[kiriakasis]

Dropping in to give an alternate interpretation.

When, many layer up joefranklinsrs said that china would fail I think he likely meant that china today would fail in a number of years.

That is, it would have to change in some meaningful way to keep succeeding and so in term or reliable investment is not a good option whether it fail or not.

[sumedh]

> he likely meant that china today would fail in a number of years.

How many years?

[kiriakasis]

who knows, that is irrelevant in some sense. more than the number of years the focus should be on the causes and the problems causing it to fail.

when china will fail likely all that predicted it would have guessed by mere luck. But they might have spotted the right problems.

If I had to take a very wild guess the only ways china could fail would be success from external attack or side problems with their ability to handle the usual problems.

Also when somebody says X will fail in Y years they might mean "im working so that it will happens"

[sumedh]

> who knows, that is irrelevant in some sense.

Exactly, that is why you should not waste your time reading such gloom and doom predictions unless that person is confident enough to put money on the line.

[kiriakasis]

the prediction is often useless, the predicted causes can be intersting (quite often they are just memetic parroting of other still...)