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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We can all thank our lucky stars for that. Totalitarian regimes are usually corrupt, and talent is based on how much you pay rather than your actual talent. They usually do alot of own goals that benefit the leader and it’s cronies rather than the population at large. And constant purges which again helps the upper echelons but causes the country to go backwards.

We can thank their corruption for their ‘3 day special operation’ taking almost 2 years and counting now.

Similarly China now has a population and economic crisis of their own doing to please their leader. Disallowing tutoring causing alot of younger generations to lose their job and killing the tech industry jobs because of beef with jack ma. And the one child policy which was a large part of the population decline.

We’re lucky that people can’t speak up to their leader when they make mistakes. Imagine if these regimes were competent. We just need to look at Germany in WW2 to see how that can turn out.

Inflation is sweeping the rest of the world. It’s a good thing people are buying less of stuff they don’t absolutely need.

He won’t hold elections.

He’s a dead man if he’s not the president or if he loses the war. There’s no way out for him, it’s all in until the end.

Singapore’s success is partly due to the absence of minimum wages and also the use of migrant workers like Qatar. Take that away…

Unlike China there are tonnes of people who want to live in Japan. The only problem is that the immigration laws are extremely restrictive. They could solve this issue today, if politics gets in the way of doing so then it’s on them.

Again not sure what foreign property would do for them when they haven’t left China and have no plans to do so. They’re almost at retirement age so if they haven’t made any plans…

So the other half of this story was they went around to all their relatives who are based overseas and got them to “store” converted currency in GBP, USD, CAD etc. If it was me I would be converting to the place I’m interested in residing not just anything I can get my hands on.

The other relatives weren’t smart enough or was too under pressure to say no. Also someone storing currency in your name rather than their own even as a relative causes tax issues at the very minimum and other issues if the money has come from a non legitimate means (I’m not inferring this is what happened just saying the worst case scenario on why you shouldn’t deposit money from someone else)