We are living in a technological cold war where there is an iron curtain increasingly developing uh being drawn up between mainly China and the US. And what is clear to me is that increasingly uh Hong Kong is getting looped into mainland China. This I think may be net bad for the financial services sector in Hong Kong which relies on being a crossber hub not just of funds and financing as you know but also of talent and IP.
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The most interesting idea is that countries become great powers due to their mastery of the most important technologies of the day — gunpowder, sailing ships, steam power, mass production, steel, the combustion engine, industrial chemicals, electricity, airplanes, and so on. It's also possible to imagine that leading nations fall behind due to technological disruption. Britain's industrial revolution made mercantile trade less pivotal as a source of national wealth, so the Netherlands fell behind.
Noah Smith
Before the war, Iran didn't control the strait, simply because it didn't realize it could. Drone technology had advanced to the point where Iran was able to shut down Hormuz, but Iran didn't know that until the U.S. attack forced it to try the risky and desperate move of actually shutting it down.
Noah Smith
Even if one country is better at making everything, it doesn't have a comparative advantage in everything. That's impossible. Every country has a comparative advantage at something! That's why in the theory of comparative advantage, trade is balanced. In the real world, China's massive trade surplus means that trade is not balanced; much of the time, China isn't trading goods for other goods, it's trading goods for IOUs.
Noah Smith