What is the implication here? Are you warning that US corporations might start doing something shady, like scraping the internet at large scale for training data? Or mass-dowloading pirated copies of books, completely ignoring copyright?
I find it hard to imagine a future where US corporations have degraded to such a point.
No, he means that the US will close most of its domestic market to competition just like China has for decades, and the US may start subsidizing and dumping its goods everywhere
> the US may start subsidizing and dumping its goods everywhere
Isn't that exactly what companies like Uber have already been doing? Take VC money, sell goods & services at a huge loss, wait until the competition goes bankrupt.
Exactly, it's funny how most Americans have no self-awareness on this topic.
And beyond VCs, which are like massive subsidies funded by printed dollars to which no other country has access, even in industries like electric vehicles, Chinese total direct subsidies to their EV companies are like $5bn per year, while the the ones provided by the US to their auto manufacturers are in the range of $50bn per year.
I don't think the US are cheaters or are doing something bad. But i do think that this propaganda about China flooding the market through "overcapacity" and subsidies is very dishonest and needs to stop.
Yes. Dumping abroad is the entire model that Silicon Valley has been built on in the last 2 decades. China just copied the model. And even then it's a light version of it.
What’s worse, tariffs or outright banning the competition from your market? China has done both despite globalism being what has lifted it from poverty. Why is everyone suddenly surprised that globalism and free markets are coming to an end? Is this a net good? Mostly no unless you count more redundant supply chains.
> China has done both despite globalism being what has lifted it from poverty.
such oversimplification on steroids is totally misleading.
globalism was never invented or promoted to help any country in poverty, it was designed to extract excessive values from those poor countries in the first place. painting globalism as something noble is naive at best.
globalism was the theme of world trading for the past several decades, it was available to all nations. care to explain why other nations in poverty failed to be lifted by the exact same fancy globalism?
let me help you on this one - China was THE leading technological and economical force of the vast majority part of human civilisation. What happened between 1840 and 2010 (the China in poverty period) was an outlier of the history. Globalism didn't lift China from that poverty, the ability to lead the human civilization which was embedded into the Chinese DNA did that.
Kid, when our Chinese ancestors wrote the Art of War, your ancestors were still swinging on trees. You just missed that big picture.
> such oversimplification on steroids is totally misleading.
Yes, so the kettle is calling out the pot?
> globalism was never invented or promoted to help any country in poverty
It doesn’t matter what it was designed for. What matters is what it does in reality and there is no doubt that globalism helped lift China from Mao’s disastrous policies. That’s not mutually exclusive from China’s past as the Middle Kingdom
To steel man the person you are replying to, what reduced poverty in China was money from globalism + significant domestic reinvestment of that money into poverty reduction. That reinvestment policy was a deliberate choice, and now China has the biggest middle class in the world.
An example of a country which didn’t do that is Nigeria. They got something like $300B in oil revenue over a 30 year period but have actually seen significant increases in poverty, now at 70%.
The surviving non-American farmers would be confused by the future-speculative tense as America has already been doing this for decades in agriculture, and have been complaining for decades about both the subsidies and dumping of American corn.
Sure, but not at China’s scale and no where close to number of industries where China does it. Why? The US was a net importer in order to support the dollar being the global reserve.
Whole Silicon Valley is based on selling products under price, for years, killing the competition or making it impossible and extracting once monopoly position is stable enough. It is the same play book again and again and again and again. It runs unprofitable companies for absurd lengths of time.
Most of the Chinese domestic market is open to foreign competition. The areas that are closed off are those that are politically sensitive: publishing (including social media) and banking.
As for dumping, Chinese goods generally sell at a markup abroad, which is the opposite of dumping. Chinese tokens cost more abroad. Chinese cars cost several times more in Western markets than in China.
"Dumping" is when Chinese companies beat Western ones on the free market. If all claims of Chinese government subsidies on basic products were true, China would've gone bankrupt multiple times already.
You're being beaten by a Chinese company? Why improve your own process when you can just lobby for sanctions and tariffs instead!
At least in the case of solar and EVs, it's a case of western countries preferring to protect their existing cashcow industries rather than invest to build the industries of the future.
For a brief second, Germany was in a position to become a solar power global player. But our conservative government was more interested in protecting their local, bad industry. Including destroying forests for coal all projections said we would never actually need.
From a EU perspective similar could be said about the US market - no strict worker protections, lobbying, and a general "capital first" mindset over the users/people (see GDPR etc).
That does not explain DeepSeek, nor does it explain the car industry.
The main advantages the Chinese car industry has right now are: they lead in battery R&D, production is highly automated, they iterate quickly, Chinese work culture is extremely competitive and things get done fast, and the Chinese state has policies to promote EV adoption, so there's a huge domestic market.
Note that the last point is different from subsidies to car manufacturers. Cities made it difficult to get license plates for ICE cars. The government encouraged the massive buildout of charging infrastructure. And it used consumer rebates, like California did.
aside from the huge domestic market (or potential in the future), china has built incredibly efficient infrastructure for manufacturing prototyping/production.
but it's also thanks to protectionism, and their strictly controlled (not freely traded) cheap currency.
if china had to play by the same rules as japan or germany it would not be quite as successful. but the west walked into this trap, hoping their win-win proposal would be satisfactory for all. now the west is too dependent on chinese production to enforce equal standing.
of course the US has its own unfair advantages, e.g. the global reserve currency and the massive post-WWII headstart.
The US spent decades transferring manufacturing, capital, and know-how to China, while Chinese students trained, and excelled, at elite Western universities. Why are people surprised that China eventually became capable of competing with the US?
Hostile spy agencies are now as focused on infiltrating western universities and companies as they are on doing so to governments, according to the former head of Canada’s intelligence service.
David Vigneault warned that a recent “industrial-scale” attempt by China to steal new technologies showed the need for increased vigilance from academics.
“The frontline has moved, from being focused on government information to private sector innovation, research innovation and universities,” he told the Guardian in his first interview since leaving the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which is part of the “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing alliance with the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand.
People like Mr. Vigneault know nothing about how academia works. If they get their way, they'll do massive damage to Canada's academic research ecosystem. Academia is naturally open and international.
These people don't get that academics publish their research in openly available journals. They go to conferences around the world and tell everyone who will listen exactly what they are working on. Unless you're working in a secretive government weapons lab, there's nothing to hide.
In the US, people like Mr. Vigneault instituted a witch hunt against ethnically Chinese researchers, and ended up messing with the lives of all sorts of innocent people, including the director of MIT's mechanical engineering department. They found zero spies. Just a bunch of scientists working normally.
> Chinese goods generally sell at a markup abroad, which is the opposite of dumping
Dumping is selling goods below cost.
Usually because government is subsidizing part of the production. I don’t believe the word “dumping” is used for the similar process when Venture Capital is subsidizing it, but using the same term would make sense.
Price at home vs. abroad is key. The term dumping comes from the idea that a company that sells profitably in its home market dumps excess production abroad at below cost.
This is not what is happening here. Chinese manufacturers are making a large profit off every car they sell in Western markets. As I said above, they're selling these cars at several times the price they charge in China. Unless you believe these cars are being sold at just 30% of cost in China, there's no way Chinese companies are selling below cost in the West.
> I don’t believe the word “dumping” is used for the similar process when Venture Capital is subsidizing it,
I've been doing so for years. How about you join me today. I already see two other users doing the same, so there'll be at least 4 of us.
It's blatantly dumping, whether the source of the money is directly the government (those in power) or VC (mostly US billionaires (trillionaires?), in other words, those in power) is a trivial implementation detail.
I used to play the PS3 version lol, good times. I've actually just downloaded it last week to run it in an emulator. So nostalgic with the old menu, old weapons, old maps etc. (only works offline against but but still fun)
My quest is currently sitting in a drawer because it refuses to play the games I already bought unless I "verify" my "meta account" - which they demanded I create in order to use the oculus locally - by uploading my drivers license. Which I, of course, refuse to do.
Last I checked you needed either a developer account or a jailbreak to load "whatever apk you want" onto the quest, and there didn't seem to be any jailbreaks around.
If this state of things has changed, please do share! I would love to be able to actually use the hardware I already paid for.
I agree about large vehicles, but does an individual state even have the authority to ban a given kind of car from their roads? I suspect that is more under a federal authority than state-by-state.
Not ban but states can implement stricter licensing requirements for larger vehicles, and raise registration fees, gasoline taxes, and penalties for their misuse. See how Paris is handling SUV in the city center. It's very effective and other cities are likely to follow.
> Do you try to insinuate that a little bit of tracking is ok?
Everything is going to contribute to tracking, though. It's really hard to ensure that data doesn't leak.
Example proposal: sites attach an X-AGE-RATING header to pages and browsers only render the page if X-AGE-RATING < USER_AGE.
Exploitable Issue: Send multiple requests from one page for various style sheets with different X-AGE-RATING headers. The ones that get loaded give you all you need to find the user's age cohort.
But, the unique combination of things like your screen dimensions, number of threads, charge percentage, default languages, available fonts, etc already makes tracking possible. I don't know if adding one more - carefully chosen feature - would really make the situation that much worse.
> I don't know, treating general-purpose computers like alcohol seems a lot more dystopian to me
Isn't this the logical end goal of basically every approach to "age verification", though? If you really want to control access to the internet, then you can't let people have a VPN or Tor, and if you don't want people to VPNs or Tor then you need to lock the device down.
Well, the alternative is that Facebook makes you scan a government photo ID before you can use it. Any sense of privacy is gone, but at least general purpose computing isn't outlawed.
> You had my sympathy until you mentioned your healing. Now I know you were fired for being a pussy.
I was expecting some more substantial motivation for that but it's not even motivated by some weird disagreement about acceptable behavior at work, it's just this weird insanely toxic belief that taking care of yourself is "pussy behavior".
> Zuckerberg could’ve made a YouTube competitor or a Netflix competitor given that he already has a platform for video sharing and an ads infrastructure
Facebook has no content production experience though, and when they do dip their toes into that market its via AI slop (like their official AI accounts on instagram). I think this is because they don't value the human element of art at all.
They would be entirely reliant other content providers, which is a rough place to be in when you have to deal with actual studios and not just independent creators. Independent creators are easier for Facebook to exploit since they are usually small operations and dependent on facebook/instagram for market reach.
I find it hard to imagine a future where US corporations have degraded to such a point.
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