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Intel removes Xinjiang references from shareholder letter

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Re: Intel removes Xinjiang references from shareholder letter

#321

Post by helloworld11 »

alienbeast wrote: post #239
mmaunder wrote: post #166

What I find most dangerous about the United States bending to the will of China via their corporations is that it's affecting our story telling. The stories we tell define how we remember history, who our heroes are and what we think is worth fighting for. In 2012 the script of Red Dawn (a remake) was changed so that it was the North Koreans invading the US rather than the Chinese. This was done to avoid provoking th…

Here's another perspective: My wife is Chinese, and my son is half-Chinese, born in the USA. I want my son to grow up feeling American, not like an outsider. I don't want movies depicting China invading the USA, teaching his young and impressionable classmates that "Asian = evil invader". I don't want guys that look like him getting gunned down on TV by guys that look like Chris Hemsworth. As you said, the stories we…

What you say is understandable, for your son and family, but under no circumstances should it be used as a justification of or argument in favor of self-censorship of free expression against an honestly repulsive state power in media and elsewhere. Movies have been made for decades with all kinds of nations and their agents being portrayed as the "bad guys", and without hysterias about violent demonization of regular people in real life from these countries coming true. Why should China be an exception?

Re: Intel removes Xinjiang references from shareholder letter

#322

Post by chaostheory »

mmaunder wrote: post #166

What I find most dangerous about the United States bending to the will of China via their corporations is that it's affecting our story telling. The stories we tell define how we remember history, who our heroes are and what we think is worth fighting for. In 2012 the script of Red Dawn (a remake) was changed so that it was the North Koreans invading the US rather than the Chinese. This was done to avoid provoking th…

The longer China keeps their domestic markets effectively closed through severe restrictions to foreign competition, the weaker their hold will become. This will become less of an issue given Xi's general policy direction of closing.

Re: Intel removes Xinjiang references from shareholder letter

#323

Post by quantum_solanum »

trasz wrote: post #177
network2592 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engaging in epistemic and semantic hair splitting does not alter the reality of slave concentration camps or make it any less worse. Here is a recent article [0] on rape and forced sterilization of Uyghur women. [0] https://nypost.com/2021/12/18/uyghur-women-recall-horrors-of...

Here's an article on the same thing happening in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_rape_in_the_United_Stat... .

sterilization as well: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/16/913398383/whistleblower-alleg...

Re: Intel removes Xinjiang references from shareholder letter

#324

Post by trasz »

jchook wrote: post #94
network2592 wrote: post #32

> It apologised last month for the "trouble" it had caused, saying that its commitment to avoid supply chains from Xinjiang was an expression of compliance with U.S. law, rather than a statement of its position on the issue. So is the position of Intel that slave labour in concentration camps is an acceptable means of production? To what extent are Intel chips designed and manufactured in China? Presumably, they are…

It’s economic warfare against a destabilized region that only recently quelled constant terrorism. The US casts a blanket assumption that ALL products from the region are produced by slave labor unless proven otherwise. That’s backwards. And meanwhile US government and corporations have no problem buying products produced by US prison slave labor, or overseas child labor.

Look at this from a larger perspective. US killed a million random civilians in an attempt to to squash terrorism - and largely failed. China appears to have achieved this in an incomparably more humanitarian way. If this works out, this means:

1. USA failed (again)

2. They committed world's largest genocide since WW2

3. For no good reason

This is an absolutely terrible outcome from PR point of view, so it's natural for US to try to prevent China from being successful in doing that. And pretending that temporarily imprisoning people is somehow more evil than killing them seems to be working, even here on HN.

Re: Intel removes Xinjiang references from shareholder letter

#325

Post by daniel-cussen »

daniel-cussen wrote: post #120
simion314 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>slave labour in concentration camps Not an english speaker, so is Is "slave" correctly used here or is more like a "metaphor"?, In my mind a slave is someone you own, you can sell or kill. Someone you keep in prison is called different and people kept in prison for political reasons have also different label, religions/race imprisonment might also have a different label.

> In my mind a slave is someone you own, you can sell or kill. It varies a lot place to place and era to era what exactly is a slave and what isn't. Servants? Serfs? Even in a single era and a single place, as soon as one of the laws changes, things are not the same. Like in China, after the Unification, Chin Han called his administers what Westerners call "servants" or "slaves". I think this is a Western thing. Real…

EDIT: In general there actually are laws against killing them. Sparta declared war on the Helots about every year, because killing just like that, openly, for no reason, just raw murder, was just too gross. Just the level of cruelty. Even in the American South there were laws that said if a master just can't get a slave to submit, he's tried everything (I can't get an authoritative quote on this, what I'm giving you is the desert island version[1]), then in that case, the master can kill them. But I think it doesn't say kill, it's some other word. Of course, that's the law, the reality is different, the limit is far too low but there is a limit. Super basic stuff and difficult to prove, but for another example masters couldn't practice Satanism with their slaves, we're talking like egregiously egregious stuff. Which does occasionally happen.

[1] The desert island version of a text is what you remember without being able to search for it online, or review your notes, nothing. Like if it were you and I, dear reader, on a desert island, the Bible is what we remember, that's it.

Re: Intel removes Xinjiang references from shareholder letter

#326

Post by alkonaut »

jchook wrote: post #307
alkonaut wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's rhetorical -- the US has been ramping up a trade war with China for years now. The US sanctions on Xinjiang damage the region economically and cause more suffering for the people who live there. If the US gov't was truly concerned about human rights abuses, then they would not be so biased against China in particular while turning a blind eye or directly funding other very egregious human rights violations. No t…

> The US sanctions on Xinjiang damage the region economically and cause more suffering for the people who live there.

So do most sanctions no matter how justified. The well being of those people are the responsibility of the Chinese government. It would be pretty easy to allow transparent media reports in the province if one wanted to show the world that there is nothing bad going on.

What the US (or anyone else) does in any other corner of the world is a separate topic and uninteresting in this context.

Re: Intel removes Xinjiang references from shareholder letter

#327

Post by tharne »

deltaonefour wrote: post #296
duped wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> corporations are not people and do not have morals or values. They are organizations that seek to maximize profit and grow. They are however made up of people who make moral decisions based on their values, including in their businesses. Plenty of corporations choose to do or not do things based on their ethics and morals. And acting as an agent of a corporation doesn't free you from moral peril when making those d…

>I don't expect Intel the Corporation to have values, but I do expect the people within Intel who choose where they manufacture or purchase manufactured goods to have qualms about using slave labor for it, supporting a genocide in doing so. Human behavior is remarkably different depending on whether or not I'm the sole person on stage responsible for an action or whether I'm a single anonymous vote.

> Human behavior is remarkably different depending on whether or not I'm the sole person on stage responsible for an action or whether I'm a single anonymous vote.

This is exactly it. In a large organization, everyone can mentally offload any responsibility to someone else.

The rank and file can say "It's not my decision, the execs told me to do this".

The executives can say, "It's the board pushing me to do xyz and if I don't do it then someone else will, so I might as well just keep my job".

And the board can say, "Well, we just told the execs to maximize shareholder value, we didn't tell them to do anything unethical."

So you end up with a situation where no one feels like they bear any responsibility for the actions of an enterprise and you have a group of individuals who, as individuals, are moral but are contributing to an organization that is acting immorally in the aggregate.

Re: Intel removes Xinjiang references from shareholder letter

#328

Post by tgtweak »

network2592 wrote: post #55
tgtweak wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is for it's suppliers and partners. Examples of this would be Intel supplying chips to Lenovo, who are based in Beijing and who may have some components sources from that region, or Intel's fabs sourcing Silicon or other manufacturing materials (or their suppliers) from that region. Supply chains are broad and it's not hard to have goods that pass through or originate in those regions even if all your parts are pr…

Partners is a separate issue from suppliers. The letter was to suppliers. However, partners may have indeed caused "trouble" for Intel by threatening to source chips from somewhere else. But as far as suppliers, and chips in particular, CCP has very little leverage. Most chips are manufactured in Taiwan [0]. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/2-charts-show-how-much-the-w...

The goal is that both partners (downstream) and suppliers (upstream) are aware that they should not be sourcing/supplying these regions, and that if Intel is made aware of it, they will have to enforce such embargos in both directions.
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