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Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips

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Re: Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips

#191

Post by dirtyid »

perl4ever wrote: post #187
dirtyid wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because multiple indicators conform to reveal the flimsy narrative behind China being some supreme violator of free trade. Controlling for time, China should have received 112 claims since it's accession, almost 3x more. You can examine the cases more closely here and judge magnitude for yourself, but the basic pattern is that the US is the biggest exploiter of free trade and the institution that supports it, by magn…

"Controlling for time, China should have received 112 claims since it's accession, almost 3x more" In 2005, in roughly the middle of the timeframe, the US economy was almost 6 times the size of China's. Maybe you could expand on why you don't think claims should scale with the size of the economy, since you seemed to ignore the suggestion of normalizing for that.

Then compare EU with US. They have comparable GDP throughout the years, with EU being generally slightly ahead, yet they've been involved in less disputes. Around 1/2 as much as respondents, i.e. abusers.

>The EU was involved in 184 disputes with 27 Economies from the time it acceded to the WTO in 1995 through 2018. The European Union has been the complainant 99 times and the respondent 85 times.

VS

>United States was involved in 275 disputes with 42 Economies from the time it acceded to the WTO in 1995 through 2018. The United States has been the complainant 123 times and the respondent 152 times.

If you want to consider the scale of economy, then also factor in that US is one of the least trade-dependent developed economies in the world, i.e. trade-GDP is very low. Comparison of OECD countries including EU [1], US trades (low end estimate) half as much as EU, which makes the number of US disputes even more disproportional relative to unit of trade. Or the fact that US as a country somehow lodged more complaints than all EU members with their wildly disparate interests.

[1] https://data.oecd.org/trade/trade-in-goods-and-services.htm

Re: Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips

#192

Post by downrightmike »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #174
fluffything wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably. Snowden showed that every phone in the USA is used for surveillance by the NSA. I don't have any reason to expect China to be any different.

Exactly. Yet I found NSA surveillance INFINITELY less dangerous than China's.

A large part of that is the oversight panel that is in charge of looking at the program has publicly acknowledged that the programs are not finding anything. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/nsa-program-stopped-no-te...

Re: Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips

#193

Post by powerapple »

ardit33 wrote: post #40
OnlineGladiator wrote: post #8

This is really impressive for Huawei. I do not mean to say that the trade war between China and the US is the same as the Cold War from before, but I have a fun tidbit to share. One of the more interesting theories I heard for why the US won the Cold War is because Russia struggled to develop IC technology. The Russians were masters of espionage, and I would even give them the edge in mechanical engineering, but the…

I think that electronics/computers by itself do not have much to do with with the fall of soviet union. USSR fell because: 1. its economic model was dysfunctional and a failure 2. Its moderate leaders (aka Gorbachev and his allies), decided to dismantle it, as they realized the model was a failure, and their only other option was to become extremely repressive, roll out tanks and kill people. (north korea is an examp…

Central planned economy didn't work traditionally because it is so difficult to get all the information to make plans. It was too slow to adapt. I think with the age of AI and IoT, it may actually is the time for central planning to shine.

Re: Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips

#194

Post by lsc »

goatinaboat wrote: post #181
AstralStorm wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you can bring it back with a major expenses. The problem is competition against vertical semi-integration which is present in China. (Multiple companies but same place - cheap transport and high availability plus widespread knowledge.) The remaining industries are also integrated or partially integrated.

Say you have a century-old widget factory that closes (a common story here in Wales). The widget making machinery gets sold off, even if for scrap. The factory site gets demolished and redeveloped. The widget makers retire or retrain and they tell their kids “don’t go into the widget business, it’s a dead end”. All the colleges cancel their widget courses, no demand. A decade or two passes and rebooting your widget i…

>A decade or two passes and rebooting your widget industry will be an order of magnitude harder than it was to start in the first place.

Eh, you don't want any of the old equipment anyhow, you want new computer controlled stuff. I mean, sure, the people making that equipment need to have some experienced machinists, but... not so many of them; you mostly want Engineers for this job.

I think the problem America has is not with losing existing factories, but in how little value we place, culturally, on education.

Re: Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips

#195

Post by lsc »

goatinaboat wrote: post #184
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not any more? You can hire internationally now, its never been easier to research widgets. New technologies and manufacturing techniques make it a whole different widget ballgame anyway - you probably wouldn't do it the same anyway. In fact, many industries reinvent themselves periodically just to stay current. Restarting a factory can't be much different.

Here I’m using widgets as a synonym for the kinds of heavy industries we used to have. Reopening a steel mill or a tin mine is not something you can do overnight. People forget that a factory itself is a sophisticated machine and operating it is an advanced skill that relies heavily on experience. A car factory is considerably more complex than any of the cars it produces, for example. Or, we never had a fab in Wales…

sure, but... I mean, the tech has changed so much and gotten so much better.

If we threw the sort of effort (and by effort, I mean money) into reindustrialization that we throw into, say, selling ads, the problem would fall pretty quickly. Heck, the net effect would be that the same people would work on it, if the money shifted.

(I actually think the bit about using most of the same people is... pretty true? half the programmers I support are actually trained as some other sort of engineer; but writing code is massively more remunerative, say, than actually working as a chemical engineer or mechanical engineer, and programming is something that can be done by nearly everyone who can handle the education, as far as I can tell, required to become a real engineer)

Re: Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips

#196

Post by lsc »

goatinaboat wrote: post #175
lsc wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You mean autarky, full economic self-sufficiency. China is certainly big enough to operate as an autarky. The US used to, up to about 1980 or so. You think the US is less industrially capable than in 1980? that... seems unlikely. Sure, we import and export a lot more of our stuff now than we did then, but that's because we live a lot better when we trade (and because the technology of trade has improved vastly.) I m…

You think the US is less industrially capable than in 1980? that... seems unlikely. Sure, we import and export a lot more of our stuff now than we did then, but that's because we live a lot better when we trade (and because the technology of trade has improved vastly.) Once you lose a capability it’s gone forever. That is why countries cling desperately to domestic steel, shipbuilding, arms and other industries. Once…

>Once you lose a capability it’s gone forever

This is... not my impression, from working around Engineers all my life. My impression is that cutting edge manufacturing techniques from the '80s are now available, cheaply, to hobbyists. Stuff these guys put in the basement and work on then they are sick of javascript. (FDM aside, I could walk to several CnC lathes and... three large laser cutters from where I am right now, all dedicated to hobby usage, all of which see pretty regular use)

My impression is that if you paid your professional engineers as much to design automated widget factories as you pay them to design advertising systems, they'd make something serviceable. And sure, rev 1 isn't going to be as good as rev 2, it never is, The institutional knowledge effect is big... I'm just saying it's not insurmountable, and the US is a rich country. If we cared, we'd spend money and solve the problem.

I personally think the big capability we are putting in danger right now is the capability the US has always had to hoover the best minds from all over the world, to persuade them to come and set down roots and work in the US. That's the long term problem I see with the way we're going.

I think the second big capability we are putting in danger is that culturally, my impression is that the US is valuing education less than it used to. As a side effect, we're not paying to educate our people (and, I would argue, my compatriots are becoming harder to educate as a result.)

The long term advantage China has over the US is not really institutional knowledge; the long term advantage is that they are putting a lot more effort into education than we are, (and we are not scooping up those educated minds the way we used to.)

Re-training an Engineer from one field to another is a lot easier than bringing someone up to speed who isn't educated; I've watched both happen, and... one is definitely less effort than the other.

Re: Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips

#197

Post by pm90 »

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #189
pm90 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your arguments are completely superfluous and I’m getting tired of repeating the same argument. Any impact of ICs would be minimal considering the massive shortfall in other areas of the Soviet Economy. If you want to speculate wildly on shaky ground, go ahead. But don’t think for a moment that you have some unique insight into how these things work: you clearly don’t, and are just trying to hold on to a ridiculous i…

I never claimed it was my own idea - it's not. I just found it interesting and wanted to share it with people, and judging by the upvotes many other people also found it interesting. Isn't that why we're all on HN - to talk about things we find interesting? I think you're looking at this as a debate instead of a conversation. I don't care whether or not you agree with me. I'm sorry you found the idea so distasteful.

It’s not the idea that I find distasteful as much as your attempt to defend it and make it appear as a difference of opinion rather than a difference in reality. A lot of the mess we are in today politically is because the media has become experts in teaching people how to defend fairly incredulous ideas, and when those ideas are shown not to hold any water, to end the argument with “let’s just agree to disagree”. That’s not how we reason about facts, and especially about history. Avoiding the mistakes of the past requires us to clearly understand the mistakes made by those who came before us. Theories that don’t hold up water faced with facts are just fantasies and must be treated as such.

Re: Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips

#198

Post by goatinaboat »

CharlesColeman wrote: post #188
goatinaboat wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think the US is less industrially capable than in 1980? that... seems unlikely. Sure, we import and export a lot more of our stuff now than we did then, but that's because we live a lot better when we trade (and because the technology of trade has improved vastly.) Once you lose a capability it’s gone forever. That is why countries cling desperately to domestic steel, shipbuilding, arms and other industries. Once…

> Once you lose a capability it’s gone forever. That is why countries cling desperately to domestic steel, shipbuilding, arms and other industries. Once the institutional knowledge is gone and the infrastructure is gone it’s never coming back. And other countries whose interests may not align with your own have you over a barrel. Not exactly: that's only true if you let neoliberal economists set your economic policy.…

Countries like China recently gained those industrial capabilities, and the reason for that is not just because they have access to cheaper labor.

Don’t forget the psychological side. If an industry is booming then ambitious, motivated people flock to it, colleges teach courses in it, people look to build long-term careers in it. The West had that from the Industrial Revolution up until the 80s maybe. China has it now. There are still a few steelworkers and shipwrights and even miners in the UK but those industries are winding down. If we ever need a lot of warships in a hurry - which has happened not that long ago - we would struggle. The expertise is lost.

Re: Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips

#199

Post by OnlineGladiator »

pm90 wrote: post #197
OnlineGladiator wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never claimed it was my own idea - it's not. I just found it interesting and wanted to share it with people, and judging by the upvotes many other people also found it interesting. Isn't that why we're all on HN - to talk about things we find interesting? I think you're looking at this as a debate instead of a conversation. I don't care whether or not you agree with me. I'm sorry you found the idea so distasteful.

It’s not the idea that I find distasteful as much as your attempt to defend it and make it appear as a difference of opinion rather than a difference in reality. A lot of the mess we are in today politically is because the media has become experts in teaching people how to defend fairly incredulous ideas, and when those ideas are shown not to hold any water, to end the argument with “let’s just agree to disagree”. Th…

Okay. From your perspective you've already discredited my argument, and from mine I still believe what I said. Where do we go from here if we can't agree to disagree?

I'm sincerely trying to have a conversation here. I feel like you're frustrated because you're sure I'm wrong, and you're unable to convince me I'm wrong. But that's just the way the world works. In fact, it's a cornerstone of the very system you're so passionately arguing is superior (western democracy / capitalism - I realize these aren't the same but in this instance it seems relevant to blur the lines). Sometimes people are going to vote against you, even if they're "wrong."

Why not just accept that I'm wrong and move on? What makes you think it's even possible to change my mind at this point?

https://xkcd.com/386/

I can understand that you're frustrated, but at this point I'm not sure what your goal is unless you still think you can change my mind.

Re: Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips

#200

Post by pm90 »

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #199
pm90 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not the idea that I find distasteful as much as your attempt to defend it and make it appear as a difference of opinion rather than a difference in reality. A lot of the mess we are in today politically is because the media has become experts in teaching people how to defend fairly incredulous ideas, and when those ideas are shown not to hold any water, to end the argument with “let’s just agree to disagree”. Th…

Okay. From your perspective you've already discredited my argument, and from mine I still believe what I said. Where do we go from here if we can't agree to disagree? I'm sincerely trying to have a conversation here. I feel like you're frustrated because you're sure I'm wrong, and you're unable to convince me I'm wrong. But that's just the way the world works. In fact, it's a cornerstone of the very system you're so…

I'm not trying to change your mind as much as discredit your arguments. i.e. you are free to peddle whatever wacko theory you want to, but the specific arguments you try to give weight to your theory have been shown in this thread to not be very strong.

If you think your theory is still valid without any good arguments for it, you are free to continue spreading them. You will just not be taken very seriously by people who consider fact-based arguments as a foundation for reasoned arguments, which incidentally are many people in this particular forum.

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