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RISC-V Foundation moving to Switzerland over trade curb fears

reuters.com

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Re: RISC-V Foundation moving to Switzerland over trade curb fears

#231

Post by atoav »

leereeves wrote: post #73
atoav wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’d probably call me a leftist although I don’t have any group that I would feel at home with. It is quite hard for me to find any idiot in my friends circles that would defend the soviets or sympathize with them. As somebody who studied philosophy and reads quite a lot I can assure you that the amount of left intellectuals who are still defending the SU is equally low — at least in Europe. So what you are postulat…

With both Warren and Sanders proposing to tax rich people at levels not seen outside Communist countries, it's hard to believe the left doesn't sympathize with the Soviets, at least pre-Stalin Soviets.

I am afraid I can’t follow your logic there. Taxing rich people the same as everybody else (instead of paying them money) doesn’t make you a communist. Even taxing rich people more doesn’t make you a communist. Eisenhowers tax bracket in 1951 was 91% (!) above 400 k$. I am not an American, but I’d be rather surprised if Eisenhower turned out to be a Soviet all along.

These kinds of progressive tax brackets are pretty normal in most democratic nations, most of which are part of the NATO, which isn’t exactly a big fan of the soviets either.

Btw. there is a ton of influence beeing excerted by the Russians via russian oligarchs who got many politicians in their pockets. If you want to figure out who they are, you just have to check who constantly decides in the russian interest, while hurting the interest of their own nation.

Re: RISC-V Foundation moving to Switzerland over trade curb fears

#232

Post by logfromblammo »

tobltobs wrote: post #142
6510 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world applauded that effort.

Especially Delaware and all the other US tax heavens.

Delaware has invested heavily into its courts, to be attractive as a corporate domicile, on features other than lowest taxes paid to Delaware itself. You set up in Delaware to avoid paying taxes everywhere else. That's why non-havens hate tax havens; the havens are stealing milk from their herds.

Delaware, Nevada, New Mexico, et al. make it easy to set up shell companies. Multiple layers of corporate veils make it easier to evade taxation, if the business is so inclined. But it's also easier to legally avoid taxation, which is the goal of the next-generation tax haven.

The deal is that you pay some taxes to Delaware, as the unavoidable ones, and then use its business-friendly jurisdiction to set up a network of sub-companies that can more easily slide through all the loopholes in all the rest of the world's tax laws. So the Delaware company owns the Irish company, and the Dutch company, and the Bermuda company, and the Singapore company, and the Cyprus company, and it can optimize the on-paper accounting so the money generates the least tax possible whenever it moves in the direction of the owners. If someone goes after a mook company, it can be cut loose and replaced, but if someone goes after the mastermind company, they have to do it in Delaware's courts.

The tax haven version 1.0 relied on banking secrecy to hide financial information from taxation authorities, so they wouldn't know what to tax. Tax haven version 2.0 is about playing those taxation authorities against each other, so that all their weaknesses (relative to the other authorities) are attacked at once, and laws are only broken or ignored outside of the jurisdictions in which they are enforceable. The information is not kept secret, but it is managed so that the only entity that can see the whole picture has no particular reason to pry too deeply or to leak it to anyone else.

Re: RISC-V Foundation moving to Switzerland over trade curb fears

#233

Post by jacobush »

linuxftw wrote: post #197
antipropaganda wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US can't just invade any country. US would find it very difficult to invade a country with second strike nuclear capability. Even if nuclear war is out of the question, US would find it very difficult to invade, say China: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/china-u...

The US doesn't normally invade. It's far more efficient to destabilize and prop up the preferred military junta.

Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.

Re: RISC-V Foundation moving to Switzerland over trade curb fears

#234

Post by logfromblammo »

tanilama wrote: post #145
mytailorisrich wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No-one is going to invade Switzerland. A country like the US can invade any country they want. International law is irrelevant. But they can pressure a country like Switzerland without needing to resort to military action, which would be crazy anyway in the case of Switzerland.

US probably couldn't invade Russia or China, not on its own. I don't think they have the sheer number of men even. Those countries are huge.

Why would anyone ever want to invade Russia? If you want to attack Russia, invade Cyprus and seize the financial records.

Re: RISC-V Foundation moving to Switzerland over trade curb fears

#235

Post by SiempreViernes »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #110
SiempreViernes wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The the short form of nuclear weapons is conventionally a-bomb. A n-bomb is more likely to refer to use of a slavery related term, and is very frequently used in some circles which include the current US president. So demonstrably democracy does not prevent the use of n-bombs, which happens to be true historically for a-bombs as well (which were used by a democracy essentially because the war wasn't over by the time…

Thanks edited. >which were used by a democracy essentially because the war wasn't over by the time they've built the thing). But the same U.S. President Harry S. Truman relieved General of the Army Douglas MacArthur when he wanted to drop A-Bomb on China during the Korean War.

True, he did learn from that mistake, though it is still fair to criticise him for committing it in the first place and to point out that the democratic principles the USA espoused at the time did not save Nagasaki.

Re: RISC-V Foundation moving to Switzerland over trade curb fears

#236

Post by K0SM0S »

beatgammit wrote: post #206
microtherion wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's what we LIKE the others to think. Realistically, our armed forces are at a strength of about 140K soldiers right now (pretty sure that's not a state secret). The parts of the terrain that are actually inhabited are not particularly forbidding (let them build their RISC processors in a hut nestled beside an 8500ft mountain pass. Don't forget to bring popcorn as you watch them). And nuclear power plants ma…

According to Wikipedia [1], you have ~160k active military with ~1.5M that could be conscripted. That's not huge, but it's enough to give an enemy a bad time, especially with the Swiss terrain and strategic defenses. And I'm sure they'd have a bunch of other countries willing to back them up, depending on the belligerent. I highly doubt it'll come to that. It would be much easier to just infiltrate the fab and replac…

> ~1.5M that could be conscripted. That's not huge, but it's enough to give an enemy a bad time, especially with the Swiss terrain and strategic defenses.

Switzerland is filthy rich, too. Private fortunes thought to rival or surpass the biggest public billionaires, money pipes throughout the world beyond measure — the result of centuries of diligently building a discrete but very real financial empire... all of that has to count for something in the age of PMC's and acts of surgical retaliation projecting force accross the globe.

Taking on a too-rich enemy in modern times is choosing an all-out, extremely mobile, stupidly costly, and above all likely painful war. You'll lose a lot at the hand of the best weapons and talents money can buy.

Re: RISC-V Foundation moving to Switzerland over trade curb fears

#237

Post by kens »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #12

I appreciate and welcome this move by RISC-V foundation. With semiconductor industry being used as a major soft power, countries which don't have such power betting on RISC-V[1], it's wise to move to a neutral country. My only gripe being, there aren't many neutral countries which can stand up to powerful militarized nations. Edit: The reason, I mentioned lack of military power of neutral countries is because of the…

Has anyone else noticed HN comment threads becoming more, uh, unfocused lately? Here, an article on technology standards and avoiding trade restrictions on RISC-V has led to pages of comments on nuclear war with Switzerland.

Re: RISC-V Foundation moving to Switzerland over trade curb fears

#238

Post by pavon »

microtherion wrote: post #221

I'm not sure this move accomplishes that much. It seems none of the technology is moving abroad, just the legal seat. And on trade issues, Switzerland moves pretty much in lockstep with the US, at least officially (cf. Iran sanctions). To me, this smacks of the kind of legalist thinking that software engineers are prone to: Assuming that if some legal construct is implemented according to some rules, governments and…

I curious about what the legal implications of this really are. As a layman, it seems to me that US Export Control laws still exist, so if any of the technical data being discussed in the standards meetings would be considered an export before, it still will now. The change is that the liability has shifted off of the Foundation and onto the American members. If the Foundation as a whole couldn't determine its legal responsibilities, the individual members aren't going to have any more clarity. Any chilling effect of US law and policy will therefore result in US members reducing their participation, rather than members of other countries being uncertain about their ability to use the technology.

However, given that much of the early work was done by US institutions, if any US contributions were considered to be unallowable exports, that would surely include contributions that already make up foundations of the specification. This move won't undo that, and thus could result in a worst of both worlds situation where members in other countries can't make use of current standards (if they want to export to the US), and US members can't contribute to future standards.

Of course this is all assuming that RISC-V standards are actually covered by US export control laws, and that those laws will be enforced. Probably nothing would come of this either way, although the pessimist in me worries that this move itself might trigger protectionists in the US government to go looking for reasons why RISC-V technology might infringe.

Re: RISC-V Foundation moving to Switzerland over trade curb fears

#239

Post by sangnoir »

microtherion wrote: post #221

I'm not sure this move accomplishes that much. It seems none of the technology is moving abroad, just the legal seat. And on trade issues, Switzerland moves pretty much in lockstep with the US, at least officially (cf. Iran sanctions). To me, this smacks of the kind of legalist thinking that software engineers are prone to: Assuming that if some legal construct is implemented according to some rules, governments and…

> I'm not sure this move accomplishes that much.

To avoid scenarios like the one described in the middle of the article where it's unclear if it's legally OK to work with sanctioned organizations: In June, more than two dozen standards groups - including those overseeing SD memory cards and Ethernet and HDMI cables - wrote a letter to U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross asking for clarification of the rules on working with Huawei.

If bodies that work on open standards can't predictably work openly (with anyone) this risks the standards getting fragmented in non-compatible ways, or could even give rise to viable competing standards like US WiFi 7 vs. Chinese/European WiFi 7ce

Re: RISC-V Foundation moving to Switzerland over trade curb fears

#240

Post by lotsofpulp »

K0SM0S wrote: post #236
beatgammit wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Wikipedia [1], you have ~160k active military with ~1.5M that could be conscripted. That's not huge, but it's enough to give an enemy a bad time, especially with the Swiss terrain and strategic defenses. And I'm sure they'd have a bunch of other countries willing to back them up, depending on the belligerent. I highly doubt it'll come to that. It would be much easier to just infiltrate the fab and replac…

> ~1.5M that could be conscripted. That's not huge, but it's enough to give an enemy a bad time, especially with the Swiss terrain and strategic defenses. Switzerland is filthy rich, too. Private fortunes thought to rival or surpass the biggest public billionaires, money pipes throughout the world beyond measure — the result of centuries of diligently building a discrete but very real financial empire... all of that…

Rich doesn't mean anything if the currency is worthless. Switzerland has value in a consistent, trustable system and educated population. But without a larger military standing behind it, such as other European countries or the US, it's not going to be able to defend against a larger aggressor.

That's why an extremely indebted USA is still very valuable. Because they can park a few aircraft carriers off the coast of whomever they desire (although this may be changing, namely due to China).

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