belt. Mine is… not exactly that, probably a 12cm blade that flips out of the handle.
We do also only have like, uh, four cops, and they’ve got bigger shit to deal with than me for sure (it’s a day that ends in Y, so there’s probably a car on fire somewhere).
For me personally, part of my work is rocking up to peoples isolated rural houses and telling them things they don’t want to hear (you need to stop dumping rubbish in the creek). The most likely version of an incident is me being threatened with a gun, or alternatively being set on by an attack dog. Either way, I’m fucked. Me pulling out a weapon makes that situation infinitely worse. Best case, I’m still in the car, and I just… leave. Second best case scenario - I’m still in the car- and a couple tonnes of metal and my commitment to being alive means I’m running your ass over.
They’re talking (post ‘don’t get bit by dogs’ training) about getting us extendable batons (and the restricted weapons licenses required to have them) in order to help prevent dog attacks. Not to hit the dog if it attacks, but essentially to extend and hold across the body and shove into the mouth of the dog, so it bites it and not you. Gives time to keep the dog off you, and get to an escape route. We’ll see what happens with that, but theres also the chance we’ll go down the ‘riot shield’ pathway, which would be preferable- no license needed! And also in the case of incidents when there’s human members of the public about- a riot shield looks very much like ~not a weapon~
A riot shield is probably also easier to block a dog with, just in terms of surface area
