Operation Triangulation: What you get when attack iPhones of researchers

Lockdown prevents new enrollment in MDM/adding profiles, but you can use an MDM you're already enrolled in. It's pretty good from a security perspective.

What I dislike is that it applies to all devices in your iCloud profile, and is overall pretty intrusive/annoying. Best practice if you're going to use it is probably to have multiple iCloud accounts (maybe in a "family" for license sharing), and Lockdown Mode one of them for the more secure devices. I tried using it for all of my devices last year and it was pretty unusable.

(Main pain point was how it handles unsecure wifi networks; I consider ~all networks insecure regardless of wifi encryption, but not being able to save or otherwise autoconnect to a hotel network with an iPad with nothing on it, etc. was the last straw. With a decent travel router it's fine.)

So let's do it realistically. You take out a loan for 100 USD, it gets printed by some bank, let's say Chase. You buy a washing machine from China, they put it in their central bank. (And they don't but bonds, let's assume.)

What if they want to buy oil, which happens to be sold by the Saudis, who want 100 USD for it. They can do it, or they can print more yuan, and use that to buy more USD on some exchange. (And they did it a lot, to keep the yuan artificially low. That's basically half of how they ended up with this huge reserve.)

And since their inflation was around 2 percent since 2010, and currently even negative unfortunately, they can print a lot.

And this is how economic development and exchange rates connect. One man's trade deficit is another's reserve basically. As long as there's some slack in economies (mostly some unemployment metric is used as a proxy for this) it makes sense to spend. (Otherwise it'll just push up prices more, ie. lead to inflation. Hence the very technical sounding name of NAIRU, Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, I think hands down the worst name for any concept over many fields.)

If China starts using its reserves to buy US assets, that leads to a lot of USD getting back into the US economy, it's like a stimulus. It would push up prices of course, the Fed would increase interest rates, maybe it would even start fiddling with some other knobs (it could increase the fractional reserve ratio, it could increase interest paid on reserves, or interest paid on excess reserves).

> If they are afraid of US sanctions, China will be less inclined to buy assets that could be seized and so the currency is less useful to them.

Yes, and one read of the belt and road initiative is basically this, instead of giving it to citizens to spend, they tried to use it for geopolitical/colonialist/mercantilist projects.

All in all, my understanding is that using their huge reserve to cause some crisis would be a zero-trick pony (because after 2008 and the recent bank crisis, and the Russian sanctions implementations the West seems capable of handling speedbumps), and a slow decoupling would be good anyway. (As it would help the non-finance sectors of the US.)