How come? Everything they’ve got they just stole from other entities. Unless there’s a European company 4 year ahead this is just impossible. Plus I reject this notion off hand as huawei ships famously half baked and buggy software with their equipment.
If it's asserted often and loudly enough, it becomes true - at least in the minds of most people.
Huawei spends over 15 billion USD/year on R&D, which puts it in the same league as Apple and Google. Only a few companies in the world spend more on R&D. That's the real reason why Huawei is viewed as a threat. The US has been happy for China to produce cheap knick-knacks. Now that China develops and produces its own cutting-edge technology, it is perceived as a threat.
No matter how much budget you have, there's always something you can't do. It's pretty convenient to throw a bunch of resources at a project knowing "the other half" of the IP is gonna show up for free on a thumb drive someone drops by after leaving their job at Cisco (or whatever other company they decide to raid that month) in a hurry.
Your R&D budget becomes effectively your 15B (I don't believe that number btw) plus whatever Cisco, Broadcom etc.. spend. How convenient.
American companies are not behind, they don't exist.
US companies can't compete in the market where they don't exist. Qualcomm sells components, not mobile networks. There are only four big companies left for for 4G/LTE/5G mobile infrastructure:
COMPANY MARKET SHARE
Huawei 28%
Ericsson 27%
Nokia 23%
ZTE 13%
Samsung 3%
If the Chinese regime throws cash at a company to buy themselves into a dominant position to play their role in a geopolitical game, market share means nothing.
The problem with China is that they support their companies in ways that are incompatible with western laws. In the long run it is simply not possible for US companies to compete with Chinese companies, as they would be essentially competing with the Chinese nation.
If that’s the issue why not form American nation like companies or something of the sorts? Or Americano-European conglomerates? Competition could be a good thing at the end of the day..
> It announced new rules that target Huawei’s in-house microchips, which power many of the firm’s products. The rules are aimed at the factories that take such designs and turn them into working silicon, such as those owned by TSMC in Taiwan and SMIC in China.
Out of curiosity, what's the legal basis for this? Is it just a threat, and if companines like TSMC don't follow it, they'll also be blacklisted from the US market?
The legal basis is that companies which violate US sanctions are not allowed to operate in the US, or transact business using financial services companies which operate in the US. That applies even if no part of the transaction passes through US territory.
It's unfair that non-US companies must annoy Huawei. Non-US companies usually don't benefit from this. It's like forcing foreigners to be part of your army.
Those companies, like every company seeking to do business around the world, will make its judgment call on whether it's worth it to satisfy any party's demands.
Mark Liu, T.S.M.C.’s chairman, told The New York Times in October that T.S.M.C. had been negotiating with the Commerce Department about a possible U.S. plant, but said it would require substantial government subsidies. How much, if any, public money might be associated with the company’s decision was unclear.
This again? I think your point is appropriate when speaking Spanish, Portuguese (EDIT: not Portuguese), etc. However, in common English (no, not just in the US) the word "America" more often refers to the USA. Languages don't use the same or derivative words for many other countries as well.
Not even in Portuguese. "Americano" specifically means "someone from the United States". Spanish is the only major European language in which its local equivalent of "America/American" does not refer specifically to the USA.
That's bad and wrong, you should think past your familiarity for a minute and logically not do it.
This shouldn't be mixed up with the other common case which is often discussed, 'American' as the demonym for people and things from the USA. That isn't quite as bad (though it still annoys other people from elsewhere in the Americas) because it's using the name of the superset - Americans, from the USA, are also Americans, from the continent. Whereas, when "America" (the USA) does something, it doesn't necessarily mean all of America does it. The USA is a subset of America, not a superset or the only entry.
Language isn't always logical, but if you won't draw the line at something so clearly backwards as using the whole continent's name for the actions of one country, you can only expect it will start an argument every time.
I disagree with the premise here that "America" describes the continents of North and South America. That is in and of itself the issue here, so I don't agree that the USA is a subset of America because I would refer to the continents as "the Americas" or similar.
I think you and your countrymen should reevaluate this stance.
Huawei is an asset of a regime that tracks its citizens like it's 1984, spirits you away to jail (or death) if you make disparaging comments -- even if true --, locks Uyghurs away in prison/sex slavery/organ donation internment camps for "reeducation", steals Tibetan children, takes away territory from neighboring nations, builds naval bases and prevents fishing in an ocean they don't own, shuts off the water supply to Viet Nam and others, ...
I'm not saying the US is perfect, but the CCP is downright scary. They're a risk to the freedoms we enjoy.
I love China and its citizens, and I wish they were free.
We chose a really difficult country name to create an identity around. United States of America citizen just doesn't have the same ring to it as American does. Meanwhile, you know, we also stole Amazon as a word to mean something totally different than a river and region in Brazil.
wut... amazon is a greek word, which is actually derived from a different older language (the hypothetical pelasgian, the original indigenous people in the balkans).
So, yeah... you can say brazil borrowed that word from the greek language via latin, and the greeks themselves borrowed it from an extinct language...
Am·a·zon
/ˈaməˌzän,ˈaməzən/
Learn to pronounce
Origin
late Middle English: via Latin from Greek Amazōn, explained by the Greeks as ‘without a breast’ (as if from a- ‘without’ + mazos ‘breast’), referring to the fable that the Amazons cut off the right breast so as not to interfere with the use of a bow, but probably a folk etymology of an unknown foreign word.
That's going to be awfully hard to do since we decided it was better to make things overseas because it's cheaper and we didn't have to pay so many in-house engineers.
This may be a bit of pro-USA or pro-Western favoritism on my part, but if a company is getting away with illicitly gaining access to trade secrets in order to build a competitive advantage while shielded by its home country (not the best example, but t-mobile v. huawei - I imagine plenty of others are classified), is it in-scope for opposing nations to destabilize the company responsible for doing so?
Well, "nuke" might be the wrong word, but doesn't it depend on the end goal? The EU seems to be taking the "extract wealth" approach, and just as with destabilization, is there anything wrong with that?
I'm not answering the question; I'm asking it. I guess my overarching question in the end is whether or not it should be left up to the free market to resolve an issue that's spawned from an entity operating "outside" of it, either literally (e.g. in China) or figuratively (e.g. antitrust violations).
Google still owns Android - an OS the majority of the world uses, and is required to ship with Chrome (among other programs) pre-installed if the OEM also wants access to the Google Play Store.
Amazon should be forced to spin off AWS and release Twitch. Facebook should be forced to release Instagram and Whatsapp. Alphabet should be forced to release Youtube, Waymo, etc. That's about the right scale of antitrust required here.
Maybe there is a better word than “Nuke” to describe this? Perhaps a word not so strongly associated with death and destruction, unless you truly mean the physical locations of these orgs should be hit with atomic weapons?
I think a starting point for discussion is to get past equating antitrust issues with monopoly status. In the previous century, these things went together coincidentally, but the scale of our economy has grown to a point where it is no longer necessary for the largest companies to have monopoly power in their market to engage in damaging anti-competitive practices. We instead see cartel-like cooperation between these companies instead of competition, such as apple-google wage fixing that was revealed years ago. Or their complete insulation from consumer feedback necessary for healthy capitalist markets to function, because their economies of scale insulate them by making consumer choices insignificant signals lost in the noise.
Tangential conversation, but I might actually disagree with you there. The modern web browser is the gateway to easily the vast majority of content consumption and creation tools currently in existence. They can be compared in terms of whether control of such can sway the balance of power in a grander scheme.
The web browser is easier to replace than almost any of those things, though. I regularly use 2 or even 3 different web browsers on the same computer and another on my phone. If Chrome went away, there’d Be basically no impact on my life. Same not true for operating systems as it’s harder to switch.
> The web browser is easier to replace than almost any of those things, though. I regularly use 2 or even 3 different web browsers on the same computer and another on my phone. If Chrome went away, there’d Be basically no impact on my life. Same not true for operating systems as it’s harder to switch.
I'm not so sure. Yeah you could fork Chromium or Firefox (the only two browsers left), but "web standards" have ballooned and gotten so bloated that you'd need a pretty significant engineering organization to manage to support it yourself.
maybe not right away but eventually people would catch on.
Regardless, it’s pretty certain Huawei does it and the possibility someone else is doing it and currently getting away with it does not justify someone else doing it.
But is there a narrative that the federal government has a side channel way to deliver high quality intelligence to Google and Microsoft executives? How does it happen?
I don’t agree with this. It is literally his username. Have you ever seen that episode of The Office where Michael won’t call Mr. Brown by his name because he thinks it’s racist to do so? That’s what you’re doing here, Dang. It is not a personal attack unless you interpret it as such. Guidelines state to take the most charitable version of what one says. Do you think you’re doing that here?
It isn't the convention to address others directly by their usernames, so when someone breaks with that convention, they're doing so for a reason. To hide behind "it's just a name", as if the name innocently mentioned itself, is misleading.
Ditto for the oldie-but-goodie, "It's a fact. What problem can you possibly have with facts?" - as if a fact were a fish that catches itself and serves itself for dinner. There are infinitely many facts and they don't select themselves, as I often tell HN users who make this argument: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Sure it's a fact—and language has multiple levels of meaning. It's common to attack on one level and then switch to another level to defend. It's never just a fact. What the fact is being used for, and what other facts are left out, are just as relevant.
Sometimes people explicitly address someone by their username because they want to express extra friendliness, but in a hostile context it generally ups the ante and signals additional aggressiveness. This is especially true when (1) there's something about the username that is relevant to the argument, so someone's own name can be used as a weapon against them, and/or (2) you replace the literal username into something closer to the person's real name, or use it to look up their real name and use that instead. That's the equivalent of stepping close to someone and getting in their face, if the argument were in person. You guys did both #1 and #2 in this thread. (It's odd that you say "it's literally his username" when they were clearly different.)
Using personal details in this way—like people's names or (another common case) their employer's—comes across as menacing. Sometimes there is an overtone of doxxing to it, a sort of "I know who you are and am prepared to cross lines about this", or if not of doxxing, then of the online callout/shaming culture: "We're going to stick this to you". I don't think these aspects were in play in this thread, but they were in the other case I linked to above.
Something in this case was even worse. You guys changed the username into a plausible surname which is ethnically marked, because it was ethnically marked. In an argument about China, taking an obviously Chinese substring of the opposing username and putting it in the other person's face is a strong indicator of an ethnic attack. Obviously that's a bannable offense on Hacker News. The fact that you repeated it after another user started doing it is particularly awful, because now we have the semblance not merely of an ethnic attack but a gang attack. I'm sure you can understand why moderators would not let that pass.
Now let me walk this back slightly. I'm not saying that the above is what you had in mind. I can't know that. But these are strong patterns that lead to strong priors, so if you do what you did without supplying disambiguating information, that's how it's going to be interpreted (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). In this case the burden is on you to disambiguate. If I ask myself how one would do that in such a comment, I find it hard...
First of all, thanks for answering. Even if I don’t agree with you, I appreciate the effort explaining your thoughts.
> It's odd that you say "it's literally his username" when they were clearly different.
The literal part is that it is in his username. If his username had been “AChineseMan12345” and I stereotyped him by calling him Wang because it’s a common Chinese surname, then yes, it would be harassment and an attack. This was not.
> indicator of an ethnic attack
Calling people’s ideas “pro-Western bias” is also an ethnic attack but you seemed to only have a problem with it because it was starting a flame war. Flame wars are people fighting over which phones are best, not attacking entire hemispheres.
> The fact that you repeated it after another user started it is particularly awful, because now we have the semblance not merely of an ethnic attack but a gang attack.
I did not repeat it. What other users on this site have to say after me has nothing to do with the content of my message.
> We've had to ask you three times in the past not to attack other users personally, which is well into the 99th percentile, so maybe there's some sort of pattern.
Let’s be clear here. You asked me. It’s quite possible you have a personal bias that clashes with mine but let’s be clear that it isn’t a committee with diverse views deciding here. I’m highly skeptical of the 99th percentile claim given that so many people make throwaway accounts that post all the controversial stuff that gets flagged so they don’t have to be associated with it. Your moderation may be better than most but perhaps the lack of diversity of thought and unconscious bias are prevalent factors in some of your decisions.
Ah you're right- your comment was the one that started it, not repeated it. Sorry I mixed those two up.
The GP used the term "pro-Western" because the parent comment had used it. That's not the same thing at all. In any case, I don't see that as an ethnic attack. Extracting part of someone's username because it sounds Chinese and flinging it back at them in an argument about China seems altogether more aggressive.
Not really sure how to reply to the other points. I confess I pulled the number 99 out of...someplace non-quantitative, but at the same time I'm certain that it's far fewer than 1% of users whom we've had to ask three times not to do personal attacks on HN. Is it bias? Not sure how to know that. But it's certainly not personal bias against you.
Please don't post flamewar comments, as you did here and downthread, regardless of how wrong or frustrating you find some other point of view. It only makes this place even worse.
We are defending western civilization.
I would rather China to collapse than to see it replace the US of A.
China is actively trying to erase any minorities by replacing them with han chinese.
It is an evil, vile country and it needs to fundamentally change before we accept its ambitions.
I've rarely seen this kind of hiperbole on hn. Who is we? What does it mean to defend? What exactly is the connection to Western civilization here?
> I would rather China to collapse than to see it replace the US of A.
Is this in any way pertinent to the topic being discussed? Is there a risk that China would collapse if Huawei gets into business trouble? Is there any risk that China would "replace" the US if Huawei doesn't get into trouble?
Guarantee you're going to catch downvotes for this comment, but you're 100% right.
The evils of the US and China are not even comparable in the modern era. A million plus in concentration camps, secret police disappearing journalists/doctors/dissidents, absolute authoritarian control over citizens lives, replacement of ethnic minorities en masse, organ harvesting, wholesale theft of IP and technology, etc etc etc.
It's such a tired and played out argument of "but in 1973 America did [bad thing]".
America still does bad things to this day, and they can definitely be compared to China's bad things...but one may far outweigh the other. I agree with the GP's sentiment but there's no reason we can't offer criticism on both.
Between this comment and the ethnic attack in your other recent comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23277011), I have to tell you that any more of this will get you banned here.
Nationalistic flamewar is not allowed here and, in this vitrolic a form ("it is an evil, vile country?" good grief) will get you banned from HN. Do we really want HN to be a place where Chinese users and users with China-related backgrounds are hounded out of here on racial grounds? Can anyone believe that I even have to ask this? No more of this, please.
Edit: you've posted ethnically/nationalistically-tinged attacks to HN before, and personal attacks before, and we've asked you to stop these before. If you do it again we will have to ban you again, so please stop.
I'm happy to try to help you understand if you're asking in good faith, but those questions are somehow too open-ended for me to efficiently answer. If you can make them more specific I can take a crack at it.
My family had been at the receiving end of such countries. Twice.
I dont believe in a policy of appeasement. At all.
China is too similar to Nazi Germany for me to ignore it.
It is an evil, vile country that has deception and absolute disregard to human rights deeply rooted at its core.
The youtuber SerpentZA only scratches the surface of what this country is doing to not only its people.
And this is not an overstatement. To compare it to countries like Korea and Japan would be doing disservice to these countries. They are both objectively racist. Are they evil?
Well not at the moment. Imperial Japan was evil. Current Japan is just hypocritical.
These judgments about entire countries are much too grandiose and strident to count as thoughtful comments here. No matter how you feel about policy there are always many people in any country who are not part of it. Some of them are on HN. Those readers have a right to come here and not see comments denouncing their country and often (by implication if not explicitly) their ethnicity, and in a way their families too. Moreover, since such comments are pure flamebait, they are a vector toward this site destroying itself with flamewar and we have a duty to prevent that.
I appreciate what you say about the history of your family. I'd be interested to hear more about that, if there were a good context for it. Still, we need room for more gradations of behavior than extreme words like "appeasement" allow for. If the logic here is "China" -> "I don't believe in appeasement" -> "China is evil", that's far too blunt an instrument to smash into HN conversations with. You're not doing any good by fighting battles in that way. You're just adding, in a small way, more violence, and giving people a good reason (emotionally if not rationally) to retaliate.
I think it would be best if you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and try to take the spirit of this site more to heart. You're welcome here. But those guidelines are not an arbitrary hodge-podge of tonal tastes. They're carefully designed, through deep experience over many years, to try to prevent this forum from destroying itself, the way that internet forums traditionally have. That was the founding intention of this site [1], and it's no small matter. Internet discussions have a strong tendency to flamewar, and internet forums turn into scorched earth by default [2]. We're trying to stave that fate off for as long as we can [3]. For that reason, we have no choice but to ban accounts that refuse to help protect the commons here.
I think if you would stretch a bit to understand this, and see why the rules are the way they are, you'd realize that it's in your interest to participate in the community in a different way—one that is less bludgeoning. It's in your interest because that's what keeps the community interesting, which is the only reason any of us comes here. You can still make all your substantive points if you switch from a denunciatory/flamewar style to a thoughtful/curious one. Indeed, they'll be better for it and will probably lead you to new insights that make for better comments yet.
>These judgments about entire countries are much too grandiose and strident to count as thoughtful comments here.
They are not really thoughtful comments. I dont know how productive they are but I guess some people appreciate them.
I dont want to contribute to a circlejerk of "we hate china". For sure not.
I usually get carried away though.
>Those readers have a right to come here and not see comments denouncing their country and often (by implication if not explicitly) their ethnicity, and in a way their families too. Moreover, since such comments are pure flamebait, they are a vector toward this site destroying itself with flamewar and we have a duty to prevent that.
Sure do I have the right not to be dismissed by "americansplaining"?
I dont really disagree with anything you have said I just find it incredibly difficult to discuss controversial topics on the internet.
Healthy business rivalry is good, systematic theft and cloning of superior products is what we’re talking about here and huawei absolutely deserves the “corporate death penalty” for its behavior.
What if the Chinese government is working overtime to prevent the superior companies from reaching their markets? Should the Chinese people be stuck with inferior products? I'm not condoning it at all but this is about more than just Huawei. China is doing this with more than just Huawei, anyway, just take a look at what COMAC has been doing.
That's a losing battle, there's no point in fighting for the Chinese market since it's not a real market. The winner there will always be a state controlled entity until the political environment changes. But Chinese companies should absolutely be barred from doing business outside of China as their influence is toxic to democracy and freedom.
Meanwhile, "Europe's listed firms expect to glean $514 billion in revenue from China."[2]
I just don't understand where people get this idea that Western companies can't do business in China. They have a massive presence in China, unmatched by the presence of any Chinese company in the US or Europe.
Is it to sink a specific company? Send a message to a country with clear military aspirations? Reshore the semiconductor industry? Play to the president's political base? What?
If the goal is to reshore the semiconductor manufacturing industry, that's not going to work. Every country will have a competitive advantage in manufacturing against the US for as long as it prints the global reserve currency.
I need to start by saying that I live in a country that's a member state of the European Union. I also need to add that I am in no way a fan of China, or the US of A, or any nation state or federal state for all that matter.
Now that's out of the way, what I am a fan of is fighting for something instead of fighting against something. I don't believe or understand this narrative of fighting China. We've been outsourcing everything to China in the last two decades, we've helped a billion of their people come out of poverty and we've helped them build infrastructure that we only dream of. Now that they're a major power, we're starting to declare all sorts of wars on them. What if, instead of doing all these economic, military and other types of warfare, we would focus, together or alone (as states) in excelling. In building the best tech, in building the most awesome factories, in having the best quality of life for our people?
What if instead of declaring war on China and moving our production to South East Asia or Africa and then helping them grow out of poverty while extracting as much value as we can (and then in the future we declare wars on them as they gain a foothold in the globalized economy), we help ourselves be awesome and in the process help South East Asia, and Africa, and whoever else can get into a win-win situation?
I guess I'm a bit tired of this anti-China rhetoric sprouting up on Western social media. It's a classic case of identifying a 'common enemy' so that our people can be sheeped into whatever the powers that be want them to be sheeped into.
The problem with China is that it has taken a hostile non-cooperative approach, ie it’s acting in bad faith. This is evidenced by its diplomatic failures with the region and with the world. The CCP is using economic leverage to coerce smaller players in the global system. The US has its hands tied here, there really are no other options geopolitically.
I live in Europe as well, and sometimes it feels like European leadership is extremely confused: EU is a shitshow that nobody seems to be able to lead (just look at how long it took for agreeing on debt mutualization/Eurobond, Brexit, VDL apologizing to Italy, etc), Germany working with Russia on Nord stream 2 after its actions in Ukraine, Sweden pretending like the lax virus approach has nothing to do with its hyper leveraged banks and heavily indebted households, list goes on... and all we can do is entertain ourselves by making fun of Trump. We are a joke, we can’t even keep our union together. We can’t even pay for our military because daddy America has to foot the bill and if they don’t our European leaders start whining about lack of US leadership.
The US Fed had enough vision to extend the dollar swap lines to more central banks including the Swedish central bank. For the ECB there is a permanent arrangement. Despite the “tough love“ we Europeans are getting on trade from the US, ultimately Europe will soon enough realize the US is its best ally.
We just want freedom and fair economic practices. We won’t get it if we let China play communist game theory with the only planet we have.
DJT fucked both US and EU when it started to create a wedge with trade tariffs and other issues. Instead of strengthening EU and US ties he weakened it and gives china more space to operate in.
China can play any games it wants when the rest of us are locked on making cheap political points by pointing finger at eachothers inadequate response to this pandemic.
What are you talking about? The EU runs a current account surplus with the US, and it's a protectorate of the US through NATO. Europe is absolutely delusional and ungrateful.
Multinational companies are not bringing profits home. This was perhaps the best decision Trump made was to even the playing field and brought it down to about the same as most EU countries.
Europe is a much larger population but it’s not as rich as US per capita so don’t expect europeans to buy more US goods. I agree that sometimes the tariffs are too high. But the situation is more complex. VAT in Sweden is 25%, a Tesla Model S cost about 100k$ here because of VAT mainly not just tariffs. Many US products are simply too expensive for the same reasons and a Europea generally lower purchase power. Americans like to buy European luxury goods many europeans themselves can’t buy. Trade is not a single transaction. I would love to own Tesla or buy more american, but I can only afford iPhone not Tesla. And iPhones are made in China...
Nato has protected EU, but not against the refugee crisis which affect EU much more than US. US seems to infact increased the problems and is simply trying to leave now. US cares about mexican immigration but don’t do much to help situation in ME.
The US manufacturing produces things that Europeans can buy, but in some instances US companies can't compete with their heavily subsidized European counterparts.
At some point Trump got angry at us and said "OK no tariffs, but ALSO no subsidies". Obviously Europe didn't agree, and the US put tariffs in place.
All this is logical, I get it that Trump is hyperbolical and extreme, but he's not that crazy.
Almost every frame of it is stolen either from CD projekt or Riot, so did of this company's many other popular titles, top 2 game company and they earning big.
It seems like HUAWEI was determined to eat everybody's lunch in the first place and that was in large part a plan backed by the Communist Party in China. It seems that this is the backed response from the west, at least for America.
Let China develop their own technology and then we'll see a different story and nothing will stop them from taking over the world, by excellence not by IP-theft and benefit from others research. On the other I was quite happy to see China rising out of the poverty. It would have been a good counterbalance to the western Capitalistic world. Unfortunately they played the same game but with different weapons: cheap labor, IP theft and large pools of talent to pick from. Maybe the obedience of Chinese played a role behind this growth for they all benefited. However, since Xi's rise to power the ambition to dominate Asia with a fist
only grew. I hope the Chinese people don't loose the opportunity to change their future for the better.
Let Huawei burn. Nobody needs a front organization for a wicked authoritarian regime stealing their technology and using it to track people. China is always going to be an upstart, because communist dictatorships will never be able to prevail over democracy and freedom.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadIs this true, though?
Huawei spends over 15 billion USD/year on R&D, which puts it in the same league as Apple and Google. Only a few companies in the world spend more on R&D. That's the real reason why Huawei is viewed as a threat. The US has been happy for China to produce cheap knick-knacks. Now that China develops and produces its own cutting-edge technology, it is perceived as a threat.
Your R&D budget becomes effectively your 15B (I don't believe that number btw) plus whatever Cisco, Broadcom etc.. spend. How convenient.
US companies can't compete in the market where they don't exist. Qualcomm sells components, not mobile networks. There are only four big companies left for for 4G/LTE/5G mobile infrastructure:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei
If the Chinese regime throws cash at a company to buy themselves into a dominant position to play their role in a geopolitical game, market share means nothing.
Out of curiosity, what's the legal basis for this? Is it just a threat, and if companines like TSMC don't follow it, they'll also be blacklisted from the US market?
Mark Liu, T.S.M.C.’s chairman, told The New York Times in October that T.S.M.C. had been negotiating with the Commerce Department about a possible U.S. plant, but said it would require substantial government subsidies. How much, if any, public money might be associated with the company’s decision was unclear.
And from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-48917705
The US State Department has approved a potential arms sale to Taiwan, estimated to be worth $2.2bn (£1.76bn), the Pentagon said.
Maybe TSMC thought it would be really good if Tawain were protected better thanks to these weapons, and TSMC would also like these subsidies.
This shouldn't be mixed up with the other common case which is often discussed, 'American' as the demonym for people and things from the USA. That isn't quite as bad (though it still annoys other people from elsewhere in the Americas) because it's using the name of the superset - Americans, from the USA, are also Americans, from the continent. Whereas, when "America" (the USA) does something, it doesn't necessarily mean all of America does it. The USA is a subset of America, not a superset or the only entry.
Language isn't always logical, but if you won't draw the line at something so clearly backwards as using the whole continent's name for the actions of one country, you can only expect it will start an argument every time.
Huawei is an asset of a regime that tracks its citizens like it's 1984, spirits you away to jail (or death) if you make disparaging comments -- even if true --, locks Uyghurs away in prison/sex slavery/organ donation internment camps for "reeducation", steals Tibetan children, takes away territory from neighboring nations, builds naval bases and prevents fishing in an ocean they don't own, shuts off the water supply to Viet Nam and others, ...
I'm not saying the US is perfect, but the CCP is downright scary. They're a risk to the freedoms we enjoy.
I love China and its citizens, and I wish they were free.
So, yeah... you can say brazil borrowed that word from the greek language via latin, and the greeks themselves borrowed it from an extinct language...
Am·a·zon /ˈaməˌzän,ˈaməzən/ Learn to pronounce Origin late Middle English: via Latin from Greek Amazōn, explained by the Greeks as ‘without a breast’ (as if from a- ‘without’ + mazos ‘breast’), referring to the fable that the Amazons cut off the right breast so as not to interfere with the use of a bow, but probably a folk etymology of an unknown foreign word.
Should we nuke them?
I'm not answering the question; I'm asking it. I guess my overarching question in the end is whether or not it should be left up to the free market to resolve an issue that's spawned from an entity operating "outside" of it, either literally (e.g. in China) or figuratively (e.g. antitrust violations).
I think a starting point for discussion is to get past equating antitrust issues with monopoly status. In the previous century, these things went together coincidentally, but the scale of our economy has grown to a point where it is no longer necessary for the largest companies to have monopoly power in their market to engage in damaging anti-competitive practices. We instead see cartel-like cooperation between these companies instead of competition, such as apple-google wage fixing that was revealed years ago. Or their complete insulation from consumer feedback necessary for healthy capitalist markets to function, because their economies of scale insulate them by making consumer choices insignificant signals lost in the noise.
I'm not so sure. Yeah you could fork Chromium or Firefox (the only two browsers left), but "web standards" have ballooned and gotten so bloated that you'd need a pretty significant engineering organization to manage to support it yourself.
Regardless, it’s pretty certain Huawei does it and the possibility someone else is doing it and currently getting away with it does not justify someone else doing it.
But piling on with more, like you did here is even worse—it is mob behavior. That is seriously not cool. No more of this on HN, please.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It isn't the convention to address others directly by their usernames, so when someone breaks with that convention, they're doing so for a reason. To hide behind "it's just a name", as if the name innocently mentioned itself, is misleading.
Ditto for the oldie-but-goodie, "It's a fact. What problem can you possibly have with facts?" - as if a fact were a fish that catches itself and serves itself for dinner. There are infinitely many facts and they don't select themselves, as I often tell HN users who make this argument: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Sure it's a fact—and language has multiple levels of meaning. It's common to attack on one level and then switch to another level to defend. It's never just a fact. What the fact is being used for, and what other facts are left out, are just as relevant.
Sometimes people explicitly address someone by their username because they want to express extra friendliness, but in a hostile context it generally ups the ante and signals additional aggressiveness. This is especially true when (1) there's something about the username that is relevant to the argument, so someone's own name can be used as a weapon against them, and/or (2) you replace the literal username into something closer to the person's real name, or use it to look up their real name and use that instead. That's the equivalent of stepping close to someone and getting in their face, if the argument were in person. You guys did both #1 and #2 in this thread. (It's odd that you say "it's literally his username" when they were clearly different.)
Using personal details in this way—like people's names or (another common case) their employer's—comes across as menacing. Sometimes there is an overtone of doxxing to it, a sort of "I know who you are and am prepared to cross lines about this", or if not of doxxing, then of the online callout/shaming culture: "We're going to stick this to you". I don't think these aspects were in play in this thread, but they were in the other case I linked to above.
Something in this case was even worse. You guys changed the username into a plausible surname which is ethnically marked, because it was ethnically marked. In an argument about China, taking an obviously Chinese substring of the opposing username and putting it in the other person's face is a strong indicator of an ethnic attack. Obviously that's a bannable offense on Hacker News. The fact that you repeated it after another user started doing it is particularly awful, because now we have the semblance not merely of an ethnic attack but a gang attack. I'm sure you can understand why moderators would not let that pass.
Now let me walk this back slightly. I'm not saying that the above is what you had in mind. I can't know that. But these are strong patterns that lead to strong priors, so if you do what you did without supplying disambiguating information, that's how it's going to be interpreted (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). In this case the burden is on you to disambiguate. If I ask myself how one would do that in such a comment, I find it hard...
> It's odd that you say "it's literally his username" when they were clearly different.
The literal part is that it is in his username. If his username had been “AChineseMan12345” and I stereotyped him by calling him Wang because it’s a common Chinese surname, then yes, it would be harassment and an attack. This was not.
> indicator of an ethnic attack
Calling people’s ideas “pro-Western bias” is also an ethnic attack but you seemed to only have a problem with it because it was starting a flame war. Flame wars are people fighting over which phones are best, not attacking entire hemispheres.
> The fact that you repeated it after another user started it is particularly awful, because now we have the semblance not merely of an ethnic attack but a gang attack.
I did not repeat it. What other users on this site have to say after me has nothing to do with the content of my message.
> We've had to ask you three times in the past not to attack other users personally, which is well into the 99th percentile, so maybe there's some sort of pattern.
Let’s be clear here. You asked me. It’s quite possible you have a personal bias that clashes with mine but let’s be clear that it isn’t a committee with diverse views deciding here. I’m highly skeptical of the 99th percentile claim given that so many people make throwaway accounts that post all the controversial stuff that gets flagged so they don’t have to be associated with it. Your moderation may be better than most but perhaps the lack of diversity of thought and unconscious bias are prevalent factors in some of your decisions.
The GP used the term "pro-Western" because the parent comment had used it. That's not the same thing at all. In any case, I don't see that as an ethnic attack. Extracting part of someone's username because it sounds Chinese and flinging it back at them in an argument about China seems altogether more aggressive.
Not really sure how to reply to the other points. I confess I pulled the number 99 out of...someplace non-quantitative, but at the same time I'm certain that it's far fewer than 1% of users whom we've had to ask three times not to do personal attacks on HN. Is it bias? Not sure how to know that. But it's certainly not personal bias against you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Is there a link to what this new rule, is exactly?
The article states it in one line but doesn't reference it beyond that.
[1]https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/05/19/2020-10...
[2]https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2020/05/commerc...
But remember who you are defending.
Great power rivalry is bad for corporate profit and amazing for wage laborer, which most of HN is.
If you are an worker in North America, this type of headline should be a moment of celebration.
China is actively trying to erase any minorities by replacing them with han chinese. It is an evil, vile country and it needs to fundamentally change before we accept its ambitions.
I've rarely seen this kind of hiperbole on hn. Who is we? What does it mean to defend? What exactly is the connection to Western civilization here?
> I would rather China to collapse than to see it replace the US of A.
Is this in any way pertinent to the topic being discussed? Is there a risk that China would collapse if Huawei gets into business trouble? Is there any risk that China would "replace" the US if Huawei doesn't get into trouble?
The evils of the US and China are not even comparable in the modern era. A million plus in concentration camps, secret police disappearing journalists/doctors/dissidents, absolute authoritarian control over citizens lives, replacement of ethnic minorities en masse, organ harvesting, wholesale theft of IP and technology, etc etc etc.
It's such a tired and played out argument of "but in 1973 America did [bad thing]".
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've posted ethnically/nationalistically-tinged attacks to HN before, and personal attacks before, and we've asked you to stop these before. If you do it again we will have to ban you again, so please stop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20357430
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22538538
But there are more recent cases like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23135072, which is obviously unacceptable.
I have literally no idea why any of these would be considered offensive? Blunt and direct sure ...but offensive?
Does not this site promote inclusivity? or does it try to cater only to those that can navigate through american norms?
My family had been at the receiving end of such countries. Twice. I dont believe in a policy of appeasement. At all. China is too similar to Nazi Germany for me to ignore it. It is an evil, vile country that has deception and absolute disregard to human rights deeply rooted at its core. The youtuber SerpentZA only scratches the surface of what this country is doing to not only its people.
And this is not an overstatement. To compare it to countries like Korea and Japan would be doing disservice to these countries. They are both objectively racist. Are they evil?
Well not at the moment. Imperial Japan was evil. Current Japan is just hypocritical.
>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20357430
This was too long ago for me to remember it. I have no idea what I meant in the context of that discussion.
>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22538538
I honestly believe americans are overreacting much more than any other nationality I have ever observed. It's a cultural trait.
>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23135072
I have refused to engage in that discussion calling the op out on his behavior.
I appreciate what you say about the history of your family. I'd be interested to hear more about that, if there were a good context for it. Still, we need room for more gradations of behavior than extreme words like "appeasement" allow for. If the logic here is "China" -> "I don't believe in appeasement" -> "China is evil", that's far too blunt an instrument to smash into HN conversations with. You're not doing any good by fighting battles in that way. You're just adding, in a small way, more violence, and giving people a good reason (emotionally if not rationally) to retaliate.
I think it would be best if you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and try to take the spirit of this site more to heart. You're welcome here. But those guidelines are not an arbitrary hodge-podge of tonal tastes. They're carefully designed, through deep experience over many years, to try to prevent this forum from destroying itself, the way that internet forums traditionally have. That was the founding intention of this site [1], and it's no small matter. Internet discussions have a strong tendency to flamewar, and internet forums turn into scorched earth by default [2]. We're trying to stave that fate off for as long as we can [3]. For that reason, we have no choice but to ban accounts that refuse to help protect the commons here.
I think if you would stretch a bit to understand this, and see why the rules are the way they are, you'd realize that it's in your interest to participate in the community in a different way—one that is less bludgeoning. It's in your interest because that's what keeps the community interesting, which is the only reason any of us comes here. You can still make all your substantive points if you switch from a denunciatory/flamewar style to a thoughtful/curious one. Indeed, they'll be better for it and will probably lead you to new insights that make for better comments yet.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
They are not really thoughtful comments. I dont know how productive they are but I guess some people appreciate them. I dont want to contribute to a circlejerk of "we hate china". For sure not.
I usually get carried away though.
>Those readers have a right to come here and not see comments denouncing their country and often (by implication if not explicitly) their ethnicity, and in a way their families too. Moreover, since such comments are pure flamebait, they are a vector toward this site destroying itself with flamewar and we have a duty to prevent that.
Sure do I have the right not to be dismissed by "americansplaining"?
I dont really disagree with anything you have said I just find it incredibly difficult to discuss controversial topics on the internet.
When things change, so I will change my mind.
* Apple: 44.8 Billion
* Intel: 14.8 Billion
* Qualcomm: 14.6 Billion
* Boeing: 11.9 Billion
* Micron Technology: 10.4 Billion
Based on [1].
Meanwhile, "Europe's listed firms expect to glean $514 billion in revenue from China."[2]
I just don't understand where people get this idea that Western companies can't do business in China. They have a massive presence in China, unmatched by the presence of any Chinese company in the US or Europe.
1. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trade-war-watch-these-are-... 2. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-markets-eu/euro...
Is it to sink a specific company? Send a message to a country with clear military aspirations? Reshore the semiconductor industry? Play to the president's political base? What?
If the goal is to reshore the semiconductor manufacturing industry, that's not going to work. Every country will have a competitive advantage in manufacturing against the US for as long as it prints the global reserve currency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
Now that's out of the way, what I am a fan of is fighting for something instead of fighting against something. I don't believe or understand this narrative of fighting China. We've been outsourcing everything to China in the last two decades, we've helped a billion of their people come out of poverty and we've helped them build infrastructure that we only dream of. Now that they're a major power, we're starting to declare all sorts of wars on them. What if, instead of doing all these economic, military and other types of warfare, we would focus, together or alone (as states) in excelling. In building the best tech, in building the most awesome factories, in having the best quality of life for our people?
What if instead of declaring war on China and moving our production to South East Asia or Africa and then helping them grow out of poverty while extracting as much value as we can (and then in the future we declare wars on them as they gain a foothold in the globalized economy), we help ourselves be awesome and in the process help South East Asia, and Africa, and whoever else can get into a win-win situation?
I guess I'm a bit tired of this anti-China rhetoric sprouting up on Western social media. It's a classic case of identifying a 'common enemy' so that our people can be sheeped into whatever the powers that be want them to be sheeped into.
I live in Europe as well, and sometimes it feels like European leadership is extremely confused: EU is a shitshow that nobody seems to be able to lead (just look at how long it took for agreeing on debt mutualization/Eurobond, Brexit, VDL apologizing to Italy, etc), Germany working with Russia on Nord stream 2 after its actions in Ukraine, Sweden pretending like the lax virus approach has nothing to do with its hyper leveraged banks and heavily indebted households, list goes on... and all we can do is entertain ourselves by making fun of Trump. We are a joke, we can’t even keep our union together. We can’t even pay for our military because daddy America has to foot the bill and if they don’t our European leaders start whining about lack of US leadership.
The US Fed had enough vision to extend the dollar swap lines to more central banks including the Swedish central bank. For the ECB there is a permanent arrangement. Despite the “tough love“ we Europeans are getting on trade from the US, ultimately Europe will soon enough realize the US is its best ally.
We just want freedom and fair economic practices. We won’t get it if we let China play communist game theory with the only planet we have.
China can play any games it wants when the rest of us are locked on making cheap political points by pointing finger at eachothers inadequate response to this pandemic.
Maybe you can do one downvote for each dollar in the EU surplus with the US.
Multinational companies are not bringing profits home. This was perhaps the best decision Trump made was to even the playing field and brought it down to about the same as most EU countries.
Europe is a much larger population but it’s not as rich as US per capita so don’t expect europeans to buy more US goods. I agree that sometimes the tariffs are too high. But the situation is more complex. VAT in Sweden is 25%, a Tesla Model S cost about 100k$ here because of VAT mainly not just tariffs. Many US products are simply too expensive for the same reasons and a Europea generally lower purchase power. Americans like to buy European luxury goods many europeans themselves can’t buy. Trade is not a single transaction. I would love to own Tesla or buy more american, but I can only afford iPhone not Tesla. And iPhones are made in China...
Nato has protected EU, but not against the refugee crisis which affect EU much more than US. US seems to infact increased the problems and is simply trying to leave now. US cares about mexican immigration but don’t do much to help situation in ME.
At some point Trump got angry at us and said "OK no tariffs, but ALSO no subsidies". Obviously Europe didn't agree, and the US put tariffs in place.
All this is logical, I get it that Trump is hyperbolical and extreme, but he's not that crazy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCeDr07oh64
Almost every frame of it is stolen either from CD projekt or Riot, so did of this company's many other popular titles, top 2 game company and they earning big.
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1a5411s7bi
Doesn't even try to hide anything.
You should read some Chinese history textbooks, to see how much hatred is instilled since young, there will be only one left.
Let China develop their own technology and then we'll see a different story and nothing will stop them from taking over the world, by excellence not by IP-theft and benefit from others research. On the other I was quite happy to see China rising out of the poverty. It would have been a good counterbalance to the western Capitalistic world. Unfortunately they played the same game but with different weapons: cheap labor, IP theft and large pools of talent to pick from. Maybe the obedience of Chinese played a role behind this growth for they all benefited. However, since Xi's rise to power the ambition to dominate Asia with a fist only grew. I hope the Chinese people don't loose the opportunity to change their future for the better.