I appreciate and welcome this move by RISC-V foundation. With semiconductor industry being used as a major soft power, countries which don't have such power betting on RISC-V[1], it's wise to move to a neutral country.
My only gripe being, there aren't many neutral countries which can stand up to powerful militarized nations.
Edit:
The reason, I mentioned lack of military power of neutral countries is because of the existence of law such as 'Hague Invasion Act'[2] which allows U.S. to invade Hague to liberate its personnel tried at International Criminal Court for war crimes. Neutral countries need military power to protect its Neutrality!
Has anyone else noticed HN comment threads becoming more, uh, unfocused lately? Here, an article on technology standards and avoiding trade restrictions on RISC-V has led to pages of comments on nuclear war with Switzerland.
A country like the US can invade any country they want. International law is irrelevant. But they can pressure a country like Switzerland without needing to resort to military action, which would be crazy anyway in the case of Switzerland.
US can't just invade any country. US would find it very difficult to invade a country with second strike nuclear capability. Even if nuclear war is out of the question, US would find it very difficult to invade, say China: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/china-u...
But is that the norm? Cuba, Panama, Syria, Egypt, Iraq v Iran, Ukraine, Libya, Yemen, Somalia. The US takes sides all over the planet; Sometimes the US backs a 'state' and sometimes the US backs 'rebels.'
Delaware has invested heavily into its courts, to be attractive as a corporate domicile, on features other than lowest taxes paid to Delaware itself. You set up in Delaware to avoid paying taxes everywhere else. That's why non-havens hate tax havens; the havens are stealing milk from their herds.
Delaware, Nevada, New Mexico, et al. make it easy to set up shell companies. Multiple layers of corporate veils make it easier to evade taxation, if the business is so inclined. But it's also easier to legally avoid taxation, which is the goal of the next-generation tax haven.
The deal is that you pay some taxes to Delaware, as the unavoidable ones, and then use its business-friendly jurisdiction to set up a network of sub-companies that can more easily slide through all the loopholes in all the rest of the world's tax laws. So the Delaware company owns the Irish company, and the Dutch company, and the Bermuda company, and the Singapore company, and the Cyprus company, and it can optimize the on-paper accounting so the money generates the least tax possible whenever it moves in the direction of the owners. If someone goes after a mook company, it can be cut loose and replaced, but if someone goes after the mastermind company, they have to do it in Delaware's courts.
The tax haven version 1.0 relied on banking secrecy to hide financial information from taxation authorities, so they wouldn't know what to tax. Tax haven version 2.0 is about playing those taxation authorities against each other, so that all their weaknesses (relative to the other authorities) are attacked at once, and laws are only broken or ignored outside of the jurisdictions in which they are enforceable. The information is not kept secret, but it is managed so that the only entity that can see the whole picture has no particular reason to pry too deeply or to leak it to anyone else.
Delaware isn't business friendly; it's shareholder friendly, which is why investors prefer Delaware incorporation. Of more concern to shareholders than the prospect of big gains is the risk of waste and embezzlement, and preventing that requires transparency and accountability (both literally and figuratively) much greater than required by your typical fraud promoting tax haven.
Also, the US did not adopt the Common Reporting Standard from the OECD in the wake of the Panama Papers leak. So it does not report banking activity happening inside to the US to other countries.
The Paradise Papers may spur additional legislative action, pending the results of the 2020 elections.
They've actually bust a lot of African dictators and such it was more or less a success. At least in the short term. Crooks will always come up with a way to launder cash though
Since it’s open source they don’t need to move the foundation to protect the design. They’re moving to protect their ability to collect dues from companies tightly controlled by governments that commit human rights abuses on a massive scale.
In this case Switzerland seems to be a pretty good choice: compulsory military service, difficult terrain, nuclear power plants (and with them the infrastructure to build the bomb)
Realistically, our armed forces are at a strength of about 140K soldiers right now (pretty sure that's not a state secret).
The parts of the terrain that are actually inhabited are not particularly forbidding (let them build their RISC processors in a hut nestled beside an 8500ft mountain pass. Don't forget to bring popcorn as you watch them).
And nuclear power plants make a big fat bombing target for opponents too lazy to make their own dirty bombs. Conveniently placed smack in the middle of the inhabitable part of Switzerland, too.
According to Wikipedia [1], you have ~160k active military with ~1.5M that could be conscripted. That's not huge, but it's enough to give an enemy a bad time, especially with the Swiss terrain and strategic defenses. And I'm sure they'd have a bunch of other countries willing to back them up, depending on the belligerent.
I highly doubt it'll come to that. It would be much easier to just infiltrate the fab and replace stock going to an important destination.
That depends a lot on the objective, I think. The defenses against an enemy controlling the transalpine transportation axes are fairly strong. But I think this scenario gets talked up a lot for exactly that reason.
The defenses against an enemy controlling 80% of the population and 90% of the economy are much weaker. Then again, it might only take a few sysadmins armed with SQL queries to deal significant economic damage against any attacker.
> It would be much easier to just infiltrate the fab and replace stock going to an important destination.
True. And if I've understood the article correctly, no fabs would be changing location. RISC-V is an open source design, so the fabs in question would probably be located in the "enemy" countries anyway.
> ~1.5M that could be conscripted. That's not huge, but it's enough to give an enemy a bad time, especially with the Swiss terrain and strategic defenses.
Switzerland is filthy rich, too. Private fortunes thought to rival or surpass the biggest public billionaires, money pipes throughout the world beyond measure — the result of centuries of diligently building a discrete but very real financial empire... all of that has to count for something in the age of PMC's and acts of surgical retaliation projecting force accross the globe.
Taking on a too-rich enemy in modern times is choosing an all-out, extremely mobile, stupidly costly, and above all likely painful war. You'll lose a lot at the hand of the best weapons and talents money can buy.
Rich doesn't mean anything if the currency is worthless. Switzerland has value in a consistent, trustable system and educated population. But without a larger military standing behind it, such as other European countries or the US, it's not going to be able to defend against a larger aggressor.
That's why an extremely indebted USA is still very valuable. Because they can park a few aircraft carriers off the coast of whomever they desire (although this may be changing, namely due to China).
Pretty sure you'd need at least MOAB to damage a nuclear unit so that it'd become a level 6+ accident. These things are designed to withstand a jet crash.
Nuclear powerplant is a strength, not a weakness. Unless you are getting attacked by an army made up entirely of suicide bombers, they will avoid the reactors like the plague. No-one needs another Chernobyl.
Conscription is not as effective as a regular volunteer force. Atomic weapons or other WMD goes against the ethos of neutral countries which traditionally are pro-Human Rights.
But I understand where you are coming at, perhaps it is because major military nations poses A-Bombs. I guess, if they are democratic countries we have no choice but to hope that their citizens can prevent it from getting used; My real worry is the non-democratic/pseudo democratic countries with A-Bombs.
> Conscription is not as effective as a regular volunteer force.
Switzerland's terrain wouldn't see regular war but guerilla warfare (including mined bridges and everything). Having trained marksmen in almost every household helps a lot in such a situation.
> Atomic weapons or other WMD goes against the ethos of neutral countries which traditionally are pro-Human Rights.
I think Switzerland would adopt a "whatever it takes" approach when attacked. At least that's what they credibly project, and so it's unlikely that they'll end up having to play it out.
The the short form of nuclear weapons is conventionally a-bomb.
A n-bomb is more likely to refer to use of a slavery related term, and is very frequently used in some circles which include the current US president. So demonstrably democracy does not prevent the use of n-bombs, which happens to be true historically for a-bombs as well (which were used by a democracy essentially because the war wasn't over by the time they've built the thing).
>which were used by a democracy essentially because the war wasn't over by the time they've built the thing).
But the same U.S. President Harry S. Truman relieved General of the Army Douglas MacArthur when he wanted to drop A-Bomb on China during the Korean War.
True, he did learn from that mistake, though it is still fair to criticise him for committing it in the first place and to point out that the democratic principles the USA espoused at the time did not save Nagasaki.
Please keep nationalistic flamewar off HN and please don't post flamebait, period. The subthread this led to is exactly what we don't need here: tedious repetition of the same-old for the nth time, getting nastier as it goes.
This, incidentally, is why it's hard to take seriously the idea that US positioning against China is aimed at genuinely improving human rights and not just using them as rhetorical cover.
> while at the same time US law seem to magically apply everywhere in the world.
Like how non-USA financial institutions have to care about whether their clients could be considered USA citizens, just because USA law says so.
Or like USA export control laws apply to devices which were not manufactured in the USA, just because the device includes an USA-manufactured screw or something like that.
Pardoning was the wrong move, but are you honestly putting that upon the same level as over a million placed in concentration camps? The US is not perfect, but what, because of that they can't have legitimate points on human rights on what the CCP is doing?
Not that the point isn't legitimate, but it carries less weight because China can just say "we're following the US example".
https://www.businessinsider.com/leaked-chinese-papers-on-mus... : "Xi pushed the party to use the "organs of dictatorship" to move millions of the minority group, Uighur Muslims, into the camps in western China and cited the United States' war on terror following 9/11 for an example of how to limit civil liberties. "
> it carries less weight because China can just say "we're following the US example".
I agree that post 9/11 US foreign policy making has been disastrous and utterly corrosive to America's ability to hold the moral high ground. But surely we can differentiate here. Putting millions of Uhyger men into camps and forcing their wives to share beds with Han men is on a whole another level[1].
The US's disastrous and inhumane foreign policy started long before 2001 (though 9/11 did make it worse). The Vietnam War (where the US routinely engaged in chemical warfare -- a war crime) immediately springs to mind but there are many other examples.
One might note the act you reference in your link has no real precedent in US history and is an anomaly by someone who has no concept of how the military works and issues orders to the military via twitter.
>the idea that US positioning against China is aimed at genuinely improving human rights and not just using them as rhetorical cover.
You must be saying this in jest, or you have been brainwashed. Without even touching on the interment camps, which are definitely worse than the US prison system; here is demonstrable evidence that the US cares more about global human rights than the Chinese.[1]
How many people get killed at the hands of the police in encounters in the US, versus the same in China. My guess is that at least on a per capita basis, the figure would be more in the US.
Also I do not subscribe to the view that Democracy is somehow morally superior to other forms of government. Anyone who has read Plutarch, can understand that figures like Pericles can manipulate the minds of the masses and rule as an authoritarian under the guise of being a democrat. The same playbook is being used for thousands of years with the same effect. See Erdogan in Turkey, I don't see him ever outsted from power democratically, aleast not in a long time.
Same reason products with the better advertisment sells better than the better product.
That link doesn't actually mention the US at all? It points to a single example involving Zambia and China, which is definitely bad. There are an awfully long list of those around the world.
That's what I mean - if you go looking for incidents where the Chinese are involved and build up a prosecution argument against them, that's a very different approach to trying to systematically and without favour deal with all human rights abuses of all scale by all parties. Which is a huge job.
I'm saying that China consistently does a worse job of handling human rights than the United States. The post WWII global economic order has been mostly on the US; recently China has started to push out into Africa, plundering their fishing stocks and practicing neo-colonialism. I'm looking for places where China is pushing into an existing economic order and noticing how humans rights standards generally go backwards.
> recently China has started to push out into Africa, plundering their fishing stocks and practicing neo-colonialism
Do you have any idea about the history of the United States in Africa? The overthrow and murder of the first elected President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the installation of an American-friendly dictator. Support for the coup that overthrew the first elected President of Ghana and replaced him with a military government. Opposition to Angolan independence from the Portuguese empire. Support for the Apartheid regime in South Africa.
And you're comparing this to what? Chinese companies overfishing in African coastal waters? You're really lacking a sense of perspective here.
The United States invaded Iraq and killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on a thin pretext. It toppled the government of Libya, leading to years of turmoil and the return of literal slavery. It supported Sunni extremists in Syria that helped tear that country apart. It ran a global kidnapping and torture operation for years. It conducts drone assassinations around the world. When I hear Americans talking about the US standing for human rights around the world, I wonder where they've been living these past few decades.
I'm not saying that France out the UK have clean hands either, but there was critical US involvement. NATO went far beyond the UN mandate to protect civilians, however, becoming the de facto rebel air force.
NATO tried several times to assassinate Gaddafi, killing his family members instead. For example, one airstrike in Tripoli killed a son and three grandchildren of his.[1] Of course, they did eventually bomb his caravan, leaving him to be brutally murdered on the side of the road. None of this was authorized by the UN. Western special forces were also not authorized to operate in Libya, but they did anyways.
Anyways, years after this wonderful exercise in protecting civilians, the country is still in a state of civil war, torn between different warlords. People forget that as bad as Gaddafi was, Libya used to have the highest living standard in Africa. Now, it's a nightmare.
Look, I'm didn't say that the US is a beacon of morality, what I'm saying is that China is significantly less moral than the US, and I gave a direct apples to apples example. Pointing out that the US participated in the Iraq war is not really on topic at all, because the US is the sole flag-bearer of free trade on the high seas in our global economic system--no one else has the navy to do it and nobody else has to maintain that machine. The US hasn't kidnapped and tortured any consulate employees recently, which China just did.
Saying the US "participated in the Iraq war" is putting it rather euphemistically. The US government lied and engineered the Iraq War, which was an illegal war of aggression. It led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. ISIS probably would never have come into existence without the Iraq war.
> The US hasn't kidnapped and tortured any consulate employees recently, which China just did.
Perhaps not (though it does have a recent history of kidnapping and torturing people on a global scale), but the US is busy blasting away pine nut farmers in Afghanistan.[1]
How is that bullying? The US doesn’t submit to the jurisdiction of the ICC, which is voluntary. (India isn’t a member either.) Clinton never submitted it to the Senate for ratification. Prosecution of an American by the ICC would therefore be an act of aggression and military response would be warranted.
The US, in general, is defensive of its sovereignty. We have our own institutions and we are very protective of them. For example, we have a right to a jury trial by one’s peers n a criminal case. The ICC has no juries, and panelists are generally foreigners to the defendant. Criminal convictions in US federal courts (and nearly all states) require a unanimous verdict. The ICC requires a simple majority. The ICC allows trials in abstentia, regularly relies on hearsay evidence, etc.
Our highest court is the United States Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court cannot hear appeals from the ICC and cannot issue judgments binding on the ICC. Our practices in these areas, such as jury trials, are the part of an unbroken line of law and tradition dating back to the Magna Carta in 1215. Those practices can be refined and improved, but that’s completely orthogonal to submitting to the jurisdiction of supra-national organizations like the ICC. Our institutions can always be improved. But that doesn’t mean we have to submit to someone else’s institutions.
In my view, the real question is why others are so willing to give up their sovereignty and right to self determination? Why submit to the will of some foreign court that’s totally outside the framework of your own country’s laws, constitution, and institutions?
> "...the real question is why others are so willing to give up their sovereignty and right to self determination?"
It's an easy question to ask when you're the guy at the top of the pile with the biggest guns and the ability to kill or capture your perceived enemies anywhere in the world.
For everyone else, global institutions based on universal human rights are a welcome safeguard against the abuses of 20th century style sovereignty.
Just look at how many foreigners the US has abducted to be locked up or tortured, often even without a fair trial. At least the ICC guarantees a fair trial.
The US is making it very explicit that they are above rules. They have the right to commit war crimes, while holding other countries accountable for their war crimes, and even for things that aren't even crimes at all. The US is a bully, and is very explicit about it.
I'm not sure Germany and France should be on that list. Not because they wouldn't try to protect their own even from the suspicion of being war criminals but because they would never got to such lengths as to threaten war to do it.
> In my view, the real question is why others are so willing to give up their sovereignty and right to self determination?
You are an anarchist then?
Otherwise as an sovereign individual, how can you justify being part of nation with laws over you?
It's not so much giving up sovereignty as pooling it.
ie you trade your right to do so as you wish, for a guarantee that others can't just do as they wish on agreed areas - like rape, murder, stealing etc.
Same argument applies to countries - they submit to the ICC, but are also party to shaping it - it's an agreement between countries about what is 'beyond the pale'.
The sad fact is, however the US see's it's self, the rest of the world is increasingly seeing the US as the largest threat to world peace.
https://fullfact.org/news/america-world-peace/
In my view, the US need to have a long hard look at themselves and re-discover their moral mojo.
>Why submit to the will of some foreign court that’s totally outside the framework of your own country’s laws, constitution, and institutions?
They why be subject to U.N. and it's ICJ? Submitting only to institutions in which we have extraordinary influence or can veto out of unfavourable circumstances is not 'protection of sovereignty'; it's hypocrisy and disregard to delivering justice.
The UN is largely voluntary and has little power to issue anything binding. The US is a member of the ICJ but has not consented for compulsory jurisdiction. It only submits to ICJ jurisdiction on a treaty-by-treaty or consent basis.
People are challenging you on the point about sovereignty, but you’re quite right to criticize the ridiculous processes of the ICC. What defense is there for that? Is it supposed to be acceptable because it’s a ridiculousness that belongs to all nations?
> In my view, the real question is why others are so willing to give up their sovereignty and right to self determination?
What would effectively be the difference for you as an individual. You don't have sovereignty, you don't have self determination, the huge country you live in does. You have zero influence over your country's laws, constitution and institutions.
Why do you prefer to be ruled over by the US, which is corrupt to the bone and ruled by whoever pays the largest 'campaign contributions' (a.k.a. bribes). vs. something like the ICC ?
> In my view, the real question is why others are so willing to give up their sovereignty and right to self determination?
Because in doing so in the form of an agreement, others can be made to give up their freedom to do bad things while you also give up the freedom to do those bad things? Like the normal social contract, but explicit and on a larger scale.
This dates even to the 1899 Hague Convention, which the US was very keen on following earlier work by Abraham Lincoln. The way to get the enemy to treat your prisoners of war humanely is to agree to treat theirs humanely, and this held fairly well even in the horrors of WW2.
The post-Holocaust international order is devoted to the idea that there is always a risk of rogue states deciding to end the freedoms of their citizens or engage in mass murder and other crimes against humanity. There are also risks of states turning on one another and escalating economic disputes to actual wars. In order to guard against these, supranational institutions were built. Not just the United Nations and the ICC, but the whole Bretton Woods system, the WTO, the NATO mutual defence organisation, the ECHR, and the EU and its antecedants.
How can the US ask China to end its human rights abuses, and expect to be taken seriously, when the US refuses internal or external accountability for its own human rights abuses and war criminals? The official position of the United States, having determined that Edward Gallagher was deliberately murdering civilians and prisoners of war, is that he should be pardoned and have his position reinstated? That's fine and no reason for imposing sanctions on the United States?
Yes, this is a tu quoque argument, but at the level of international propaganda it works.
Human rights are universal as established by the Nuremberg trials. If they were not then Nazis could not have been prosecuted for crimes against humanity. Nazi Germany never recognized the authority of these trials.
The point is that human rights are above national laws. If an American citizen commit serious human right abuses abroad he/she should naturally be put on trial.
In particular American involved in kidnapping and torturing foreigners to obtain information ought to be put on a human rights trial. I am thinking in particular about all the human rights violations during the Bush/Cheney years.
“The Court may exercise jurisdiction in a situation where genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes were committed on or after 1 July 2002 and:
the crimes were committed by a State Party national, or in the territory of a State Party, or in a State that has accepted the jurisdiction of the Court; or
the crimes were referred to the ICC Prosecutor by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) pursuant to a resolution adopted under chapter VII of the UN charter.”
The only way the ICC can exercise jurisdiction over a non-member is through referral from the UN Security Council.
Just to clarify, it is officially called 'American Service-Members' Protection Act' which was supposedly passed as there was a chance George W. Bush could be arrested & tried at ICC for war crimes; media & human rights organizations call it 'Hague invasion act' for what it is.
he was already tried in absentia. It was easy, there are many TV interviews where W does a full confession by saying torture produces good information.
Interestingly, the US would also have an obligation to defend The Hague against any invasion if the Netherlands were to invoke Article Five of the NATO treaty.
Given that the US funds more than 70% of all dictatorships, has funded and organised numerous coups against democratically-elected leaderships (to install US-friendly ones) and is currently waging several illegal wars in the middle east -- I don't see how you could argue that the US is holding anything together. Even at a cursory glance, they seem to be instigating most of the problems.
This is wrong to the point that it's sometimes worrisome, the amount of arbitrary 'anti police' and 'anti Americanism' etc. here on HN and in other places that clouds otherwise intelligent judgement.
I often wonder about the roots of this; of course 'the police' or 'America' have many faults, it's easy to point them out, but I'm always perplexed by those that can't see the bigger picture.
As though it needs to be articulated - the US doesn't really gain a lot from it's military expenditures, or '80 bases' around the world. But the world would be in chaos without them.
To start, 'high seas' (including the Suez Canal, the Gulf, and the Panama Canal) are currently open to anyone only due to US power. Particularly those 'strategic spots' - it is America that makes sure that anyone can use them. China, Russia, Iran - anyone. They're open, and free. The same cannot be said if antagonising powers like China, or local fiefdoms like a Panamanian populist to take over.
The entire world takes the concept of 'open, navigable waters' for granted, but this would not be the case were there not a force to ensure that this happened.
In Europe, the US is the only power preventing Russian Imperial expansion. Putin has already tried to 'pull a Crimea' in the Baltic states, it was only coordination by American-led NATO that enabled their defence. Even to this day, Europeans are very poorly coordinated on the issue. Ukraine would be fully under Putin's control, and Russia would be creeping into Poland. Georgia would have been invaded when the Russians occupied South Ossetia.
In Asia, we can see most recently the attempt by China to take exclusive control of vast ocean territories off the coast of Philipines, Vietnam etc. - only America has the power to ensure that this area will generally stay open.
S. Korea would not be a state without American power, it's possible that Japan would not, and certainly not Taiwan.
More contentiously, the US holds some authoritarian powers together, but even then it's for the greater good. Most obviously Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, but even Qatar, Bahrain, UAE fall in this camp. These aren't the nicest states, but they are generally 'good players' on the international scene, they mostly help fight against terrorism, and they sell their Oil on the international markets and market prices. Without US support none of those countries would exist as such. We saw what Saddam did in Kuwait, and there's no reason to believe he would have stopped there. In particular, the Iranians have been trying to very seriously destabilise those countries for some time by providing weapons, political cover, training, and support.
And that's just scratching the surface; without the US the high seas would not be open and navigable, the Suez/Panama/Gulf would be controlled by petty fiefs or hostile powers, large parts of Eastern Europe would be back in the Russian Empire and Putin would have that much more ability to antagonise, at very least Korea and Taiwan would not exist, and there'd likely be more hostility over there, and the Middle East would be unrecognisable, the hostilities would be far worse than they are today. And again - those are just the obvious areas - but if those dominos were to fall, so many others would. In short, a 'world without America' would be a dark and hostile place, there is no other leadership on the world stage that has the power to ensure the stability we have right now. Europe could, but they're not willing.
Americans gain a little bit in terms of prestige, access to some foreign markets, and their own security, but frankly it's just not enough to justify in hard terms.
Without the incredible goodwill of Americans the 'balance of internal political power' of their foreign policy would be such that they would have left the Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese, Lithuanians, Polish etc. in the wind, long ago.
In the 1990s it was looking like the American led world order would melt into democracy, but it's not going to be that way at least for the time being.
This is a great move. It is time to punish countries that impose restrictions on technology. I don't want to be a prisoner in a place where technology is simply considered "illegal" because it doesn't further the interests of the ruling class.
I think standards development should be open, so Switzerland is the ideal host in any geopolitical situation. Otherwise, I do think the American economy could benefit from restrictions on imports. It's called import substitution economics, which worked very well for american steel back in the late 19th century. Not sure if it'll work again though. Things are different now.
The mistake is categorising things like iPhones as simple "imports", when both the parts and the software and most of the profits are from American companies. I work for an iPhone-part-supplying US headquarters company with offices around the world. We spent some considerable effort working out who was allowed to continue talking to Huawei.
Tariffs and other protectionary measures make much more sense for developing countries than for developed countries.
Developing countries want to protect their fledgling industries from much stronger competition from the developed world. This hurts consumers in developing countries, who are forced to buy substandard domestic products at higher prices.
Developed countries want as free of trade as possible, so that their advanced companies can sell everywhere, and their consumers can buy the best products at the cheapest price.
A good analogy is to weight classes in boxing. They protect lighter fighters from the heavyweights. The heavyweights themselves would be fine if the weight classes were abolished. They'd win every fight.
That would be more true if domestic labor was on a more even playing field with global competitors. As it stands, domestic labor is expensive: not just because of wages and benefits, but also health and safety regulations, legal liabilities, etc.
I'm not saying we necessarily need to roll back those protections, but it's worth mentioning out that as the cost of hiring domestic labor in developed countries go up, companies begin to off-shore labor as soon as they are able.
My point is that we already don't have "free trade". The question is whether tariffs are a good way to balance the scales between domestic and foreign labor.
> as the cost of hiring domestic labor in developed countries go up, companies begin to off-shore labor as soon as they are able.
Productivity of labor is also much higher in developed countries. What matters is comparative advantage.
Even from a strictly economic point of view, it is often better for rich countries to off-shore a lot of low-level manufacturing. That decreases prices for manufactured goods in rich countries and frees labor for more productive jobs. If you somehow force companies to bring back manufacturing jobs to the US, two things will have to happen:
1. Prices will increase for consumers.
2. People will be transferred from their current jobs to the new manufacturing jobs. You may actually be transferring people from more useful, productive labor into less productive labor, leaving the entire society worse off.
Government imposed costs on labor don't necessarily scale proportionally with productivity. It's possible that those costs can price even highly productive labor out of the market.
Furthermore, at least some of the people affected by the displacement of manufacturing jobs in developed countries do not have higher productivity. The opioid crisis in the US is to some extent an example of this. I know of blue collar communities where the level of productive employment is lower now than it was a generation or two ago.
That doesn't mean these communities could not adapt to the changing economic landscape (as people did when there was the transition from an agricultural to a manufacturing economy). Patterns of specialization and trade are bound to change, but government imposed prices on labor can create a hindrance to a society's ability to adapt.
> Government imposed costs on labor don't necessarily scale proportionally with productivity.
Not necessarily, but they correlate very strongly. It's the rich countries that tend to have strong labor protections, mandatory pension schemes, high healthcare costs, etc.
> at least some of the people affected by the displacement of manufacturing jobs in developed countries do not have higher productivity.
Some of them don't, but overall, developed countries have moved on to higher value-added sectors. Moving large numbers of American workers into things like mass hand-assembly of smartphones would not make economic sense.
> That doesn't mean these communities could not adapt to the changing economic landscape
Government could much more strongly redistribute the overall gains from world trade to those who lose out to trade. That would make a lot of sense, though it would go against the right-wing economic thinking that has dominated American politics since Reagan.
> Not necessarily, but they correlate very strongly. It's the rich countries that tend to have strong labor protections, mandatory pension schemes, high healthcare costs, etc.
Obviously they correlate. The question is whether such labor regulations run ahead of labor productivity and inadvertently price labor out of the global market place. It's certainly not a given that labor regulations are proportional.
If it's not proportional, you either need to roll back some of those regulations or enact protectionist measures (tariffs, etc.) to enable fair competition.
It's not just labor regulations either. Environmental regulations also play a role. While I agree with having environmental regulations, if they are too stringent, then the result is that resource extraction moves countries without any protections.
> Some of them don't, but overall, developed countries have moved on to higher value-added sectors.
Those "left behind" could be a fairly large number. Democratic societies need to balance the interests of all of their citizens.
> Moving large numbers of American workers into things like mass hand-assembly of smartphones would not make economic sense.
If those large numbers of Americans are otherwise unemployed, or even working in low-skill service jobs, then moving them into smartphone manufacturing absolutely makes sense.
> Government could much more strongly redistribute the overall gains from world trade to those who lose out to trade. That would make a lot of sense, though it would go against the right-wing economic thinking that has dominated American politics since Reagan.
We are already redistributing to those who lose out on trade. I don't think more redistribution is what they want. My impression is that they would rather have jobs. Indeed, it makes much more economic (and psychological) sense to have as much of your population engaged in productive occupations as possible.
It would definitely work. The USA is a -huge- market, it just wouldn't be as economically "good/efficient" as free trade is in a strictly classical economics sense.
That's only true if the global order continues. The only reason why you can set up shop across the street from a US factory and import some goods from halfway across the world and sell it for cheaper is because the United States Navy made the risk of shipping those goods negligible. That wasn't the norm for most written history and is a function of the post WW2 order. If the US elects a pacifist president who cuts the DoD budget in half, or even if the current POTUS continues on his isolationist path then this will no longer be the case.
This specifically furthers the interests of a ruling class, the Chinese Communist Party. It is explicitly giving the CCP an American funded and developed technology which they can use for further development of racially profiled mass surveillance for the continued genocide of the Uyghurs. This is an awful move.
It's not at all. RISC-V Foundation can develop open-source CPU's in the US as they have thus far. They are moving explicitly to circumvent US export restrictions to China. The CCP's mass surveillance in Xin Jiang is incredibly sophisticated[1]. It is simply not possible for them to accomplish this computationally without state of the art hardware which they will now have a new avenue to acquire.
The impact on China's mass surveillance capabilities is negligible, because RISC-V work is open source already.
What the foundation avoids by moving to Switzerland is fragmentation of their ecosystem due to US foreign policy decisions.
Note that China is already among the technology leaders in the world. Even if cut off from the remaining world, they would have no issue in manufacturing and operating sophisticated surveillance infrastructure. So I can't see how the foundation would help suppressed minorities in China by staying in US.
Great work. Let over politicized countries fight each other while the rest of the world moves ahead.
>“The Chinese Communist Party is trying to circumvent our export control system to support national security threats like Huawei - we cannot let it succeed,” Representative Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin, told Reuters.
I mean, one cannot make this more obvious. The rest of the world really doesn't want to be subservient to US paranoia
Ah yes, let's do business without concerns of morality. Make western funded technology available CCP SOE's. After all, they gotta power their "exciting" and "innovative"[1] algorithms with some sort of architecture. Less we miss anyone[2].
Morality is simply "things I like" and "things I don't like". It's not a good basis for policy, especially when moral standards vary significantly between individuals.
It's a fool's errand to try to impose your morals on another person as if they were somehow superior (though that arrogance is the foundation of the American psyche). You literally just can't.
> There are such things as universal human rights, and China is absolute violation of them.
You mean the ones that the US routinely violates for "terrorists" and "criminals"? China uses the exact same rhetoric for the people whose rights it violates. The situation with the Uyghurs mirrors a lot of the tactics used in the 70s by American police against black Americans under the guise of the "war on drugs" (hint: our police and prison guards were way more abusive than many people realize).
> Right, which is why we let Hitler exterminate the Jews.
What else could we have done? Anti-semitism was considered morally acceptable at the time. The American people were completely against the war until Pearl Harbor. Then we locked anyone who looked Japanese or spoke German up in camps. What we were doing was the exact same thing Hitler said he was doing with the Jews.
Obviously in hindsight Hitler was awful and the Holocaust was frighteningly real. But the extent of the Holocaust was not understood until after the war. By the standards of the time, what Hitler said he was doing to the Jews didn't cross any hard moral lines -- to both the German people and most Americans.
I actually believe it's the belief in moral absolutes like this that allow monsters to perpetuate atrocities: people assume "well, no rational human would round up all the Jews and murder them" -- which is exactly why it was possible.
I don't understand. Are citizens of countries that do bad things not allowed to point out issues in other countries as well? I'm more than aware of, at least some of, the bad things the US has done and in some cases is still doing. I get mad and voice my dissatisfaction with those issues as well. I don't think any of that prevents me from doing the same for other issues globally. I can think what the US is doing is horrible and think what China is doing is bad as well. Your first two paragraphs are basically just saying "US does it too".
We could have engaged with the Japanese in the Pacific and let Europe duke it out and weaken themselves to nothing. Then rolled into Europe with tanks and taken over the whole world? Seriously. I'm not a historian, but I'm pretty sure we could have taken a very different route in WWII. If we really lacked morality, why didn't we just take over the World after WWII, or force the countries we helped out into terrible economic deals like China is doing in Africa. The Marshall plan was charitable.
> If we really lacked morality, why didn't we just take over the World after WWII, or force the countries we helped out into terrible economic deals like China is doing in Africa.
We didn't do both of those? That's news to me, because I thought that's what the Cold War was about. We just learned from Europe's colonial failures and allowed the countries to remain nominally politically autonomous while being economically bound to the US. The only thing that stopped us was the USSR, and it really only delayed the eventual US takeover by about 40 years.
> The Marshall plan was charitable.
It absolutely was not. It was designed to prevent nationalism from taking hold by making economic conditions in the defeated nations tolerable to the populace and to make those countries economically dependent on the US. It also led to former global powers Germany and Japan becoming proxy states of the US -- they are still occupied by US forces today. But it wasn't about charity by any means, it was a response to the lesson we learned from WWI that if you leave the losers destitute, resentment and nationalism follow.
The rest of the world is doing the exact same thing. Sovereign nations should control their own technical infrastructure and not rely on American, Chinese, Russian or European technology.
Open source is certainly a big step in the right direction toward a world where we can better rely on technology. But we're not there yet, when it comes to hardware.
Free market can dissuade your competitors from creating their own supply chain because that won't make economical sense. But once that illusion is gone, the ones that are getting hurt is the current market leaders.
I was just reading on the state of union memo released this past September by the RISC-V foundation. I'm kind of curious how the economics works. I was under the impression that a good chunk of the funding came from US tax payer money (a mixture of UC Berkeley and DARPA). I know that RISC-V is starting to become more popular so they're definitely self fundable in the near future by many other means. I'm curious if the funding methodology from the US gov will change as the globalization landscape changes in the coming years.
I was a minor foot soldier in the export control wars of the 1990s (via Switzerland too, as it happened). These rules were stupid then and are terrible now.
Americans would be less safe had foreign contributions to cryptography been kept out. In addition these export rules act as price subsidies for foreign companies (much as the recent agricultural tariffs have helped Brazilian farmers).
If you consider it a national security issue, just note that 1940s Germans had to develop everything themselves while the allies developed and swapped around technology with trans-national teams.
Let 'open' stay true to its very meaning. It is a good chance , or may I say the best chance for RISC-V to seize influence, because now the will and capitals are aligned to make an alternative ecosystem that is not controlled by US single handedly.
RISC-V originated from 5 year project called Parallel Computing Laboratory (Par Lab) at UC Berkeley. Par Lab received no direct federal funding. It was funded mainly by Intel and Microsoft and State of California.
This may have been true in the early years, but my understanding is that DARPA has played a large role in funding the development of RISC architecture. [1]
At the beginning of the Second World War it was still an impoverished agrarian country. I personally don’t consider that a very long time.
This opinion is due to the longer tenure as tech “hub” of various places in the UK, France, and USA.
There is some great tech coming out of Switzerland but I’m not sure there’s a really a connection between hosting standards organizations and having a technical infrastructure.
was there ever a blockchain era? All I ever heard of was the blockchain bubble? Sure it's useful but it's not the end of all traditional exchange and contracts like it's most religious adherents subscribed to.
There was blockchain hype, but it was mainly among young adults. Those of us who are older have been through enough hype cycles to know that the tech is only as good as the people running it, and "a shadowy cabal of exchange owners whose names we don't know" is honestly way worse than "a shadowy cabal of publicly traded banks".
> wants to ensure that universities, governments and companies outside the United States can help develop its open-source technology
Read as:
> wants to ensure that China...
Let me see if I understand this correctly. US tax dollars funded (in part, via UC Berkeley) this technology, and now this organization is moving outside of the US specifically so that it can work with China in ways that the US would not appreciate. And we (“we” being an audience almost entirely based in the Occident) are all cheering this on?
Do you think they are worried about that US blocking them from working with Oxford, or with the Spanish government? This is because they got money from Alibaba.
Is this the same group that was defending South Park and bashing on the NBA just weeks ago?
Both sentiments are pointed in the same direction - more freedom.
Also, Blizzard, South Park, NBA are part of popular culture in the west. Cooperation with China is endangering that culture, so you see backlash.
Standards related to RISC-V are not part of popular culture and there is no danger of Chinese censorship. There is however danger of USA protectionism.
And yes - I can see Americans using microchip intellectual property against Europeans. EU is right there on the list of trade foes with China and Russia according to USA president.
Is it just maybe possible that the US public is waking up to the ongoing genocide, ethnic cleansings, and widespread human rights violations in China, which may lead to the state being sanctioned like so many other despicable regimes?
The US backs (either financially, politically, or militarily) 70% of the world's dictatorships -- many of which were placed into power after US-organised coups overthrew their democratically-elected leaders. Yemen has open-air slave markets, thanks to the US's bombings and destabilisation of the region.
The point is that "we are doing the humane thing" is not an argument that the US has legitimate access to anymore.
Also let's not forget that Saudi Arabia treats women as third-class citizens. Let's not pretend they're some paragon of virtue.
No. The average person in the US doesn't care about these things or even know about them. What is finally starting to make sense is that other countries have next to no regulations, and literal sweat shops, and US workers are feeling the effects these are having. IE, it's all about money.
I’m all for cooperation with China and the diminishment of national culture (not forgetting it but also accepting others) and a better understood global culture.
What I’m not ok with (and why I think there’s backlash toward the cooperation with China by these companies) is the way the Chinese government treats people.
Harvesting organs from political prisoners and the violence toward protesters isn’t ok. Ever. I don’t care if it’s Trump or Merkel or Xi that’s doing it it’s not ok and that’s not something people should cooperate with.
>US tax dollars funded (in part, via UC Berkeley) this technology,
Term 'open-source' license seems to be conveniently left behind in the 'Read as'.
Linux kernel was first funded by the Tax money of a Finland Citizen, the reason everyone can use it incl. large U.S. corporations entirely dependent upon it is because it is under the 'freedom' of open-source license.
RISC-V, is moving to protect the 'freedom' of it's open-source license. If there is anything to feel agitated about it, it is why some entity had to take such drastic action from the so called 'land of the free'.
Sorry if this is a first for you. It's been a very long time however that the US has been successful (and this is a compliment) at commercializing tech that was invented elsewhere. US is a huge beneficiary of the bad business climate elsewhere and international brain drain. This is just a taste of how it works when e.g. european companies emigrate to the US (again, because the US is a better place for them). Consider that the US won the business world because of its openness, not in spite of it.
> Let me see if I understand this correctly. US tax dollars funded (in part, via UC Berkeley) this technology, and now this organization is moving outside of the US specifically so that it can work with China in ways that the US would not appreciate.
Given the open source nature of the tech, one assumes they are (rightly or wrongly) moving out of the US so they can continue to work with whoever they want.
People are cheering it on because there are no viable openly licensed ISAs besides RISC-V and the alternative to this move is RISC-V being crippled due to sanctions. Anybody in the US is just as free to use the ISA, and designs and fab IP can still be proprietary in whatever country.
The signals from the current US administration is pretty clear. It is a government that puts American interest ahead of any other concern. Naturally universities in other western countries are going to have their doubts about cooperating on crucial technology if it is under control by a government which only cares about national interests.
Same reason I favor exiting NATO and building a European alliance only. The US cannot be trusted. Look at what was done at a whim in Turkey.
Look at how the current US administration screwed us in the Iran deal.
Trump did not commit to defending other NATO allies, when asked. Hence what is the point of NATO? There is no point in being member of a defense alliance which the US uses when it suits them but which they are not committed to when it is inconvenient for them. That isn't an alliance at all.
> The signals from the current US administration is pretty clear.
If it was only the current US administration then it would be easier. Didn't the bush administration also had a policy "You're either for us, or against us"?
Even in the case the current administration is replaced, it's only 4 or 8 years until they are again replaced by another administration willing to blow up alliances for domestic politics.
Not really. Previous administrations had a much greater tolerance before countries were placed in the 'against camp'. The current administration has dubbed more countries enemies than prevously - Germany for example. The the fun of following a nationalist agenda.
The US pays 22% of the relatively tiny (~2B€) NATO direct budget. France, Germany, and England supply 34% combined. The US also has the something like the idea9th largest military in Europe at ~65K.
Absolutely. In light of all this American antipathy Europe should form its own strong alliance. Relying on an overseas superpower when we could be a superpower ourselves as the EU will bite us eventually. And we will definitely achieve nothing as more than two dozen separate countries.
> It is a government that puts American interest ahead of any other concern.
I always have a hard time swallowing the bullshit that is the American government ever held any other concern above American interest, whether the results were favorable notwithstanding.
There was a sensibility for enlightened self-interest that Trump does not understand. Entities like the UN or WTO subjected the US to certain rules, but also subjected everyone else to those same rules. For example, the US gave up the freedom to impose tariffs whenever it likes, but in doing so, ensured that its own companies would have unfettered access to foreign markets. Trump's strategy appears to be to tear down all multilateral institutions, and to bully each country one-by-one into accepting what he wants.
And that's going swimmingly with global growth being the lowest since 2008 and low 2% US growth only being sustained due to insanely high fiscal deficits and monetary easing. Meanwhile business investment is in the toilet which bodes terribly for future long run growth since there is no capital deepening now.
If this change helps the group operate more in the open, and the group operating more in the open ends up benefiting China, I guess I don’t understand why I should have a problem with that. I’m sure lots of open source development has been beneficial to China (among many others of course).
I think your analysis is correct. Before jumping to the “US is a bully” narrative, one should consider:
- they whole problem here is that Hauwei and other state-sponsored Chinese firms are flooding the market with below-cost, compromising devices in order to give the Chinese government broad access to sensitive information [0]
- Hong Kong is dying under the Chinese boot [1]
- China is running concentration camps [2]
Our community isn’t used to thinking about open source software - or technology in general- in the context of geopolitics. We seem to agree IBM was wrong to help the Nazis manage the Haulocaust [3] but don’t apply that logic to China. Yet. Maybe our children will; that’s on us.
This is another skirmish in the long war around the Chinese Rise. America is by no means perfect, but I think we’ll miss Pax Americana when it’s gone. We need to search our souls and find our spines.
That was not what people believed at the time, and indeed I don't think any of the relevant laws have ever mentioned "open source" or similar. It's actually still in force, it's just that there are large enough exemptions for HTTPS to work.
> they whole problem here is that Hauwei and other state-sponsored Chinese firms are flooding the market with below-cost, compromising devices in order to give the Chinese government broad access to sensitive information [0]
Spying aside ( probably - just like US firms ) - isn't the real reason this is an issue at all is because Huawei actually has a technological lead.
To paint them as winning because they are 'flooding the market with below-cost' is
frankly xenophobic - note they have out innovated - not copied - you can't copy yourself a technological lead.
The US appears in panic - imagine a world where CISCO kit ( a company that has obligations to the US state ) isn't installed everywhere - rather some other countries stuff.
If you want to constrain China, then you have to accept the rules that constrain everyone. The time where the US can lord it over everyone ( for better or worse ) is coming to an end - just as the British empire came to an end.
As for ARM, they initially stopped shipments to Huawei (it was an internal email that got leaked) but since it used less than 25% US-origin technology, US export controls don't apply and ARM could ship it
I'm not sure this move accomplishes that much. It seems none of the technology is moving abroad, just the legal seat. And on trade issues, Switzerland moves pretty much in lockstep with the US, at least officially (cf. Iran sanctions).
To me, this smacks of the kind of legalist thinking that software engineers are prone to: Assuming that if some legal construct is implemented according to some rules, governments and the legal system will disregard the actual physical reality, and will refrain from employing their political leverage.
Then again, I'm sure the RISC-V Foundation has professional legal advice at their disposal.
To avoid scenarios like the one described in the middle of the article where it's unclear if it's legally OK to work with sanctioned organizations:
In June, more than two dozen standards groups - including those overseeing SD memory cards and Ethernet and HDMI cables - wrote a letter to U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross asking for clarification of the rules on working with Huawei.
If bodies that work on open standards can't predictably work openly (with anyone) this risks the standards getting fragmented in non-compatible ways, or could even give rise to viable competing standards like US WiFi 7 vs. Chinese/European WiFi 7ce
I curious about what the legal implications of this really are. As a layman, it seems to me that US Export Control laws still exist, so if any of the technical data being discussed in the standards meetings would be considered an export before, it still will now. The change is that the liability has shifted off of the Foundation and onto the American members. If the Foundation as a whole couldn't determine its legal responsibilities, the individual members aren't going to have any more clarity. Any chilling effect of US law and policy will therefore result in US members reducing their participation, rather than members of other countries being uncertain about their ability to use the technology.
However, given that much of the early work was done by US institutions, if any US contributions were considered to be unallowable exports, that would surely include contributions that already make up foundations of the specification. This move won't undo that, and thus could result in a worst of both worlds situation where members in other countries can't make use of current standards (if they want to export to the US), and US members can't contribute to future standards.
Of course this is all assuming that RISC-V standards are actually covered by US export control laws, and that those laws will be enforced. Probably nothing would come of this either way, although the pessimist in me worries that this move itself might trigger protectionists in the US government to go looking for reasons why RISC-V technology might infringe.
Open-source information isn't export controlled but technical data is. You can imagine this causes alot of consternation with standards organizations b/c that line isn't exactly clear. I was just speaking to legal counsel at GSMA and their response was "no one knows what the law is unless the government says we violated it".
Eh, not really. Switzerland was never a member of CoCOM and only joined the Waessenar Agreement b/c there is no binding requirement for the Waessenar Agreement. Switzerland's export controls on dual-use (military and civilian) technology basically don't exist.
Considering the chinese goverment the trade war make sense. However, Risc-V decision makes equal sense. Staying neutral and moving
to place where they can avoid politcal pressure is good for an open foundation.
Switzerland isn't a magical neutral land on Earth. It's a neutral place from the point of view of Europe because its terrain is difficult to practice for troops.
On a virtual level (software, intellectual, legal), Switzerland is not more neutral than any other small country on Earth. It could have been Iceland.
Automatically centralizing to Switzerland everything considered 'neutral' (neutrality is a debatable concept btw) is risky, stereotyping and doesn't look legit.
I don't view this move as "centralizing" to Switzerland. They've left the US over concerns about the legal and regulatory environment there.
Switzerland is a reasonably neutral in the on-going trade and IP disputes, so it a good choice for now. If that changes, the RISC-V foundation could always move again and relocate to Iceland or Singapore or somewhere else.
As it becomes more and more common for teams and companies/foundations to be globally distributed, I think we'll see more of this movement, with talent flowing to the countries that have the most favorable environments.
I’m sure the reporters called his office and spoke with an aid and received a generic and knee-jerk response based on what the reporter said. I don’t think he knows nor cares about risc-v nor the topic.
Assuming what I wrote above is how it happened (95% likely) it should not reflect poorly on him. I have a low opinion of the man but I doubt this quote reflects anything on how he might vote if some related issue comes to the senate floor.
“The Chinese Communist Party is trying to circumvent our export control system to support national security threats like Huawei - we cannot let it succeed,”
Look at the growing number of Chinese student returning home, something is pretty damn wrong.
You know for my parent’s generation, being able to study and immigrate to US is their unreachable dream. Nowadays it’s faded and quite a lot people just came to gain the experience.
Maybe they prefer to live under a communist dictatorship? I don't know. I grew up in the USSR. The reasons why anyone would want to return to this shit elude me completely.
Well For China it’s far from shit unfortunately. For one thing those can afford going abroad are still pretty much top 15% in big cities, definitely top 1% of entire population (ok that number is way too big). I can safely tell you dictatorship doesn’t affect those people that much. Also China has seen 800X increase in middle class over the last 20 years, it’s hard to convince us that the government is shit
I guarantee you the drug dealers and smugglers in south east Asia and South American kills more people, and there must be an international organ smuggling business years ago. And we all know officials and local government is behind it. It’s a crime anyway why bother mentioning it over and over again? Is that not a crime in China?
But you do have to wait until it does. There’s almost no motivation for the majority of Chinese population to go against their government. HK is one of few places where those protests actually makes sense for democracy/historic reasons. Uighurs well blame Xi for that, it’s a stupid move that no previous leaders will make, but honestly you know what the majority Han population doesn’t really show sympathy, because there were terrorist from that area and they did kill people. It’s more like regional wars in the ancient times just this time it’s one sided
It must do if not they would not all but one go outside. Even the very top guy. Ask where is his relatives.
What puzzle us is why they still support the communist when they are free. Even positively attack eg the lady Canadian student rep. Or of course my fellow hkers.
Any Russian leaving Soviet Union fighting for the interests of Soviet Union after they left. Openly. Not as a spy. I more remember one day in the life of .... kind.
Treating chinazi arising is a fair raise of a nation is totally wrong. Look just as the treat of minority like us as an exception is also wrong. When you feel the hit like lots of nba, apple, google etc and everyone has to kneel down to live, you will know that
First there is ...
Chinazi is chinazi. Forced Harmony especially without understanding is a crime against humanity. It would be too late when you get the the truth personally. Find it out earlier and fight.
> What puzzle us is why they still support the communist when they are free
I can assure you the majority does not support the party wholeheartedly and for one thing it’s certain: if you tell them they should go ahead overthrown everything and re-establish the system they’ll think you are out of your mind. Chineses like to have concrete and feasible plans, Democracy slogans doesn’t work for this culture.
As to the integrity of China, it won’t be something that can be easily changed, given Chineses are obsessed to regain what was lost during early 20 century.
If you want to fight I’d respect it since HK deserves most of it and for such a small place I do think there are better plans. For entire China no, it will cause chaos and regressions, don’t even talk about long term
The uncomfortable truth is that restraining China's ambition does directly benefit the United States. Especially the part of the United States that's in the middle of the country that was basically sold out for a quick buck by the ruling elite over the past 3 decades.
If your worried about China recruiting your talent maybe, like, make them want to stay in the US?
This is one example of how elites in this country get to have their own form of socialism whereas say a humble computer scientist must be subjected to the whims of the invisible hand for the sake of preserving market efficiency.
But you can't make foreign intelligence assets "stay in the US" as it were. I bet every single large tech company in the US has rather substantial numbers of Chinese (and other countries') spies embedded within it. They also get caught again, and again, and again. And remember it's only the idiots who carry secrets on their person that get caught, rather than just upload data straight to some servers in China. I bet there's quite a bit of that going on as well.
The recent few cases are just baffling. The guy resigns and gets caught on the border exfiltrating trade secrets. For one thing, why resign? Just go - you'll get fired automatically when you don't return. For another, why carry this stuff in your suitcase? Just upload it to AWS in encrypted form sail through the customs with no problem at all. They are clearly not sending their best.
Strange and I still do not understand why they so explicit about it.
The key is you cannot easy reside, study, work in China key U and technology program freely. But seems you can in Usa. An one sided war with one side powerful but leaking key assets. Hence all these shooting using software and chip.
This made me laugh :D. Their "best", might not want to work at big tech companies just to exfiltrate secrets. And also their "best" would have an increased chance of being identified in background checks...
They are probably just sending some poor students who are pressured into it an exchange for whatever, if they get anything at all besides "not being punished".
What exactly did people expect to happen with this bizarre trade war? Instead of pressuring 'bad actor' countries with more free trade and something like TPP, levying pointless tariffs was obviously going to drive any joint international groups overseas. Just brainless stuff.
TPP was cancer. Every rich nation in the world profited off of precisely the kind of IP theft which TPP aimed to punish. It was kicking away the ladder which the U.S. U.K. France, South Korea and others had climbed before anyone else could get up it.
Liberal economics reeks of colonialism. "As above so below, everything in its rightful place. Let mexico grow avocados and let india make t-shirts and let the chinese build semiconductors. Lets's put all these people in their rightful places and engineer foreign policy to make sure they stay there forever."
One provision among many which stack the deck in favor of the U.S. and other rich nations. Even something as seemingly uncontroversial as the anti-corruption provisions would be deal breakers for many states. Compliance with such would require the establishment of a government arm specifically to investigate and punish corrupt officials. Who is going to pay for all of those bureaucrats, in a place like Vietnam, where people are literally selling their children just to stay alive?
And investor-state arbitration? The ability for some random joe schmoe to sue a foreign government for violating a trade treaty? We saw how that shook out with the tobacco industry; the experience was so unpleasant that tobacco was actually banned from making use of the ISDS system laid out in TPP. Interfering with a state's ability to make and enforce it's own laws is NO BUENO.
TPP makes sense from the perspective of a walmart shareholder, but to the states which walmart exploits, it's complete and utter lunacy backed by big guns and fat wallets.
UBI also isn't money for votes, its money regardless of votes. I can vote for UBI and lose more in taxes then I gain, and I can vote against it and still benefit. That sounds like about as non corrupt as it gets.
The funny thing is that you’ve also described exactly how tax breaks and deregulation for industries works. Google got massive benefits of Trump being president despite not donating to him.
A politician promising tax breaks for an industry is no different than a politician promising tax breaks for low income people.
I'm still not sure where I stand on UBI, but it's interesting that I've seen some economic liberals that are huge fans, other economic liberals that dismiss it as people "voting themselves money" and I've seen socialists that are huge fans of it and socialists that dismiss it as "an attempt by Capital to bribe the proletariat." Meanwhile most moderates I know seem to think it a pipe dream.
Who else is in your "many" other than the one person (polling at absurdly low numbers) offering handouts, Andrew Yang? It's not even clear whether his offer is legal.
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.”
Switzerland has been around as a (relatively) small government democracy for quite a while. There are regular direct democracy polls on spending and taxes.
Switzerland used to be quite poor until not long ago. It was a mostly subsistence farming country, and throughout the 1800s, it was a nation that people emigrated from.
Switzerland does have quite a few poor people, the difference being that someone on the poverty limit in Switzerland still happens to look quite alright from the outside.
The problem is that one cannot just look at income, rather what someone has to pay for as well, and in Switzerland you pay for everything.
I think that many Swiss can relate to this, when I lived there we used to joke that only breathing is free.
That doesn't make sense. The voters already collectively own the treasury of their state. And how exactly is it a requirement for a democracy to exist that it implements your favorite policies?
Corporations have only themselves to blame for the failure of the TPP. Instead of limiting the agreement to trade, it was filled to the brim with anti-consumer, anti-worker, and anti-environment clauses. Negotiated entirely by industry and kept secret from even senators, laundering legislation they could never get through any parliament. If there was any justice in the world, the TPP would not only have failed, but everyone involved would be executed for treason.
The bigger criticism I heard about the TPP was extending America's Intellectual Property laws even further across the globe.
And the secrecy was annoying as well.
What anti-consumer, anti-worker and anti-environment clauses are you referring to?
Of course, from the standpoint of mainstream economic theory, trade agreements are moot for their stated purpose: everyone is better off just opening up to unilateral free trade. No need for an agreement.
(Trade agreements can still be useful in practice to organize political coalitions for trade.)
> What anti-consumer, anti-worker and anti-environment clauses are you referring to?
The mentioned IP clauses would be anti-consumer, criminal penalties for trade secrets, and the horrifyingly 'standard' investor-state arbitration, which can throw a wrench into any pro-consumer/worker/environment law, as they usually impact corporate profit, meaning lawyers can argue that this is an indirect form of expropriation. It has a chilling effect on legislation. E.g. Canada backed off cigarette plain packaging and pesticide registration due to the arbitration clauses in NAFTA: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141121/07460329216/corpo...
A law professor made the same argument specifically in reference to the TPP - that the government would basically have to pay a tax to corporations on any legislation that cuts into their profits: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/gord-miller/trans-pacific-part...
"Dean Baker argued that Article 18.78, under which countries should ensure that they protect trade secrets and impose criminal procedures for violators, could be used to enforce non-compete agreements.": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership
And much of the TPP's more noble language, such as environmental and worker protections, is non-binding, and even explicitly subordinate to other parts of the agreement: "In the event of any inconsistency between this Chapter and another Chapter of this Agreement, the other Chapter shall prevail to the extent of the inconsistency.": https://theconversation.com/the-trans-pacific-partnership-po...
Basically, if it were remotely good, it would not have been negotiated in such secrecy. Think about who it was kept secret from - not the counterparties in the negotiations, so it cannot be argued the secrecy was to preserve some 'advantage'.
> The bigger criticism I heard about the TPP was extending America's Intellectual Property laws even further across the globe.
The IP issues were the big criticism within the tech community, because we care a lot about IP laws, but AFAICT not the big issue for unions, left-wing orgs, right-wing populists, etc who were much, much more concerned about tariffs, workers rights, etc and had barely anything to say about IP.
But the TPP didn't fail - Trump pulled the US out, the rest of the countries came to an agreement (under a different name and without the onerous US/Disney IP stuff) and are happily free-trading today
What disturbs me is the full swings in public opinions. A few years (months?) ago nobody cares, then a US president makes an announcement and suddenly a whole country is full throttle on how bad China is, from politicians to medias, public opinion, internet, even HN, South Park, left or right... Nothing like a good war to unite people and make them not bother politicians?
Why did America make China powerful in the first place by doing business in the first place then? There is nothing new here, China was totalitarian 30 years ago too. I’m not disagreeing with the fact that we don’t tolerate it further, just questioning the mechanism and the sudden overnight war declaration.
That's because "the smartest guys in the room" that are supposed China experts have and to this day maintain that China is going to liberalize[1]. Which has been utterly disastrous policymaking. It's only been recently that public policymaking has actually reflected reality which has caused the swing in opinion.
> What's truly brainless is thinking we can just bury our heads in the sand and ignore an ever expanding Totalitarian dictatorship bent on becoming the world's most powerful country.
I'd be more in line with this reasoning if the intent of the trade war was to incentivize better moral outcomes. This war won't end in China becoming less of a totalitarian power, nor will it stop China growing as an economic power. The real worry, is if China become even more powerful, and technologically advanced, but without the expense of having to provide human rights and freedoms, those rights and freedoms will be compromised for all other countries that now need to compete at the same level. The casualties will be workers' rights and welfare all over the world.
If the US administration wants to bring people, and the populations of other countries on-side with this trade war, it needs to be working towards an even playing field. I don't see how what the US is doing now is making this happen. In the short term they are weakening the domestic economy which simply can't replicate the manufacturing infrastructure of China, and alienating itself from the rest of the world.
>...without the expense of having to provide human rights and freedoms
If you assume that raising a small population of creative, technical problem-solvers requires this expense, then China has successfully outsourced that role to 'us' (meaning Western democracies, esp. the US), just as we've outsourced our manufacturing workforce to them. I think a trade-war is justified in retaliation for rampant systematic IP theft - although this would clearly be a post hoc rationalization at this point.
I'm not sure how you've come to this belief that there isn't a population of creative, technical problem-solvers in China. I'm very much certain of the opposite. China is a large nation with a super-size talent pool drawn from a monster labour force, with a strong cultural heritage and long history of state provided education opportunities. The US isn't some sort of exception here. If anything, it wastes much of it's population by asking poor people to jump through a series of hoops before they can even contemplate higher education.
Edit:
I think I should add, this kind of naivete is what caught the western world by surprise in the WWII in the Pacific. I'm sourcing my 'facts' from Dan Carlin here, but essentially the British command in Singapore, as well as the US, vastly underestimated the ingenuity of the Japanese, claiming them to be great at imitation, but not at innovation, and generally a disorganised and an underwhelming military opponent. This thinking led to Pearl Harbour, the dramatic taking of Singapore and the sinking of some very expensive battleships. Their air forces quickly overwhelmed and outclassed by the technically superior Japanese planes, handled with precision by well-trained pilots, and directed with strategy bold and unseen by even well-tested veterans who had seen action in Europe. Large scale military defeats down to foolish racial stereo-typing from the top down. I'd say the US should watch it's six.
That is not my belief and I didn't say it was. Stealing IP is not incompatible with also creating it.
That said the US has been collecting brilliant expats from around the world for ~70 years, including from China, so I might be forgiven for expecting our science and technology output to be superior. At least until we stop attracting great minds.
But here's the thing, we aren't in a position to steal IP because we don't make anything, so they don't send us the plans. If they did, we might be stealing too, but I hope not.
It seems pretty reasonable to say China has a plan to supplant the United State's values in the international order and surpass their military might.
It makes sense to avoid wars, trade and otherwise, but it also makes sense to consider what China is going to do in the future. Turning a blind eye to the fact that they are showing no particular signs of liberalising as they get wealthier would be a mistake.
Even if the trade wars themselves are a bad idea it is very comforting to see the US trying to focus on actual threats rather than the ghosts of the Soviet Union and blowing up brown people in the middle east.
For instance the story about Venezuela and Adobe shows the issue that the broadly applied policies of the U.S. can affect the livelihood of individual artists and designers.
There are more examples like that. (YouTube and COPPA, ...) Now people around the world can fear that some strange new or old policy from the U.S. take their income away. With the current political climate in the US that could be a serious risk.
You’d probably call me a leftist although I don’t have any group that I would feel at home with. It is quite hard for me to find any idiot in my friends circles that would defend the soviets or sympathize with them. As somebody who studied philosophy and reads quite a lot I can assure you that the amount of left intellectuals who are still defending the SU is equally low — at least in Europe.
So what you are postulating here seems to be colored strongly by your own world view and where you live. Instead of offering us a interesting new perspective that would help leftists to leave their own bubbles, your comment seems to only show your own lack of experience in that area. You might have missed for example that “the left” is usually much more fractured and less uniform than the right: most things you could validly criticise have pretty certainly already been criticised by another left fraction or even within one fraction. So doing as if there was any unified opinion here says rather more about your own bias than anything of substance about the other side.
Many US observers often seem to paint a black and white picture of what is much more nuanced. E.g. saying that everybody who doesn’t support the silly ideas of your president is automatically on the side of the Russians certainly boldly outlines your views, but suffers from the significant disadvantage of not describing reality. Let me assure you: especially conservative Europeans are fed up with how the US acts on trade lately.
Minds change over time. Back before the USSR disbanded and their decades of various problems were revealed, there were a sizable number in the US with some sympathies with the Soviet Union (if not for its then-governance, there was at least sympathy for the possibilities and future of the communist country). Even Bernie Sanders decided to have his honeymoon in the Soviet Union to improve relations and find lessons to bring back home.
With both Warren and Sanders proposing to tax rich people at levels not seen outside Communist countries, it's hard to believe the left doesn't sympathize with the Soviets, at least pre-Stalin Soviets.
I am afraid I can’t follow your logic there. Taxing rich people the same as everybody else (instead of paying them money) doesn’t make you a communist. Even taxing rich people more doesn’t make you a communist. Eisenhowers tax bracket in 1951 was 91% (!) above 400 k$. I am not an American, but I’d be rather surprised if Eisenhower turned out to be a Soviet all along.
These kinds of progressive tax brackets are pretty normal in most democratic nations, most of which are part of the NATO, which isn’t exactly a big fan of the soviets either.
Btw. there is a ton of influence beeing excerted by the Russians via russian oligarchs who got many politicians in their pockets. If you want to figure out who they are, you just have to check who constantly decides in the russian interest, while hurting the interest of their own nation.
> These kinds of progressive tax brackets are pretty normal in most democratic nations
What's the highest wealth tax you know of in a NATO nation? Is it near 8%?
Sanders has openly said that he doesn't think billionaires should exist, and has a history of supporting communists, so I don't think I'm stretching very hard here.
Would you please stop using HN for nationalistic battle and posting flamebait? You've been doing that a lot lately, and we ban accounts that do that. Fortunately your account has posted good (for HN) comments before that; please do that here, and not this.
> The foundation’s move from Delaware to Switzerland may foreshadow further technology flight because of U.S. restrictions on dealing with some Chinese technology companies, said William Reinsch, who was undersecretary of commerce for export administration in the Clinton administration.
> “There is a message for the government. The message is, if you clamp down on things too tightly this is what is going to happen. In a global supply chain world, companies have choices, and one choice is to go overseas,” he said.
What's controversial about that? If Chinese companies want to contribute to Open Standards and US laws put all of the IP at risk, of course they're going to move to a better jurisdiction to serve their purposes.
This is a case where I would trust them because it -is- open source. However I support US efforts to keep Huawei out of core communications structures, at least in the USA, and hopefully Europeans will follow with US or Continental suppliers. Microchips make it very, vey easy to bury backdoors for Chinese intelligence agencies as well as put in encryption weaknesses. Say what you want about the US but there are pathways to prevent you from being railroaded by the government if you're willing to stand up to them. This isn't so in China, where you just get disappeared or imprisoned if you don't tow the party line.
I was thinking the same thing but then it struck me they might be US companies who are much more intimately familiar with government doctoring. It might even be Berkley?
My only gripe being, there aren't many neutral countries which can stand up to powerful militarized nations.
Edit: The reason, I mentioned lack of military power of neutral countries is because of the existence of law such as 'Hague Invasion Act'[2] which allows U.S. to invade Hague to liberate its personnel tried at International Criminal Court for war crimes. Neutral countries need military power to protect its Neutrality!
[1]https://shakti.org.in
[2]https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...