Joe

A simple search shows several cases of reparations or more targeted compensation schemes by some western countries, japan, etc. Not covering all the atrocities, and some WTFs too… Go search and compare as needed.

It has knobs, twiddle them or use the raw data.

Yes - societal collapses tend to do that.

Seems relatively on par with the rest of the world…

https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20250731-112524/grapher/life-expectancy.html

• Across the world, people are living longer. In 1900, the global average life expectancy was 32 years. By 2023, this had more than doubled to 73 years.
• Countries around the world made big improvements, and life expectancy more than doubled in every region. This wasn’t just due to falling child mortality; people started living longer at all ages.

Thanks. I find it quite fascinating, despite the open hostility of some here.

That china is a socialist state is not in question.

We’re talking about its economic system, and I believe “state capitalism” is the right description.

That most of its major industries are state controlled and the biggest firms are SOEs doesn’t change this.

As a side note: There is still a lot of private capital slushing around in China, and many USD-millionaires. There’s still significant inequality. They still have work to do, but that doesn’t detract from what they have achieved.

It’s a market economy too, of course, but it is capitalist because of the private capital in business. That the state also has representatives in large companies plus is often a minor investor doesn’t remove the capitalist aspect. In other countries you sometimes see unions and workers councils, backed by laws and courts serving similar roles to protect workers and limit excesses in large corporations. China has the ability to refocus its economic policies and priorities far more directly, which is quite cool when you think about the challenges humanity faces. I hope it can stay on a peaceful path.

If 90% of the population really support the government (hopefully without much deception necessary, but perhaps not so important), and the 10% aren’t being persecuted, then that’s wonderful.

Talking about china? I’d probably classify china as a socialist authoritarian state with its own brand of state capitalism. That they have feared revolution, suppress protests and simultaneously try to be seen as fair and just has probably been a good thing for citizens … unfortunately, the masses are increasingly easy to control, and incentives for good & responsive governance will likely change as a result.

You are talking about military aid, which is something else. Eg. Israel gets military aid, Gaza gets food and medicine. Pre-trump, there were reductions and slow-downs of the former based on intelligence reports, and attempts to guarantee the latter, trying to limit the civilian humanitarian crisis of Israel’s response to Hamas’ attack on Israel. Hamas opened pandora’s box.

On Ukraine: Many countries throughout the world are supplying both direct and indirect military, financial and humanitarian aid to Ukraine so that it may continue to defend itself against an illegal war of aggression, initiated by russia against a peaceful Ukraine. Pre-2014 saw ukranians and russian speaking ukranians living and working side by side (including in the east and in crimea). Conflicts were primarily driven by elites in politics and business, and not borne by ordinary citizens. After russia invaded in 2014, a russia perpetrated genocide of Ukranian culture began in all occipied regions. Rigged “elections”, oppression of proud Ukranians (forced relocations, imprisonment, social restrictions) along with forced conscription (DPR/LPR, later Crimea too). Peace destroyed on a political whim by a neighbouring country. This initial invasion led to the militarization of Ukraine, whose military was small and weak in 2014. Russia then expanded the war in 2022, attempting and failing a complete takeover of Ukraine. The number of civilian casualties skyrocketed as a result, along with military casualties. Millions of lives destroyed, all because of russian political decisions.

My opinion: Russia fears the prosperity and anti-corruption efforts that will come with EU membership. NATO is a bogeyman for russia, while the real risk to russia comes from a prosperous independent Ukraine, hence the desire to keep a foot on its throat.

China? As already stated, they aren’t a particularly big contributor to the world’s humanitarian aid given their economy… they are mostly doing business deals for influence. China is the up and coming superpower, and saw an opportunity while the US focused elsewhere. While Europe pays to keep migration crises at bay (often excacerbated by russian and US involvement), China reaps the reward of pragmatic engagement with any country, democracies and despots alike. Good for them, I guess.

FTR, China (as the big communist-style economy) seems to be one of the smaller donors among the big economies to international aid programmes for both food and healthcare.

The US (until the schmuck) was the biggest by far for food contributions via the WFP, with the EU and individual donors making up the majority. Healthcare seems more balanced contribution-wise (not so much from the US)

Obviously it is hard to get exact numbers. In particular, China also has its own aid programme too. Estimates are of USD 5 billion to USD 8 billion per year (1,000 million) … a total for all aid.

Sure, aid is also used for leverage (soft power), but there certainly seems to be a historical pattern of the capitalist superpowers helping to feed the world, despite it often still not being enough…

It will be interesting to see if China has stepped up, with the US cutting back under trump.

edit: In a world where leaders and governments put the needs of people first, one wouldn’t need as much aid, of course.

Hah, yeah. Vibe coding and prompt engineering seem like a huge fad right now, although I don’t think it’s going to die out, just the hype.

The most successful vibe projects in the next few years are likely to be the least innovative technically, following well trodden paths (and generating lots of throwaway code).

I suppose we’ll see more and more curated collections of AI-friendly design documents and best-practice code samples to enable vibe coding for varied use-cases, and this will be the perceived value add for various tools in the short term. The spec driven development trend seems to have value, adding semantic layers for humans and AI alike.

Most code on the planet is boring legacy code, though. Novel and interesting is typically a small fraction of a codebase, and it will often be more in the design than the code itself. Anything that can help us make boring code more digestible is welcome. Plenty of other pitfalls along the way though.

No, but it can help a capable developer to have more of those moments, as one can use LLMs and coding agents to (a) help explain the relationships in a complicated codebase succinctly and (b) help to quickly figure out why one’s code doesn’t work as expected (from simple bugs to calling out one’s own fundamental misunderstandings), giving one more time to focus on what matters to oneself.