Cisco complied with the NSA PRISM program (Snowden leaks) and were putting hardware backdoors in their hardware on request from the NSA, for hardware that was destined for overseas.
The rise of China has done a lot to destroy the neoliberal, globalist dream.
Letting them cheat the globalist system (e.g. violating IP laws, human rights violations, Uyghur/Tibetan genocide) may have been fine when they were desperately poor, but there was always an implicit assumption that they would eventually start playing by the rules and culturally liberalize. But they're not. How can we hold onto ideals like "diversity is our strength" and open borders are good when China is kicking ass and threatening the balance of power as an insular ethnostate with one of the lowest rates of immigrants on the planet?
And now they're growing to a power level that threatens to rival the US and its authority to police this global system we've created. That isn't stable, and the west would be insane to not shut China out and take a step back from our open, globalist ideals until we sort out this geopolitical game of thrones.
But the IP laws are visibly stupid, their role in the system is prevent success stories like China where some plucky upstart vaults to the forefront of the industrial world and drags a billion people out of poverty. The response to China achieving such success by ignoring IP laws should be to recognise the laws have been disasters and then to release the limits worst of the limits they impose on Western innovators.
A huge part of the software industry is there because of explicit GPL-style agreements defang the intent of IP laws while working inside the legal requirements they impose. The west should allow good ideas to be deployed in its own industrial processes.
So this shows how much the West considers liberalism and open markets to be its "values" when they throw that completely away when they're economically threatened. This tells me that in hardship is when people show their true colors. The money is the true "value", everything else is just a side show.
When you're playing prisoner's dilemma games, and your co-player is consistently defecting, you can only play cooperate for so long. Tit for tat is the only way you don't get majorly screwed by the defector over time.
Its quiet easy to understand, you can be liberal and free so long as wealth keeps flowing into your part of the world. What are you going to do make fun of becoming more wealthier.
The liberalism and freedom stops once too much money flows out of your part of the world, hence companies like palantir popping up like mushrooms. No one likes to be made fun of when they are in a declining trajectory.
No, just no. I get where you’re coming from, but I disagree in the strongest terms that copying China is the way forward. Closed, centralized models can scale quickly, as China did, but open models generate more frontier innovation and resilience. Iirc, nearly half of our unicorns have immigrant founders.
Sure, let’s harden IP and other trade laws, and punish China for violations (start treating them as an adult, a nation peer, instead of a rowdy child). But giving up our strategic advantage because China was able to semi-copy-us without having that advantage would be a huge mistake imo. I’m not saying America doesn’t need major changes, but I don’t think the way forward is to close our borders to global talent. Instead, let’s take advantage of our superpower status to implement UHC and UBI, to make our nation even more attractive to talented immigrants.
this is what most WEIRD people do not understand: (Western-Educated-Industrial-Rich-Democratic) - by today it looks like that the Chinese system may proof to be more "performant" on most/several (all?) levels. Its hard to accept for libertarian minds, i guess.
Once here on HN someone wrote like: "democratic systems seems to be too slow to adapt in world changing at our current speed".
China did some vey wise decisions from their perspective; think about this joint-venture thingy that foreign companies need to have a JV partner which always holds at least 50.1% - very clever! Why did no western state do this? Its one of the by far smartest decision that you could do.
This JV obssession is weird, China basically admitted that they can never compete on ICE cars and bet on EVs instead, either this JV model doesn't actually work or what was transferred do not have much value.
Now people claim they stole their IPs through JVs and that's why they are good at making EVs, this theory doesn't add up.
Also, what China offered is a vast untapped market, no one forced these companies to go to China to set up JVs and start picking up gold down the street, this was way before WTO and China was not at all obligated to open it's market, let alone for free.
Now ask one question, what the EU has to offer to "force" China to set up JVs? Guaranteed billion dollars profit?
EU car market is crowded and full of incumbents, Chinese cars represent a low single digit market share despite the weekly "China is taking over the EU car market" news article.
China bet on EVs because of national security. China has less reliable access to oil than many other countries and the US can choke off delivery of oil to China through bottlenecks if it comes to war. Investing in solar, wind and nuclear makes sense in their predicament. "Green energy" and "saving the planet" are secondary and mostly marketing by comparison.
Countries hitting their industrialization stride have a bloom of real world applicable talent that they can direct to these things in a way that is a little harder for others. Especially when you have a huge population.
It isn't just the US, Russia has oil and shares a land border with China. However, Russia isn't always friendly with China, nor is the middle east, and anyways, it just seems like a headache to deal with them + the petro dollar when they have plenty of energy to tap at home.
Air pollution was also a huge problem, aside from national security. China's empahsis on STEM and the fact that they've been a huge source of engineering/science/tech talent meant China could just tap its own human resources rather than making them go abroad for decent jobs. The fact that they also know how to build things and have set up all the infra for that is just another bonus.
China is willing to play ball in less developed countries, and the deals they setup is not just Chinese companies coming in and dominating the market, they are also partnering with and trying to raise local companies as well. That won't work in Europe or the US, at least for now.
It's true that Russia and China share a border, but the infrastructure to move oil across it at large scale barely exists and I got the impression the geology is very unfavorable for it. It's probably easier to ship it, but future pipeline expansions may still happen.
The whole Belt and Road initiative seemed to mimic a Korean style labor export to increase the inflows of currency into the country while keeping people employed, but I also kind of figured it was aimed at reducing the friction of future resource transportation between the countries.
Remember 10 foot tall Ivan? Apart from eugenics experiments on the basketball court, neither are the Chinese. In light of gross over-spending on showcase infrastructure projects, and overbuilding housing where people don't want to live, over-praising the CCP's system for training and promoting leaders is not going to make assessments of China more accurate.
I agree that our system (America’s, specifically) is too slow, but it’s not inherent to democracy, it’s the fact we only have elections every few years, because these rules were written in the 1700s when holding an election / voting in an election was difficult. No snap elections when the government is about to shut down (would’ve prevented all the nonsense of the last month and a half).
This isn’t cope. China has virtually no cultural exports of note compared to its size, except some gacha games (that are still mainly voiced in Japanese, which does have cultural exports). Every time I visit, I have to accept that my internet is going to be ridiculously unreliable and throttled and flaky.
I’m not saying China is “wrong”, but it’s not the obvious winner to me. Nor is it to my Chinese-born spouse who moved here for the greater opportunities and freedom.
It's difficult to export culture when the receiving cultures don't speak the language, don't share religion, etc. US has a big benefit of being part of the Anglophone world going back to it's founding and more recently with Western European dominance from WW2 where basically everyone there knows some level of English. Also, don't forget China has suffered from great "humiliation" for the last few hundred years and hasn't been in much of a position to export much of anything until recently. Furthermore, the main reason the US has absorbed some SK and Japanese cultural things is we brought them into our neoempire.
Kids in America are hopelessly addicted to Tiktok but that doesn't count as a cultural export.
Most the items in people's homes are made in China but that doesn't count either.
Chinese rappers could be dominating the pop charts and we would just say rap was invented in America so that doesn't count.
All the American kids could be learning to play the guzheng and we would just say we invented a new American style of playing the guzheng, doesn't count.
Cybertruck is a great case study in how people confuse form for function.
In a world where technology is advancing exponentially, aesthetics increasingly offer a poor signal for performance, and only those who obsessively look under the hood and disregard form will see through it all.
Yep. There were endless articles and hundreds of comments here about how atrocious the crash safety of the cyber truck must be for occupants. Everyone knew for a fact it had no crumple zone, etc.
Then the actual crash testing data comes out…… And crickets.
Why would you limit to only billionaires, and why would you compare it to all spend? Try funding pensions and healthcare by taxing the wealth of the top 0.5% and it doesn't sound so impossible.
A realistic wealth tax probably caps out and around 2%, remembering that the net worth of very rich people is generally not liquid and can be difficult to mark to market. Any higher rate risks forcing the rich to have an asset fire sale, which liquidates productive assets and isn't really good for anybody. At six to seven percent you would force them to be entirely liquid and would begin to shrink their wealth, killing off the tax base in a few generations. Even this is absurdly optimistic since a globally standardized wealth tax is a pipe dream and without it you get capital flight as a result of any wealth tax at all, but let's ignore that.
To steelman this as much as possible let's say you can charge 6%. The top 0.5% are worth $30-$40 trillion in the U.S. (which is just an easy example because the statistics are available) which gives you a probably unrealistically high max annual tax revenue of $2.4 trillion. Social Security and Medicare in their current form cost $1.35 trillion a year; Medicare for All would double to triple that or more, depending on what estimate you believe.
Europeans pay for their social safety nets with very broad taxation while America instead charges negative income tax (after credits) to the bottom 60 percent of the population (even after inflation, excise taxes, state tax, payroll tax and tariffs the total tax burden is pretty slim at the bottom end by European standards). There doesn't seem to be a mathematically feasible way to give benefits to the working class that the working class doesn't pay for.
You're probably right, though U.S healthcare costs per capita are much higher than they need to be, and would be much lower in a "proper" single payer system like in Europe. In any case, a wealth tax would still help a lot with being able to fund these programs. Yes, the working class does have to pay as well, but it'd be much less if there were a reasonable wealth tax.
But yes, global co-operation to enable a large enough tax on wealth is not going to happen any time soon. A more likely scenario is that as automation develops and as the share of income that capital gets grows, the working class will end up in a position bad enough that capitalism will collapse and be replaced with something else. Hopefully with something better, but could also be worse.
Yes, you could do this, but it's parasitic behavior that depends on your ability to extract value from the labor of other people's kids. If everyone does this, then there are no kids to take over the work to keep things running and money doesn't do anything anymore because the economy stops working.
It did not. I'm just pointing out reality. Kids are expensive, and it's probably easier to save for retirement if you don't have any. Don't get me wrong: I love my kids and wouldn't trade them for anything, and I have no problem working more and harder for them, but we don't live in the age where retirement depends on having kids anymore.
Maybe you meant to propose to change that, so only people with kids have a right to a government pension, which is certainly an interesting idea, but also doubly painful for people who wanted kids but were unable to have any.
Not having kids yourself but still having a retirement of any kind is a privilege that only exists if most people still have kids, so that their kids become workers who will provide the goods and services you need to keep living in retirement.
Government pension doesn't magically continue to work if everyone chooses the individually optimal solution of not having kids and consequently having a much easier time saving more money for retirement. If everyone executed this strategy, all that extra money you saved would become worthless, because there would be no one to give you goods and services in exchange for it.
If everybody suddenly stopped having kids, I think a lack of retirement would be the least of our problems. But you seem to feel as if only people who have kids are entitled to retirement, while people without kids don't have that right. And that's very much an opinion, not a fact.
It was the case in the distant past when your kids were your retirement, and even then people tended to work until they died, but that time is now in the distant past. At least in the industrialised world. There may be poor countries where this is still very much the case.
I don't get how this isn't obvious. If you can't defend your territory without relying on another country, you are not truly sovereign. The larger union might be sovereign, but you aren't, and your protection is only as strong as the larger union.
I don’t think you have to go quite that far. NATO was intended to provide cover against the other superpower bloc in Europe. That superpower isn’t really a superpower anymore, but the remnant that legally succeeded it still has a lot of nukes.
Arguably in a world of superpowers, only superpowers have total sovereignty under your definition, hence why I said it was a sliding scale. 95% of any individual nation or most configurations of alliances you could technically (though maybe not plausibly) come up with would still get crushed by the French military in a mano a mano military conflict. They can defend themselves, but what if they have to defend themselves alone vs the United States, Russia, the PRC, or a medley of European great powers? NATO keeps them from having to go it alone, and NATO plus the EU takes a couple of those possibilities off the table, at least for a while, but in Charles de Gaulle’s time, France still had a colonial empire they were trying to keep together (and they still have a fair number of overseas territories outside of metropolitan France) and the plausibility of NATO keeping it together was all up in the air.
Throughout the duration of the Cold War, I don’t think you can make a winning argument that on balance the US was ever a bad ally, but as an old European leader, he was definitely right to be skeptical about the tradeoffs, and right to think that if France has more power, then it wouldn’t need to cede sovereignty or at least much sovereignty to all these newfangled international institutions popping up across Europe.
I don't think the issue is whether or not it's obvious. It boils down to weighing the risks. It seems to me that the weight has favored dependence on another superpower for the past several decades. I'm sure everyone involved understood that the consequence of that decision was quasi-sovereignty. I'm not in Europe, so I'm not sure what the UK government has been saying this whole time, but it probably sounds really bad to admit that publicly. So, I'm sure they perform lingual acrobatics to try to reassure the public that they are truly independent when it comes to military security.
Perhaps it's a naive take, but I'm just armchairing this from the perspective of playing a 4x grand strategy game and the sort of decisions you have to make in these contexts.
Anything can be called 4D chess if we add enough layers to the logic. I agree that what you're describing makes sense; but I think it's probably more in line with the bureaucratic mindset to observe this is the result of decades of kicking cans down the road.
Yes, unlike the "player" in a 4x game, there's too much discontinuity in administrations between decades. Makes it very easy to kick the can down the road.
No that's the thing, you can't get the treatment if it doesn't exist.
For the years that i was living in Ontario there were only 3 MRI machines across the entire province. The waiting period for that diagnostic MRI ranged from anywhere between 10 and 24 months. If doctors were even convinced you were worth getting it.
You could die from something before you could even end up getting properly diagnosed with it.
You might not have competent enough doctors in some countries for specialist treatment if you need it. A popular Canadian Youtuber who lives in Japan (which generally has great medical care) decided to relocate to the United States during the time they were undergoing their particular cancer treatment a couple of years ago. Japanese yakuza bosses pretty famously obtained their illegal organ transplants at UCLA Medical instead of in Japan...
The US's system is certainly flawed but it guarantees that you can obtain the best care possible if you can afford it. That's much better than not being able to get the care even if you can afford it.
> For the years that i was living in Ontario there were only 3 MRI machines across the entire province.
Jesus. I've got more MRI machines than that within walking distance of my house.
It does seem to have improved significantly, as in 2020 Ontario had 124 (which made it the best provisioned province at the time). When were you there?
Do those machines operate 24/7? I'm Canadian and get regular (publicly funded) MRIs as part of my healthcare needs and they always happen on time, and close to home. Zero issues. Sometimes you get appointments at weird hours but that's because they run them constantly.
We could definitely use more and our healthcare system could definitely use serious improvements, but the way it's talked about amongst Americans often seems a little divorced from reality.
Is that not two different tradeoffs? One is first come first serve and the other is purely if you have the resources at the time? The only people I see that praise the "guarantee if you can afford it", are indeed, the ones that can afford it.
Soviet bread lines were first come first serve too and I don't know any former Soviet state residents gushing about how great those times were. Those 3 MRI machines that I mentioned had to service 1/3 of the population of Canada at the time -- about 10 million people.
Saying "oh that's just first come first serve" is totally missing the fact that the service level can be woefully inadequate.
What's really crazy is that I live in a small city of about 100k people and there are about a dozen hospitals that I can choose from, first-class trauma centers, multiple renowned research centers (affiliated with three different universities). None of that is counting all of the urgent care and other facilities in the area.
I have an order of magnitude more options for treatment than I did when living in New York City...
The only way I could open myself up to more/better care options would be to move to Texas.
Life expectancy is, perhaps counterintuitively, not highly connected to health care. The major factors contributing to the gap between US and Canadian life expectancy are car accidents, homicides, and cardiovascular disease, and CVD differs wildly depending where you are in the country; there are states that lead the G7 in CVD outcomes, and others (like Mississippi and Alabama) that look like developing-world countries.
None of this is to defend the US system in particular, which wildly overspends on the outcomes it achieves. But generally, when it comes to managing chronic and acute health conditions, those outcomes are very good.
Except that comprehensive studies, in contrast to anecdotes, show that people in countries with public health care in fact DO get good treatment generally. So while maybe in rare circumstances you could have to wait too long, the vast majority of the time your life is not put at risk by a little wait.
The United States honors international IP law and doesn't cheat its way into threatening domestic production of other countries like China does.