Yep we have no way to compete with low income countries.

Firstly their wages is very low.

Secondly the amount of inductions and safety related stuff people have to attend to even for an office job, it was literally the entire first week and a yearly update.

Then all the other compliance you have to do. Twice yearly fire drill. Need multiple people on site that’s certified for first aid, fire wardens and the whole coordinator.

A whole month of people’s working life every year is paid in annual leave and that’s not even counting sickies or other personal leave. Overtime rates starting at 1.5.

When someone dies on the job here people get in a lot of shit (and rightly so).

In China people are kept in dormitories and a friend who was born there said that lower educated people who usually takes this job are kept in dormitories so they can spend more time working (less time commuting). Some are known to only get 1 day off a month, which isn’t unusual.

Definitely no overtime rates, no sickies or personal leave (don’t work don’t get paid) no annual leave.

If someone has an accident at work well there’s 10 waiting at the door to replace them. Same if they quit. You want more wages? Well bye, there’s someone to replace you.

Not saying that’s correct but that’s the reality. We will never be able to complete because their standards for workers is way lower.

We should focus on high tech industries. Health/education industry we should increase wages for nurses and teachers.

More investment in IT, FinTech etc. Banking, consultancy, etc white collar jobs.

Let the lower income countries do the dangerous jobs and focus on high return safer jobs in Australia.

They’ll pay a very heavy price. How far is the Taiwan strait? If you think D-day is bad you haven’t seen anything yet. Many wouldn’t even make it to the beach.

Having said that they do have excess males, they’ll probably be better off to lose those. Because only the numpty bellends join the armed forces, the ones with more than 2 brain cells have some self preservation. Noone joins the armed forces if you have other prospects in China.

Many people will lose their only child. This cannot be good as many people will protest. However the government has one advantage over other countries.

China isn’t as unified as propaganda leave you to believe. Noone gives a shit about anyone other than their immediate family members. You can see this when people get run over and noone helps. Or how they push and do everything to be first in line with no regard for anyone else.

Money is king in China thesedays. They will probably have no issue shaking down or worse their countrymen if they get a bonus or two, all they have to do is import people from the next province or two to do the dirty work.

Not saying it’s a smart idea but just saying they could probably contain the blowback of the body bags coming home and lose the most unproductive of society in the process.

We’ll see if Xi goes fuck it I wouldn’t be around for the consequences when he gets older. He’s 70 now, in a decade he will be 80. The average age in China is 78. He probably will beat that as he would have the best health care but beyond that it’s not guaranteed. So not much to lose for him.

China and Taiwan can be one country tomorrow. I’ve said it a hundred times.

All China has to do is cede full control to Taiwan. It will be governed by Taiwan but it will be one country.

Yes I know it’s too hard politically and unrealistic. Because they don’t really want unification they want control.

I think if they passed the legislation first as a trial and then if it went well put it through a referendum there would be more support.

I’m not saying he would but he could just force it through legislation now, with the greens support and independents support, Pocock is in ACT who was the only place to vote yes, I think they have enough to pass.

Sure it will go against the results of the referendum, or “the will of the people” but it will be a legal way to do it. I think if it went through legislation it would become like GST, deeply unpopular at the time but it just becomes fait accompli and noone would dare reverse it. Because once in noone wants the optics of being “the racist in the parliament” besides maybe ONP.

China can unite with Taiwan tomorrow if they want to peacefully.

It’s been done before. Look how East and West Germany did it. Overnight.

All China has to do is be East Germany and let Taiwan be West Germany and it will be sorted. But obviously they don’t want that because being one country isn’t their main goal.

It’s the system that is the issue. Without checks and balances if it wasn’t Xi it would just be another guy with a different name.

I believe Deng Xiaoping had two successors lined up last being Hi Jintao, so a dictator was always going to seize power when xi came on.

So you can replace until Xi showed up with until anyone showed up that term.

So if small businesses aren’t what you call producing anything of value then what would you consider would be something that does produce something of value? Out of curiosity.

Because those small businesses are providing services to the community/other businesses which wouldn’t be able to function without them. That’s not the case with the censorship pencil pushers the businesses there would be able to function better without the extra layer of bureaucracy.

And big 4 accounting and investment banking is required, they fill a market in outsourcing by providing expertise where it doesn’t make sense for every company to have a full time employee on it. Good for short term projects the places I worked in all use them. Investment banking well you have to spend money to make money so yes they’re providing value by providing the investment for other businesses to grow.

Well let’s see, I don’t know because I don’t live there. Not everyone/everything lives in/revolves around America.

In any case I’ll bite then. Everyone I know who’s in business degrees are of minimum big 4 or in an investment bank at a minimum, the smarter ones have their own small business.

Are you seriously saying those are less productive than someone who censors information and makes it harder for people to conduct business?

And to your second point the overproduction of housing is two fold, firstly it’s one of the very few investable resources there and second the local government needed to sell the housing to raise taxes and needed to build despite demand or lack of due to keeping people in a job.

For some unknown reason the parties are swapped in NSW.

For example LNP in NSW would bring in policies that the Labor party would bring in other states, whereas the opposite is true for NSW Labor.

NSW LNP had very good policies like the electric vehicle policy, electric vehicle charging grants, they are the party of infrastructure with the westconnex and metro projects up, Parramatta light rail.

Whereas Chris Minns and Labor I’d actually compare Minns with the onion eater of all people. Very good at cancelling projects because he didn’t think of it first and provides no policies or thoughts of his own.

Wanted to cancel the metro, whilst providing nothing in replacement (only saved because the project is too far to be cancelled), too scared to do anything in regards to housing policy, no pill testing is the latest one. Cancelled the ev grants. In fact I’m not sure of anything that they’ve done through their own policies since they came in. Hopefully an one term government because they seriously lack vision.

It might dissuade people from buying an iPhone or computer every year. So much stuff is thrown away prematurely.

They are own goaling their economy with these counter productive pencil pusher jobs that provide zero or negative input to the economy.

Real estate crisis, reduction of jobs especially in the younger population, lack of investment from overseas because of zero covid for too long forcing companies to move supply chains and that’s before picking a fight with everyone causing uncertainty which makes it less investable.

Cutting down the “private” sector which provided the majority of the jobs because that would threaten pooh bear.

It’ll make China weaker in the long run, but the people in charge won’t care, they’ll be long dead before then. All the people in the top powers are all multi billionaires, even if they lost 95 percent of their wealth they would still live extremely comfortably.

As for the general populace, I like to use the Kim Jong Un anology - a fat man within a nation of skinny men. Not really of importance to the ruling elite.

Through drones we are seeing a first hand view of the war. First time I’ve seen a person shot, someone blown up. It’s not like the Hollywood films that’s for sure.

No bleeding, missing arms like every war film in Hollywood. You don’t see anything, they get shot and just become lifeless. No visible blood or anything. Similarly the drone dropped grenades, I would have thought they would be missing body parts.

But on the outside you wouldn’t even know it’s terminal injuries. And there was another one where the tank commander landed on the roof due to a cook off in what seemed to be in one piece. But then someone calculated the G force as 300gs.

Thanks to drones I now know people mostly go out on a whimper and not a bang.

If it’s any consolation it’s pretty bad to say but it might be good for humanity in the end. Half the issues they have is the lack of men caused by a previous war with a figure that Putin is trying to emulate now.

Putin is sending more of his men to their deaths unnecessarily. Could have been avoided by not starting the war. But what’s done is done, now that it is started the men that has been liquidated will help restrict Russia in the future. They still haven’t recovered from WW2.

Her mistake was to do it in a Muslim country. I have a Muslim friend you wouldn’t even know if they didn’t tell you.

Outdrinks everyone, sometimes eats pork but rarely. But that’s because they only get pub food, according to him food just takes up space that can otherwise be occupied by beer/vodka/gin/burbon. Noone else I know Muslim or not goes to this extreme, it can’t possibly be good for their liver.

He’s at least smart enough not to do this in a Muslim country.

Actually for me it’s quite good. Get like 1/3 back from dental. Then a bit back from gym fees. Optical is another one I use regularly and I get a massage a year. And most importantly ambulance cover just in case.

Granted one or two of them I would have skipped if I wasn’t paying private health (optical and massage).

At the higher salaries if people didn’t want to pay the Medicare surcharge and having to buy junk policies they can funnel their discretionary income into investments, the costs of the investments can be negatively geared so you can earn for example a million dollars and only pay 90000 taxable income worth of tax (an extreme example I know). ASX, property, into the business etc. where you reduce your taxable income in exchange for gaining (investable) assets.

I mean Joe Lycett was briefly known as Hugo Boss, name didn’t stick after he changed it back.

There’s actually a famous instance of it happening. K-19. They had to go into the reactor room to fix up the cooling because of botched manufacturing process.

What happened to them after can only be described as gruesome. I’d rather a bullet to the brain after.

I like NSW governments policy. Highrise depends on infrastructure and not how far it is from the CBD. But it is still not good enough.

We have 220m+ in Parramatta which is 20km from CBD and from what I understand the application for it to be higher was denied because it was too close to the airport.

Macquarie Park, Rhodes are new suburbs with 150m+ (definition for a skyscraper). Many others are getting 100m+, Olympic Park, Liverpool etc.

So it is quite spread out already. Even places very far away from Sydney like Penrith, Rouse Hill, Edmondson Park and Leppington will be zoned for high rise.

But we need to overhaul the zoning laws for the missing middle. In Sydney Bankstown to Marrickville and Revesby to Turella should all be up for 100m towers or maximum allowed due to proximity to airport.

Might be a good thing in the end. There is a way to remove him, he will go sooner or later, everyone dies eventually, not even the most powerful dictator can get around that.

What we do know is that he has stuffed up his country for his own personal gain. Killed off so many jobs because Jack Ma and co was getting too powerful. These are high value tech sector jobs that the now unemployed youths would have been happy to be employed as.

He has put in alot of money into state owned enterprises which doesn’t have as much output as more pseudo private companies. Causing higher unemployment.

Zero covid lockdown that was a big cause of this economic situation well it was Xis policy and noone could tell him it wasn’t a good idea until it was too little too late.

Again as I say he has stuffed his country up for his personal gain which wouldn’t even matter in a few decades time once he passes away. But the damage to his country will be lasting and affect future generations (not that he will care, it doesn’t affect him).

Imagine the alternative in which we have a competent dictator. We may all be conquered and have to live under their political model. That’s a hard no from me.

They’re very nationalistic especially China. There’s no guarantee they don’t want to conquer the world even if they were not authoritarian. Just ask any of them about the 9 dash line, instead of saying something neutral like no comment they say yeah it belongs to us.

So the best thing is even if they democratise, for the moment never interrupt your enemy whilst they’re making a mistake.