Why is China smashing its tech industry? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is China smashing its tech industry?

#371

Post by trasz » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 11:44 AM UTC

andy_ppp wrote: post #368

trasz wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is while what you’ve mentioned is just state propaganda, US killing million people in Iraq alone is an easily verifiable fact.

The actual reports discuss a range that’s unbelievably wide in terms of civilian casualties. Somewhere in the region of 100,000 to 1,000,000 which seems incredibly broad. The US did not deliberately engineer the situation in Iraq of course, and the insurgency, Sunni/Shea civil war that happened as well as Al Qaeda and other foreign fighters made the situation unmanageable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_o…

It doesn’t really matter whether the US planned to kill slightly fewer people. Everything that ensued was their fault; it wouldn’t happen without US invasion.

Also, note that those numbers are only the direct victims. How many people died because of US sanctions?

As for Uyghurs - I’m sure there were a lot of horrible crimes there. It’s unavoidable when doing things at that scale, in a country which still has a long way to go about human rights. The propaganda part is 1. claiming this is a “genocide”, as in something deliberate, rather than crimes committed by individuals, and 2. claiming it’s somehow worse than the US solution to the same problem, which is killing those people on the spot.

Re: Why is China smashing its tech industry?

#372

Post by aaron695 » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 12:41 PM UTC

foerbert wrote: post #370

aaron695 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article talking about this sells it as they managed to get the cost down through 3D printing, I'm absolutely willing to bet it cost the Airforce way more than contracting it out. The cost of a commercial 3d printer with security, to autocad it up, training staff, sending people into the field to measure it. To have a trained air force employee designing toilet seats is questionable, is that what the military sho…

After reading this, I think I've actually changed my mind a bit - not that I ever had a super strong opinion. But now I'm thinking that yes - we absolutely want the military occasionally doing things like going out and designing their own toilet seat. The military is kind of an odd organization. As the world in general increasingly specializes, the military doesn't. Not really. At the end of the day the military is t…

DARPA did kinda try and automate sewing - https://www.wired.com/2012/06/darpa-sweatshop/ Uniforms are billions of dollars.

I think what's important is not they bought 3 toilet seats for $10,000 on planes that costs $100,000 a hour to fly.

Universal Camouflage Pattern costing $5 billion to develop and make, then gets ditched because it sucked feels like a bigger story. How does that happen.... Isn't that the military's main interface with the world.

Re: Why is China smashing its tech industry?

#373

Post by faeriechangling » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 2:01 PM UTC

caeril wrote: post #11

> China may simply see things differently. It’s possible that the Chinese government has decided that the profits of companies like Alibaba and Tencent come more from rents than from actual value added Excellent observation, and I hope, for China's sake, that this is the reason. The United States is likely in for a long-term rude awakening when it finally realizes that an economy predicated on negative-value-add acti…

What I notice is that the most productive efforts of big tech are seemingly quick to be abandoned side projects. The real money is in adtech with is 90% zero-sum and 10% happily marrying the right companies with the right customers.

I don't really see Netflix as being as much of a problem compared to other "attention" companies because they screwed with the media cartels, have fantastic infrastructure, mostly sell long-form content, and denormalized ad-breaks. Compare to YouTube or TikTok.

Re: Why is China smashing its tech industry?

#374

Post by pasabagi » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 2:10 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #313

pasabagi wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that just the plan of every developing country? You start with textiles, then move up the value chain until you're a developed country and can pay for socialism or aircraft carriers or whatever you want.

It's not the plan, it is probably an inevitability. If you could automate your textiles, with 1/100th the labor, while retaining it all, you'd still want to keep it even at a reduced labor benefit, rather than see it go to China or elsewhere. China would rather keep all of their textile industry and hyper automate it, than see it leave to countries like Vietnam. Keeping industry like that internally has vast benefits…

Thanks for the really interesting reply!

I think this question of unemployment and underemployment is one that's simply going to get worse everywhere, and I don't see a non-political solution. I just don't see a realistic way to employ everybody, or even a majority, in a high automation society.

So my feeling is, the countries that will be best placed to tackle this are the ones that are able to push forward a political solution. I'm not entirely sure of how socialist china is, but there are certainly some socialists in the CCP who would be perfectly happy for everybody to be unemployed or underemployed, and to pay for them from the profits of highly automated industry.

I think it's probably a question of ideological flexibility. Because China is both officially marxist, practically capitalist, traditionally confucian, and pragmatically developmentalist, they have a lot of options open when it comes to political solutions that western countries don't. So they could, for instance, just pay everybody UBI, then point out that China is a socialist country if elites object. That would be a harder argument in officially capitalist countries.

I don't imagine they'll go that way, but I guess the basic point for me is that productivity, employment, and welfare are largely the result of political decisions. You can run the economy like they did in the DDR, where everybody had a job even if it was totally meaningless. You can run the economy like in Japan, where if you have a job, you'll probably never lose it. These things have different tradeoffs. The biggest challenges are usually how hardened the political discourse is around work itself.

Re: Why is China smashing its tech industry?

#375

Post by tablespoon » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 2:40 PM UTC

vondur wrote: post #311

tablespoon wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe, maybe not? We’ll see if this goes well as planed. Easier said than done. My understanding is that China's manufacturing supply chain is so well-developed that companies like Apple don't think they even have a choice except build their stuff there. The only things they're missing are a few things at the very high end. If they lack a commitment to free markets, its conceivable that they could use that advantag…

Funny thing I noticed that the last batch of iMac's I purchased were made in Thailand.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce...:

> Two decades ago, as Apple’s operations chief, Mr. Cook spearheaded the company’s entrance into China, a move that helped make Apple the most valuable company in the world and made him the heir apparent to Steve Jobs. Apple now assembles nearly all of its products and earns a fifth of its revenue in the China region. But just as Mr. Cook figured out how to make China work for Apple, China is making Apple work for the Chinese government....

> No Plan B

> In 2014, Apple hired Doug Guthrie, the departing dean of the George Washington University business school, to help the company navigate China, a country he had spent decades studying.

> One of his first research projects was Apple’s Chinese supply chain, which involved millions of workers, thousands of plants and hundreds of suppliers. The Chinese government made that operation possible by spending billions of dollars to pave roads, recruit workers, and construct factories, power plants and employee housing.

> Mr. Guthrie concluded that no other country could offer the scale, skills, infrastructure and government assistance that Apple required. Chinese workers assemble nearly every iPhone, iPad and Mac. Apple brings in $55 billion a year from the region, far more than any other American company makes in China.

> “This business model only really fits and works in China,” Mr. Guthrie said in an interview. “But then you’re married to China.”

Re: Why is China smashing its tech industry?

#376

Post by rini17 » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 2:57 PM UTC

inglor_cz wrote: post #359

Animats wrote: post #150

China is not "smashing its tech industry". It's cracking down on private Internet companies that acquired too much power through network effects. This is completely consistent with CCP doctrine. Anything that central has to be state-owned. Xi declared this year that while digitization is important, “we must recognize the fundamental importance of the real economy… and never deindustrialize.” Right. China, remember, h…

The five year plan is interesting, because I was born in a country that worshipped its five year plans ("pětiletky"). It was the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Now the thing about five year plans was that they worked rather well at the beginning , so approximately until 1960. Back then, the economic power of a country was measured by its heavy industry, and in a post-WWII world where there was war damage to be fixe…

My dad worked in Tesla Elektroakustika Bratislava manufacturing electronics and often recounted that a member of Politbyro said "Prečo vyrábate polovodiče a nie vodiče?" "Why do you make semiconductors instead of conductors?"

There isn't such kind of boneheaded inertia in China. Yet.

Re: Why is China smashing its tech industry?

#377

Post by inglor_cz » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

rini17 wrote: post #376

inglor_cz wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The five year plan is interesting, because I was born in a country that worshipped its five year plans ("pětiletky"). It was the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Now the thing about five year plans was that they worked rather well at the beginning , so approximately until 1960. Back then, the economic power of a country was measured by its heavy industry, and in a post-WWII world where there was war damage to be fixe…

My dad worked in Tesla Elektroakustika Bratislava manufacturing electronics and often recounted that a member of Politbyro said "Prečo vyrábate polovodiče a nie vodiče?" "Why do you make semiconductors instead of conductors?" There isn't such kind of boneheaded inertia in China. Yet.

Yeah, President Novotný is said to have declared that semiconductors are a fad and Czechoslovakia will wait to develop "toticonductors" ("celovodiče").

That is price paid for a system that kept a totally dumb person at the head of the country for 12 years. And when we got rid of him, the Soviets arrived in their tanks to correct our heresy (1968).

As for China - TBH we do not yet know what happens within China. The flow of information is fairly restricted. A lot more of the economy is outside direct control of the Party, and those parts of the economy are likely to be fairly functional; they have to compete on the international market, after all. But within the Central Commmittee, I wouldn't be surprised if boneheadedness wasn't a significant problem. Many politicians are of the "dumb, but cunning" sort, even in the West.

Re: Why is China smashing its tech industry?

#378

Post by mountainb » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #226

onepointsixC wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China could not ramp up steel production because it imports the raw materials from far away, mostly from Australia. Most of the raw materials, including energy and even food are imported into China. None of those supply chains would be left untouched in a war.

And the first thing the US should do in the case of a large scale war involving China, is hand Australia nuclear weapons for its self-defense. It would guarantee an extraordinary cost if China were to decide to destroy Australia to try to annex their land for resource extraction. In the coming decades China will have the military capability to invade Australia, given China's rapid naval expansion. It's not a sure thi…

It's not an ultimate deterrence to invasion. MAD is a theory, not an iron law of the function of the universe. If there's one thing World War II taught us, it's quite possible for modern life to continue despite 8 figure casualties, and quite possible for industrial output to increase even under the most severe conditions.

Australia is hard to invade because it's a separate continent, not solely because it would be protected by nuclear weapons. It's all the other normal stuff related to the challenge of conducting opposed landings over long distances that would make it very costly to attack. The nukes are a plus but they are not magical. All modern nations have tons of expendable population. It's politically convenient to present nukes as the ultimate deterrent but it's not backed by empirical evidence. The other issue is that due to test ban treaties we really do not know how currently existing stockpiles of such weapons will perform under real conditions. We could have vast stockpiles of antiquated garbage. We just don't know.

Re: Why is China smashing its tech industry?

#379

Post by yostrovs » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 4:16 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #262

volta83 wrote: post #40

> There are certainly those in America who believe that Facebook and Google produce little of value relative to the profit they rake in; maybe China’s leaders, for reasons that will remain forever opaque to us, have simply reached the same conclusion. Arguably, capturing most of your country's top talent with absurd salaries and putting them to work on world-critical challenges like... how to generate more revenue fr…

> Arguably, capturing most of your country's top talent with absurd salaries and putting them to work on world-critical challenges like... how to generate more revenue from advertisement or... how to create as many "phone-addicts" as possible... could be quantified as producing tons and tons of negative value. And where is that happening? It's not happening in the US, China or Europe. The ad tech segment would be luc…

I know of a number of people that received PhDs in physics, who would have become proper scientists, that instead went to work for investment firms because they can do the math and know how to code. After a decade of student poverty, getting a $150,000 salary did amazing things to their minds and their inspirations. Not all have done this, but many have for sure, and this has caused a brain drain.

Re: Why is China smashing its tech industry?

#380

Post by mensetmanusman » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 4:56 PM UTC

p_l wrote: post #369

fennecfoxy wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sanctions against Huawei were for malware + ties to the CCP, not because the west "couldn't compete".

If you think the part where they blitzed 5G so hard that a) you could build 5G network using only Huawei b) it was effectively impossible to build 5G network without Huawei, didn't have impact on USA push to sanction Huawei... I have few bridges in Brooklyn to sell, good price.

Building a next gen communications infrastructure on top of a CCP backbone just didn’t seem like a good idea for many.