Also flightradar24 feels something that should benefit heavily from caching especially in an instance where lots of people are all tracking the same thing.
Heavier caching for non-logged in users is a basic of keeping sites up against unexpected influx because the vast majority of "new" (i.e. spikey) traffic won't have accounts, and won't be as fuzzy about seeing cached data, and are harder to monetize than logged in accounts.
Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the US House of Representatives. She is 2 heartbeats away from being President (she would become president if both the President and Vice President became incapacitated).
The House is similar to the UK Parliament. She is elected to her position by the members of the House.
Since Democracts control the House this term, they elected Nancy Pelosi as Speaker for this term.
The President has primary responsibility for foreign affairs. The Speaker taking this action could be interpretted as stepping on the toes of the President, or could have tacit approval of the President as a kind of stalking horse.
The House is one of two chambers that make up Congress. The House is a representational chamber by population, whereas it's counterpart the Senate is fixed at 2 members per state.
The House is often where bills originate, and the Senate is the latter half of the process.
The Senate was designed from the beginning to be an obstacle. If you can't get both a majority of people, and a majority of states to agree then it should stay a law at the state level instead of the federal.
> I'm choosing to interpret this as a sarcastic jab at HN's US-centric tendencies
It wasn't a sarcastic jab.
> willful ignorance
Do you expect everybody in the world to know how the US government works?
> It would take two seconds to look this up.
I looked it up immediately after looking up Nancy Pelosi on Google. This is what I got (Wikipedia):
"The United States House of Representatives, usually referred to as the House, is the lower chamber of the United States Congress, with the Senate being the upper chamber."
Right. Now I have to look up "US congress", "US senate", "US upper and lower chamber"... Didn't want to bother with it.
So I typed in a simple explanation.
This is the honest truth. Believe it if you want to.
(I actually got a better understanding of what US House of Representatives is by reading other comments here.)
FWIW, there's also "simple.wikipedia.org", which has plain-English definitions for many of the most popular entries in regular Wikipedia. Here[1] is the entry for "House of Representatives".
> Didn't want to bother with it.
I suspect this is the root cause of the problem. I could see why you'd post such a question here if you had tried Googling, found no relevant results, and ran out of options for doing the work yourself. But that doesn't sound like what happened. Instead, it sounds like you had the ability to continue Googling, but decided to let others do your research for you. That's like saying your time is more valuable than other people's time. Do you see the problem there?
> Here[1] is the entry for "House of Representatives".
Thank you for taking the time. Much appreciated.
> Instead, it sounds like you had the ability to continue Googling, but decided to let others do your research for you.
No. I did not decide to let others do the research.
I simply stopped doing the research. Didn't want to find out more, because deep knowlege of the House of Representatives does not add much value to my life. And neither is it a topic I'm interested in (like, I have spent hours reading and learning about comets because that's something I'm interested in, even though it too doesn't provide much tangible value to my life).
> That's like saying your time is more valuable than other people's time.
Wrong. It's like saying I don't want to spend too much time on this.
I never asked anybody else to do anything on my behalf. Frankly I never expected this to upset people.
I don't know. I'm not an American and I know what the house of representatives is, I also know what the chinese national congress is and who is the president of France and who is Modi. I suggest it is a good thing to invest some time into reading international news, because so much of what influences our daily life is determined by international politics and the big players in it.
> Right. Now I have to look up "US congress", "US senate", "US upper and lower chamber"... Didn't want to bother with it.
I mean yeah, this does look a lot like what I would call "willful ignorance." Of course there's nothing wrong with needing to look up words, especially in one's non-native language, but anyone could feign needing to exhaustively depth-first search words in the dictionary to understand any concept regardless of how basic it is. Consider that for any explanation someone gives you in an HN comment you could also just as easily say "now I need to look up every word in that comment, and every word in the definition of each of those words, and every word in each of those definitions, etc.
> I mean yeah, this does look a lot like what I would call "willful ignorance."
The meaning I came up with in my original comment wasn't wrong, was it?
My goal was to find out who Nancy Pelosi is. Finding out what's House of Representatives wasn't the top priority.
I don't understand why you're upset with me not digging deeper into what the House of Representatives is.
> Consider that for any explanation someone gives you in an HN comment you could also just as easily say "now I need to look up every word in that comment, and every word in the definition of each of those words, and every word in each of those definitions, etc.
It's not the slippery slope fallacy, because I'm not saying anything about incremental steps inevitably leading towards anything. You complained that looking something up doesn't work because you then need to look up all the words you encounter in the definition. I pointed out that the same could be true for any explanation regardless of its source (and likely would be true, because words like "congress" would almost certainly feature in anyone's explanation).
Well, Congress is a term used by a number of countries, not just the US, for their legislative bodies. The main difference between a Congress and a Parliament as far as I recall is that Parliament has a combined legislative and executive role, where Congress is solely legislative.
Senate and the nuance of our bicameral legislature is going to be more bespoke, like me having to look up the House of Commons vs. House of Lords in the UK.
Sort of... I didn't get the impression he stayed at the Capitol because he thought it was the right thing for the country, but instead because he felt staying was the better option for his own power and legacy. I mean, I'll take it, but I'd prefer our leaders were slightly more principled than that.
In France you have a strong president that combines the role of a monarch and prime minister, but the role of "constitutional gatekeeper" is shared by the Constitutional Council, Supreme Court and Administrative Court. The latter three are actually entities that use their power.
The idea of having two houses of parliament is common in most large countries, and it is also common for those houses to be segregated from the executive (EU etc...).
The US is a political and cultural mess, but a lot of those issues aren't inherently due to the political system involved.
It's just that when a majority of the American people want certain changes in policy, they are not able to get them passed even though the country is a democracy.
The parent comment just gave reasons for that (among other things).
The United States is not, strictly speaking, a democracy. The people don't make decisions. They elect people who make decisions, thus it is a republic.
I hear a lot of people in technical (predominantly US) forums make this distinction. Where does the perception that Republic or democracy are conflicting concepts come from?
Republic and democracy are orthogonal concepts. A republic is a form of government where the head of state is elected. So it is in conflict with a monarchy, where the head of state is passed by inheritance. In democracies decisions are made by the people through various means, like elections. In fact many (most?) republics are democracies, where the head of state is elected by the people. The US is one of them, the "the original" one Athens was as well.
However there are republics where the head of state is e.g. elected by a clique of oligarchs or the military. They are undemocratic republics.
Don’t forget that the President and Senate are both elected on the basis of land, rather than population. And the presidential allotment is winner-takes-all for most of those land areas. Definitely doesn’t disenfranchise large population centers, it’s fine.
The patches to the constitution aren't as deeply thought out as the original one. The Senate wasn't even an elected institution until 100 years ago, whether that is better or worse than an appointed system is mostly a false dilemma as there are more than two options. Pointing out that our constitution isn't really geared for the current process is a first step of getting more inspiration on how it could function.
When you patch one aspect it throws the other aspects out of whack.
"Basis of land"? LOL. Are you referring to the 50 individual state governments that make up the United States of America? Most Europeans don't know this, but the first government in the world to ban slavery was the U.S (Vermont). The US isn't one homogeneous zone. There are 50 individual governments that write their own legislation, have their own taxation systems and have military's (state guards). California is free to create their abortion access legislation as is Texas. Many states in the US legalized Weed despite the fact that the federal government has some bizarre policy in place (which isn't constitutional).
I hate to burst your bubble but Pope Zachary ended slavery in Rome in the 740s, banning the slave trade and manumitting all slaves already present by purchase of the church & state.
Seems like a significant security risk that it is publicly trackable?
I've seen AF1 land at the airport here (Bozeman) -- it flew in to the area at high altitude then circled tightly reducing altitude until final approach. I assumed to reduce the chance of a stinger hit from mountain-men.
As you noticed from AF1, the people who manage the flights of nation-level VIPs are extremely cautious and have a rich, well-informed risk model. You can imagine these airplanes have many countermeasures (SPAR19 is a C-40C, which is a military version of a 737). For all we know it was a decoy plane.
Hiding it from the army is not the point. Who knows if there'd be another maniac with a homemade gun or explosives out there, just like what happened with the ex-PM of Japan.
What's the risk of a plane flying over the Sea above the reach of "simple" weapons is being tracked?
A military-level attack against the third highest representative of the United States is a quite certain way to launch a war, maybe even nuclear retaliation, based on how quickly and well "prove" for attribution is unveiled.
However getting attention is a key purpose of that trip.
When US representative fly to Taiwan secretly it's disabled but whole world was talking about Pelosi going there and China's treats to shoot her down for day or two. Putting that flight for whole world to see is actually more secure than trying to keep it secret.
I like ADS-B Exchange and all for being a (purportedly unfiltered) data stream based off community volunteers uploading data from SDR stations (I even briefly ran a data source), but it's missing data for the middle of the flight.
I like to bring this up whenever FlightRadar24 is mentioned.
They heavily censor their feed. Not only for military aircraft, but they also have a service where you can pay to have your aircraft hidden by the system.
Personally my beef with them is that they started as a paid app, then transitioned to a subscription model and left everyone who bought the app hanging.
FR24 also uses a network of volunteer feeders. The difference is that FR24 uses that volunteer data and monetizes it. ADSB Exchange shares it back to the community.
Yeah, seems they don't have much coverage in Indonesia and the Philippines. I wonder if FR24 (which was showing the flight path correctly all along) depends on private uploaders there, or do they have other data sources to fill the gaps.
I think they have some satellite-based connection points, and those feeds understandably cost $, but maybe with cubesats we’ll fill in some gaps at an affordable price (possibly delayed).
Might also fill in with actual ATC radars (either interrogating in Mode S or listening to ads-b) or just national infra ads-b/multilateration output. These usually cost $$$.
> Previous job roles posted by the company suggest that it runs a mixed system infrastructure “based on a modern virtualized data center environment as well as AWS and Azure cloud services” — with the SRE role suggesting that it was building a “future private cloud based on open technologies like OpenStack, Ceph, and KVM.” [1]
Sounds like they needed a monolith, single server ;) (tongue in cheek, I know it's not that simple)
In an era of unlimited scaling infrastructure, it's a shame they're struggling to capitalize on an exclusive superbowl scale marketing event. It was predictable days in advance.
Days is not enough advance notice, if for example they don't have a way to monetize the traffic. Unlimited scale = unlimited cost. Potentially the site crashing was the financially appropriate outcome.
Will people coming in from Twitter and co specifically to check in on Pelosi's plane have any interest in converting to a subscriber for general flight tracking? I'd suspect the conversion rates would be (/are) extremely low with this kind of inorganic traffic.
Days in advance would have been enough to prepare a static page for SPAR19 alone, updated minutely or something... would cost practically nothing, especially if served from CDN edges.
I would be surprised if that's not already the architecture of a website like this, especially if keeping infrastructure costs low is a significant requirement for the business.
It's not unlimited scale, it was just over 700_000 people according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32320697. If your web page is 100 kilobytes, which seems like the maximum that would be reasonable, that's 70 gigabytes of traffic. AWS charges US$0.09 per GB so this is US$7. If you eliminate the cloud premium it's closer to US$1.
In fact loading their home page takes 3.1 MB for me over two minutes. Searching for a flight (AAL301 in this case since SPAR19 has already landed) brings this to 3.8 MB. At this size it would be 266 gigabytes, US$27. Reloading the page, I see that this was about 180 HTTP hits, though a lot of those were ads (I guess they have a way to monetize the traffic) which were blocked by uBlock Origin.
But doesn't it take a lot of CPU and RAM to serve 700_000 page views, especially at 180 hits per page view? That's 126 million hits, after all! Well, of course you can write your code arbitrarily inefficiently. According to https://crozdesk.com/software/fastly/pricing Fastly charges US$0.0075 per ten thousand hits, so if you could serve all those hits from Fastly it would cost you just under US$100. And probably if you're getting 700_000 people looking at the same thing you should figure out how to make all those hits cacheable either in Fastly or in something slower but cheaper. This probably isn't the first popular flight on FlightRadar24, even if it's the first one that's this popular.
(Also though you probably don't need 180 hits to serve up a single page. One for HTML, one for JS, one for CSS, one for an icon sprite sheet, and maybe half a dozen map tiles. The cause of death was a self-inflicted wound.)
What if we want to know the minimal CPU cost to serve up 126 million hits rather than the minimal dollar cost for someone else to serve them up for you? Well, one weekend a few years ago I wrote a static file HTTP web server called httpdito-386: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/server.s (docs in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/httpdito-readme). It's 710 lines of code and can handle 20_000-30_000 hits per second on my ten-year-old laptop (8 cores) and push about 1.8 gigabits per second of traffic. It's not the most efficient web server (it forks a new process for every connection and drops the connection after handling the first request) but it's probably adequate to get a ballpark figure.
Serving up 126 million hits with httpdito would take 84 minutes on my ten-year-old laptop, so probably you'd have needed 2-5 server machines, or one machine that wasn't ten years old. Serving up 70 gigabytes in a smaller number of hits would have taken 5 minutes.
Of course, the whole point of FlightRadar24 is that it's giving you dynamically updated Comet information about where flights are, not just serving up precomputed files from the filesystem. You could implement this kind of functionality by polling, but using Comet would probably be more efficient. Maintaining 700_000 open connections is easily within the capacity of a single server today; we were doing several thousand on our Comet server at KnowNow in 02000, using what we called RUTH (Robert's Ugly Thttpd Hack), using select() on a 32-bit machine with a gigabyte of RAM and a gigahertz.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32319147 says, "Use one big server." The associated article https://specbranch.com/posts/one-big-server/ profiles the servers they use at Azure: two 64-core CPUs with a 2-2.5 GHz clock, 4-6 instructions per clock, 256 MiB (MB?) of L3 cache, and 1 TiB (TB?) of RAM. From the cloud pricing they're citing, buying one probably costs about US$15k, roughly the cost of one programmer-week. According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32321406, FlightRadar24's revenue in 02021 was US$25M, so this would be a little less than 6 hours of their revenue.
Serving the website html, js, css, images, etc is only a small part of their overall hosting costs. Do they maintain backend services? API gateway? Waf? Logging? Analytics? State/database? Cache? Load balancers? etc etc.
Your walltext paints an incredibly incomplete picture of their overall hosting expenditure. They aren't running a wordpress site lol.
Well, as I said, you can complicate things to an arbitrary extent and make them arbitrarily inefficient, and they clearly have done so because their site went down under the load of less than a million pageviews. But the essential part of the service is delivering some HTML, JS, CSS, and images, and updating the client webpages with new flight status information, and that doesn't require 3.1 megabytes, 180 hits, a WAF, an API gateway, etc.
There's no reason FlightRadar24 has to require as much horsepower as running a WordPress site, which involves interpreting PHP (inherently inefficient, throws away 95% of your CPU power in exchange for flexibility and easy end-user programmability) and accepting user comments from a substantial fraction of users. It does require maintaining hundreds of thousands of open connections for Comet, which WordPress doesn't, but that's a manageable problem ever since kqueue landed in FreeBSD and epoll landed in Linux. It's not 01999 anymore.
Let's do an estimate of database size. 100_000 flights a day means about 32768 flights at any given time. You might get an update on each of these flights once a minute, so maybe 720 updates per flight, maybe 16 kilobytes per flight. That's 512 megabytes for the entire database. Not only can you fit that in RAM now; you can fit that in RAM on a 286 from 01987.
If the way you're accustomed to building websites results in websites that crash under light load, maybe you should consider doing it a different way rather than criticizing people who tell you there's a better way to do it.
Though I guess you missed it, I did talk about caches in my comment (edge caches with instant invalidation is the service Fastly provides), which was 626 words, less than three minutes of reading. Calling it a "walltext" makes me think you'd die of a heart attack if you ever saw a book.
Again, you are taking massive simplifications. Flight information is only one dataset they manage. They also manage data on planes, their users' subscriptions, perhaps site analytics, etc. The cost of the storage goes beyond the disc size - you also need redundancy, you might have offline ETL jobs to enrich the data, etc. Quoting estimates of disc size and per GB storage costs is not sufficient to summarize their costs.
Further to the point, your reply (to my comment) is not addressing my reply at all.
> unlimited traffic = unlimited cost
To support additional traffic does not come free. Sure, the traffic:cost ratio is not linear, but I don't think you are making the point that supporting the additional traffic does not have a cost associated to it? Exactly how are you refuting my comment, if you are at all?
Site analytics can of course grow without bound, but collecting so much site analytics you crash your site? Thats dum. Design your site so that it sheds load by not collecting so much analytics if that's a problem. And load test it before it's the most popular source of information on an international diplomatic incident.
I never quoted any estimates of disc size. I linked a server with a terabyte of RAM. Are you seriously suggesting they might have more than a terabyte of data on their users' subscriptions and on planes? Offline ETL jobs? Come on, be serious.
Redundancy? Yeah, you should have two big servers, not just one. 12 hours of FlightRadar24's revenues.
Yeah, unlimited traffic would be unlimited cost, but this is not unlimited traffic, this is US$27 of traffic that should have been US$1 of traffic. If this were 01999, or if a billion people had swarmed their site instead of less than a million, you would have a point.
We seem to be talking past one another, and from what I can tell you are more or less agreeing with me. Supporting additional traffic takes additional money. The estimation of the amount of money it costs to support the traffic they receive is evidence of this being the case.
Commenter
> In an era of unlimited scaling infrastructure, it's a shame they're struggling to capitalize on an exclusive superbowl scale marketing event.
My Reply
> Unlimited Scale = Unlimited Cost
You
> estimate the cost of a limited amount of traffic
Me
> wasting time talking in circles reiterating my original point
> That's 512 megabytes for the entire database. Not only can you fit that in RAM now; you can fit that in RAM on a 286 from 01987.
I'm an idiot, on a regular PC you can only fit that in RAM since 01999, not 01987. Not sure how I looked at "megabytes" and thought "kilobytes", since I'd just calculated it.
I agree you'd probably need more than a 4-euro VPS. Indeed, I said in my comment that my 8-core laptop wouldn't be enough; you'd need 2-5 of them, unless you were running more efficient web server software than that hack I wrote one weekend in under 1000 lines of code. (And you couldn't use it anyway; it only supports serving stuff from the filesystem, not Comet.)
Clearly the systems they use aren't that simple or they wouldn't have crashed under such a light load.
Do they really want lots of traffic? It's a very specialized website, it's not like the traffic will stick. The people who want to pay for their services are already customers. I doubt they care about random Joe
Their infrastructure might very well be setup in a way that can't scale.
They don't need unlimited scaling for the entire site, just enough to scale for one particular plane.
They make money from ads and subscriptions. Any such business pays for user acquisition and a % of users convert to subscriptions.
Even if all this is spiky traffic, their site probably has now had millions of first-time users. When traffic dies down, they will settle back at a higher than previous usual levels.
Bank accounts ultimately put a hard cap on scaling infrastructure. Considering most folks use this service for free, I can't imagine they'd want to let those free users DDOS their bank account into bankruptcy.
Considering that the warnings were issued to the U. S., I imagine the ones laughing would be…the U. S.? I have no idea why you’d bring the Soviets into it.
The CCP is embarrassing themselves, making threats they're to scared to carry through with, hoping the threat alone will be enough. Nancy Pelosi is flaunting those threats, showing the world that Xi Jinping has no clothes.
It seems to me that everyone involved is taking a chance offered by other events, like China knowing that the US is helping Ukraine with weapons and would never want to be involved in two (indirect but potentially real) wars on multiple fronts, Russia knowing that the US is already committed to help Taiwan but don't want to piss off their allies China too much to avoid a direct military conflict, and the US knowing that Russia is in the worst possible economic shape and couldn't sustain an attrition war for much longer without risking either its collapse or resorting to nuclear.
And by what measures is Russia less able than the West to sustain the conflict in Ukraine? Many European countries have already complained that they aren't able to supply more weapons and IIRC the US has already given Ukraine 1/3 of its HIMARS missile supply. Not to mention how the West's energy supply chain is fucked as a result of all of this.
Probably yes, I've hit the language barrier many times in the past; not being a native English speaker and having spent less than 2 months combined in my entire life in English speaking countries comes at a price:)
> Actually why would Russia interfere or react to China/Taiwan in any way, regardless of Ukraine?
Pure speculation, but it is possible that both Russia and China will support each other, at least through economic pressure or threatening military action against the US and NATO countries, so that the US are forced to keep the guard up on multiple fronts because, should the shit hit the fan on one front, they could deploy only part of the available personnel and gear.
That would work as hell of a deterrent, and I'm pretty sure that if it happens on one front, let's say China invades Taiwan and the US intervene militarly, something nasty would happen also on the Russian front, like Russia getting the chance to attack some EU or NATO country so that the US would be forced to divert part of their force there.
Not a fantastic comparison. They were acting on the best information they had at the time. No one knew how important sparrows were to keeping locust populations down.
Is it actually true that no one knew that? Or just that Mao didn't know (or didn't care because he thought it was important to bend nature to his will)? Did people not realize that sparrows at bugs until the 1960s?
Correct. It shows the world where the real balance of power lays and gives confidence to American allies that America is not a fair-weather friend that can be bullied out of its commitments by loudmouthed tyrants like Xi Jinping. This is excellent for American global interests.
I don't think it reveals anything new about the balance of power. We know the USA is currently still the largest economy and we know China is in the ascendancy and is on course to dominate the coming decades. As for giving confidence to allies - East Asia in particular is all to aware of how far the USA is willing to go to advance its interests and ideology in the region, having fought (and lost) two conflicts there since WW2.
You seem to be brimming with pride at this gesture, I think this pride is misplaced. I hope nothing bad comes of this, but I cannot fathom the idea that increasing the chance of conflict with China being good let alone excellent.
The conflict is probably inevitable anyway. Appeasing the Chinese Communist Party by acquiescing to their demands won't bring us peace in the long run. Better to do everything we can (short of violence) to humiliate, undermine, and disrespect them. This demonstrates firm resolve and helps to maintain confidence among our regional allies.
> The conflict is probably inevitable anyway. Appeasing the Chinese Communist Party by acquiescing to their demands won't bring us peace in the long run.
Sure it would, but peace was never the goal of the US empire.
> Better to do everything we can (short of violence) to humiliate, undermine, and disrespect them. This demonstrates firm resolve and helps to maintain confidence among our regional allies.
I wish it was against the HN rules to advocate for public policies that wouldn't be acceptable on HN. For example, if I called you a stupid moron, an amoral cretin who should be thrown in a cell and left to die, dang might have a problem with that. And yet your equivalent suggested policy will pass without concern.
Well if peace is your only goal then sure we can allow China to take over Taiwan plus the rest of the first island chain, and dominate the entire Asia-Pacific region. Is that what you would prefer? Fortunately the adults in the room have realized that appeasing expansionist dictators like Xi Jinping never ends well.
The social conventions of being kind and polite hardly apply to existential conflicts between superpowers. To pretend otherwise is dangerously naive. I would be quite happy if every single member of the Chinese Communist Party was thrown in a cell and left to die. Call that amoral if you like, but it would make the world a better place.
Sure if the Ukrainians had quietly made a backroom deal to be annexed by Russia then there would not be a war now. And then next year it would be Estonia, and so on. Would that be preferable?
The Europeans (mainly Germans) wouldn't have to buy so much LPG from the US if they had invested in other energy sources and avoided becoming dependent on Russian fossil fuels. Presidents Obama and Trump specifically warned them about this strategic risk but they didn't listen.
As a junior congresswoman, she walked right into Tiananmen Square and held up a banner that memorialized those that died. Right in front of the Beijing police! She's never stopped poking at China. The fact that she keeps getting re-elected, over and over again, is pretty good proof that she has indeed been elected to engage in foreign policy ;)
I agree that her history of activity really does play a part in being re-elected.
I find the parent comment a bit shocking. It seems unreasonable to claim an elected U.S. representative is somehow not allowed to engage in foreign policy discourse by visiting a country or by suggesting that they aren’t representing their constituent’s views because they do political work outside of the (U.S.) country?
Shall we hazard a guess about unelected Americans? Are those people allowed to exercise their right to freedom of movement and freedom of speech? Obviously yes and yes, but partisan polarization makes all of these norms, rights even, a point of contention.
The Department of State is not the only group of American bureaucrats who are allowed to travel and engage in public actions that are considered political. America isn’t a dictatorship where only specific party members are allowed to engage in foreign policy discussions. When any American is threatened by members of an actual dictatorship (of the proletariat, literally), it might be worth considering that these issues transcend party politics.
The parent comment strongly implies that there isn’t a long history of elected American officials visiting other countries, often with controversial media coverage and/or overt political threats from less than liberal societies. That history also extends to normal Americans speaking in foreign parliaments and speaking in public squares. It is a good thing that everyone has these rights, even if everything said isn’t always good.
With that said, Pelosi might be provoking world war three, but the reason to argue against her actions isn’t because she doesn’t have the right to travel or speak or engage in politics abroad.
As a side note: Taiwan probably should be defended by people who support democracy, though I understand this might not be seen as defense but as unnecessary provocation.
Related though and on display in this thread is a kind of cynicism against America doing positive political actions abroad. This is part of a larger trend perceived from inside and certainly outside of America about some Americans: the light of liberty is going out in America, and most of the world has noticed. It isn’t particularly partisan and has really accelerated since 9/11 under both parties in different ways. It is really sad. America should be a light of liberty in the world, we should bring hope to democracies under threat from illiberal societies. I understand that this is now controversial in America in some political circles and it is really terrible. As polarization increases, all sides will find friends in exile or worse - peaceful resolution requires political discourse regardless of geographical location.
Put another way: Ensure your political “enemies” have basic rights or you too might find that you are without rights, if and likely when, other people run the show…
It's a bit silly to frame a Congressperson visiting Taiwan as merely "visiting a country" given the known sensitivity and the near military standoff over its political status. She has more responsibility than that as a representative of the U.S. She should not be willfully undermining U.S. foreign policy for any reason outside of the legal mechanisms available as a member of Congress. The fact that there was no real purpose to the visit aside from political grandstanding just makes it so much worse.
Do you deny she has the right to do it? Or do I misunderstand your position?
We both probably agree it’s politically risky, perhaps even stupid. I understood your original comment to be a denial of her right to freely travel there. From my perspective she has the right to do it. Do you disagree?
Additionally I don’t believe you have shown that she is undermining U.S. policy, merely that she disagrees with the executive. Why is that a problem? We have a separation of powers and she is part of the legislative body, not the executive. By design these branches can and should disagree when there is disagreement. This is a basic check and balance issue. By the way, Congress has the exclusive power to declare war and controls the power of the purse as well. So if anything is a bit silly, it’s a bit silly to pretend that she isn’t allowed to see the situation on the ground before discussing and perhaps even voting on going or not going to war. She is doing this legally and entirely within her authorities. She is not in the hierarchy of the State Department, and I think it is clear that she has voting constituents in Taiwan that are overseas voters. I know several California voters who live there and she is their duly elected representative. Your position appears to be simply suggesting that the separation of powers doesn’t exist and that she is out of line. I encourage you to cite the line you believe she has crossed.
Party affiliation doesn’t mean iron clad agreement. Dissent against the U.S. President’s policy is a right of all Americans. If it’s a problem in her role, censure her and sanction her in the U.S. House of Representatives. This won’t happen but I do encourage you to work for it politically if you disagree with my analysis. My understanding is that Biden seems to personally agree with her about supporting Taiwan. I don’t know but it seems reasonable to suspect he may even privately be happy she can do what he can’t. It’s too bad American policy with regard to supporting democracy abroad is only widely supported when it’s an imperial, illegal invasion. Here is a chance to do it peacefully and to ignore the Saber rattling of the Chinese dictatorship. I understand some people are too afraid to do this now, or they don’t care about people outside of America. As someone with (American) friends in Taiwan, that isn’t my position. As someone proud of the good things about American democracy, defending and supporting nascent democracy around the world is a good thing. I understand this is going out of fashion. As someone who has lived in and traveled frequently to less than free societies, I implore others to not give up the support for democracy, especially when it is peaceful political discourse under violent threats from illiberal bullies.
>Do you deny she has the right to do it? Or do I misunderstand your position?
I'm getting thoroughly fed up with analyses of geopolitics that begin and end with talks of rights and justifications. It's just the wrong framework to analyze international relations if your goal is to predict behavior at the scale of nation-states and maximize ones own interests. Of course she has a legal right to travel to Taiwan as a US citizen. The question is whether in doing so she is flouting her responsibility as a representative of the US to not undermine US foreign policy. It seems plainly obvious to me that she is and it carries the potential to damage US interests.
>Additionally I don’t believe you have shown that she is undermining U.S. policy, merely that she disagrees with the executive.
It is US policy to maintain a stalemate over encroachment on Taiwan sovereignty. This policy is maintained by careful adherence to time-tested conventions and behavioral constraints as well as calculated actions to maintain the stability of this equilibrium. As a representative of the US government, her actions abroad can and will be interpreted as a reflection of US policy, therefore she should be bound to not interfere with explicit US policy, except through legislative actions available to her. Willfully undermining US's strategy (of an equilibrium with China over Taiwan) by unilateral action is treasonous (for lack of a better word). You said it yourself, her actions could plausibly kick off world war three.
The fact that people are cheering her on is absolutely insane to me. Signalling has completely overwhelmed our collective ability to think rationally on complicated issues, to the detriment of the world. If WW3 does happen, I expect social media will play a non-trivial role in bringing it about.
> I'm getting thoroughly fed up with analyses of geopolitics that begin and end with talks of rights and justifications.
No doubt. It’s a challenging frame for a discourse. Part of the challenge might be related to the fact that it sometimes completely dismantles other arguments that are willing to ignore human rights as enshrined in the U.S. constitution? If we don’t live up to those goals and indeed if they aren’t shared goals, we might need to rethink the entire American government. Personally, those are still very important goals for me and I am glad to see that elected officials try to use soft power to spread idealistic, but basic human rights. The right to self determination is important, as is the right to vote (e.g.: without party membership such as in a one party state).
You’re using your free speech rights on this social media website to argue that someone who is an elected representative shouldn’t exercise her rights. This is perplexing but also understandable.
> It's just the wrong framework to analyze international relations if your goal is to predict behavior at the scale of nation-states and maximize ones own interests.
My sense is that we need more than one framework, I also think game theory and expected value analysis is also probably useful here.
However I don’t think we agree about the notion of self interest. The world is slipping, perhaps running, into authoritarian rule in several areas. If we do not hold the line, and in fact try to expand it peacefully through, we will find it shrinks for us as well. Probably in the short term, the damage to the economy if Taiwan was unavailable for semiconductor manufacturing would probably seriously harm us in an economically measurable manner.
In this way, human rights, the economy, and game theory all seem like reasonable frames for discourse - the balance of the results is then a political question. That political question is best answered with democracy. It’s not perfect, it seems unclear what is better though.
> Of course she has a legal right to travel to Taiwan as a US citizen.
Thanks for conceding that as it was unclear - when you said “Nancy Pelosi wasn't elected to engage in foreign policy” I was unsure. That’s the reason several persons I know voted for her (I know; the plural of anecdote isn’t data…), I didn’t but hey, how can we evaluate that statement except by a legal or rights based analysis? In terms of power delegated to her, it’s certainly part of the job. If not, there is a specific legal process to impeach her. Personally I think she should probably be impeached for insider trading but that’s also because it looks clearly like corruption, and that really harms American interests in a measured way.
Apologies for being long winded, I don’t have enough time for shorter comments today.
When you said “She should not be doing actions abroad that have implications for U.S. foreign policy.” I think that this sounds like an opinion and an unsupported claim. On what basis can someone do “actions abroad” at all then? All actions by all Americans abroad have “have implications for U.S. foreign policy.” Some have more “implications” than others but it’s not only her right, it’s her job. I disagree with her on many issues and I wish she would be replaced, but how can we objectively measure what you’re claiming here should not be done? It really sounds like isolationism - that she just should not do it and that doing it is somehow beyond her mandate, and it follows that lesser Americans like the rest of us unelected folks should also not do it. That’s a level of isolationism that exceeds even Thoreau in his criticism of the Mexican-American war. Talking abroad as a person in power where it may avert a war seems provocative but the most basic kind of interventional action allowed for such a person.
> The question is whether in doing so she is flouting her responsibility as a representative of the US to not undermine US foreign policy.
That’s a new question and a good one. I’m glad you ask it, thank you for taking the time to engage.
The separation of powers encourages dissent against policy or actions by other coequal branches of government. On what grounds do you think she is flouting a responsibility? Which specific responsibilities is she flouting?
I’m not sure what you mean exactly, so I withhold any judgement. She may be doing that and I am plainly open to that option, there is simply some clarity here that I am missing from the question.
> It seems plainly obvious to me that she is and it carries the potential to damage US interests.
It is not plainly obvious to me. I would like very much to understand your position because I sense some frustration that means I am blind to something important to you. It seems like pandering to her base in some ways, but it also seems like one of the better American interventions in the last twenty years. No weapons, very small fiscal expense, positive PR for American values, potentially heading off a similar conflict to Ukraine before it starts, and perhaps other positive things like cheaper semiconductor production for Americans not made in mainland China? I presume someone did some game theory analysis and concluded that the Chinese make a lot of threats they don’t back up ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_final_warning ), and by conceding to a bully, the bully is empowered.
> It is US policy to maintain a stalemate over encroachment on Taiwan sovereignty.
In this, I think we agree - this seems unobjectionable but I admit I am not a foreign policy expert by training, only by working abroad for many years, including with relevant parties here.
> This policy is maintained by careful adherence to time-tested conventions and behavioral constraints as well as calculated actions to maintain the stability of this equilibrium.
What if they ran the numbers and decided they needed her to do this to maintain that stalemate? By showing that there is dissent internally, this may encourage China to try to work with Biden to censure Pelosi, bringing them back to the discussion table at a time (Ukraine war) that they seem to indicate they want to move on Taiwan.
> As a representative of the US government, her actions abroad can and will be interpreted as a reflection of US policy,
Maybe. It’s clear she dissents from Biden’s official policy as I understand it. She can also be interpreted as a reflection of the values of the (capitalist) democratic system which allows for dissent from the highest executive leadership.
>therefore she should be bound to not interfere with explicit US policy, except through legislative actions available to her.
Ah that’s a policy suggestion that I can’t agree with unless there is a specific proposal. Do you have one? It might be that I do agree with your view but I already believe there is more than one way to view her actions and the U.S. policy generally.
> Willfully undermining US's strategy (of an equilibrium with China over Taiwan) by unilateral action is treasonous (for lack of a better word).
Calling her actions treasonous when Biden himself agrees personally seems like a stretch. It’s clearly a coordinated motion by the Democrats, not only to win votes at home but also abroad. Russian and Chinese intervention seems much worse than American when we consider her gesture.
Additionally, I don’t think you have shown she is undermining it, especially if U.S. (e.g.: intelligence, diplomats, etc) thinks China may soon take action to break the stalemate. I’m not sure if this is the case but that seems like something that is being discussed. If China is going to break it with violence, it is better to change the norms slowly with diplomacy. It is especially better if the expected value of a war now includes the calculation of kicking off a major conflict with the biggest and best navy in the world, not just a tiny island. As a side note the tiny island did very well in the last hot war and they clearly managed to help create this stalemate. We probably could learn something from them when they ask for our help, it’s probably not something to dismiss.
> You said it yourself, her actions could plausibly kick off world war three.
There is a flip side: inaction presents danger as well. If we are not regularly taking steps to ensure peace, we may also find ourselves in the Third World War. The Cold War over African infrastructure (primarily between U.S. and China) is underway now. Peace requires work, constantly.
> The fact that people are cheering her on is absolutely insane to me.
It seems like you have lost faith in American soft and hard power, and you think China will not only start a hot war, that they might win it? Is that fair? I’m definitely against a war with China but diplomatic action is precisely how I think we avoid it: we tell them the expected value of their actions and put it on display for the entire world to see. If they pull the trigger, America will have the moral upper hand and we clearly have the military superiority. It will probably be a completely stupid and pointless war, and it will wipe out huge number of innocent lives. Pelosi herself will probably escape unharmed.
> Signalling has completely overwhelmed our collective ability to think rationally on complicated issues, to the detriment of the world.
I agree. However we have definitional disagreements.
Diplomatic action is not merely (social media or media) signaling, it is critical for the functioning of the world. This is within her mandate, and it is clearly to counter China’s rumbling about taking Taiwan by force. They’re the little guy and China is the bully. If they take Taiwan, it will damage the American economy immensely, to say nothing of rights or values. The economic impact of a war in Taiwan would be even worse than the direct human cost.
> If WW3 does happen, I expect social media will play a non-trivial role in bringing it about.
Absolutely, the cynicism it brings to the world is harmful. That’s what free speech gets us - I think the trade offs are worth it, in the end free societies will (with constant effort!) triumph over illiberal societies. It will be with a high cost but it is worth the price. I expect to go quickly if nuclear arms are used and I accept this as a risk.
We should dare to risk, we cannot live freely without risk. Live free or die, and all that.
>If they pull the trigger, America will have the moral upper hand and we clearly have the military superiority. It will probably be a completely stupid and pointless war, and it will wipe out huge number of innocent lives. Pelosi herself will probably escape unharmed.
This point really cuts to the heart of the matter. Moral and rights talk, in a manner that treats them as unconditionally overriding principles, is the exclusive domain of the privileged. It takes an uncommon privilege to eschew any consideration of the externalities of your actions; to treat the justificatory quality of rights as total. Those who aren't so privileged know, just as the right-of-way in an intersection won't protect you from an oncoming car, a moral or legal right won't protect you from the negatives of uncritically exercising your presumed rights. But social media has created a potent source of short-term utility from virtue signaling with no consideration of context, the costs of which usually falls on those less privileged than the virtue signaler.
It's like we've collectively forgotten that the world isn't black and white, and that actions have reactions. We just can't avoid considering our actions in a space of possible reactions and then judge the utility of the outcome. That is, if we actually care about helping people and reducing suffering. But those who go around advocating for promoting democracy, or standing up to bullies, or whatever are doing exactly this, dispensing with the complicated task of analyzing the outcome of actions and judging if the presumed benefit is worth the cost. When Pelosi goes to Taiwan to poke China, she can afford to ignore the potential reaction. As you said, she is likely to survive a nuclear war. But there is no virtue here, only self promotion. The real virtue is restraining oneself in these uncritical "moral" performances precisely because the cost tends to be borne by those less privileged. It is easy to say democracy is worth dying for when you're not the one that will be dying.
>It seems like you have lost faith in American soft and hard power, and you think China will not only start a hot war, that they might win it? Is that fair?
I don't know what would count as a "win" in a hot war with China. It's negative-sum. The win is not to engage in it.
>Calling her actions treasonous when Biden himself agrees personally seems like a stretch. It’s clearly a coordinated motion by the Democrats, not only to win votes at home but also abroad. Russian and Chinese intervention seems much worse than American when we consider her gesture.
I don't know that Biden agrees with her. Even if he personally agrees with her, the issue is how her actions undermine US policy that President Biden is executing. But perhaps this is some surreptitious tactic to confound China's ability to predict US responses. In that case, I wouldn't have a problem with Pelosi's action (although I do have a problem with the tactic). But that's not how it looks from where I'm sitting and I can only judge by the information I have.
>The separation of powers encourages dissent against policy or actions by other coequal branches of government. On what grounds do you think she is flouting a responsibility? Which specific responsibilities is she flouting?
The separation of powers isn't akin to a no-holds-barred cage match where the last person standing wins. There are legal structures in place for each branch to influence or constrain the other branches. Operating outside of these constraints to influence US policy is just to declare yourself an enemy of the constitution. Iran-Contra was treasonous precisely because the executive did an end-run around the legal authority of Congress. This is no different.
> Moral and rights talk, in a manner that treats them as unconditionally overriding principles, is the exclusive domain of the privileged.
This claim seems backwards as a general rule. For one easy example: In jail support, prisoners, including political prisoners but also common criminals, often speak of their rights. Often their rights being violated is a problem precisely because they are not privileged and the basic rights, which are the responsibility of the state, are not being upheld. With PREA as an example, the state agrees with this discourse. There is a bottom of the barrel, and when we speak about rights we are really scraping the bottom of that barrel. Rights are important most of all or especially for the least privileged in society because usually those people are directly faced with the organs of the state. The rights based discourse is of course the domain of the literate, but the exercise of those rights is important for everyone which by definition includes the unprivileged. I suppose we could debate which group is larger but that’s the logical fallacy of the majority…
> We just can't avoid considering our actions in a space of possible reactions and then judge the utility of the outcome
I agree. I don’t think there is avoidance here. Pelosi flew on a military aircraft which Biden as Commander in Chief could have stopped. This fact is a giant hint that we don’t have all the information. If she had flown commercial, it would be a different signal. Chinese commentators have noticed this (e.g: https://nitter.net/CarlZha/status/1554720310611812354 ) fact. How do you explain this detail?
Furthermore the logic of conflict you present (as I understand it) seems like a game of tic tac toe rather than chess or go. It certainly it is a standard lower than the decision theory taught at the Rand Corp (ha!) or practiced in Department of State. With what I take from your comments the way to win any conflict with a U.S. following these rules is simply to make a huge threat, and the bully will win, almost always. There is no risk worth nuclear war, so we shall have no freedom of navigation in the “South China Sea” as China regularly says no and makes serious (sounding) threats.
Alternatively we can view their threats as a reaction to basic international law, and we can push back on their threats not on a rights based discourse alone but also an expected value outcome in terms of economic cost. They won’t carry out their threats and indeed they did not start world war three. Your strategy as proposed (and again I admit I may misunderstand) doesn’t seem like a good strategy for many reasons.
> It is easy to say democracy is worth dying for when you're not the one that will be dying.
Sure.
I have been to war zones and risked my own life to be there. I assert that you need not take this risk to hold any position. My implicit question was if you agree in any case. It’s easy and yet you don’t take a position. That’s fair but maybe it would be helpful to say that? I don’t see agreement here so again, the risks here seem too much for you, and as a result there is a simple way to beat your diplomatic strategy every time in game theory simulations.
> The win is not to engage in it.
This is true for a war, on that we agree - though I suspect America will have at least one person standing. A technical win with high costs which is probably fair to dismiss as hardly a win at all.
Still I think you avoid the direct question: what about the need to engaging in peace building where it may risk war and where inaction also risks war?
> But perhaps this is some surreptitious tactic to confound China's ability to predict US responses.
What is the standard of evidence I could meet to demonstrate that this is likely or actually happening? It seems clear (say, a preponderance of evidence but not yet beyond a reasonable doubt) to me based on the use of military aircraft, Biden’s personal statements, the history of empty Chinese threats, and other details published in the popular press.
> But that's not how it looks from where I'm sitting and I can only judge by the information I have.
Thank you for acknowledging that the core problem is that we simply don’t know enough. It’s hard to have a functional democracy when this is true, and yet diplomatic action requires secrecy from the general public (at least for a time, and not forever) in tense moments. If you don’t have confidence in government officials at all, I can see how it would be hard to give them the benefit of the doubt.
> There are legal structures in place for each branch to influence or constrain the other branches.
Which legal structures do you assert that she isn’t free and legally allowed to do this travel? Your goal posts seem to be shifting. We already agreed she has a right, so how can you assert now that she doesn’t, and that it is somehow illegal or against any rule of conduct for members of the House?
> Operating outside of these constraints to influence US policy is just to declare yourself an enemy of the constitution.
I’m not sure that the latter follows the former. You haven’t shown that she is operating outside of any constraints, nor that “influence US policy” is a thing that shouldn’t be done. Again, on what basis do you make that claim? Do you assert that the various democrats and republicans who visited Ukraine should have a political litmus test, to see if they are influencing U.S. policy in some (supposed and implied negative) manner? From my perspective this is a core part of their job.
Iran-Contra was bad but in the end, I don’t think any of the people involved caught treason charges. Did they? I might be wrong here as I am definitely not an expert in Oliver North’s crimes. Was anyone directly involved and convicted of any crime an elected official? If not, I think the comparison doesn’t stand but it does raise a question about the actions of unelected people. Regardless, Arms smuggling is materially different than a visit to meet with political counterparts and constituents.
In summary, we probably agree about a few things here, but we are operating in a vacuum regarding their analysis process and thus we lack information. There are hints that this is happening and I perceive your cynicism to be overpowering your confidence that this is indeed happening.
Your view appears to be that all of this is empty virtual signaling, and I partially agree - but that’s the pandering to her base, many of which can’t engage in the economic or conflict analysis by game theory when reading a news paper. So the rights based discourse is easier as a summary, and it is obviously (to me anyway) not the full analysis leading to her actions. Do you seriously contend that this is merely a P.R. exercise with no analysis and that military transport is simply free for use to do Twitter virtual signaling?
> This is excellent for American global interests.
Of course it is. It is a very typical pattern of the US external politics. Decompensate some frozen conflict or a status quo situation somewhere beyond the ocean and then enjoy being a safe haven when the rest of the world is burning.
The US is literally interfering in the internal affairs of China. Taiwan is legally part of China. They never declared independence. Even the Joint Communiqué between PRC and USA explicitly says recognizes that Taiwan is part of China.
This is unrealistic from an Asian perspective. The US has actually lost three proxy wars with China on the other side (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan) and what is happening in Ukraine is a total mess that no Asian country wants to be in. The US also did not manage to unite the world (including most of the Asian continent) against Russia.
The idea that the US will be willing defend Taiwan fiercely when the US did not do the same for Ukraine, against a foe that is much mightier than Russia, is silly. No country in the world wants to descend to the levels that Ukraine had gone.
The US is not an ally of Ukraine. We never had any kind of commitment to defend them. We give them weapons and other support as a way of knocking Russia down and preventing them from threatening our actual allies.
The situation with Taiwan is completely different due to the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, and official policy statements by multiple presidential administrations since then. The US would absolutely defend Taiwan against a major attack. The question is how far that commitment goes? If China uses tactical nuclear weapons at sea, would the US escalate or back off? No one knows what would really happen in that scenario...
It's also worth pointing out that United States spent a significant amount of effort to prevent Taiwan's indigenous nuclear weapons program from reaching fruition.
It seems rather irresponsible to poke China in the eye like this, they are definitely going to scale up air, naval, and cyber intrusions in response. Very likely nothing significant will happen, but these heightened tensions increase the likelihood of accidentally sparking a real crisis.
I don’t understand what your reply is trying to communicate.
She scheduled a trip to Taiwan. China gets big mad as usual and says ‘don’t do that or else’. And you think not bending over backwards for the unreasonable and silly demand of their pathetic dictator is just ‘swinging your dick around’..? Makes zero sense to me.
Swinging your dick with no consequences would be something a bit more than just "i am going on a scheduled trip to an allied state".
Xi is the one swinging his dick (the metaphorical version of which we are about to verify as rather impotent), threatening with some vague aggressive messages towards the US just to prevent a planned trip.
Messing with the carefully managed status quo is foolish. China cares a lot more about Taiwan than the US does, if we goad them into action on this issue it's going to be a repeat of Ukraine. We will send them some donations and put Taiwanese flags on social media, but they would get devastated and occupied.
I don't think this is an accurate assessment of the situation.
China's an export based economy that's going through a slowdown and still struggling with pandemic lockdowns. War would shut down the Taiwanese straight for shipping and it's one of their busiest export lanes in the world. It's not helping that their housing market is in pretty dire straights. So the CCP's not in super great water popularity wise (although sometimes wars can bring people together, I'm not sure that's as true with acts of aggression as it is with acts of defense).
China and the US are both heavily dependent on Taiwan for semiconductor manufacturing, especially for state of the art chips. War would shut China off from that tap. Those labs are incredibly advanced and not easy to rebuild. And the US dependence on those chips give the US a strong reason to defend Taiwan. Both countries are ramping up their own chip production in order to make this less of an issue but it's certainly the case at the moment.
An invasion across the Taiwanese straight _would not be a cakewalk_. China's military is certainly much stronger than it used to be, but at some point you need to move troops across that straight in greater numbers than jumping out of the back of bomber planes can provide. A mass landing is likely to result in huge casualties and may not be successful. The US has been arming Taiwan for decades now and it's certain they're planning for that cross channel invasion.
Anti-China sentiment in the US is fairly strong at the moment and the current US President has said the US would defend Taiwan. China will invade when the US is divided on the issue and thus more likely not to step up to the plate. Similarly, where the US goes it'll have help from its partners.
China's not in a great position at the moment, at the end of the day, despite a lot of rolling around on the ground trying to scratch for fleas the United States is still a pretty big dog in this world. And going toe to toe with it in something that's not a proxy war probably isn't something any regime has much appetite for.
Even without a hot active phase, potential escalation and the prospect of export issues with the US at this point would just fuel China's trade with Russia, as sanctions would become an unavoidable event, hence CCP wouldn't have a reason to think twice before maximising trade with all other sanctioned states. And the trade wouldn't happen in US dollars/western financial infrastructure either.
I think China would much rather take Taiwan in 10 or 20 years than today, and it would take some serious goading to spark an actual conflict. Could they pull it off today? I'd give them decent odds, but as you describe, even the best case would be painful and expensive. Opposed amphibious landings are extremely hard to pull off.
In terms of public opinion, I think you underestimate the extent to which Chinese people believe that Taiwan is a rightful part of China. Their domestic audience would not view it as invading another nation, but rather the rightful culmination of a long effort to reunify territory lost during the century of humiliation (eg. Hong Kong, Macau).
Biden's statement that the US would defend Taiwan was an unscripted gaffe in response to a question that the White House walked back within hours. In reality, the US has no legal obligation or treaty compelling it to defend Taiwan. Again, there are pretty clear parallels to Ukraine, where the US provides materiel and support, but isn't willing to actually guarantee military intervention.
My takeaway is that this visit will ratchet up tensions and has a very small probability of escalating into a serious crisis, for no appreciable foreign policy benefit. It just looks like a cynical attempt to shore up foreign policy weakness before the midterms, after the mess in Afghanistan and Ukraine.
AFAIK The confederate states of the US during the civil war thought that Europe would come to their aid to keep the price of cotton down. Cotton traders ended up making more money with the shortages so there was no incentive to do so.
Expensive chips for a while is probably cheaper than WWIII.
Eh, I don’t think that anecdote is relevant. The production pipeline for cotton is extremely simple in comparison: add lots of manual labor plus land fertile for cotton and you get cotton. Many places on Earth would have fit that bill in those times.
The US government can’t allow the Chinese to have absolute power and control over the technology that the _world_ runs on. It’s an existential threat.
Can you imagine, at the height of the Cold War, the US outsourcing nuke construction to the Soviet Union?
I’m pretty sure the Taiwanese factories are rigged to go, or at least those factories will be destroyed in the event of an invasion. Plus it’ll be easy to sanction China and prevent them from acquiring new fab tech to rebuild the factories.
I’m pretty sure the US is ok with the world being set backwards a bit in tech if they get to reacquire chip leadership. A more cynical person could suggest that the US is agitating for a war in order to precipitate this very outcome.
An even more cynical person (me) would suggest that the democrat party is facing a pretty tough mid term, and nothing gets voters to back the part in charge more than a good old fashion conflict...
The cynical person in me says none of them care or even think about trade, tech leadership, or anything beyond retaining power in the next election
How long do you think it will take, in this scenario, for local US fabs to reach parity with TSMC? Intel has been trying for a decade. AMD is a TSMC customer.
Your scenario only makes sense if the US was almost on the verge of achieving technological parity with TSMC, say within months or maybe a couple of years. But that is not the case. Heck, building a fab from scratch takes longer than that. What happens in the interim? And what happens to the rest of the world? The disruption on a global scale would make the pandemic look mild.
The main problem with building the factories in the US is doing it cheaply enough to remain competitive. When the competition is destroyed that is no longer a problem.
The rest of us will just have to get used to paying more for less.
Just because something is incredibly destructive doesn’t mean politicians won’t do it. I’m sure many people would like to punish TSMC customers for not buying American in the first place.
Chip manufacturing is probably the most value added industry in the world, while simultaneously being absurdly automated. If you can't make them in the US because of costs there is nothing you can make in the US.
Did you completely ignore all the things China has done in the region to mess with the status quo? Keep appeasing to China will only make things worse until it's too late.
The Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty was nullified over 40 years ago. The US policy with respect to Taiwan since then has been strategic ambiguity, and we can see how well that worked out for Ukraine! They were in the same situation as Taiwan, being strung along by US assurances without a firm commitment. The parallels are obvious, and if I were a Taiwanese policymaker, I certainly wouldn't be counting on US military intervention.
Also refer to multiple occasions this year where Biden has said that the U.S. commitment to Taiwan was similar to NATO Article 5, or otherwise that the U.S. would militarily defend Taiwan:
Compare that with ... nothing at all of any similar kind of legislative or executive message w.r.t to Ukraine. There is no strategic ambiguity about the U.S. defending Ukraine military; the U.S. is absolutely not committed to that course of action and has never been - the strongest language on this point being a non-binding memorandum from 1994.
I'm familiar with the Taiwan Relations Act, which means I know that it provides absolutely no guarantee of military intervention. What exactly is the relevance of the Taiwan Relations Act to the question of whether the US has guaranteed military intervention if China invades Taiwan? You are citing an irrelevant current law, and a treaty that expired 40 years ago, which doesn't inspire much confidence in your subject matter expertise.
As with Taiwan, with respect to Ukraine the US did not guarantee military intervention, but reserved the option to intervene and made statements to that effect. In recent months, they did clarify that they would not send US troops to intervene directly, but I expect we would see similar statements from the White House if China started preparing for an imminent invasion.
The opinion piece that you linked spends the first three paragraphs explaining why people should believe that Biden's statement wasn't a gaffe. That opinion piece was published on May 25. The Fox News story describes how Biden walked the statement back on May 24. Apparently the author either didn't bother to follow the story for 24 hours, or just hit publish with out of date info. Either way, rather embarrassing.
You clearly aren't here to engage in good faith discussion, so I'm done.
This isn't a random person who happens to want a little trip to an island, swooning with shock at the idea that it could provoke some kind of response. It's one of the most senior politicians in the dominant global power deliberately doing something they know will provoke a response in an ascendant global power. It's an act of defiance which you can agree or disagree with (personally I think nothing good can come of this) but let's not kid ourselves that it's a sweet old lady on holiday.
Or is it one of the most senior politicians in the dominant global power deliberately demonstrating that they recognize and support Taiwan and is willing to do so in spite of Chinese military threats and they need to back the fuck up?
Unless there's something being done to the raging dictatorship, the event makes the dictatorship more determined to spread and demonstrate its influence over the region. And the US does nothing, it actually is unable to do anything to CCP at this point, but it shows the audience meaningless posturing that don't lessen dictatorship's influence.
we are in agreement with at least one, but very important point - offering the dictatorship to escalate confrontation is counter-productive at this point (maybe not so much some time in the future under different circumstances), because the US will not be able to afford itself to save Taiwan if CCP decides to escalate it further this time.
1. Taiwan never declared independence.
2. Mainland China is not a dictatorship. There *are* democratic processes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China. You just basically never hear about them in Western media.
> Mainland China is not a dictatorship. There are democratic processes
Get this propaganda out of here. When there is only a single political party allowed and all candidates for that party have to be approved by the party leadership, you don't have a democracy.
From the wiki article you yourself cited: "the CCP tightly controls the nomination and election processes at every level in the people's congress system... the tiered, indirect electoral mechanism in the People's Congress system ensures that deputies at the highest levels face no semblance of electoral accountability to the Chinese citizenry."
Whoever wrote that on Wikipedia clearly does not understand how accountability works in China, nor follows news in China, and is only speaking from theory.
If you follow the news in China, you see elected officials promptly getting fired for messing up in their governance, some also get prosecuted if corruption is involved.
> If you follow the news in China, you see elected officials promptly getting fired for messing up in their governance, some also get prosecuted if corruption is involved.
So was imperial China. They're the first in history to have some competence examinations for holding public offices. Makes them a competent monarchy/dictatorship not a democracy.
Edit: How do you define "messing up in their governance"? You trust the press articles published inside China? As in, inside the great firewall? Why do you think it's there?
Because the Western media outside the GFW is full of lies and Western propaganda. Having lived through the Hong Kong 2019 riots, I know what it’s like.
The GFW is there to filter away all the distraction so that most people can stay unbothered and just go on with their lives. BTW, it is a lie that VPNs are illegal in China. That’s why you see so many what some call “bots” and “wumao” on Twitter. Those who really want to weather the waters outside the GFW are allowed to, at the tiny cost of buying a VPN. Most people don’t bother.
Only when the "diagreement" is about stuff i've experienced personally. I've lived under a communist dictatorship the first 13 years of my life so you're wasting your time.
All I can say is that I'm sorry your life sucked under that particular regime.
Not all communist regimes are the same, not even when you are talking about successions within the same country. Wen Jiabao, Xi Jinping, Jiang Zemin, Deng Xiaoping all have different strengths, different weaknesses, different focuses.
Having travelled to many parts of China, having worked there, and knowing people from Mainland China for many years, tells me that the Chinese gov has been hugely beneficial to its people in general.
For an extreme example, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (commonly known as North Korea) also has elections, but everyone with a brain knows they're a sham.
Or the Deutsche "Demokratische" Republik. Mock elections seem to be a staple of many dictatorships. Not sure why, it's not like they're fooling anyone either domestically or internationally.
That's because China is a meritocracy. Everybody has to work their way up from the very bottom in order to prove their worth - even people with connections will fail if they can't prove their worth. And so you don't end up with random dudes with no qualification whatsoever trying to run for important seats.
... in practical terms, it's legally a one-party state in an authoritarian system of government - this is broadly recognized as the "one-party dictatorship" model.
So what? Hong Kong and Macau also have their own currency, passport, and elections. And they are still part of China.
Nobody says the PRC will just nullify Taiwan's currency, etc. upon unification. All they are asking, basically, is that Taiwan not become a bastion for the US.
Thoughts like these are hillarious when you've lived part of your life under the Romanian communist regime. Yes, we had elections too. I was too young to remember the details, but I'm sure no adult gave a shit about them because they were pointless.
Naivety would be charming if it weren't dangerous. You also believe what the seller is telling you about the product? Esp in the US where any lie is legal if you're trying to sell something...
Couldn't they just write all locations say to a public s3 file, maybe separated by geo squares depending on your viewport? client would just keep polling the s3 file(s). Unlimited bandwidth (at a cost yes..)
Back when S3 and EC2 were brand spanking new services, and EC2 didn't have persistent disks, I got to see a quite well designed analytics pipeline. The inbound tracking http requests went into a pool that aggregated them locally in mysql, then wrote out the database files to S3. A separate pool would pull down these files and merge them into a local mysql databases for the web app UI. So kindof like a very simplistic map reduce atop s3 using mysql ISAM files.
It was impressively simple to keep running, and they easily scaled it to handle massive spikes related to sports events and such. The only real downside is the delay in new data hitting the UI layer, but this was built out while a lot of people still had webtrends installs kicking around, so it was perfectly acceptable for their customers.
This is more likely to be about not overflying China/PRC's disputed territorial claims in the South China Sea - the flight certainly has to overfly part of that claim (because it in includes Taiwan/ROC), but it doesn't have to fly over all of it ... seems like some kind of carefully calibrated diplomatic message / inside baseball.
Nancy Pelosi is about to land in Taiwan on that flight, China has been threatening some sort of action (military/economic/angry words) if it were to happen.
They have to wait for the person on the plane to disembark and find a pay phone to call back to the home office to let some one know they landed safely.
In fact, I believe they now do both. Starting in 2005, Taiwan has started using the name "Republic of China (Taiwan)."
Not that it really matters, but I wonder which would actually bothers the PRC more. I would have thought that the real source of irritation with, "Republic of China," is that it references the name used by mainland China up until the revolution of 1949, thus manifesting Taiwan's historical claim to be the legitimate Chinese government in exile.
CCP wants Taiwan to claim to be China as then it is seen as an internal struggle between two Chinese factions. So the CCP takeover of the island becomes reunification. If Taiwan calls itself Taiwan and develops a separate identity at some point it becomes a struggle between two separate identities and it would not be a unification but a hostile takeover.
To sum it up, most important for CCP is that Taiwan is considered Chinese. I know CCP likes to play the long game, but at some point Taiwanese cultural identity will have shifted too far for this to work. I think it is close that that point, and that in another generation it will most likely be there.
Also flightradar24 feels something that should benefit heavily from caching especially in an instance where lots of people are all tracking the same thing.
Heavier caching for non-logged in users is a basic of keeping sites up against unexpected influx because the vast majority of "new" (i.e. spikey) traffic won't have accounts, and won't be as fuzzy about seeing cached data, and are harder to monetize than logged in accounts.