The article says that the "majority of app were payment platforms".
I would interpret it with the quote of Trump: "by accessing personal electronic devices such as smartphones, tablets, and computers, Chinese connected software applications can access and capture vast swaths of information from users, including sensitive personally identifiable information and private information."
I think with the idea of "camera scanning" they will require authorization and they will capture sensible informations of US citizens. I think that's the idea behind this kind of ban...
Wait - "Chinese software applications can access and capture vast swaths of information from users, including sensitive personally identifiable information and private information" Doing this is now a bad thing? I thought it was the fundamental idea behind the tech industry.
i used to have this app. like many it sold for a single price initially, then later someone else bought the rights to it and it wanted a subscription and became loaded with trackers.
So I think its the trackers part that makes it bannable.
It is beyond me why anyone would trust an app owned by Tencent and has intrusive ads, whereas the alternatives for most people (Adobe / MS) offerings are free.
America somehow seems to have this political correctness complex. There is nothing wrong being weary of such things.
In this specific CamScanner context, I think it has less to do with political correctness and more to do with the fact that CamScanner was one of the first apps in the marketplace that had this ability to produce half-decent scans through a smartphone camera. I remember using it to scan class notes ~6 years ago, long before Google Drive shipped it as native capability.
Indeed, if my social circle's "woke" parts are anything to measure by, active efforts are being made to find alternatives to made-in-china products. Most people are able to make the distinction between the despotic Chinese government and the average Chinese citizen.
Trump is not educated enough on these matters to take the initiative. The intelligence apparatus is pushing for these, and will continue to do so with the Biden administration.
I can’t envision this Cold War ratcheting down. On the surface, Biden will wipe the slate clean on the trade war stuff, but the tit for tat stuff like this will accelerate.
I don’t know what the end result of it will be, but the movement on this front is almost like day trading for defense departments, there’s enough bullshit here to justify entire agencies and budgets (as in, Palantir is going to find some crap here to monetize).
Prediction - at least a few provisions in the near term stimulus bills, green deals, that will include funding for China containment policy.
Biden has been clear he doesn’t want China setting preconditions for companies (the precondition being we get to copy your IP), and the second bullying sovereign nations economically in it’s sphere of influence. I just don’t know what this will actually look like, but Biden/Obama had way more of a master plan policy than Trump ever did for dealing with China:
With Europe and a Biden presidency being pro-China, I have serious doubts the western world will be able to face the Chinese century, and I doubt they will contain China anyhow.
I'm sure that as China gets even richer and starts polluting less, politicians will take pride in that, as if they did anything.
I’m very serious. Dig into the news reports. China is arbitrarily blocking Australian imports of wine, seafood, coal based on “irregularities” that require “inspection” that amazingly results in product spoilage.
China is turning the screws on Australia for past transgressions. China makes up a huge percentage of Australian exports so it’s not hard for China to economically hurt Australia at little cost to themselves.
Watch how it plays out. It will be eye opening. My opinion is this is a test case and an attempt to split Australia off from the western group of countries.
Did the Chinese navy show up on Australian shores and take the property at gunpoint? Or did a local seller conduct business with a Chinese buyer and make money?
You appear to be saying that property acquisitions are happening under some kind of duress on the seller's side. That's what I'm trying to get clarification on. I'm inclined to think that it's a deal between a buyer and a seller.
If you feel selling to Chinese nationals presents a national security issue, then you could be more clear about that.
I think a lot of this only serves to hurt china more than Australia, not that china would ever admit they are hurting. I don't really want to go investigating this, but I can't take SCMP seriously since it turned very pro china after being aquired by Alibaba.
Do a search in other media outlets, even Western ones, it's a major concern.
And yes, China is hurting a bit. Apparently the reduced coal imports are causing issues, but with wine and other food items, they have other countries they can buy from.
China is what? 20x the size of Australia? A little hurt in China means a lot of hurt in Australia.
Australia needs to reduce its dependency on coal anyway with china committing to carbon reduction by 2050 and (can’t think of the other country) committing to 2030. So the coal is a good kick for Australia. The rest I think time will tell.
There's no chance of Biden going easy on China, that would be political suicide. What might change is that Biden will lean more on multilateralism to build a coalition of democracies against China in contrast to Trump's reality TV "America first" approach.
I'm not sure why you've been downvoted. Biden may or may not be Pro China, but he's made zero commitments so far to deal with any of the current issues the world has with the PRC...
(Hong Kong, Democracy and the rule of law, Covid 19, lies around Covid 19, the ongoing treatment of minorities, slavery and forced labour, the aggression towards its immediate neighbours, treatment of Taiwan and other issues)
To be clear, I'm no Trump fan (he not only did nothing but lied and said he would/was taking action). I'm just saying I think presidents don't have much power over this (it's mainly economic policy) and Biden hasn't given any indication he will spend capital on this as far as I know...
Edit: now I don't know why I've been downvoted either! C'est la Vie.
But only under Chinese law, which means they have to be founded and led by a Chinese national, and the Party has to be involved. That's before conforming to their censorship and social credit policies comes in.
Tesla is the most interesting one. Elon was so happy about it, but I'm sure it will come back to him in time. Still, it was worth it even if China steals all of Tesla's IP.
I would be interested if you could elaborate more. Do you think they can gain much more from that factory than from disassembling a model 3? For me it is hard to grasp what kind of information would be valuable. Would it be granular things like temperature curves of some oven or rather the wholistic integration and automation?
I think that Elon believes their edge is in moving so fast, that copying them is not viable (that is also what he referred to when the whole moat thing came up with Warren Buffet). I hope it works out for them as I love their products and also hope that Elon gets rewarded for the risk, hardships and brilliance he put into it.
China has always been an unequal
playing ground for foreign companies. If you want Chinese money, then you get your local Chinese partner company and start the technology transfer.
It’s only fair Chinese companies in America receive some reciprocal treatment.
Trump can do all he wants, but empirical data shows that folks just ignore him without consequences so these apps won't be banned any longer than Tiktok was shut down or Chinese companies were delisted from the NYSE.
That doesn't mean he is wrong and China hasn't infiltrated America at every level, but it's a lost battle now that America will be rolling out the red carpet for the CCP.
The grand-parent comment is problematic for anybody who has read enough Chomsky and remembered the lessons.
One needs to define “America” for that comment to be meaningful. Or rather, one should recognize that there is not one “America”. We need to think in terms of classes: the 1%, the other 9%, and the rest. Or even more drastically: the 0.1% and the rest.
Banning these apps was rational, much more so than TikTok.
Financial services have always been protected industries, in every country, combined with the close association with BoC and political oversight it's a huge red flag.
Importantly, it's worth noting that Trump has no idea what these apps are or what they do, this is not 'his initiative' clearly, it's from the team.
The Dems and Republicans are mostly in sync on China.
These bans are of a different kind that TikTok.
Biden may use the opportunity to try to 'reset' and the rhetoric will be softer, but I suggest these bans will remain in place.
This isn't really Trump populism, this is 'the apparatus' engaging in actual policy.
These bans also seem kind of weird after the TikTok ban. They were supposed to find a US buyer or leave the US market. They’ve done neither and are still live.
Because despite so many people claiming Trump will create a dictatorship, it turns out US courts do actually have power, and the seperation of powers does actually work.
The president isn't the be all and end all power in the USA, as some people would like to think.
Trump alone, maybe not. He doesn't want to do the hard work that goes into becoming a dictator. Dictators come to power very often through legitimate means and deft political work. It's not like all dictatorships come to life through violent means. It's not the case. It's going back to a democracy that HAS to be violent.
Also, if the GOP controlled both chambers of Congress, the odds that Joe Biden would be sworn in on the 21st would be very slim. There is your dictatorship. You might say that we would essentially become a parliamentary system, but I don't think that's what we were GOING for.
>>It's going back to a democracy that HAS to be violent.
Uhm, you might be unaware, but Poland has gotten rid of communism and replaced the ruling communist party through both peaceful protests and democratic elections. I see these comments all the time ("all uprisings have to be violent") but that's just provably not true.
This only worked for Poland because their communist masters (the Soviets) simply disappeared overnight for reasons of their own. It’s not as if Poland itself had some intrinsic desire for communism and then changed its mind.
Are there any absolute statements that one can make about humans and human behavior? All humans have arms and legs? No. Even "All humans have brains" seems debatable after 2020 :-P.
> their communist masters (the Soviets) simply disappeared overnight
On the contrary. They stayed in power for many years in various forms. Read about the deal Solidarity struck with the commies in Magdalenka. No one left. They just changed their banners.
You should watch Rules Rulers on YouTube by CGP Grey. It very neatly summarises how you can't change a regime peacefully unless keys parties (e.g. Police, Military) are on your side. If the regime is paying those keys well, the population has little power.
All true about (mostly) peaceful transition of power in Poland. Worth noting there were casualties though - father Jerzy Popieluszko, the "Wujek" coal mine come to mind as examples.
However the reason why it happened relatively seamlessly in Poland has to do with the fact that after the transition the post-communists still held onto a lot of power and the most impactful branches of the government, like the secret services. This was part of a deal in Magdalenka.
Poland never opened their communist archives because that would compromise many active politicians. They didn't get rid of the cancer like they did in Chechoslovakia or the DDR.
A good evidence of that was the fact that my Polish grandfather who was lt colonel of secret service (going after the Solidarity freedom fighters) still enjoyed his 10x higher pension and privileges than his victims even 10+ years after Poland became a "free" country.
Truth is, only 4 years after supposed fall of communism in Poland communists went back to power by winning democratic parlimentary elections in 1993. Two years later they also won presidential election.
Sure, but the point is that those were by all measures and accounts(at least I can't find any proof suggesting otherwise) free and democratic elections. A party consisting mostly of former communist politicians won, sure - but pre 1989 there was no democracy, there were elections but just like there are elections in the present-day Democratic Republic of Korea - the ruling party always wins with 99% of the votes. After 1989 we have managed to change the system into democracy where both the parliment and the president are chosen by the people - and well, the best proof of it working is that the SLD party both won and then lost the elections, all before the decade was out.
Yes, formally the win was fair, on the surface, but it wouldn't happen without some preparations. The deal made with communists in 1989 made sure that:
1. Communist party members never answered for their crimes, and were free to continue their political careers.
2. Compromised communist judges continued their service in courts, effectively granting communist scumbags immunity for their crimes. Crimes which included stealing huge amounts of money, which then were used for point 3:
3. The only two private TV networks, as well as biggest newspaper were owned/controlled by former communist intelligence officers. This was a great propaganda platform.
You see, that's a downside of peaceful revolutions: you never get a chance of permanently getting rid of your former rulers. Had generals Jaruzelski, Kiszczak and maybe two dozens other top ranking communist been executed in 1989 we might have avoided this mess.
I do not know why some down-voted this, but all these points are correct, and not only for Poland but also for many other countries from Eastern Europe, which had or even still have political problems due to the descendants of the former communists, who never really lost their mafia-like power.
A lot depends on the military and police. They have the ability to enforce the law or constitution. Or they can just stand aside and let things happen, like a peaceful revolution. You can't be a dictator from a prison cell after all.
The military is not going to swoop in and cuff Ted Cruz after he votes to nullify a US election. There is no election police. It's all based on an honor system.
Half the country (ok, that's hyperbole) believes Trump won a second term by an overwhelming margin and that the Democratic Party has installed Joe Biden via coup de tat, possibly on behalf of the CCP. Republicans have openly called for martial law, and using numerous underhanded (but technically legal) tactics to overturn the election, and state governors have suggested secession and civil war.
The narrative he and the right wing have been building over most of the last decade - that America at all levels of society is being infiltrated and captured by leftist extremists as a pretext to some kind of communist/globalist/NWO takeover (so vote for God, Guns and the GOP) - is exactly the doomsday trigger scenario that American militias have fantasized about and wargamed over, and QAnon and many Evangelicals believe Trump has been sent by God to cleanse America of occult pedophiles and atheistic liberalism.
Sinclair Lewis may or may not have said "When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross," in other words, by infiltrating American gun culture and conservative Christianity, because those are the forces that control the greatest potential for populist violence in the US. Trump may not have succeeded directly, but it remains to be seen who he's laid the foundations for in the future.
But only one side is actually trying to negate the legitimate result of a Presidential election at the moment, and it isn't the Democrats or "the Left."
The beginning of 2016 was quite different though. Just because Democrats are currently the heroes doesn't buy them pardon for past sins - or protect them from future ones.
The "sins" of the Democrats in 2016 were overblown by the Trump camp. They exposed the ugly sausage-making processes of the DNC and called it corruption and treason, when both political parties operate the same way, and neither party committee is a direct democracy.
People called on the electoral college to overturn the vote of the people in 2016 —- and several did. I’m not sure how much more brazen you can be about trying to overturn an election’s results.
How much more brazen can you be? Turn on the goddamn news today. Show me a list of democratic congressmen who voted against certification in 2016. Show me when Obama pressured his VP to toss electors. Show me a barrage of completely bullshit lawsuits. Show a phone call from the incumbent asking to miraculously find votes.
I can do thousands of Trump supporters literally storming the capital by force at this moment, encouraged by a sitting President who has convinced them the election was stolen from him[0].
You’re not wrong. The GOP went so hard on Benghazi that they didn’t have the bandwidth to go after actual scandals like Fast & Furious, pulling back from Syria, and Hillary hiding her health issues. IMHO, Benghazi was a positive event in terms of Democratic strategy.
I'll give you everything else but "Hillary hiding her health issues" was a meme as far as I know, basically the forerunner to "Biden has severe dementia"
She gave a very canned response to her fainting while on video. She had the opportunity to look honest and forthcoming after Trump's obviously forged doctor's note and she wasted the opportunity.
That's way too 4D chess. He's essentially a drag performer who primarily performs for himself. It's the only context in which anyone would ban products that Americans generally can't use or don't even know about, or write executive orders that can't actually be carried out, or tries to pull a coup through a court system that he doesn't have direct control over. It's like the fine art of gender impersonation or, for fans of The Crown, "Kinging/Queening", he's just presidenting, nothing to see here.
I'm never quite sure. Is he just a drag act like you say (he's definately that) or is there some weird background conspiracy as well? I like to think there is, but that's at least partly because I don't like the idea there is nothing here but distraction. Who knows.
I used to think that Trump was secretly a mastermind who put on a certain persona in public that was advantageous for him. But as time went on, I became more and more convinced that he just does not have the capacity for something like that.
For another hilarious analogy, Seth Meyers described the behaviour of the senators backing him up as "cosplaying as noble statesmen"; here it is queued up: https://youtu.be/umWOkozTejI?t=425
There was a "Stop the Steal" event in DC yesterday that Roger Stone attended and it is so incredibly bizarre I have trouble believing that I'm not watching a Mike Judge movie or SNL skit:
I don't think the correct reference is the honorable art of drag but, either reality TV (recall Trump's history on The Apprentice) or "keyfabe" from professional wrestling.
The link that went round about the analogies between QAnon and LARP also seems relevant here. If someone lives in and believes their own hype for long enough, have they created their own little bubble of reality?
It's like watching someone try to perform a coup with a foam sword and a Nerf gun. On the other hand, a lot of bank robberies are done with fake guns; so the question is, how much does the plausibility of realness matter? All a bit Baudrillard for my taste.
do you actually believe that 1) Trump is the one coming up with these ideas, and 2) he just bans stuff willy nilly as some kind of masturbatory performance?
>That's way too 4D chess. He's essentially a drag performer who primarily performs for himself.
The President seldom if ever performs for himself on big decisions. There are so many lobbies and power interests moving their hands here and there, according to the tides of power.
It's just convenient for the masses to believe the President to be some kind of idiot (despite the fact that he is the President and they are random people which couldn't get that position if their lives dependent on it - or even much easier ones to get).
Trump is just uncouth and uncultured, with no filter. On some ways it's a disgrace. On others, it's a breath of honesty - between JFKs mafia types (and general non-worthiness, he was just made President by his family's money), Nixon's tapes, Reagans disastrous economics and policies, Bush's cowboyism, Bill Clinton's scandals, sex obsession and Epstein field trips, and Obama's backtracking on promises, warmongering, and empty rhetoric) most politicians are equally crass if not more, they just know how to not show it or show it in moderation.
Since Trump doesn't come from a politics background, he hasn't internalized this automatic filtering, instead he has been brought up on sales and media businesses, so he automatically takes the role of salesman and entertainer.
The Trade War with China thing was a long time coming for the interests of certain parts of the American establishment, and will be continued by Trumps successors. It wasn't some idiot's one-off.
And in those cases, unless you're clearly on top of the other side, there are lots of false bragging and BS symbolic moves that don't amount to much, so expect more of the "Tik Tok" style gestures in the years to come.
I always had a soft spot for Clinton. His worst crime was getting a consentual blow job from a woman in her 20s. I never got why that mattered given the shit the others were up to...
Trumps "trade war" was a storm in a tea cup at best. It was great cover for business as usual imho. I hope whoever takes it on actually fights it. He's sort of wrecked future efforts by alienating almost every other nation Ns doing nothing imho, so I understand by Biden doesn't want to "continue" it.
Ha, it was far from being "just a blowjob," nor even a single intern. That's just the only time he got caught, since all the other witnesses/victims had been gaslighted or coerced into silence.
> His worst crime was getting a consentual blow job from a woman in her 20s. I never got why that mattered given the shit the others were up to...
That was character evidence in a sexual harassment lawsuit from a different woman (Paula Jones) who claims that he tried to pressure her into non-consensual sex.
Clinton was sanctioned for perjury due to lying about that relationship in court, appealed the ruling, then later dropped the appeal and surrendered his law license voluntarily.
So there were elements of perjury and non-consensual sex here and your summary is incomplete.
People remember Clinton as being particularly good because he exited on an economic high note and was followed by 9/11, the dot-com crash and two decades long wars. Then combine that with all the people who aren't old enough to remember the news from back then who think it was just a blowjob and the blowjob wasn't more of an Al Capone tax evasion type of moment and it's pretty easy to see why he has such a positive reputation.
Whether or not HIPAA is a bad thing is very much a matter of opinion. That's the one thing that's keeping medical info from being whored out like all our other metadata these days.
The last uncontroversially good president we've had was born in the 19th century.
People remember HIPAA poorly? Ive worked very closly in the industry, and I think it was a net positive. It could have been better, but it sure beat what was there.
>and letting China into the World Trade Association
That probably meant the WTO.
Still, "letting"? As if it's the role of the 4% of the world to dictate whether the 18% of the world would enter a supposedly neutral global trade organization?
If we are using board games analogy, that's hardly a checker's game. If you are POTUS your opinion affects the market. You can easily affect the market.
Imagine how easy would be to make money through stock options if you had the power to affect any stock to go up or down. Only ethics would stand in your way and if you think ethics are for loses, nothing is stopping you from doing that.
If you want reduce your risk further, you could simply get paid by your friends from Mar-a-Lago (by purchasing expensive rooms in your hotel) by letting them know your announcement ahead of time and let them do the investment. That will also reduce connections to yourself.
Perhaps it is because our government does not have unlimited power to seize property, and the order against TikTok was not legal? Just because the executive branch makes an order, or our legislative branch makes a law, or for that matter, a judge makes a ruling, does not mean that it will not be overturned under judicial review. Our entire system in the US is based on individual rights being protected from the collective will.
This is a move that does not make sense at all - seriously you start a squabble about a payment service with one of your largest bondholder? It does not make sense in a strategic way - what on earth is the goal here, if you want to reduce Chinese sales tell Walmart buying the stuff. It makes no tactical sense - there is not current trigger and the administration is outgoing in a few weeks. The only sense I can see is salting the ground for the incoming administration's diplomacy and there I think they underestimate the ability of the Chinese to pursue long term goals.
I agree it makes no sense. But having China as a bondholder does not give them any power over us. Especially when said bonds are delineated in US currency - something the US can print at will.
Thought experiment: US pays China $1T in US fiat. Simultaneously, US cuts $1T checks to every single resident of the US. Chaos ensues. But seriously, wtf would happen in this situation?
Hyperinflation and the collapse of the US economy, and at long last, the introduction of socialism to the United States, (unfortunately, in the worst possible manner). A week later, we'll all be trading cans of gasoline and ammunition for euros and bottle caps.
Perfect example of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Answer: The CARES act was the US government printing $2 trillion bucks and handing checks out to every resident of the US. Nothing happened (the chaos predated the money).
Also, it's important to realize that t-bonds and USDs are basically the same thing. A T-bond is, for all intents and purposes, high-denomination dollar bill that can be exchanged for low-denomination bills on an open market.
You missed the part where I said each resident would get a trillion bucks. Patently absurd, I know, but it's more fun to imagine than today's actual news.
Is not the money that is the problem, they hold bonds because they specifically do not want US dollars and are waiting for the time when the US (or the world) has something other than US dollars to offer them.
They don't want dollars doesn't matter who prints them.
Would you be kind and explain how this is works? (my suspicion is that it is akin "if you owe bank a $10000, you have a problem. If you owe bank a $100mil, bank has a problem", but please don't let this idea influence your answer)
China has taken on the risk of us paying the $1tn. If they were to get incredibly aggressive, for example starting a war, then we could clear the debt. We just don't pay.
$1tn is a lot of money to any country, even one as large as China.
Defaulting on our debt would be a huge fucking deal for us as well, but if the stakes were high enough others would understand that we couldn't pay someone money while at war.
The cost of two first world nuclear armed nations going to war can't really be measured in dollars. Even if nukes didn't come into play, I'm listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History episodes on the War in the Pacific right now. The death tolls and misery is just staggering, and he hasn't even gotten to the firebombing where I'm at yet.
This isn't right, there's incentive for both parties to behave but anytime China can sell treasuries on the open market for below what they are worth driving up yields dramatically.
If the US tries to issue more bonds they'll have to match market rates or buyers will simply go to the secondary markets.
You're suggesting that the US could intentionally devalue it's own notes to financially hurt China, but that would also devastate every other holder as well as itself. Basically economic scorched Earth policy that even a madman wouldn't consider.
If China dumps those bonds tomorrow the US dollar would collapse instantly. China would feel some pain of course, but their internal economy is not directly tied to international markets so they can handle it way better.
The Federal reserve would buy them all up at the now discounted rate.
Now China would be stuck selling assets (t-bonds) at a loss, and in return, they get another asset (USD) which now has a suppressed value. And since low USD makes American goods relatively cheaper, it will hurt the Chinese production economy and help the American one.
Also, China could have difficulty deploying those USDs if the US Government imposes sanctions or other prohibitions on purchasing or capital inflow to the US.
T-bonds and dollars are basically the same thing. A t-bond is basically a bank account with the US Treasury saying that you gave them USD and that you're entitled to that USD back, with interest, at some later date.
Saying China "dumping" t-bonds is bad for America is like saying that a person "dumping" CDs is bad for a bank. The seller is the one getting hosed on the deal, because they are forced to sell at a discount (otherwise, it wouldn't constitute dumping). The bank / treasury already knows they need to pay back the money at some point.
Also, a trillion dollars in t-bonds isn't that much. The Fed has purchased hundreds of billion on several occasions without much fanfare. A trillion bucks won't do much more than trigger some NYTimes articles on the subject.
Dollars are dollars now, bonds are dollars in the future. They are not the same.
Dumping bonds is not just an economic decision, but also a trust decision. You hold bonds because you trust the US. Dumping bonds means you no longer trust the US ability to pay back those bonds with dollars worth anything; that you lost hope of ever getting repaid.
And of course you lose your nominal amounts of dollars, who's arguing that? You still dump them because you are taking your loses today instead taking more tomorrow.
They are cash and cash-equivalents. Meaning, the same.
Many large business transactions are done using t-bonds. The amount of dollars in the economy is surprisingly small, thus, at some price point, it becomes necessarily to pay in t-bonds.
> They are cash and cash-equivalents. Meaning, the same.
> Many large business transactions are done using t-bonds. The amount of dollars in the economy is surprisingly small, thus, at some price point, it becomes necessarily to pay in t-bonds.
Then they are not the same. You admit they are not the same, then deny they are not the same. If they were the same they would be called the same, and would be the same.
They can be equivalent and they are used similarly, just as a house can be used as "cash-equivalent" under certain circumstances. But they are different instruments that allow different (and some similar) uses.
I recommend you read this short bio of Trump's economic advisor Peter Navarro (aka Ron Vara) [1]. I am deeply familiar with Trump's policies on immigration which were not just evil (as partisans pointed out) their real hallmark was how incompetently they were implemented. Same his happening on the economic front.
I am not passing a value judgement on China or US trade relationships but from a developed nation like USA I would expect a broad policy first using which we can reliably predict how a successful Chinese company be treated in USA. That helps consumers, business partners VCs and so on.
Something similar happened when Gary Cohn swiped a letter off Trump's desk on the US-South Korea trade deal.
> Another portion of the book describes an instance with Mr Trump’s former chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, who “stole a letter off Trump’s desk” that the president intended to sign to formally withdraw the US from a trade agreement with South Korea.
Because it was a complex administrative and legal process which the Trump administration wasn't capable of handling. Pretty much every single executive order they issued ("muslims are banned from entering the country", "no more work visas", "TikTok is banned") has seen extremely chaotic and ineffective implementation, with government bureaucrats themselves not sure what to do.
It should be obvious by now that Trump is all talk at best. At normal times he does stuff and worsen things.
For example, on the whole China trade war. The US’s net imports from China are higher than they have been since the mid 2000s. Chinas economic strength relative to the US is higher than its ever been. Instead of the US being trading and strengthening relationships with Pacific nations until Trump ripped the TPP its now China that has those trading relationships. The EU is reducing interactions with the US and just signed a deal with China, something that may have been unthinkable for them even ( years ago. The US is absolutely non existent in Africa while China continues to build relationships ans trade links there. Thanks to the US trade war China has drastically increased trade with Brazil (to procure soybeans instead of from the US) while US relationships with South America continue to weaken.
Trump has presided over worsening relationships with literally every other continent barring Antarctica, and as a direct consequence of his actions China has greatly improved relationships in all those continents.
This is an often-used tactic. First-term outgoing executive declares a bunch of policies last-minute that his supporters love, incoming executive cancels all of them.
Since the policies were untested, they became symbolic rather than a demonstrably failed experiment.
When the first executive tries for a second term later, they can use this as an example of how they tried to do X, but their replacement didn't even give them a chance.
I've seen this exact thing done many, many times, and not just in the American presidency.
Economic and political disasters often trail policy changes by months or years as well so no doubt the next administration will be taking the blame for lots of other stuff this admin intentionally screwed up in their last year.
The "lame duck" government is a weird anachronism. The transfer of power should be significantly accelerated, and probably a lot of power transferred away from the presidency too.
Wall Street is very concerned that the next occupy wall street will circumvent their payment processor blacklists and surveillance by using Chinese competitors that aren't controlled by US financial interests.
Why would Occupy Wallstreet 2.0 need payment processors? The big advantage (and weakness) of those movements was that they were decentralised and had no leader (or treasurer)
Personal anecdote: I worked in finance back then at London Stock Exchange. The building we were in was next to St Paul's Cathedral, where Occupy London were setup.
They were nice guys and girls, I went out to talk to them occasionally and bought them donuts and stuff. When I asked what they wanted, they couldn't tell me. I think I knew the movement was dead at that point. If you have no "demands" and what are people meant to do for you?
Even brexiteers with their self contradictory demands managed to get something done.
I think occupy was more like Woodstock (an event or experience) than a "movement" in the end...
That's not really necessary as long as they have a coherent message. Occupy had that, BLM has it, Antifa does, and none of these organizations are formally structured ones, they have no leaders, no HQ, etc. They are groups organized via common goals.
I mean I'm sure they have some ring leaders, the people that organize the protests and do a lot of the leg work, and I'm sure they're on the Lists of the various agencies, but it's not like Trump can get on stage and do his "we got 'em" moment announcing they captured the leader of antifa.
Any political party that decides to fight wall street will find it incredibly hard when their bank accounts are closed, their paypal donations confiscated, and their credit cards canceled. Try paying your phone bill in cash. Occupy Wall street was quashed because it was a disorganized leaderless mess, and Wall Street would rather it stay that way.
I'm a bit incredulous of this. Has wall street ever actually done that? Here in the UK the last Labour Party was super left wing, actively said they'd cut 90% of financial services. They didn't get their accounts closed or their cards cancelled.
Were Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren forced to use bitcoin for their groceries?
The real pull Wall Street has is that its a profitable industry. It makes a shit tonne of money and you want it here because you want to tax it. Compare that to car makers, a low margin industry with big externalities that can't easily decamp to some other country.
Wallstreet (The City is the UK equivalent) is also a major strategic asset. Cutting Iran off from Western listed companies and dollar transactions is a much bigger issue for them than sanctioning their leaders or blowing up the occasional general. The same for Zimbabwe or China: revoked access to capital markets is a big issue. To be able to revoke access to those markets, you need to have those markets.
As a working class American why should I care about cutting off Iran from international bank transactions? US wages have been stagnant for 40 years while executive pay has ballooned.
Yes. Dozens of small parties and political organizations have been targeted by finance in both the US and the UK.
Can you share an example of when financial services companies have deplatformed (is that the right term?) a political party in the US or UK?
I agree you probably shouldn't care about Iran. I'm just saying that's why presidents and senators care. Also, you should care about all the jobs FS creates both at the top and further down. Without financial services not only would your taxes go up, you wouldn't get half as good a mortgage and there would be a lot fewer jobs across the economy...
Edit:
The only examples of account closures I can find are either for right wing groups (HSBC closed a load of those) or 1 democrat in Florida whose account was closed after she was told they couldn't accept cannabis cash and she said she'd pay that in anyway...
After American intel officially claims it was Russia behind the SolarWinds hack, Trump lashes out at China. "Lookit here!". Coincidence? Hey, I am just asking questions.
So when American companies invade the privacy of European citizens its okay, but when Chinese companies do the same with American citizens this is "digital totalitarianism"? Anyone care to explain this to me?
America's foreign policy (as a government as evidenced through history and present-day) is to police and/or spy on the world but not to be policed and/or spied on.
Everyone wants to spy, nobody wants to be spied on. It's a typical part of what we call international power politics and it's been going on for roughly all of human history.
I honestly don't understand the point you're tying to make. Are you just complaining that it's unfair?
I think the question was on the lines of "why do people think it's ok when their country does it but not ok when others do it". The answer if simple: ignorance and cognitive dissonance (hypocrisy?). Ignorance because most aren't even aware their own country engages in the exact same tactics and even far worse. And cognitive dissonance because "I must be good so my opponent must be bad" [0].
Unfortunatley that's just the way the world works. We don't have world peace yet, and have plenty of countries that if not outright hostile in the rhetoric and stance, have the capacity to elect leaders who could change those stances. All of those countries have complex sets of relationships with one another, and its not a given that if your country is attacked (and is not the US or some other super power), that someone else will come and defend it. The concern over China is, of course, quite a bit more obvious given the _ongoing_ abuse of their own citizens.
I'm a liberal, but I agree with Trump on this. The world needs to stop China.
China is stealing Western tech to gain an economic and strategic advantage. They're going to out-compete our tech and leave us in the dust. They have far more engineers that are willing to work "996". (Sure, founders might work "996", but our workforce doesn't/can't/won't.)
Playing unfair isn't great, but it's not the most worrying component of this. Our opponent has concentration camps, organ harvesting, no free press, crushes dissidents, disappears billionaires. And this is a regime that wants world domination. This gives me nightmares.
We should be doing everything in our power to disentangle and stop China.
When China has a military that surpasses the US in terms of scale and tech, they're going to start invading and taking more than they already do. They've shut off water to Vietnam, set up shop in the energy/resource-rich South China Sea, etc. They're not going to stop.
Our media is already censored and caters to Chinese tastes. None of our movies are ever critical of China. They're actively manipulating us.
Western democracies aren't primed to fight this. This is such a lopsided fight. We have to start playing hardball.
edit: I'm being censored right now. This is the game we're playing.
Yup this is exactly the point. Everyone can throw around all the whataboutism they want in this discussion (which there will be plenty) but this remains true in the end.
We’re also I’ll equipped right now to fight this, our culture is divided and most of the intellectuals in power are more concerned about seeing everything through the social justice lens. So anything we do against China for our own national safety is being chalked up as racism etc. China sees this and is taking full advantage. I hope Biden takes a strong stance on China domination so at least one end of the political spectrum can be convinced to get on board here.
We can’t just simply out battle evil regimes like we could in the past. Each major power (Russia, China, US) has weaponry that could destroy the world if unleashed against each other. We are at a turning point in world history. So we have to fight this on the economic level, banning apps is part of this strategy.
The US has a decades long history of using it's vast military to crush anyone, even people living in literal caves with all the brutality of black sites, torture, murdering of entire villages of civilians, etc.
US don't have the moral superiority to get anyone against China and that's sad and harsh but it's true. No one reading this thinks the US is any better and this is the US fault. When they starve entire countries to death over a 50 year old embassy attack, then who in the world will eagerly listen to them about which countries are good and which are bad?
Eventually this will become a battle of systems, and it is not clear that this time, freedom will win. The Chinese system works very well, and in some regards much better than the western model of governance. It feels very much that the western world is in decline - we can no longer coordinate on large-scale projects, or produce beauty. The aqueducts are still standing, but we can't build new ones.
> we can no longer coordinate on large-scale projects, or produce beauty
This is some incredible malarkey.
> The aqueducts are still standing, but we can't build new ones.
SpaceX, Tesla, Moderna, Apple M1, Nvidia, OpenAI, Google Brain, James Webb telescope, the new Perseverance Mars rover ... what the heck are you talking about?
> The Chinese system works very well
Not for Uyghurs or political dissidents. Also, we just voted out the Republicans wholesale (!!) Can you do that in China?
I'd take our system any day of the week over being disappeared for disagreeing with officials.
As much as I dislike the anti-maskers, we have freedom. And that's so much better.
> SpaceX, Tesla, [...] what the heck are you talking about?
Capitalism works well both in the US and in China. Those are private companies, and I hope you don't try to list NASA projects. Elon wants to bring down the cost of space transportation to 10$ per Kg, a Space Shuttle launch used to cost 1.5B$.
My point was about the public sector. Last time I checked, the high-speed railway they were trying to build in California added another billion $ to its budget. Meanwhile, feel free to look how much high-speed rail China has built in the last few years.
> Not for Uyghurs or political dissidents.
Just because a system works very well for the majority of its citizens doesn't mean it works for everyone. You are not refuting the central argument.
> I'd take our system any day of the week over being disappeared for disagreeing with officials.
You seem to have the impression I'd prefer the Chinese system. I don't. That does not mean you can't take a hard look at what they do better.
Jesus, this reads like GPT-2 output. In a light skim it looks fine, but then you start actually looking at the structure or the writing and it falls apart.
Your comment is full of (and I mean FULL, nearly every sentence) anti-Chinese assertions with zero factual evidence involved:
> The world needs to stop China.
> China is stealing Western tech to gain an economic and strategic advantage.
> Our opponent has concentration camps...
> And this is a regime that wants world domination.
> Our media is already censored and caters to Chinese tastes.
This is not an argument, it's bullshit. Oh don't get me wrong, some of it is probably true at some level, and Chinese foreign policy is just as acerbic as in the US, but without any evidence given, it's not worth reading.
Which makes it funny that there are a bunch of comments just below where people chime in "spot on!", as if the parent commenter made some EXCELLENT points with his jumbled and disjointed word-vomit.
What's going on here? Did I have a stroke or something? The words are just no longer making sense.
I’ve skimmed the articles you’ve linked to. However, I have an honest question: how do I decide whether the linked sources are trustworthy? Ok, there’s a book by a guy who claims to have interviewed Chinese doctors and policemen. But why should I trust him?
I never mentioned your grammar; you misinterpreted "structure" here. If you read past the first sentence, it's clear I'm referencing your logical structure.
GPT-2 actually produces decent grammar, but not any context-aware logical structure to the text it produces. Just a bunch of disjointed sentences with keywords that all generally lie on the same semantic vector.
More importantly, you are ignoring the entire rest of my argument. Thank you for posting some source links, those make two of your initial assertions more credible. What about the rest?
In the West it's commonly believed that working too many hours reduces creativity and productivity in the long run. So that feature of the Chinese economy may be good for Western competition.
> China is stealing Western tech to gain an economic and strategic advantage.
Cry me a river.
Western companies went there for cheap labor. They could've rethought this any time in the past 20+ years, when it became apparent Chinese companies aren't willing to follow US IP laws and keep buying the trinkets they (and at this point, only they) know how to make at a markup. Instead, our corporations still outsource manufacturing, and solve their IP issues by telling the people to tell the government to cry foul and do something about a now nuclear-armed nation that decided to grow past being a source of cheap labor.
There are plenty of bad things to say about China as a country/government, but on the IP front, that's just funny. IP laws in the West are a ridiculous racket. For all the companies here talk about innovation, there's sure as hell more of it happening in China than over here.
Really? You're going to out-compete? What happened to the free market? What happened to the advantages of capitalism? You're worried about them becoming economically dominant because they work harder? Why does the US deserve to remain dominant then?
> European countries are free to take whatever actions they see fit against US companies.
And the EU does. But ironically whenever that happens Americans argue that such action isn't about privacy but instead about the EU trying to promote their own domestic industries.
Though I guess that same spin would likely be argued by those on the receiving end of the US/China ban too.
>And the EU does. But ironically whenever that happens Americans argue that such action isn't about privacy but instead about the EU trying to promote their own domestic industries.
International politics isn't fair or just or honest. However that's been known since probably before written history. So of course the US will spin things with propaganda and false statements and whatever. You can't change it or impact it or do stop it directly. So blame Europe for not successfully countering it rather than the US for knowing how to play the game.
I don't think Europe needs to counter it as American opinions on this sort of action don't matter to most Europeans. I think the user above was more likely calling out the HN community for its double standards with regards to this.
> So blame Europe for not successfully countering it rather than the US for knowing how to play the game.
Can this be applied to any situation where one party found itself (through error, inaction, incompetence, inability, etc.) in a position to be dominated or abused by anther party? Or is it only selectively applied based on personal preference or inclination? Because applying it selectively is exactly the double standards people (myself included) highlighted in this thread.
This may be pragmatic but it's also vicious towards the losing party. Politicians or corporations bribing or abusing power to get away with anything know how to play the game. The people being abused or losing everything are to blame for not successfully countering them.
Double standards are a good way to justify anything to your advantage by simply flipping the argument the way it suits you. As I wrote in a previous comment, it makes for exceptionally low quality conversation.
In my view, yes, when the party being dominated or abused has massive power itself. This isn't about a small entity being abused by a large entity no matter how much you seem to want it framed as such. It's two incomprehensibly massive and powerful entities going at at with one losing due to its own actions.
edit: This is the only view I see that allows the losing entity to learn from the experience and avoid it in the future. Any other view just results in the same thing happening again in the future.
> when the party being dominated or abused has massive power itself
The expected "relativistic" cop-out. "Massive" means nothing if your opponent has substantially more. It simply means that no matter how much you want to escalate they can take it a notch higher and you will suffer just a bit more than your opponent. There are examples literally all around you.
> This is the only view I see that allows the losing entity to learn from the experience
The only way? It is a way best used when everything else has failed, like education. Am I to understand that you learned everything from personal experience? If you truly believe things are only ever learned on your own skin then you understand close to nothing about the world, history, and consequences, not living through almost any of them yourself. Which explains the narrow view.
I genuinely don't get it. If the app spies on you so what? Facebook spies on you. So do Twitter and Google. The average person doesn't watch Citizen four or care how much these companies spy on them. The average person is happy to get free Facebook in exchange for them spying. Why can't Chinese apps do the same?
It's all bull. What you're saying about China is true but it has nothing to do with AliPay vs Google/Facebook/Twitter
There's a lot to unpack here. But no, European countries can't realistically take too many measures, mostly under the threat of economic and political retaliation. No more than Chinese citizens are free to take whatever actions they see fit against their leadership. We're all free to take any action we want but it's not freedom if we can't exercise it out of fear of retaliation.
You can see this in action with most EU countries disagreeing with many sanctions imposed on US enemies but eventually caving under pressure from the US. Or when having to switch the frequencies used for the Galileo system to something that could be more easily jammed by the US.
The US is exhibiting towards other countries the same kind of tyrannical behavior bent on maintaining power that the Chinese leadership is exercising towards its citizens. It's the age old need to maintain power, and the more power, the further you're willing to go to maintain it. From a global surveillance exercise where every human is spied on relentlessly, to meddling into most countries internal affairs to the point of changing regimes to suit them, to oppressing their own citizens. These are all publicly and officially documented issues. It's all great if and only if your interests align.
If you cannot acknowledge this then you are certainly not prepared to have a discussion beyond "we're good, they're bad".
I don't think the US is the same as China even if the US isn't perfect. The CCP actually commits genocide, takes political prisoners, and its justice system is a kangaroo court. Compare that to the US which spies on people and is taken to court for even attempting to kill a citizen who's become an enemy combatant in a warzone and has a justice system which often invalidates the actions of the legislative branch.
Europe with GDPR does set its own rules for how American tech can operate and penalizes them heavily for perceived infractions. So that continent is taking the actions they want to take which is their right. Beyond that, there are more examples: Spain did effectively shut down Google News, and I don't remember any retaliation.
Look at the wars the US continuously waged over the past decades and count the the deaths and destruction. You can rationalize it any way you want if it makes you feel better, you can pretend it's a fight for freedom on one side, and a fight for oppression on the other, you can say those school children were just combatants. But in the end it's the same on either side: those with power kill to maintain it. Some kill locally, some kill globally.
On the other hand the examples you gave are absolutely minor and barely noteworthy. I referred decisions with global impact, not inconsequential things like Google News being affected in Spain. Intel never payed the fine the EU imposed for unfair practices close to a decade ago. Facebook and Google barely saw a blip due to GDPR since it was basically (and legally it seems) rolled into their ToS.
The real consequential things are the public support the US demands from the EU for sanctions or wars. For political and economical issues that involve far more than you mentioned as a counterpoint. For countless human lives lost.
The US isn't the same, it's just worse as a whole over a longer period. What we've done to South America and the Middle East will impact those areas for decades more. We've got a lot of blood on our hands in the name of democracy, colonialism, and oil futures.
Even more with how our soon to be ex-president pardons convicted war criminals on a whim.
USA actually performs genocide; its prisons are full of people convinced for political (mostly racial) reasons, see the justification for war on drugs; and it’s courts can punish convinced murderer with a fee instead of proper sentence. Not mentioning crimes, which often end up with decorating the perpetrators.
It would be nice if US would be taken to court for everything done, but that is very far from the truth.
For example the US is guilty of criminal negligence during the invasion of Iraq, when an important part of the historical heritage of the entire humanity has been destroyed.
It would have been extremely easy to avoid that, and there were ample efforts to warn the US political and military leaders to take appropriate actions, but all the warnings from competent people were ignored.
A common thief or vandal who destroys one picture from a museum might rot in jail, but US presidents or generals who have destroyed historical artifacts far more valuable will never be punished in any way.
A long time ago, in a 'Modesty Blaise' book, when Wille Garvin is incarcerated and the guard tries to cut a deal with him saying that he'll set him free - Garvin says "I already have my freedom, what you'll give me is liberty".
I always think of this phrase whenever questions of freedom come up.
And like you mention, all of us our free, but mostly our liberty is curtailed by external circumstances or by our own fears of retaliation.
> But no, European countries can't realistically take too many measures, mostly under the threat of economic and political retaliation.
They can also threaten economic and political retaliation. That's international politics and negotiation and diplomacy in a nutshell. It's a dirty game but the rules have been known for centuries. Europe isn't some tiny South American nation, it's a global power whose GDP rivals the US. That it's failed to successfully do this is the fault of Europe and no one else.
Europe has failed to protect itself against US power and now you seem to be upset that the US wants to not fall into the same trap in terms of China?
See, you're not actually contradicting me, just finding a justification for why the US is to the world what China is to its citizens.
> They can also threaten economic and political retaliation.
Sure but threats and negotiations work if you actually have the bigger gun and leverage. Given that the US is both the largest economy and military power this feels like a moot point.
> Europe has failed to protect itself against US power
Yes, just like Chinese citizens failed to protect themselves against their leadership. They aren't just a tiny South American nation, they are 1.3bn people who want freedom. That they failed to successfully do this is the fault of the people and no one else.
But really, the fact the EU stood quietly next to the US while the US tightened its grip on the world is indeed a failure of the EU (Europe, given that this started happening long before the EU). They took the easy road of growing in someone else's shade, even if post WW2 it may have been the best or only thing Europe could have done. This doesn't change anything about my characterization of the US, it's just a tangent.
I'm not saying what China is doing is ok because the US does it too. But just like OP, I pointed out the double standards obvious even here on HN. Whether it's mis- or dis-information, ignorance, hypocrisy, cognitive dissonance, or whatever else you may call it, the fact that people hold 2 completely different and opposing opinions on the same kind of action differentiated only by "us vs. them" is a massive failure of those people.
>Sure but threats and negotiations work if you actually have the bigger gun and leverage. Given that the US is both the largest economy and military power this feels like a moot point.
China's growing influence and Russia's influence on international politics clearly show that it's not about absolute power but how you apply it. Europe is large enough and powerful enough that the US can't invade it or cause massive economic damage without significantly hurting itself. Europe has massive leverage in negotiations and politics and diplomacy. It just fails to use it likely because it's not unified enough to fully and quickly apply it.
Please stop blaming Europe's diplomatic failures on external factors. All that does is ensure that they will continue to happen because you won't blame the government that is actually at fault.
> Please stop blaming Europe's diplomatic failures on external factors
After I clearly stated this:
>> But really, the fact the EU stood quietly next to the US while the US tightened its grip on the world is indeed a failure of the EU [...] They took the easy road of growing in someone else's shade
Is a sign that you did not bother to read, let alone understand my comment. That is terribly disrespectful and a sign that you have no interest in a discussion, just a monologue of meritless opinions.
Your posts can be summarized as "Europe messed up in the past but now it's totally not their fault because the US is just too big to do anything." My post was "the US isn't that big and Europe has plenty of options so Europe is still messing up due to it's own fault even if you keep deflecting that point."
No, my comments (direct response to OP's "why are we pretending what US is doing is different form what China is doing") can be summarized as "pretending China and the US are different is just un/mis/disinformed or hypocritical". They are both superpowers and they both resort to any measures within their grasp to maintain or increase that power. Pretending otherwise is just euphemistically "double standards".
The EU only appeared in the discussion as a reference or "witness", just like the Chinese people are used as reference for what their leadership is doing. You turning the discussion towards some EU blame for whatever isn't only a meritless distraction from the topic, it's also akin to blaming the Chinese people for not overthrowing the CCP. They are 1.3bn people, surely they have "massive leverage".
I reiterate, you have no interest in reading or understanding any of my comments. The extent to which you perverted and rewrote my words just to fit whatever narrative you're more easily able to support really makes for low quality discussion. I have more than adequately made and supported my point and will politely withdraw.
> ... they [Chinese citizens] are 1.3bn people who want freedom.
Is there evidence that a significant portion of the population really do want more freedom? While I would hope so it's possible the majority there prefer the status quo. (Of course lack of evidence doesn't prove it.)
I have no evidence either way, the truth might as well be in the middle (many like it, many hate it). In an attempt to show how "double standard" GP's opinion was I just repurposed the argument that one party failing to counteract an opponent which has more power than them, being dominated instead, is entirely the fault of the weaker party. I replaced "the EU" with "the Chinese people". To my surprise GP went on to confirm even this exaggerated interpretation of mine, later adding that allowing them to make the mistake and implicitly paying for it is the only way the weaker party will learn to be strong. Such opinions are far too cynical and extremist for my taste.
Maybe we should add to this that this is a unforceable ban (as the TikTok and WeChat bans demonstrate) probably mostly designed to annoy incoming Biden administration.
The best way to understand all this is that the US basically acquired Western European Empire in all but name after WWII.
If you look at history, the US exercises about as much control of Western Europe as Rome did. Basically the areas were free to run their daily affairs but military matters went through Rome. Similar to now.
The fiction lasted well throughout the Cold War but is starting to fray. It will be interesting to see what happens going forward.
Whataboutism is simply not a good justification for a country doing bad things.
Go ahead and say that the US does bad things. But, regardless of that, we should still retaliate against China for doing bad things to us.
And you bringing up even more bad things that the US has done is not relevant at all, to how we should definitely still stop China from doing bad things.
It was a means to highlight the double standards many people (on HN included) hold, as OP also pointed out. Deciding whether atrocities get a free pass or not depending on the country doing it is just nationalism. Somehow considered those atrocities "necessary" due to some misguided Messiah complex is extremism. Others have done it in the past so we should know how to recognize it. You're judging nationalities instead of crimes, giving murder a free pass when you do it, punishing it when other nationalities do it. At some point you punish them simply because you already established they're bad.
> we should still retaliate against China [...] we should definitely still stop China from doing bad things
You can retaliate. Should implies an obligation. Since the narrative (yours included) is that you're punishing actions ("bad things") not nationality, not following up with retaliating against your own leadership for the same "bad things" or worse means having exactly that misguided Messiah complex (misguided because you don't understand the purpose of your own country's actions) as well as holding a healthy dose of double standards or hypocrisy. You live in a democracy, this is your will. The unspoken desire to enjoy and exert dominance, followed by the inevitable rationalization that gives it a morally acceptable varnish.
As I said in my original comment on this thread:
> If you cannot acknowledge this then you are certainly not prepared to have a discussion beyond "we're good, they're bad".
That is a weird phasing. By "should" I mean that it is a good thing to call out bad things that happen, such as in this case with these apps, and I am happy when the US retaliates against bad things, such as what is happening in this example. The reason being, that these apps are doing bad things that should be stopped. You have not contradicted this point.
> established they're bad
In this specific case though, regarding these app and the actions that they are taking, they are bad though!
> You live in a democracy, this is your will.
Ok. And bad things being punished in this specific example. Thats good. And misdirection to talk about something different does not overrule the fact that it is good in this specific example that these specific bad things are being punished/retaliated against.
> gives it a morally acceptable varnish.
Specifically in this example, it is morally accepted to punish these specific bad things that these apps are doing though. So there are no problem with retaliating against these apps and actions, because in this example they are indeed bad and should be retaliated against.
I will not deny the atrocities the US has committed and will undoubtedly continue to commit. Any nation with that level of power will end up doing the exact same thing in order to maintain that power. It’s no secret that China wants that power. However I’d much rather live in a world where the US has that power than China. I’m sure my personal bias play into it, being from a western (though not American) nation, but I’ll try to remain objective.
- The US has at least a two party system. It’s not much, and is deeply flawed, but at least the governmental power is not completely unchecked. That and the government is ostensibly at the mercy of the people. Propaganda, disinformation, and manipulation aside, if a government does something egregious enough the people of the US still have the power to vote them out. The Chinese people do not have that power. Their government is much more top down and prescriptive. The only checking of power is the willingness of lower level people to enforce rules.
- Freedom of Speech. Nobody is above criticism. Simple as that. Not being able to question the government is an awful situation to be in. Imagine a world where you could get extradited to China for saying something critical of the CCP online. I’ll remind you that the CCP jailed 8 doctors in Wuhan last year for raising the alarm about the coronavirus, saying they were spreading false rumours online. No thanks.
- From an ideological standpoint the CCP seems to be be hellbent on reclaiming lost territory and retaliating against the evil west who have wronged them for so long. The US has no such motivation, being relatively young.
Please don’t get me wrong. I think China is a beautiful country, having visited several times, and the Chinese people and culture are both wonderful. I just do not want to live in a CCP-centric world.
I'd add to this (as a US citizen)
please take action against US companies. The last time, with Microsoft, it was a very good thing for the US, the EU, the World, and the internet.
It's rational. The US government exists to protect and promote the interests of US citizens and companies. So it is the US's job to protect its citizens from foreign surveillance.
I'd say it's Europe's job to protect its citizens from foreign surveillance. It's not "OK" so much as "Not my job."
At a basic level, I agree there’s not a fundamental difference. But I think it’s reasonable to look at practical differences between China and the US and consider which one you’d prefer to be secretly recording your personal data. The US has cultural and constitutional support of free speech, due process, and independent judiciary. On the flip-side, the US has PRISM, theocrats, an insane president, and a history of covert violent foreign intervention. China has little support for freedom of speech, separation of powers, etc.. And is frequently accused of extrajudicially disappearing people for their speech/beliefs.
I think at present I’d still significantly prefer the US over China to secretly collect my personal data (even if I wasn’t a US citizen). It’s certainly possible that difference will further erode over time.
I don’t necessarily mean to endorse banning Chinese apps, as that seems very problematic and arguably cuts against our own value system. It’s always seemed very protectionist when China did that to us, and it seems the same when we do it to them, and comes with the same surface area for corporate corruption of our government.
But does this make a difference in practice? I’ve been to China only for short business trips, so I can’t judge. But when I looked at the city and talked to people in China and outside of it, I didn’t get an impression people are oppressed or suffering. I don’t claim I have the evidence, but it’s just that so many people here paint a grim picture and I’m afraid it’s only based on US propaganda.
Yes, it’s very different. Here’s a Chinese interrogation video of a “suspect” being interrogated for posting a comment mildly criticizing the local police on QQ:
It’s also to a significant extent moot because much of the data that can’t be gathered from banned apps in the US can be bought from data brokers.
When your domestic privacy laws are weak enough to allow a largely unregulated marketplace in personal information and to largely allow domestic apps to gather and sell personal information, banning foreign apps that also do so won’t keep such data out of foreign hands.
Not that hard for me. Americans have criticized, sued and raised awareness about their government misconducts, with little repercussions. Joseph Gordon-Levitt didn't get persecuted for playing Snowden. Adam Driver didn't receive state sanctioned intimidation for playing Daniel J. Jones. Director, screenwriters, producers and etc get to live their life normally.
Can you imagine what will happen to Fan Bing Bing if she plays Chai Ling (One of Tiananmen Square student leader)?
So to answer your question - no it's not okay. But I would expect HN audience to be able to see the obvious distinctions.
It's ironic that you mention Hollywood, because our studios are now catering to CCP sensibilities. You'll never see a film critical of China made domestically. Our studios want access to the Chinese market and they know that if they produce such a film, they'll be blacklisted.
This is why we need top-down decoupling. China knows we're addicted, and they've got us in a good spot to continue growing off of our market.
Isn’t it the case that only 10 or so US movies are allowed in China in any given year? I figure that we optimize our 10 movies for China and then leave the rest alone.
It’s happening in gaming too. The most recent thing in memory was something Blizzard did, and apparently the word Taiwan is censored in all chats in PubG[1]
The committee McCarthy chaired at the time of his notorious anti-Communist crusade was the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which still exists.
You may be thinking of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which also spent some time doing similar anti-Communist witch hunts, which existed until being renamed as the House Internal Security Committee in 1969, and was abolished with it's functions transferred to the House Judiciary Committee in 1975.
Well, no, 63 years ago was Yates v. US; even through the height of the anti-Communist witch hunting phase, the US had a stronger protection of free speech rights of Communists than China has for dissidents today.
It's not difficult to explain. The American government acts in the interests of Americans (or attempts to do so). European governments act in the interests of Europeans. The Chinese government likewise. Their rhetoric reflects those goals. What's the alternative: governments that act against the interests of their population in order to conform to notions of morality that only really apply to individuals?
Governments exist to serve a specific population, not humanity as a whole.
In each case, you also have to consider the possibility that each government is acting in the best interest not of the governed, but of the individual or group doing the governing.
Is this genuinely in the interest of America, or just in the interest of the person making the decision? That's a question you always have to ask, but it seems particularly pertinent in the case of a leader who has been issuing numerous baseless complaints about various opponents, whose actions have repeatedly been refused by courts, and who was denied a second term.
So while it's true that the government doesn't need to act in the interests of anybody but its own citizens, it would be nice to know if this decision achieves even that much -- or if it's just spite.
> In each case, you also have to consider the possibility that each government is acting in the best interest not of the governed, but of the individual or group doing the governin
That's absolutely true, which is why we have courts, representative legislatures, and elections. Methods of mitigating the corruption of the governing class are built into the system. It doesn't work quickly or perfectly, but it's better than autocracy.
It's true the US has been promoting "freedom" throughout the world, but at the end of the day they should only care about their own citizens or interests.
China just jailed a number of pro-Democratic leaders in Hong Kong, and have now shown they are willing to pursue people outside of their own borders that are a threat to the CCP. I'm sure they will be using meta data to justify their arrests. I don't see how any reasonable person can compare the two.
When American companies invade the privacy of European citizens, it's because Facebook is collecting marketing data to make a buck. The concerns the US has about these Chinese companies is not that these companies are collecting too much marketing data, but that the CCP has coopted them into doing espionage operations on their behalf. Note that the US didn't care about these Chinese companies back when they were only collecting marketing data. It has only been since Xi's recent consolidation of power and crackdown on the autonomy of big tech that these issues have been hot topics.
If America wants to claim some sort of moral superiority in this stupid pissing match, it becomes quite difficult to do so when engaging in the same kind of bullshit state censorship that other countries routinely engage in.
Oh well. Maybe this will accelerate the move toward app platforms that can't be so easily censored arbitrarily by the state.
After decades of exporting (and/or stealing) western IP and most of our manufacturing base to China, at the expense of the working class and to the benefit of capitalists, Trump was first to stop the bleeding. He wasn't particularly smart about it, and he should have built alliances, yet he went alone as usual.
With all major western internet platforms being already banned in China, Jack Ma having disappeared for weeks now after being critical of the CCP, there are still comments here why everyone can't be nice to each other, and what harm were those Chinese apps causing. The opioid crisis has so far killed more Americans than WW2, and at least some of it is caused by the evaporation of blue-collar jobs. This is a direct consequence of certain economic policies. Say what you will about the CCP, but at least it cares about its people - because they are doing the polar opposite.
Facebook/Google does the same thing just owned by different govt. WHo's to say what happens to a Russian/Indian/Sri-Lankan app that poses some arbitrary threat any different.
I don't understand why Russia is doing obviously hostile acts (elections, hacking government agencies, invasion of Ukraine & others, covert operations and so on...) against the US, and not much is done.
Meanwhile, I can't remember a covert operation done by China or a visible invasion of a third-party country (except putting concrete on a few inhabited islands) and then everything is done to portray them as the bad guys and ban entire industries
I can't help thinking of either racism, or politicians being controlled by Russian intelligence (possibly them not being unaware of this)
China is currently the conservative foe of choice and Russia the ally of choice. We'll likely see this flip now that centrists are taking power since they were all-in on Russia as a foe over the past few years. Russian intelligence doesn't necessarily have to be a part of the picture, though we've certainly had cases of politicians taking foreign money.
It's hard to say how much of it is motivated by racism, though it's certainly a part of it. When pols call COVID-19 "the China virus" and talk about making them pay for it there's obviously a grudge there.
China is an economic competitor to the US while Russia is essentially not. China controls a lot of the supply chains that the US depends on which gives it great but subtle power. It's not in the interests of a nation to allow another nation that much control over the items it depends on. They may not use that power right now but that can change at any moment and there may less public uses of that power. Same reason China (and Russia) pushes home grown companies over foreign companies.
At the same time, the US controls the financial monetary system (petrodollar), dominates the world military-wise, tech and so on. If one is able to follow this logic, does that mean that Europe and other countries should also take hostile measures against the US since they control "supply chains" and has "great but subtle" powers over them?
Yes they should and in some ways they are with various laws aiming to curb the power of large (US) tech companies. They also seem to have stronger laws protecting domestic industries than the US although I might be wrong. Europe failing to protect itself properly against either the US or China (see how much of UK infrastructure is owned by China) isn't an argument for other nations not doing so.
Major incidents include the 2010 Google gmail hack, the F-35 blueprints hack, multiple military contractor breaches, the 2015 OPM hack which the leaked the details of most FBI/CIA agents worldwide, and the 2017 Equifax hack which stole information on 145 million Americans.
That’s just because there’s no Chinese Snowden yet. What do you know about surveillance in Asia? If you’re here speaking English I reckon you know nothing.
There are tons of well documented cases of China straight up mass MITMing their citizen's traffic. And this is legally authorized under their law.
In 2014 they MITM'd iCloud. In 2018 they simply required Apple to hand over iCloud to a local state-owned company. Apple no longer controls iCloud in China, the Guizhou government does.
I don't think the surveillance in China is even remotely comparable to anything that has ever happened in the US.
„ At the BND, the project group charged with supporting the parliamentary investigative committee once again looked at the NSA selectors. In the end, they discovered fully 40,000 suspicious search parameters, including espionage targets in Western European governments and numerous companies.”
There’s more of course, but... have you actually read that article?
Ok, here’s the deal. Ukraine had Russia as the biggest trade partner before 2014. Several companies were owned by Russians: banks, communication providers etc. and millions of Ukrainians working in Russia. Now, when 2014 comes, the armed thugs get their hands on automatic weapons and overthrow the government. And the new government is not just “not pro-Russian”, but actively anti-Russian with all the consequences for Russian capital which has been invested in Ukraine. I mean, you had to be in Kiev in 2014 to see what was going on. So saying Russia was unreasonably hostile towards Ukraine...that’s just being naïve.
> I can't remember a covert operation done by China
Why would you expect to? Have you been watching for them? Are you privy to information the rest of us don't have? They are covert after all. "I don't remember" says more about your perception than about the underlying reality. As others have pointed out, there are many known instances of Chinese malfeasance, mostly around misappropriation of military secrets. There are surely some unknown as well.
> I can't help thinking of either racism, or...
Again, more to do with your perception than the underlying reality. That those are the first explanations you grasp for says nothing about whether they're the right ones.
Lindsey Graham was very much publicly against Trump, then news came out his email was hacked by Russia, and soon after his stance turned 180 degrees. It's all coincidental but there are just too many coincidences to disregard it.
I'm surprised no action was taken against WPS Office until now.
I'm surprised AirDroid wasn't on this list though. It gives the government of China full remote access to millions of Android devices, including many in sensitive corporate environments.
What? Thanks for mentioning that. I've been using it for years (albeit in LAN-only mode, I don't like clouds). Need to re-evaluate it now (not that I trust China's gov particularly less than US gov at this point, but I prefer apps that don't give any governments obvious remote access capability). Do you know of any good alternatives for hassle-free WiFi file transfer?
I don't know if it's "hassle-free" but adb over Wi-Fi has worked well in my experiences. I tend to use adb over USB for file transfer. Both use command-line utilities so not suitable for all end-users.
I'll try that, though it's not perfect for me. I'm fine with CLI, but my use case for AirDroid is usually dropping some photos from my phone into someone else's computer, while we're on the same network.
Come to think of it, maybe I could just spin up a HTTP server on the phone with Termux, and serve the DCIM directory. And then wrap it into a homescreen icon via Tasker.
With all this talk about China threating US national security. US actions is actively causing damages in china. Sanctions on Huawei for example is already resulting Huawei unable to build smartphones and other products. There are layoffs at huawei, all kind of suppliers, even sales people at huawei stores. If you count all the people related by Huawei's activities, its millions. Normal people, regular folks, who just want to earn a living to support their families. Now all of sudden out of jobs during an pandemic year because of political action by US government. They may have bills and mortgages to pay, kids to feed. Real people are suffering because of the actions of US gov. Chinese people's security is actually being damaged here. And where do these people go to protest for their rights and fight for what were theirs?
Are these the actions of the US Government or the response to China made by the US gov?
China doesn't care about their own people rights, unfortunately.
It feels like your argument here is that any company that employees people should be allowed to do anything, because stopping them from doing something would negatively impact their employees.
While you and me agree it's shitty of the US government to not consider all humans on this planet, this is hardly the first nor the last time the US government is actively trying make things worse for others. In fact, large parts of the US geopolitical strategy is just that, screw with others in order to try and save itself.
Do you believe individuals across the world should be free to travel, start and run businesses and deal with each other without unfair restrictions or penalties? If not, why?
"Globalization can be partly responsible for the current global economic crisis. Case studies of Thailand and the Arab nations' view of globalization show that globalization is a threat to culture and religion, and it harms indigenous people groups while multinational corporations profit from it. Although globalization has promised an improved standard of living and economic development, it has been heavily criticized for its production of negative effects. Globalization is not simply an economic project, but it also heavily influences the country environmentally, politically, and socially as well."
Your comment sounds overly sympathetic. I'm not sure if blaming US actions for China's social loss is fair. Bills to pay, kids to feed -- is that the responsibility of the US government? Without a doubt China is not the most innocent country. They push their weight around with other countries and significantly impact their economy. Did you forget how unethical and dangerous their government is? Tiananmen square, Uighur Muslims, Hong Kong, Taiwan .. my heart does not bleed for them, not for a second.
Just like China, the United States is an independent sovereign country that's allowed to make decisions which it considers in the best long-term interests of its people. Sometimes that can mean using trade embargoes, sanctions and economic decoupling.
If the US conduct here in contravention of the mutually agreed upon World Trade Organization rules, then China should bring a case to the WTO.
It is of course completely legal for the US to apply any kind of economic sanctions they desire against any Chinese company, like Huawei or any others.
Nevertheless, it is stupid, for several reasons.
One is that there are no real reasons to apply sanctions to the companies selected until now and not apply the same sanctions to absolutely all Chinese companies. As the US themselves say, all Chinese companies must obey the Chinese government and they must assist their military if ordered to, so there is no base for banning commerce with only a selected list of companies, instead of banning all.
So the only reason why it can make sense to choose just some companies for the moment is that blocking completely all the commerce with China would hurt more the US than China.
However, for the Chinese companies it is clear that these arbitrary sanctions are not correlated with any behavior that they might try to have in order to be liked by the US in order to avoid sanctions, but as long as they remain Chinese companies they may be sanctioned too at any time. So they have a single exit, to never buy again anything from the US but substitute everything with alternatives.
Sooner or later they will succeed to do that and then the sanctions would not be efficient any more. The sanctions would have been successful only if there would have been 2 possible lines of action for the Chinese companies and it would have been certain that one direction implies sanctions and the other direction means no sanctions.
In that case maybe the US sanctions would have been useful. As it is, they can just annoy the Chinese and force them to give up on buying US products, which cannot be of any benefit for the US.
The second reason why the sanctions are stupid, is that they are hurting the Chinese only because they were sudden and unexpected so they have caught the Chinese off-guard, being still dependent of various components that include parts of US provenience. All this has happened only because the US propaganda has repeated during many decades that the global free commerce is good and that everybody should not waste time and money by producing goods that might be purchased from the US either at a lower price or at a higher quality.
Now all this formerly very successful US discourse has been exposed as a pack of lies, as it appears to have been just a trap conceived to ensnare other countries to become economically dependent on the US, in order to be vulnerable to economic sanctions.
Such a trap can work only once and the time and manner chosen by Trump were not at all the best. Now all countries will try to remove their dependencies on US and the next time when the US might need to have real leverage, for a better reason than now, it will be much less likely to have enough impact.
> so there is no base for banning commerce with only a selected list of companies
Sure there is. The justification is that the US should do whatever is the most effective way of retaliating against these practices, even if it means that we pick and choose which companies we retaliate against.
> they can just annoy the Chinese and force them to give up on buying US products
The US is huge customers of many goods and services from china. Us no longing buying certain things from them, could cause them to lose a large amount of business.
> Such a trap can work only once
Nope. The reason being because of the stuff that the US buys from China. That is a large amount of value that the US can continue to chip away at, if there is a reason to do so.
> there are no real reasons to apply sanctions to the companies selected until now and not apply the same sanctions to absolutely all Chinese companies
The Trump administration sees buying t-shirts or a pencil from China as less of a risk than high-tech products so they've put export restrictions on components. Though they've put tariffs on more than just high-tech goods. This makes sense because even the manufacture of t-shirts or pencils fuels the economy of China and therefore its tax base and military so sanctioning all products of China makes a lot of sense.
> So they have a single exit, to never buy again anything from the US but substitute everything with alternatives. Sooner or later they will succeed to do that and then the sanctions would not be efficient any more.
China can and should try to do this. Even with all the resources of the state China hasn't yet built a reliable jet engine, let alone leading edge semiconductor plant.
Now they need to do all of this simultaneously. It's very difficult and it's not clear whether they'll succeed at any of these endeavors.
> Now all this formerly very successful US discourse has been exposed as a pack of lies, as it appears to have been just a trap conceived to ensnare other countries to become economically dependent on the US, in order to be vulnerable to economic sanctions.
From what I can tell most countries (like Vietnam and India) are trying to get closer to the US militarily and economically and further away from China.
The only exception is the European Union which was already very close to the US militarily and economically.
> And where do these people go to protest for their rights and fight for what were theirs?
They go to their own government, which is the entity that is supposed to protect them and operate in their interest.
If that’s not possible because their government is too much $adjective, that’s on them, not on the US. Peoples have the right to self-determine.
The US are “responsible” in the sense that they have played a role in causing certain eventual outcomes, but are obviously not “responsible” in the sense they should do something about those outcomes. They pursue their own foreign policy agenda, like all other nation-states do. Then the targets of that agenda have the opportunity to respond as they see fit, taking into account the relevant implications and welfare of their own citizens.
Even more so, causing significant disruption to Huawei and putting the Chinese govt in a tight spot very likely was the goal of the entire thing in the first place.
Are the US evil because of this? Maybe. However that’s just how foreign policy strategies work. To think otherwise is just naif, or preposterous.
Why can't the App Store and Google Play add country-of-origin labeling for applications?
I'm against the US banning apps, but having a clear warning message detailing the risks around downloading apps Made in China (eg, history of widespread Chinese government-sanctioned economic espionage) seems reasonable and appropriate.
"This app is developed in Beijing, China by ByteDance"
Then clicking the info button could then say "Data on this platform is typically hosted on servers based in the United States but may be accessed by ByteDance engineers and governmental authorities based in China. Always be careful what you share."
I think such country-of-origin disclaimers should apply to all apps (including Facebook, GMail, YouTube etc).
We have country-of-origin labeling for all other goods and services.
Clear labeling helps put the onus on the user to determine if using such an application is a risk they're willing to take.
ByteDance claims their a Cayman Islands company. But their engineers are based in China.
The text would be computer generated based on a database:
"This app is developed in $locations by $company. Data on this platform is typically hosted in $data_center_location but may be accessed by $company engineers and $country_specific_dangers."
For a remote-first company like GitLab, I would have the following text:
"This app is developed by a team of remote engineers in various countries by GitLab Inc. Data on this platform is typically hosted in geographically nearby data centers (typically Singapore, South Korea), but may be accessed by GitLab engineers, and the governments of the nations in which these engineers live"
There's only 195 countries on Earth, and maybe 1,000 popular applications.
A single individual could build such a database and open-source it. It's not a big task at all and brings much more transparency to end-users.
The problem isn't Chinese software, it's the smartphone model that makes consumers extremely susceptible to vendor lock-in and network effects for even trivial things like sharing files.
The issue again is that seems an opaque action based on vague "national security" grounds. It certainly behoves the executive to demonstrate justification for actions before they are done.
The proper thing would be to define due transparent process for determining legality of apps/services and subject all apps to the same set of rules.
Executive in general shout not be acting like a dictatorship.
For the most part I believe countries act in their our economic interest. If its banning products or services, spying or starting wars.
I don't really draw this out to an ethical debate... But if the everybody is playing dirty (Americans, Europeans, Chinese, etc) What do the country gain by following the rules?
Maybe I'm cynical, but I really don't think any country is capable of up holding up the standards. (Even the Israelis spy on the Americans and "we" are supposed to be best friends) All countries distribute humanitarian assistance, but we all know that increase influence.s
How do you suggest the US can do better, if they've let China continue this asymmetric behavior for nearly two decades? If China hasn't been participating in free trade fairly, do you think the US should continue letting that happen for another two decades?
This is a bad move by the US. In the short term it creates political impact, but in the long term it merely cements a multilateral world as we all have to implement multiple payment systems to reach disparate markets. The key beneficiary of that is China. With Alibaba now getting squashed by both the Chinese and US governments, I guess Bezos will think twice before stepping in to consumer payments.
It's a good move, try using any of the US payment providers in China, forget app based services, can't even take money out of ATM there with Visa debit card
I am not sure about WeChat pay, yes, there might be security issues. On the other hand, China is blocking a lot of western apps. From play store, facebook, gmail, whatsapp to tinder.
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I would interpret it with the quote of Trump: "by accessing personal electronic devices such as smartphones, tablets, and computers, Chinese connected software applications can access and capture vast swaths of information from users, including sensitive personally identifiable information and private information."
I think with the idea of "camera scanning" they will require authorization and they will capture sensible informations of US citizens. I think that's the idea behind this kind of ban...
It is. But it seems that lately governments in their own silos are thinking I can do it, you cant.
PS: Not saying in any way to allow capture of vast swaths of information to anyone :)
- data goes to US corporations == fine
- data goes to CCP == not fine
So I think its the trackers part that makes it bannable.
It is beyond me why anyone would trust an app owned by Tencent and has intrusive ads, whereas the alternatives for most people (Adobe / MS) offerings are free.
America somehow seems to have this political correctness complex. There is nothing wrong being weary of such things.
Being wary because you find Tencent specifically untrustworthy is fine.
Indeed, if my social circle's "woke" parts are anything to measure by, active efforts are being made to find alternatives to made-in-china products. Most people are able to make the distinction between the despotic Chinese government and the average Chinese citizen.
I can’t envision this Cold War ratcheting down. On the surface, Biden will wipe the slate clean on the trade war stuff, but the tit for tat stuff like this will accelerate.
I don’t know what the end result of it will be, but the movement on this front is almost like day trading for defense departments, there’s enough bullshit here to justify entire agencies and budgets (as in, Palantir is going to find some crap here to monetize).
Prediction - at least a few provisions in the near term stimulus bills, green deals, that will include funding for China containment policy.
Biden has been clear he doesn’t want China setting preconditions for companies (the precondition being we get to copy your IP), and the second bullying sovereign nations economically in it’s sphere of influence. I just don’t know what this will actually look like, but Biden/Obama had way more of a master plan policy than Trump ever did for dealing with China:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_foreign_policy_of...
I'm sure that as China gets even richer and starts polluting less, politicians will take pride in that, as if they did anything.
How Australia goes is how the rest of the world goes.
I’m very serious. Dig into the news reports. China is arbitrarily blocking Australian imports of wine, seafood, coal based on “irregularities” that require “inspection” that amazingly results in product spoilage.
China is turning the screws on Australia for past transgressions. China makes up a huge percentage of Australian exports so it’s not hard for China to economically hurt Australia at little cost to themselves.
Watch how it plays out. It will be eye opening. My opinion is this is a test case and an attempt to split Australia off from the western group of countries.
Did the Chinese navy show up on Australian shores and take the property at gunpoint? Or did a local seller conduct business with a Chinese buyer and make money?
If you feel selling to Chinese nationals presents a national security issue, then you could be more clear about that.
And yes, China is hurting a bit. Apparently the reduced coal imports are causing issues, but with wine and other food items, they have other countries they can buy from.
China is what? 20x the size of Australia? A little hurt in China means a lot of hurt in Australia.
Huh?
(Hong Kong, Democracy and the rule of law, Covid 19, lies around Covid 19, the ongoing treatment of minorities, slavery and forced labour, the aggression towards its immediate neighbours, treatment of Taiwan and other issues)
To be clear, I'm no Trump fan (he not only did nothing but lied and said he would/was taking action). I'm just saying I think presidents don't have much power over this (it's mainly economic policy) and Biden hasn't given any indication he will spend capital on this as far as I know...
Edit: now I don't know why I've been downvoted either! C'est la Vie.
It’s only fair Chinese companies in America receive some reciprocal treatment.
That doesn't mean he is wrong and China hasn't infiltrated America at every level, but it's a lost battle now that America will be rolling out the red carpet for the CCP.
Why so?
One needs to define “America” for that comment to be meaningful. Or rather, one should recognize that there is not one “America”. We need to think in terms of classes: the 1%, the other 9%, and the rest. Or even more drastically: the 0.1% and the rest.
Financial services have always been protected industries, in every country, combined with the close association with BoC and political oversight it's a huge red flag.
Importantly, it's worth noting that Trump has no idea what these apps are or what they do, this is not 'his initiative' clearly, it's from the team.
The Dems and Republicans are mostly in sync on China.
These bans are of a different kind that TikTok.
Biden may use the opportunity to try to 'reset' and the rhetoric will be softer, but I suggest these bans will remain in place.
This isn't really Trump populism, this is 'the apparatus' engaging in actual policy.
The president isn't the be all and end all power in the USA, as some people would like to think.
Also, if the GOP controlled both chambers of Congress, the odds that Joe Biden would be sworn in on the 21st would be very slim. There is your dictatorship. You might say that we would essentially become a parliamentary system, but I don't think that's what we were GOING for.
Uhm, you might be unaware, but Poland has gotten rid of communism and replaced the ruling communist party through both peaceful protests and democratic elections. I see these comments all the time ("all uprisings have to be violent") but that's just provably not true.
On the contrary. They stayed in power for many years in various forms. Read about the deal Solidarity struck with the commies in Magdalenka. No one left. They just changed their banners.
However the reason why it happened relatively seamlessly in Poland has to do with the fact that after the transition the post-communists still held onto a lot of power and the most impactful branches of the government, like the secret services. This was part of a deal in Magdalenka. Poland never opened their communist archives because that would compromise many active politicians. They didn't get rid of the cancer like they did in Chechoslovakia or the DDR.
A good evidence of that was the fact that my Polish grandfather who was lt colonel of secret service (going after the Solidarity freedom fighters) still enjoyed his 10x higher pension and privileges than his victims even 10+ years after Poland became a "free" country.
1. Communist party members never answered for their crimes, and were free to continue their political careers.
2. Compromised communist judges continued their service in courts, effectively granting communist scumbags immunity for their crimes. Crimes which included stealing huge amounts of money, which then were used for point 3:
3. The only two private TV networks, as well as biggest newspaper were owned/controlled by former communist intelligence officers. This was a great propaganda platform.
You see, that's a downside of peaceful revolutions: you never get a chance of permanently getting rid of your former rulers. Had generals Jaruzelski, Kiszczak and maybe two dozens other top ranking communist been executed in 1989 we might have avoided this mess.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/11/trump-admin-dela...
The narrative he and the right wing have been building over most of the last decade - that America at all levels of society is being infiltrated and captured by leftist extremists as a pretext to some kind of communist/globalist/NWO takeover (so vote for God, Guns and the GOP) - is exactly the doomsday trigger scenario that American militias have fantasized about and wargamed over, and QAnon and many Evangelicals believe Trump has been sent by God to cleanse America of occult pedophiles and atheistic liberalism.
Sinclair Lewis may or may not have said "When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross," in other words, by infiltrating American gun culture and conservative Christianity, because those are the forces that control the greatest potential for populist violence in the US. Trump may not have succeeded directly, but it remains to be seen who he's laid the foundations for in the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Altemeyer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...
This "both sides" bullshit needs to stop.
[0]https://news.google.com/search?q=trump+supporters+storm+capi...
At the same time, its a nice way to look tough on China while actually doing nothing about China...
1. Money
2. Adoration
3. Revenge
4. Preservation
https://youtu.be/USLCJ0mRq3M
The link that went round about the analogies between QAnon and LARP also seems relevant here. If someone lives in and believes their own hype for long enough, have they created their own little bubble of reality?
It's like watching someone try to perform a coup with a foam sword and a Nerf gun. On the other hand, a lot of bank robberies are done with fake guns; so the question is, how much does the plausibility of realness matter? All a bit Baudrillard for my taste.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkghtyxZ6rc
Reality TV is a bit different in that it is intentionally deceptive.
is that really your understanding of Trump?
The President seldom if ever performs for himself on big decisions. There are so many lobbies and power interests moving their hands here and there, according to the tides of power.
It's just convenient for the masses to believe the President to be some kind of idiot (despite the fact that he is the President and they are random people which couldn't get that position if their lives dependent on it - or even much easier ones to get).
Trump is just uncouth and uncultured, with no filter. On some ways it's a disgrace. On others, it's a breath of honesty - between JFKs mafia types (and general non-worthiness, he was just made President by his family's money), Nixon's tapes, Reagans disastrous economics and policies, Bush's cowboyism, Bill Clinton's scandals, sex obsession and Epstein field trips, and Obama's backtracking on promises, warmongering, and empty rhetoric) most politicians are equally crass if not more, they just know how to not show it or show it in moderation.
Since Trump doesn't come from a politics background, he hasn't internalized this automatic filtering, instead he has been brought up on sales and media businesses, so he automatically takes the role of salesman and entertainer.
The Trade War with China thing was a long time coming for the interests of certain parts of the American establishment, and will be continued by Trumps successors. It wasn't some idiot's one-off.
And in those cases, unless you're clearly on top of the other side, there are lots of false bragging and BS symbolic moves that don't amount to much, so expect more of the "Tik Tok" style gestures in the years to come.
My 2 euro-cents.
Trumps "trade war" was a storm in a tea cup at best. It was great cover for business as usual imho. I hope whoever takes it on actually fights it. He's sort of wrecked future efforts by alienating almost every other nation Ns doing nothing imho, so I understand by Biden doesn't want to "continue" it.
We'll see I guess.
It's all in the Starr report.
That was character evidence in a sexual harassment lawsuit from a different woman (Paula Jones) who claims that he tried to pressure her into non-consensual sex.
Clinton was sanctioned for perjury due to lying about that relationship in court, appealed the ruling, then later dropped the appeal and surrendered his law license voluntarily.
So there were elements of perjury and non-consensual sex here and your summary is incomplete.
People remember Clinton as being better than he was because they think he was railroaded over the BJ.
Whether or not HIPAA is a bad thing is very much a matter of opinion. That's the one thing that's keeping medical info from being whored out like all our other metadata these days.
The last uncontroversially good president we've had was born in the 19th century.
Far more damaging was NAFTA and letting China into the World Trade Association.
That probably meant the WTO.
Still, "letting"? As if it's the role of the 4% of the world to dictate whether the 18% of the world would enter a supposedly neutral global trade organization?
Imagine how easy would be to make money through stock options if you had the power to affect any stock to go up or down. Only ethics would stand in your way and if you think ethics are for loses, nothing is stopping you from doing that.
If you want reduce your risk further, you could simply get paid by your friends from Mar-a-Lago (by purchasing expensive rooms in your hotel) by letting them know your announcement ahead of time and let them do the investment. That will also reduce connections to yourself.
collective will is a delusional thought
"It makes no tactical sense"
This is a pretty good summary of much of the last four years.
Perfect example of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Also, it's important to realize that t-bonds and USDs are basically the same thing. A T-bond is, for all intents and purposes, high-denomination dollar bill that can be exchanged for low-denomination bills on an open market.
They don't want dollars doesn't matter who prints them.
Thank you.
$1tn is a lot of money to any country, even one as large as China.
Defaulting on our debt would be a huge fucking deal for us as well, but if the stakes were high enough others would understand that we couldn't pay someone money while at war.
It sounds like a lot of money, but the US War in Iraq tallied over a trillion, with Afghanistan matching that amount.
The CARES Act is estimated to have cost $2 trillion.
Countries are not going to go to war over such a petty amount of money. The costs of such a war would be 100x that amount, easily.
"If you owe the bank a 5 million NOK and cannot pay then you have a problem.
If however you owe the bank 500 million NOK and cannot pay then the bank has a problem."
If the US tries to issue more bonds they'll have to match market rates or buyers will simply go to the secondary markets.
You're suggesting that the US could intentionally devalue it's own notes to financially hurt China, but that would also devastate every other holder as well as itself. Basically economic scorched Earth policy that even a madman wouldn't consider.
If China dumps those bonds tomorrow the US dollar would collapse instantly. China would feel some pain of course, but their internal economy is not directly tied to international markets so they can handle it way better.
Now China would be stuck selling assets (t-bonds) at a loss, and in return, they get another asset (USD) which now has a suppressed value. And since low USD makes American goods relatively cheaper, it will hurt the Chinese production economy and help the American one.
Also, China could have difficulty deploying those USDs if the US Government imposes sanctions or other prohibitions on purchasing or capital inflow to the US.
Further proving to anyone else holding bonds how worthless dollars are.
Saying China "dumping" t-bonds is bad for America is like saying that a person "dumping" CDs is bad for a bank. The seller is the one getting hosed on the deal, because they are forced to sell at a discount (otherwise, it wouldn't constitute dumping). The bank / treasury already knows they need to pay back the money at some point.
Also, a trillion dollars in t-bonds isn't that much. The Fed has purchased hundreds of billion on several occasions without much fanfare. A trillion bucks won't do much more than trigger some NYTimes articles on the subject.
Dumping bonds is not just an economic decision, but also a trust decision. You hold bonds because you trust the US. Dumping bonds means you no longer trust the US ability to pay back those bonds with dollars worth anything; that you lost hope of ever getting repaid.
And of course you lose your nominal amounts of dollars, who's arguing that? You still dump them because you are taking your loses today instead taking more tomorrow.
They are cash and cash-equivalents. Meaning, the same.
Many large business transactions are done using t-bonds. The amount of dollars in the economy is surprisingly small, thus, at some price point, it becomes necessarily to pay in t-bonds.
> Many large business transactions are done using t-bonds. The amount of dollars in the economy is surprisingly small, thus, at some price point, it becomes necessarily to pay in t-bonds.
Then they are not the same. You admit they are not the same, then deny they are not the same. If they were the same they would be called the same, and would be the same.
They can be equivalent and they are used similarly, just as a house can be used as "cash-equivalent" under certain circumstances. But they are different instruments that allow different (and some similar) uses.
I am not passing a value judgement on China or US trade relationships but from a developed nation like USA I would expect a broad policy first using which we can reliably predict how a successful Chinese company be treated in USA. That helps consumers, business partners VCs and so on.
https://reason.com/2020/11/08/peter-navarros-no-good-economi...
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/11/tiktok-says-its-...
> Another portion of the book describes an instance with Mr Trump’s former chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, who “stole a letter off Trump’s desk” that the president intended to sign to formally withdraw the US from a trade agreement with South Korea.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
For example, on the whole China trade war. The US’s net imports from China are higher than they have been since the mid 2000s. Chinas economic strength relative to the US is higher than its ever been. Instead of the US being trading and strengthening relationships with Pacific nations until Trump ripped the TPP its now China that has those trading relationships. The EU is reducing interactions with the US and just signed a deal with China, something that may have been unthinkable for them even ( years ago. The US is absolutely non existent in Africa while China continues to build relationships ans trade links there. Thanks to the US trade war China has drastically increased trade with Brazil (to procure soybeans instead of from the US) while US relationships with South America continue to weaken.
Trump has presided over worsening relationships with literally every other continent barring Antarctica, and as a direct consequence of his actions China has greatly improved relationships in all those continents.
US democracy can be seriously threatened by an administration incapable of using a calendar, apparently.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/02/climate/envir...
Since the policies were untested, they became symbolic rather than a demonstrably failed experiment.
When the first executive tries for a second term later, they can use this as an example of how they tried to do X, but their replacement didn't even give them a chance.
I've seen this exact thing done many, many times, and not just in the American presidency.
Personal anecdote: I worked in finance back then at London Stock Exchange. The building we were in was next to St Paul's Cathedral, where Occupy London were setup.
They were nice guys and girls, I went out to talk to them occasionally and bought them donuts and stuff. When I asked what they wanted, they couldn't tell me. I think I knew the movement was dead at that point. If you have no "demands" and what are people meant to do for you?
Even brexiteers with their self contradictory demands managed to get something done.
I think occupy was more like Woodstock (an event or experience) than a "movement" in the end...
I mean I'm sure they have some ring leaders, the people that organize the protests and do a lot of the leg work, and I'm sure they're on the Lists of the various agencies, but it's not like Trump can get on stage and do his "we got 'em" moment announcing they captured the leader of antifa.
Were Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren forced to use bitcoin for their groceries?
The real pull Wall Street has is that its a profitable industry. It makes a shit tonne of money and you want it here because you want to tax it. Compare that to car makers, a low margin industry with big externalities that can't easily decamp to some other country.
Wallstreet (The City is the UK equivalent) is also a major strategic asset. Cutting Iran off from Western listed companies and dollar transactions is a much bigger issue for them than sanctioning their leaders or blowing up the occasional general. The same for Zimbabwe or China: revoked access to capital markets is a big issue. To be able to revoke access to those markets, you need to have those markets.
Yes. Dozens of small parties and political organizations have been targeted by finance in both the US and the UK.
I agree you probably shouldn't care about Iran. I'm just saying that's why presidents and senators care. Also, you should care about all the jobs FS creates both at the top and further down. Without financial services not only would your taxes go up, you wouldn't get half as good a mortgage and there would be a lot fewer jobs across the economy...
Edit:
The only examples of account closures I can find are either for right wing groups (HSBC closed a load of those) or 1 democrat in Florida whose account was closed after she was told they couldn't accept cannabis cash and she said she'd pay that in anyway...
I honestly don't understand the point you're tying to make. Are you just complaining that it's unfair?
[0] https://pics.onsizzle.com/our-blessed-homeland-their-barbaro...
China is stealing Western tech to gain an economic and strategic advantage. They're going to out-compete our tech and leave us in the dust. They have far more engineers that are willing to work "996". (Sure, founders might work "996", but our workforce doesn't/can't/won't.)
Playing unfair isn't great, but it's not the most worrying component of this. Our opponent has concentration camps, organ harvesting, no free press, crushes dissidents, disappears billionaires. And this is a regime that wants world domination. This gives me nightmares.
We should be doing everything in our power to disentangle and stop China.
When China has a military that surpasses the US in terms of scale and tech, they're going to start invading and taking more than they already do. They've shut off water to Vietnam, set up shop in the energy/resource-rich South China Sea, etc. They're not going to stop.
Our media is already censored and caters to Chinese tastes. None of our movies are ever critical of China. They're actively manipulating us.
Western democracies aren't primed to fight this. This is such a lopsided fight. We have to start playing hardball.
edit: I'm being censored right now. This is the game we're playing.
We’re also I’ll equipped right now to fight this, our culture is divided and most of the intellectuals in power are more concerned about seeing everything through the social justice lens. So anything we do against China for our own national safety is being chalked up as racism etc. China sees this and is taking full advantage. I hope Biden takes a strong stance on China domination so at least one end of the political spectrum can be convinced to get on board here.
We can’t just simply out battle evil regimes like we could in the past. Each major power (Russia, China, US) has weaponry that could destroy the world if unleashed against each other. We are at a turning point in world history. So we have to fight this on the economic level, banning apps is part of this strategy.
China: "Let's edit the genes of babies and make them 47% stronger."
US don't have the moral superiority to get anyone against China and that's sad and harsh but it's true. No one reading this thinks the US is any better and this is the US fault. When they starve entire countries to death over a 50 year old embassy attack, then who in the world will eagerly listen to them about which countries are good and which are bad?
This is some incredible malarkey.
> The aqueducts are still standing, but we can't build new ones.
SpaceX, Tesla, Moderna, Apple M1, Nvidia, OpenAI, Google Brain, James Webb telescope, the new Perseverance Mars rover ... what the heck are you talking about?
> The Chinese system works very well
Not for Uyghurs or political dissidents. Also, we just voted out the Republicans wholesale (!!) Can you do that in China?
I'd take our system any day of the week over being disappeared for disagreeing with officials.
As much as I dislike the anti-maskers, we have freedom. And that's so much better.
Capitalism works well both in the US and in China. Those are private companies, and I hope you don't try to list NASA projects. Elon wants to bring down the cost of space transportation to 10$ per Kg, a Space Shuttle launch used to cost 1.5B$. My point was about the public sector. Last time I checked, the high-speed railway they were trying to build in California added another billion $ to its budget. Meanwhile, feel free to look how much high-speed rail China has built in the last few years.
> Not for Uyghurs or political dissidents.
Just because a system works very well for the majority of its citizens doesn't mean it works for everyone. You are not refuting the central argument.
> I'd take our system any day of the week over being disappeared for disagreeing with officials.
You seem to have the impression I'd prefer the Chinese system. I don't. That does not mean you can't take a hard look at what they do better.
Your comment is full of (and I mean FULL, nearly every sentence) anti-Chinese assertions with zero factual evidence involved:
> The world needs to stop China.
> China is stealing Western tech to gain an economic and strategic advantage.
> Our opponent has concentration camps...
> And this is a regime that wants world domination.
> Our media is already censored and caters to Chinese tastes.
This is not an argument, it's bullshit. Oh don't get me wrong, some of it is probably true at some level, and Chinese foreign policy is just as acerbic as in the US, but without any evidence given, it's not worth reading.
Which makes it funny that there are a bunch of comments just below where people chime in "spot on!", as if the parent commenter made some EXCELLENT points with his jumbled and disjointed word-vomit.
What's going on here? Did I have a stroke or something? The words are just no longer making sense.
That's your retort?
My grammatical structure?
Okay.
Here's some sources. I mistakenly thought they were common knowledge:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-forcefully-harvests...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-54277430
> That's your retort?
> My grammatical structure?
I never mentioned your grammar; you misinterpreted "structure" here. If you read past the first sentence, it's clear I'm referencing your logical structure.
GPT-2 actually produces decent grammar, but not any context-aware logical structure to the text it produces. Just a bunch of disjointed sentences with keywords that all generally lie on the same semantic vector.
More importantly, you are ignoring the entire rest of my argument. Thank you for posting some source links, those make two of your initial assertions more credible. What about the rest?
US (may) needs to stop China. For others countries it's not that clear.
Cry me a river.
Western companies went there for cheap labor. They could've rethought this any time in the past 20+ years, when it became apparent Chinese companies aren't willing to follow US IP laws and keep buying the trinkets they (and at this point, only they) know how to make at a markup. Instead, our corporations still outsource manufacturing, and solve their IP issues by telling the people to tell the government to cry foul and do something about a now nuclear-armed nation that decided to grow past being a source of cheap labor.
There are plenty of bad things to say about China as a country/government, but on the IP front, that's just funny. IP laws in the West are a ridiculous racket. For all the companies here talk about innovation, there's sure as hell more of it happening in China than over here.
You are being downvoted outside the spirit of HN downvotes.
It would be very interesting and cool of dang to investigate the accounts which are conducting this behavior.
China is an authoritarian state and it's respect for the individual rights of people is nowhere near that of the US.
And the EU does. But ironically whenever that happens Americans argue that such action isn't about privacy but instead about the EU trying to promote their own domestic industries.
Though I guess that same spin would likely be argued by those on the receiving end of the US/China ban too.
International politics isn't fair or just or honest. However that's been known since probably before written history. So of course the US will spin things with propaganda and false statements and whatever. You can't change it or impact it or do stop it directly. So blame Europe for not successfully countering it rather than the US for knowing how to play the game.
Says the bully.
Can this be applied to any situation where one party found itself (through error, inaction, incompetence, inability, etc.) in a position to be dominated or abused by anther party? Or is it only selectively applied based on personal preference or inclination? Because applying it selectively is exactly the double standards people (myself included) highlighted in this thread.
This may be pragmatic but it's also vicious towards the losing party. Politicians or corporations bribing or abusing power to get away with anything know how to play the game. The people being abused or losing everything are to blame for not successfully countering them.
Double standards are a good way to justify anything to your advantage by simply flipping the argument the way it suits you. As I wrote in a previous comment, it makes for exceptionally low quality conversation.
edit: This is the only view I see that allows the losing entity to learn from the experience and avoid it in the future. Any other view just results in the same thing happening again in the future.
The expected "relativistic" cop-out. "Massive" means nothing if your opponent has substantially more. It simply means that no matter how much you want to escalate they can take it a notch higher and you will suffer just a bit more than your opponent. There are examples literally all around you.
> This is the only view I see that allows the losing entity to learn from the experience
The only way? It is a way best used when everything else has failed, like education. Am I to understand that you learned everything from personal experience? If you truly believe things are only ever learned on your own skin then you understand close to nothing about the world, history, and consequences, not living through almost any of them yourself. Which explains the narrow view.
I genuinely don't get it. If the app spies on you so what? Facebook spies on you. So do Twitter and Google. The average person doesn't watch Citizen four or care how much these companies spy on them. The average person is happy to get free Facebook in exchange for them spying. Why can't Chinese apps do the same?
It's all bull. What you're saying about China is true but it has nothing to do with AliPay vs Google/Facebook/Twitter
Any chance that it's just protectionism against Chinese companies (Huawei, Ali)?
You can see this in action with most EU countries disagreeing with many sanctions imposed on US enemies but eventually caving under pressure from the US. Or when having to switch the frequencies used for the Galileo system to something that could be more easily jammed by the US.
The US is exhibiting towards other countries the same kind of tyrannical behavior bent on maintaining power that the Chinese leadership is exercising towards its citizens. It's the age old need to maintain power, and the more power, the further you're willing to go to maintain it. From a global surveillance exercise where every human is spied on relentlessly, to meddling into most countries internal affairs to the point of changing regimes to suit them, to oppressing their own citizens. These are all publicly and officially documented issues. It's all great if and only if your interests align.
If you cannot acknowledge this then you are certainly not prepared to have a discussion beyond "we're good, they're bad".
Europe with GDPR does set its own rules for how American tech can operate and penalizes them heavily for perceived infractions. So that continent is taking the actions they want to take which is their right. Beyond that, there are more examples: Spain did effectively shut down Google News, and I don't remember any retaliation.
On the other hand the examples you gave are absolutely minor and barely noteworthy. I referred decisions with global impact, not inconsequential things like Google News being affected in Spain. Intel never payed the fine the EU imposed for unfair practices close to a decade ago. Facebook and Google barely saw a blip due to GDPR since it was basically (and legally it seems) rolled into their ToS.
The real consequential things are the public support the US demands from the EU for sanctions or wars. For political and economical issues that involve far more than you mentioned as a counterpoint. For countless human lives lost.
Even more with how our soon to be ex-president pardons convicted war criminals on a whim.
For example the US is guilty of criminal negligence during the invasion of Iraq, when an important part of the historical heritage of the entire humanity has been destroyed.
It would have been extremely easy to avoid that, and there were ample efforts to warn the US political and military leaders to take appropriate actions, but all the warnings from competent people were ignored.
A common thief or vandal who destroys one picture from a museum might rot in jail, but US presidents or generals who have destroyed historical artifacts far more valuable will never be punished in any way.
I always think of this phrase whenever questions of freedom come up.
And like you mention, all of us our free, but mostly our liberty is curtailed by external circumstances or by our own fears of retaliation.
They can also threaten economic and political retaliation. That's international politics and negotiation and diplomacy in a nutshell. It's a dirty game but the rules have been known for centuries. Europe isn't some tiny South American nation, it's a global power whose GDP rivals the US. That it's failed to successfully do this is the fault of Europe and no one else.
Europe has failed to protect itself against US power and now you seem to be upset that the US wants to not fall into the same trap in terms of China?
> They can also threaten economic and political retaliation.
Sure but threats and negotiations work if you actually have the bigger gun and leverage. Given that the US is both the largest economy and military power this feels like a moot point.
> Europe has failed to protect itself against US power
Yes, just like Chinese citizens failed to protect themselves against their leadership. They aren't just a tiny South American nation, they are 1.3bn people who want freedom. That they failed to successfully do this is the fault of the people and no one else.
But really, the fact the EU stood quietly next to the US while the US tightened its grip on the world is indeed a failure of the EU (Europe, given that this started happening long before the EU). They took the easy road of growing in someone else's shade, even if post WW2 it may have been the best or only thing Europe could have done. This doesn't change anything about my characterization of the US, it's just a tangent.
I'm not saying what China is doing is ok because the US does it too. But just like OP, I pointed out the double standards obvious even here on HN. Whether it's mis- or dis-information, ignorance, hypocrisy, cognitive dissonance, or whatever else you may call it, the fact that people hold 2 completely different and opposing opinions on the same kind of action differentiated only by "us vs. them" is a massive failure of those people.
China's growing influence and Russia's influence on international politics clearly show that it's not about absolute power but how you apply it. Europe is large enough and powerful enough that the US can't invade it or cause massive economic damage without significantly hurting itself. Europe has massive leverage in negotiations and politics and diplomacy. It just fails to use it likely because it's not unified enough to fully and quickly apply it.
Please stop blaming Europe's diplomatic failures on external factors. All that does is ensure that they will continue to happen because you won't blame the government that is actually at fault.
> Please stop blaming Europe's diplomatic failures on external factors
After I clearly stated this:
>> But really, the fact the EU stood quietly next to the US while the US tightened its grip on the world is indeed a failure of the EU [...] They took the easy road of growing in someone else's shade
Is a sign that you did not bother to read, let alone understand my comment. That is terribly disrespectful and a sign that you have no interest in a discussion, just a monologue of meritless opinions.
The EU only appeared in the discussion as a reference or "witness", just like the Chinese people are used as reference for what their leadership is doing. You turning the discussion towards some EU blame for whatever isn't only a meritless distraction from the topic, it's also akin to blaming the Chinese people for not overthrowing the CCP. They are 1.3bn people, surely they have "massive leverage".
I reiterate, you have no interest in reading or understanding any of my comments. The extent to which you perverted and rewrote my words just to fit whatever narrative you're more easily able to support really makes for low quality discussion. I have more than adequately made and supported my point and will politely withdraw.
Is there evidence that a significant portion of the population really do want more freedom? While I would hope so it's possible the majority there prefer the status quo. (Of course lack of evidence doesn't prove it.)
If you look at history, the US exercises about as much control of Western Europe as Rome did. Basically the areas were free to run their daily affairs but military matters went through Rome. Similar to now.
The fiction lasted well throughout the Cold War but is starting to fray. It will be interesting to see what happens going forward.
Go ahead and say that the US does bad things. But, regardless of that, we should still retaliate against China for doing bad things to us.
And you bringing up even more bad things that the US has done is not relevant at all, to how we should definitely still stop China from doing bad things.
> we should still retaliate against China [...] we should definitely still stop China from doing bad things
You can retaliate. Should implies an obligation. Since the narrative (yours included) is that you're punishing actions ("bad things") not nationality, not following up with retaliating against your own leadership for the same "bad things" or worse means having exactly that misguided Messiah complex (misguided because you don't understand the purpose of your own country's actions) as well as holding a healthy dose of double standards or hypocrisy. You live in a democracy, this is your will. The unspoken desire to enjoy and exert dominance, followed by the inevitable rationalization that gives it a morally acceptable varnish.
As I said in my original comment on this thread:
> If you cannot acknowledge this then you are certainly not prepared to have a discussion beyond "we're good, they're bad".
That is a weird phasing. By "should" I mean that it is a good thing to call out bad things that happen, such as in this case with these apps, and I am happy when the US retaliates against bad things, such as what is happening in this example. The reason being, that these apps are doing bad things that should be stopped. You have not contradicted this point.
> established they're bad
In this specific case though, regarding these app and the actions that they are taking, they are bad though!
> You live in a democracy, this is your will.
Ok. And bad things being punished in this specific example. Thats good. And misdirection to talk about something different does not overrule the fact that it is good in this specific example that these specific bad things are being punished/retaliated against.
> gives it a morally acceptable varnish.
Specifically in this example, it is morally accepted to punish these specific bad things that these apps are doing though. So there are no problem with retaliating against these apps and actions, because in this example they are indeed bad and should be retaliated against.
- The US has at least a two party system. It’s not much, and is deeply flawed, but at least the governmental power is not completely unchecked. That and the government is ostensibly at the mercy of the people. Propaganda, disinformation, and manipulation aside, if a government does something egregious enough the people of the US still have the power to vote them out. The Chinese people do not have that power. Their government is much more top down and prescriptive. The only checking of power is the willingness of lower level people to enforce rules.
- Freedom of Speech. Nobody is above criticism. Simple as that. Not being able to question the government is an awful situation to be in. Imagine a world where you could get extradited to China for saying something critical of the CCP online. I’ll remind you that the CCP jailed 8 doctors in Wuhan last year for raising the alarm about the coronavirus, saying they were spreading false rumours online. No thanks.
- From an ideological standpoint the CCP seems to be be hellbent on reclaiming lost territory and retaliating against the evil west who have wronged them for so long. The US has no such motivation, being relatively young.
Please don’t get me wrong. I think China is a beautiful country, having visited several times, and the Chinese people and culture are both wonderful. I just do not want to live in a CCP-centric world.
I'd say it's Europe's job to protect its citizens from foreign surveillance. It's not "OK" so much as "Not my job."
Edit: parent comment said something like "Europe is a continent"
I think at present I’d still significantly prefer the US over China to secretly collect my personal data (even if I wasn’t a US citizen). It’s certainly possible that difference will further erode over time.
I don’t necessarily mean to endorse banning Chinese apps, as that seems very problematic and arguably cuts against our own value system. It’s always seemed very protectionist when China did that to us, and it seems the same when we do it to them, and comes with the same surface area for corporate corruption of our government.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiMLVYK4hEc
53 Hong Kong democrats, activists arrested under security law: https://hongkongfp.com/2021/01/06/breaking-over-50-hong-kong...
When your domestic privacy laws are weak enough to allow a largely unregulated marketplace in personal information and to largely allow domestic apps to gather and sell personal information, banning foreign apps that also do so won’t keep such data out of foreign hands.
Can you imagine what will happen to Fan Bing Bing if she plays Chai Ling (One of Tiananmen Square student leader)?
So to answer your question - no it's not okay. But I would expect HN audience to be able to see the obvious distinctions.
This is why we need top-down decoupling. China knows we're addicted, and they've got us in a good spot to continue growing off of our market.
[1] https://venturebeat.com/2018/11/15/chinese-censorship-affect...
You may be thinking of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which also spent some time doing similar anti-Communist witch hunts, which existed until being renamed as the House Internal Security Committee in 1969, and was abolished with it's functions transferred to the House Judiciary Committee in 1975.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yates_v._United_States
Alipay is the Chinese government for all intents and purposes. 100% of your information for freely to the CCP for their purposes.
We're not talking preferring one company over another, we're taking preferring a free market company over a state sponsored actor.
Governments exist to serve a specific population, not humanity as a whole.
Is this genuinely in the interest of America, or just in the interest of the person making the decision? That's a question you always have to ask, but it seems particularly pertinent in the case of a leader who has been issuing numerous baseless complaints about various opponents, whose actions have repeatedly been refused by courts, and who was denied a second term.
So while it's true that the government doesn't need to act in the interests of anybody but its own citizens, it would be nice to know if this decision achieves even that much -- or if it's just spite.
That's absolutely true, which is why we have courts, representative legislatures, and elections. Methods of mitigating the corruption of the governing class are built into the system. It doesn't work quickly or perfectly, but it's better than autocracy.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-31/china-and...
Oh well. Maybe this will accelerate the move toward app platforms that can't be so easily censored arbitrarily by the state.
With all major western internet platforms being already banned in China, Jack Ma having disappeared for weeks now after being critical of the CCP, there are still comments here why everyone can't be nice to each other, and what harm were those Chinese apps causing. The opioid crisis has so far killed more Americans than WW2, and at least some of it is caused by the evaporation of blue-collar jobs. This is a direct consequence of certain economic policies. Say what you will about the CCP, but at least it cares about its people - because they are doing the polar opposite.
Meanwhile, I can't remember a covert operation done by China or a visible invasion of a third-party country (except putting concrete on a few inhabited islands) and then everything is done to portray them as the bad guys and ban entire industries
I can't help thinking of either racism, or politicians being controlled by Russian intelligence (possibly them not being unaware of this)
It's hard to say how much of it is motivated by racism, though it's certainly a part of it. When pols call COVID-19 "the China virus" and talk about making them pay for it there's obviously a grudge there.
Are you sure that's ethnically rooted, or that they're trying to describe the CCP and simply chose the wrong title?
A number of people calling it the "China virus" redubbed it the "CCP virus".
You can be angry at Chinese leadership while empathizing and supporting its people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_cyberwarfare
Major incidents include the 2010 Google gmail hack, the F-35 blueprints hack, multiple military contractor breaches, the 2015 OPM hack which the leaked the details of most FBI/CIA agents worldwide, and the 2017 Equifax hack which stole information on 145 million Americans.
In 2014 they MITM'd iCloud. In 2018 they simply required Apple to hand over iCloud to a local state-owned company. Apple no longer controls iCloud in China, the Guizhou government does.
I don't think the surveillance in China is even remotely comparable to anything that has ever happened in the US.
The difference is, China doesn't seem to be spying on the rest of the world, while NSA is documented to be doing so.
There’s more of course, but... have you actually read that article?
Ok, here’s the deal. Ukraine had Russia as the biggest trade partner before 2014. Several companies were owned by Russians: banks, communication providers etc. and millions of Ukrainians working in Russia. Now, when 2014 comes, the armed thugs get their hands on automatic weapons and overthrow the government. And the new government is not just “not pro-Russian”, but actively anti-Russian with all the consequences for Russian capital which has been invested in Ukraine. I mean, you had to be in Kiev in 2014 to see what was going on. So saying Russia was unreasonably hostile towards Ukraine...that’s just being naïve.
Why would you expect to? Have you been watching for them? Are you privy to information the rest of us don't have? They are covert after all. "I don't remember" says more about your perception than about the underlying reality. As others have pointed out, there are many known instances of Chinese malfeasance, mostly around misappropriation of military secrets. There are surely some unknown as well.
> I can't help thinking of either racism, or...
Again, more to do with your perception than the underlying reality. That those are the first explanations you grasp for says nothing about whether they're the right ones.
There have been a few big ones that became public against western targets, e.g.:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/us/p...
https://gizmodo.com/report-chinese-hack-of-federal-employmen...
But many of the rest have been concealed by the victims to protect business interests with China, which is why you haven't heard about them:
https://www.npr.org/2019/04/12/711779130/as-china-hacked-u-s...
I'm surprised AirDroid wasn't on this list though. It gives the government of China full remote access to millions of Android devices, including many in sensitive corporate environments.
What? Thanks for mentioning that. I've been using it for years (albeit in LAN-only mode, I don't like clouds). Need to re-evaluate it now (not that I trust China's gov particularly less than US gov at this point, but I prefer apps that don't give any governments obvious remote access capability). Do you know of any good alternatives for hassle-free WiFi file transfer?
Come to think of it, maybe I could just spin up a HTTP server on the phone with Termux, and serve the DCIM directory. And then wrap it into a homescreen icon via Tasker.
Free trade and competition? As long as it suits the powerful.
Democracy and sovereignty? Only if they play nicely with our big players.
Human rights? If your economic interests align with ours.
It doesn't need to be like this.
"Globalization can be partly responsible for the current global economic crisis. Case studies of Thailand and the Arab nations' view of globalization show that globalization is a threat to culture and religion, and it harms indigenous people groups while multinational corporations profit from it. Although globalization has promised an improved standard of living and economic development, it has been heavily criticized for its production of negative effects. Globalization is not simply an economic project, but it also heavily influences the country environmentally, politically, and socially as well."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_globalization
If the US conduct here in contravention of the mutually agreed upon World Trade Organization rules, then China should bring a case to the WTO.
Nevertheless, it is stupid, for several reasons.
One is that there are no real reasons to apply sanctions to the companies selected until now and not apply the same sanctions to absolutely all Chinese companies. As the US themselves say, all Chinese companies must obey the Chinese government and they must assist their military if ordered to, so there is no base for banning commerce with only a selected list of companies, instead of banning all.
So the only reason why it can make sense to choose just some companies for the moment is that blocking completely all the commerce with China would hurt more the US than China.
However, for the Chinese companies it is clear that these arbitrary sanctions are not correlated with any behavior that they might try to have in order to be liked by the US in order to avoid sanctions, but as long as they remain Chinese companies they may be sanctioned too at any time. So they have a single exit, to never buy again anything from the US but substitute everything with alternatives.
Sooner or later they will succeed to do that and then the sanctions would not be efficient any more. The sanctions would have been successful only if there would have been 2 possible lines of action for the Chinese companies and it would have been certain that one direction implies sanctions and the other direction means no sanctions.
In that case maybe the US sanctions would have been useful. As it is, they can just annoy the Chinese and force them to give up on buying US products, which cannot be of any benefit for the US.
The second reason why the sanctions are stupid, is that they are hurting the Chinese only because they were sudden and unexpected so they have caught the Chinese off-guard, being still dependent of various components that include parts of US provenience. All this has happened only because the US propaganda has repeated during many decades that the global free commerce is good and that everybody should not waste time and money by producing goods that might be purchased from the US either at a lower price or at a higher quality.
Now all this formerly very successful US discourse has been exposed as a pack of lies, as it appears to have been just a trap conceived to ensnare other countries to become economically dependent on the US, in order to be vulnerable to economic sanctions.
Such a trap can work only once and the time and manner chosen by Trump were not at all the best. Now all countries will try to remove their dependencies on US and the next time when the US might need to have real leverage, for a better reason than now, it will be much less likely to have enough impact.
Sure there is. The justification is that the US should do whatever is the most effective way of retaliating against these practices, even if it means that we pick and choose which companies we retaliate against.
> they can just annoy the Chinese and force them to give up on buying US products
The US is huge customers of many goods and services from china. Us no longing buying certain things from them, could cause them to lose a large amount of business.
> Such a trap can work only once
Nope. The reason being because of the stuff that the US buys from China. That is a large amount of value that the US can continue to chip away at, if there is a reason to do so.
The Trump administration sees buying t-shirts or a pencil from China as less of a risk than high-tech products so they've put export restrictions on components. Though they've put tariffs on more than just high-tech goods. This makes sense because even the manufacture of t-shirts or pencils fuels the economy of China and therefore its tax base and military so sanctioning all products of China makes a lot of sense.
> So they have a single exit, to never buy again anything from the US but substitute everything with alternatives. Sooner or later they will succeed to do that and then the sanctions would not be efficient any more.
China can and should try to do this. Even with all the resources of the state China hasn't yet built a reliable jet engine, let alone leading edge semiconductor plant.
Now they need to do all of this simultaneously. It's very difficult and it's not clear whether they'll succeed at any of these endeavors.
> Now all this formerly very successful US discourse has been exposed as a pack of lies, as it appears to have been just a trap conceived to ensnare other countries to become economically dependent on the US, in order to be vulnerable to economic sanctions.
From what I can tell most countries (like Vietnam and India) are trying to get closer to the US militarily and economically and further away from China.
The only exception is the European Union which was already very close to the US militarily and economically.
They go to their own government, which is the entity that is supposed to protect them and operate in their interest. If that’s not possible because their government is too much $adjective, that’s on them, not on the US. Peoples have the right to self-determine.
The US are “responsible” in the sense that they have played a role in causing certain eventual outcomes, but are obviously not “responsible” in the sense they should do something about those outcomes. They pursue their own foreign policy agenda, like all other nation-states do. Then the targets of that agenda have the opportunity to respond as they see fit, taking into account the relevant implications and welfare of their own citizens.
Even more so, causing significant disruption to Huawei and putting the Chinese govt in a tight spot very likely was the goal of the entire thing in the first place. Are the US evil because of this? Maybe. However that’s just how foreign policy strategies work. To think otherwise is just naif, or preposterous.
I'm against the US banning apps, but having a clear warning message detailing the risks around downloading apps Made in China (eg, history of widespread Chinese government-sanctioned economic espionage) seems reasonable and appropriate.
Then clicking the info button could then say "Data on this platform is typically hosted on servers based in the United States but may be accessed by ByteDance engineers and governmental authorities based in China. Always be careful what you share."
I think such country-of-origin disclaimers should apply to all apps (including Facebook, GMail, YouTube etc).
We have country-of-origin labeling for all other goods and services.
Clear labeling helps put the onus on the user to determine if using such an application is a risk they're willing to take.
Do you want Apple or another authority to write this?
ByteDance claims their a Cayman Islands company. But their engineers are based in China.
The text would be computer generated based on a database:
"This app is developed in $locations by $company. Data on this platform is typically hosted in $data_center_location but may be accessed by $company engineers and $country_specific_dangers."
For a remote-first company like GitLab, I would have the following text:
"This app is developed by a team of remote engineers in various countries by GitLab Inc. Data on this platform is typically hosted in geographically nearby data centers (typically Singapore, South Korea), but may be accessed by GitLab engineers, and the governments of the nations in which these engineers live"
There's only 195 countries on Earth, and maybe 1,000 popular applications.
A single individual could build such a database and open-source it. It's not a big task at all and brings much more transparency to end-users.
Hahahaha what is this??
The proper thing would be to define due transparent process for determining legality of apps/services and subject all apps to the same set of rules.
Executive in general shout not be acting like a dictatorship.
I don't really draw this out to an ethical debate... But if the everybody is playing dirty (Americans, Europeans, Chinese, etc) What do the country gain by following the rules?
Maybe I'm cynical, but I really don't think any country is capable of up holding up the standards. (Even the Israelis spy on the Americans and "we" are supposed to be best friends) All countries distribute humanitarian assistance, but we all know that increase influence.s
Make a law that announces everyone in the world who can and cannot do business in the US and what's expected of them, and then follow it.
Do not ban arbitrary companies for whims and which hunts and vendettas even tho they are complying with all the same rules as the rest.
And there are indeed cases you ask yourself what might be the real motivation of the owner: https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/06/grindr-sold-china-national...