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Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

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Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#561

Post by kergonath »

anovikov wrote: post #526
quitit wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People outside of China are served a different set of maps. Each country is served maps that conform to their territorial claims. E.g. If you view the map of India while in India, it'll appear different than if you viewed it in China.

One thing about claims (say display Crimea as part of Russia within Russia and as Ukraine elsewhere), but distorting SIZES of the places on maps according to someone's political preference is well... plain out ridiculous, laughable. It displays how messed up China is more than anything else. It's seriously hard to expect the place that does things like that, as a next superpower. You can't build a superpower on silly…

I am not disagreeing at all, but most places have stupid regulations for petty nationalistic reasons. Saying that you can’t have a superpower with these is laughable, considering the history of the USSR and the US specifically. Though, again, this is very common.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#562

Post by gostsamo »

MichaelBurge wrote: post #547
anovikov wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing about claims (say display Crimea as part of Russia within Russia and as Ukraine elsewhere), but distorting SIZES of the places on maps according to someone's political preference is well... plain out ridiculous, laughable. It displays how messed up China is more than anything else. It's seriously hard to expect the place that does things like that, as a next superpower. You can't build a superpower on silly…

It's a mistake to treat "China" as one coherent entity with a single unified purpose, which chooses to prioritize the mapping issue front-of-mind. China has over a billion people. That one middle manager in the maps department is personally offended by territory appearing smaller, has zero relation to the rest of the country and shouldn't affect your opinion. Many bureaucrats in the USA draw stupid lines in sand that…

This is not some middle manager's sensibility. This is a deliberate inner propaganda policy. When chinese people ask: "What we are fighting for there?", they can open the map and see some big island and not the shit of a fly visible only under a microscope.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#563

Post by systemvoltage »

pembrook wrote: post #501
klebe wrote: post #473

the top comments talking about maps, it's absolutely insane 'The agreement included a pledge from Apple to help Chinese manufacturers develop "the most advanced manufacturing technologies," "support the training of high-quality Chinese talents," use more components from Chinese suppliers, sign deals with Chinese software firms, collaborate with research in Chinese universities, and directly invest in Chinese tech com…

> It aches my heart to be a young man in this country and see this be our so-called 'leaders'. I'm confident the tides have already turned against all this nonsense, though, and I look forward to rebuilding industries of the world with good-hearted men & women I just got finished reading a book about the pre-war climate of 1930s Europe and man this comment sounds scary and nationalist. I’m worried that so many people…

About 24 million people are at stake, just watch the Taiwanese Foreign minister's palpitations and the horror on his face with regards to Chinese aggression. If this doesn't convince you of the tacit reality, not sure what will: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3D0_Bhzbyo

Some level of pushback - manufacturing in this case - is the most reasonable, peaceful and rational recourse to the threat China poses to the world and its neighbors, while also creating a supply chain resiliency. I think narrative that you've spelled out is a grave danger to democracies around the world. If anything is ratcheting up that is taking an innocuous comment about globalist corporation's greed to an extreme and alarmist parallel to pre-world world nationalism which I find rather irresponsible.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#564

Post by raverbashing »

scrubs wrote: post #375
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Apple has, and will, fold to government pressure faster than a lawn chair." As a publicly-traded, trillion dollar company, where profits are at stake, this would seem to make sense. What does not seem to make sense is why anyone would believe Apple might ignore its own financial interests and those of its shareholders and deliberately sacrifice a major opportunity^1 in order to resist government pressure based on so…

I seriously disagree with this. I expect a whole hell of a lot more out of American management. Money is not the measurement of all things. Apple could have: - pointed out China is confusing its politics with business - thrown this out to a shareholder vote - tried to see what customers outside of China thought - threatened to pull all manufacturing out of China - required China concede control elsewhere: Apple can o…

> I expect a whole hell of a lot more out of American management.

> Goodness gracious serious companies understand there's more going on

That's what you get when your management is exclusively MBAs that never set foot outside of their bubbles and STEM-graduates that are naive in history/geopolitics/economy, etc

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#565

Post by tooltalk »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #557
tooltalk wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> China has scale and stability. ??? Vietnam has nearly twice South Korea's population (and less than Japan's) and of course, it also has scale, as South Korean businesses in Vietnam have shown repeatedly. To boot, Vietnam has no immediate internal political threats (eg, compared against China's separatist movements by ethnic minorities in Tibet, Uigher, Inner Mongolia) or no potential regional geopolitical/territor…

Vietnam has 90 million people. South Korea doesn’t have much scale, Japan has a bit, the numbers only start making sense if we could develop a supply chain throughout Indonesia, Malaysia, maybe using talent and capital from Singapore. Or India and South Asia, of course, if things were more stable. But alas, stability is important. And none of those regions are very stable. > That's only inevitable b/c of Apple's poli…

>> Apple is like .1% of the political clout and lobbying being brought to bear

Sure, as Tim Apple testified before Congress, Apple pays the most tax in the US and is also the most valuable company in the world. I'm pretty sure there is nothing going on between Apple and American/Chinese gov't. /s

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#566

Post by pasabagi »

epivosism wrote: post #487
pasabagi wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. was done in secret Was it? Reading the article, the only 'secret' component was the lobbying, which is obviously done behind closed doors. Everything else is public commitments and public statements - which makes sense, since they were trying to pour oil on troubled chinese waters. FWIW, western media often suggests stuff is 'secret' in china, because they can't read chinese, and all those orientals are awfully…

It's effectively illegal* in china to write unapproved stories about any government official or department or policy. I think that's what people mean when they say government dealings are 'secret'. * i.e. to be a journalist you have to go through intense ideological screening; extreme prohibitions on foreign journalists operating in china; complete prior restraint on ALL media (and all education, all printing presses…

I guess I'd see it more as a continuation of the whole 'kremlinology' trope. Granted, access is difficult in China atm. On the other hand, most of the press doesn't like to do deep investigative journalism in any case, so when you put a few barriers in their way, they tend to get real lazy real fast.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#567

Post by pasabagi »

gnarlysasquatch wrote: post #489
pasabagi wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. was done in secret Was it? Reading the article, the only 'secret' component was the lobbying, which is obviously done behind closed doors. Everything else is public commitments and public statements - which makes sense, since they were trying to pour oil on troubled chinese waters. FWIW, western media often suggests stuff is 'secret' in china, because they can't read chinese, and all those orientals are awfully…

> FWIW, western media often suggests stuff is 'secret' in china, because they can't read chinese, and all those orientals are awfully mysterious. What English speaking media should one read to see this for themselves?

If you just check google news 'china secret' you can see an enormous number of articles, many from credible sources, talking about various 'secret' doings of the CCP.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#568

Post by lostlogin »

magicalist wrote: post #332
borski wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. They’re unavailable because they refused to go back into the market after China got caught using espionage. Were it not for that, it’s very possible Google would have caved; we don’t know how that would have fallen. It’s convenient they didn’t have to answer that, but not because they didn’t cave.

Absence of evidence doesn't seem as definitive as you're making it here, but it's worth noting that we have two counterfactuals we can use as a prior: Bing still works in China and Yahoo only pulled out last summer, in spite of public espionage and hacking incidents.

> Bing still works in China

If by ‘works’ you mean it allows searches that China finds acceptable.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#569

Post by ngc248 »

MichaelBurge wrote: post #547
anovikov wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing about claims (say display Crimea as part of Russia within Russia and as Ukraine elsewhere), but distorting SIZES of the places on maps according to someone's political preference is well... plain out ridiculous, laughable. It displays how messed up China is more than anything else. It's seriously hard to expect the place that does things like that, as a next superpower. You can't build a superpower on silly…

It's a mistake to treat "China" as one coherent entity with a single unified purpose, which chooses to prioritize the mapping issue front-of-mind. China has over a billion people. That one middle manager in the maps department is personally offended by territory appearing smaller, has zero relation to the rest of the country and shouldn't affect your opinion. Many bureaucrats in the USA draw stupid lines in sand that…

China has over a billion people: true, but everything is under the control of CCP. So for anyone outside China, it is one coherent entity which is the CCP.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#570

Post by tablespoon »

systemvoltage wrote: post #558
tablespoon wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's despicable is that none of the mainstream media (WSJ, NYTimes, WaPo, Boston Globe, CNN, Fox, etc.) are covering this story. The American people atleast deserve to be informed. That's not true. IMHO, this is part of a larger story (Apple's obsequious compromises with China), and the NY Times has previously reported on other parts: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce... . It's seems Th…

I honestly feel like NYTimes is not going to cover it for political reasons. I am happy to be convinced otherwise.

> I honestly feel like NYTimes is not going to cover it for political reasons. I am happy to be convinced otherwise.

Explain those "political reasons," please.

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