Whose sovereignity though? And to replace it with what? As almost all 6G kit builds on 5G kit which is at most 40% Huawei FRAND patented.So whatever the path HW gets paid.
As an aside the whole OpenRAN debacle to replcae 5G kit seems to have peterd out after the initial hype.
This move also ignores economies of scale - if the rest of the planet is on HW kit lowerig cost even with razor thin margins.The opps Nokia/Ericsson would either have to get massive subsidies to make financial sense or have a worse cost/benefit ratio.
One thing that gets glossed over though , is that the end user speeds/stability arent the main driver for 5/6G advancement (even though thats where all the marketing hype went) of course mobile device connectivity is growing and most users interaction online is primarily mobile.
The big draw use case is the industrial and automation applications, where HW has a signifiant lead - from autiomated ports that aut load/unload to automated 'dark factories' that run without human intervention.Thats where the 'real' application is.
The other use case for end users most likely will be in the autonomus cars and humanoid robots once they take off to any significant degree.
The only other way to make up the requisite volume from such an endeavor is one that Brussels was floating about a month ago. The Global Gateway funds to assist developing countries will come with ano HW clause.Might just be the final nail in the coffin in EU efforts to retain friends and influence with the rest of the planet.Whose main concern is living a modern life with the infra not requiring you mortgage your childrens future.
You don't need a crazy fast connection for most of this automation stuff, because it has to be able to operate offline successfully to start with. Any dark factory should be running on its own wireless network anyway, not some cellular network. Who would do that? Even for a local wireless network, why would a Huawei router be any better?
To me, this was never about 5G or 6G. This was always about CCP controlled network hardware getting installed across the globe taking advantage of a natural iterative next step in network improvement which would be fine if the CCP wasn't absolutely psycho and immoral, but they seem to be. I'm sure there are many well-meaning and smart people who work at Huawei, but unfortunately any advantage a Chinese company gets in a foreign market becomes potentially leveraged as CCP advantage and control.
Many countries leverage their companies abroad if something is important enough, but few countries are as bold or blatant as China in this regard. Nobody is worried about most of these countries excessively abusing their influence abroad, because most care about their reputation. China is basically untrusted by all of its neighbors and doesn't seem to care about authentic reputation over manipulation. To them, "harmony" just seems like a way to misspell "control". Balance to them means nothing if they aren't the center of gravity.
For as old and advanced as China has become, it discarded all of its slow wisdom to be wrong as fast as possible. Can a country like that really be trusted? No, it can't. There isn't any country on Earth that can be trusted 100%, but the CCP is just far below the threshold of even tolerable levels of trust.
There is nothing 5G or 6G provides that is worth letting the CCP control your networks. Aside from just spying or hacking, imagine World War 3 comes around and the CCP just decides it's time to shut off all our networks? Trust is almost always more important than speed.
>You don't need a crazy fast connection for most of this automation stuff, because it has to be able to operate offline successfully to start with
As i mentioned youre looking at it as a consumer, this is industrial systems.Its not about speed primarily but latency - costs of deployment and maintainance.Your COTS router is not being installed wher million dollar assembly lines are operating, and for any serious business concern low opex/capex are first and foremost as well as reproducibility for expansion.
KUKA robot arms are not being connected to TPlink routers.Together with the nature of Just-In-Time manufacturing , instant data for maintainance and logistics is crucial.
Ditto for the automated ports [1]
>There is nothing 5G or 6G provides that is worth letting the CCP control your networks. Aside from just spying or hacking
The two standards are currently accelerating both consumer and industrial changes worldwide.There are some networks in GlobalSouth countries whose speed/latencies will rival even those deployed in major US cities.
Its a question of leveraging future infrstructure for productivity and improving living standards.
As for espionage and hacking that was stillthere even with dialup modems and fax machines.
Regarding countries using their leverage via multicorps abroad , you really should read up on the US CLOUD act, patriot act etc and cast a cursory glance at entities as benign sounding as Nestle(child slaves in W.Africa) Chiquita(Death Squads in S.America) PullMan Cigarettes (suing to block ati cigaratte ads in SE.Asia)
,not adding historical ones like Swiss CryptoAG.
In short multicorps are immoral profit extracting entities and on the global stage they act sometimes directly with their parent county to further whatever agandas they have.
Thus far no Chinese companies have been implicated in any such shenanigans - as im pretty sure if it had happened it would be published about in banner headlines 24/7/365.
As it stands all the accusations are simply alllegations of a future scenario , which most people specify any sensible person should be able to mitigate with good security architecture and practices.
If you want to steel man the argument it’s worth acknowledging that China is also concerned with backdoors in what they import.
> allegations of a future scenario
There’s been plenty of CCP aligned hacking, backdoors, and industrial espionage people can point to. Expecting a bad actor to continue there behavior is a little more than allegations of a future scenario.
The dollar value of the assembly lines isn't as important as the scale and architecture of the information that has to move.
I could see scenarios where there is a high level of variability on the line and it requires a very large machine learning model to process the many possible variations, so maybe you send a realtime video feed or still images to a server and try to optimize for the fastest response time rather than paying to run all that compute at each station. Maybe you're doing this for 5000 stations.
You can also imagine small instructions needing to arrive with very low latency where bandwidth isn't the issue really and straight line of sight wireless should presumably be the lowest latency.
Neither of those problems require or justify Huawei anything and those are not likely to be most factories.
> Its a question of leveraging future infrstructure for productivity and improving living standards. As for espionage and hacking that was stillthere even with dialup modems and fax machines.
You don't improve the lives of future generations in your country by letting an adversary control your infrastructure. That is easy. Why would you even consider that? There's a list of priorities. You aren't starting at the top.
> Regarding countries using their leverage via multicorps abroad
No doubt, people should always push back against any companies proven to be doing things that are problematic. It doesn't only apply to countries. Still, I restate my point about trust. A lot of these companies (and countries) legitimately care about their reputations, not only because a destroyed reputation can hurt their profits (if you believe that's all they care about, which is very cynical), but because many people would rather do the right thing than the wrong thing if given the choice.
Sometimes these organizations are so big, they don't even know all the details about what's happening at the ground level until it gets reported on by 3rd parties.
In terms of US government influence over networks, the US government is structured very differently. In the US, it's a national tradition to not excessively trust the government, because the history of the world says that's a bad idea. If the US abuses its trust to a critical degree, it can face pushback in a real way that isn't even allowed in China. I believe in the feedback mechanism loop within the US more than what China has, by far.
Your argument comes across very empty to me in this regard.
ignoring the weird moralizing about china, i think the parent comment is indeed referring to factories etc running their own 5G networks, that is very much a thing; ie aws used to have a private 5g offering, there are some open source projects, more that i can't remember
The good old ccp rule. You can tell how deranged a comment is by the number of times it has "ccp" in it.
> CCP wasn't absolutely psycho and immoral
As opposed to what? The US? The EU? Germany? Seems like the CCP is the least psycho and immoral of the bunch.
> but few countries are as bold or blatant as China in this regard.
China is the least bold and blatant out of the major players.
> Nobody is worried about most of these countries excessively abusing their influence abroad
Everyone is. It's just that "those countries" are in no position to fight back against the US.
> Trust is almost always more important than speed.
If trust was important, then germany woud choose "ccp's" huawei. After all, it's germany's "allies" that spy on them the most. And the "ccp" would win by providing the world with the most trustworthy network hardware.
The reason I specify the CCP specifically rather than always stating China, is because the government is not "of", "by" and "for" the people. There are many Chinese people and only a small fraction of them are part of that government structure. The propaganda battle around whether Taiwan is a part of China or not also doesn't help.
The rest of your commentary suggests you need to broaden your horizons for where you get information.
Why would we change the way we respect those? None of those nations engage in the same uncompetitive practices that the Chinese do with respect to patents and IP.
> The Global Gateway funds to assist developing countries will come with ano HW clause.
So they only want to "save" the Planet and its (presumably poorer) people if said poorer people acquiesce with their imperialistic reflexes, tale as old as time when it comes to the West.
But not sure why would they need the Global South's money for all of this? Aren't they, the magnificent West, big enough to shoulder almost any costs? Especially when it comes to "strategic" concerns. Or so they were saying.
The way most of these deals get structured especially when multicorps get involved is requiring the donor gov to guarantee the loan. Which gets routed to the recepient country, kickbacks get shaved off and re-routed back to the donor country.
In this instance though my thinking is that for competeive pricing they would need volume , and prerequisite demand.
This would be one way to generate that demand.In a way similar to the whole Tariff circus just more upfront.
Good attempt comrade. China + Russia + Iran fueling the war with Europe. They openly declare a war on way of living of western world . Sure , build critical infrastructure independently is insane.
The Russia, China, and Iran axis doesn’t exist. That’s American propaganda linking together three countries it dislikes.
Iran has loose relations with both which are not dissimilar to the one it has with the EU. Its conflict is also fairly limited to Israel and the Middle East.
Meanwhile, Russia and China have an ambivalent relationship where they are key economic partners with complementary economies but have no official military alliance and are somewhat wary of each other as Russia fears a potential Chinese invasion.
Isn't it the other way around? I mean, I keep seeing western people advertising that the ways of living in those countries are wrong and they must change, while I don't often see anyone urging western countries to change their way of living.
> China + Russia + Iran fueling the war with Europe.
It's the other way around. Europe fueling war with china + russia + iran.
It isn't china sending warships along german, british, european coastline. It wasn't russia that overthrew democracy in ukraine. And it isn't iran bombing europe.
> They openly declare a war on way of living of western world .
No. You once again have it backwards. It's the western world declaring war on them. The genuine head scratcher is why china, russian and iran haven't formally joined forces to fight back.
> “We’ll discuss with industry what we can do, not only to make ourselves independent from China, but also for example independent from the USA, independent from the big tech companies,” Merz said.
Good to know it's not just China.
> Merz ruled out fully decoupling from China, which is Germany’s second-biggest trading partner. “We can’t do that,” he said. “China can’t do that, but we can do it even less.”
And even better to know that the move is practical and understands who has the upper hand.
This is the most incredible thing about it. As soon as Palantir has a foot in the the door of the authorities, only a disaster will be able to get them banned. And that disaster is way past the point of all the citizen's data getting collected and analyzed in real-time, because that's what our authorities want: full insights.
If you believe this I have a bridge to sell you. They're using this to hide the real reason for the move, which is to do Washington's bid, just like a good colony does.
Yeah, it's just lip service until a democrat is president again. Same happened last time, it's like we time-travelled back to 2016, every argument is exactly the same in politics and media.
What it means is that in the future Europe will have to consider a Trumpist USA to be like a 21st Century version of a totalitarian Eastern Bloc or Soviet country: Orbanism, absurd projectionism, dangerous allies, the state demanding a share of businesses and directing sales and mergers, openly describing the EU (and now the UK) as not friends or even as enemies, trumped up prosecutions of political enemies, assuming that foreign surveillance is built into its products, etc.
The "most racist" places are typically the most diverse and most multicultural. They have more exposed tissue than places where minorities make up single digit percentage points, so you see injustices more often in these places. And it follows that it gets reported on at volume.
By that same coin, these places also have more friendly interactions by volume than places without diverse racial makeups. You just don't see that reported because it's not news.
America, "racist", simply has a very diverse population.
The American South, "racist against Black people", simply has the nation's largest population of Black people almost to the point the racial makeup is bimodal.
Texas, "racist against Latinos", - same thing.
You see the bad apples, but you don't see the overwhelming degree to which society works with people together in a melting pot.
I grew up in the South, where every second person is Black. I fly to SF where there are barely any Black people at all and have dinner conversations with people calling my region racist. Sometimes the people saying these things grew up in all-white cities in New England. I have to laugh inside.
SF region is gonna be racist among other things itself. That is true of all of America but there’s levels to this and American south is more racist. Don’t have to grow up in a diverse place to see/know that.
Apple CEO Tim Cook "secretly" signed an agreement worth more than $275 billion with Chinese officials, promising that Apple would help to develop China's economy and technological capabilities - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...
China was suppose to become a giant sweatshop which would be allowed to gain subsistence wealth. Just enough to produce and consume western product but not wealthy enough to ever outgrow their station in the world.
And that is the core contention for the anti-China rhetoric. That they are a competitor. There are a billion and one reasons people say they don't like China, but the core issue is competition.
> As soon they became a competitor there was a problem
Was there? It seems to me trade and offshoring continued even after they became a competitor. And then continued after they strong-armed Western corporations to invest in China [1], destroyed Western corporations through espionage [2,3], or through subsidy-enabled dumping prices and preferential treatment [4,4.1], after they extracted groveling apologies from Western firms [5], and after they started operating literal police stations on Western soil [6], while turning Western countries into subordinate receivers of orders [7,8].
I guess you were hoping your framing would guilt people into not seeing the threat?
[1] Apple CEO Tim Cook "secretly" signed an agreement worth more than $275 billion with Chinese officials, promising that Apple would help to develop China's economy and technological capabilities - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...
Western state department and corporations aren’t the same thing. China is New Democracy where the classes are all represented with the state at the top. That’s not how Old Democracy (liberal democracy) works where the hierarchy between state and corporations is more mixed with corporations in more power.
You’re equating things that corporations are doing as if that’s in the best interest of the American state.
China is being seen the way it is by white people and white societies because they see a competitor.
the west made a deal with the devil for cheap plastic trinkets and reaped what it sowed. that's why switching the manufacturing to India won't do any good either.
domestic production or nothing. the "service economy" is a stupid concept.
Well, as European, i have to clearly state - unfortunately - this is only because of what happened in the 20th century: WWII. This "event" changed somehow the psychology, not allowing the EU to "stand up straight with our shoulders back".
Unfortunately. With around 500m customers, we could be powerful. But we arent: Stumbling upon our own feeds.
The countries that comprise the EU had been among the biggest warmongers for centuries. The EU is the most successful peace project the continent has ever seen. And the reason for that is that every country refrained from trying to be a superpower on the continent.
The European mentality has real, tangible upsides for its continent. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work well in a larger world where other actors don’t share the same experience and values.
Not just for business. All foreigners in China must register their stay with the local police. Large hotels handle the registration automatically through their electronic reporting systems. However, if you’re staying at a friend’s home or another private residence, you need to go to the local police station and register in person.
Wrong. People that live here (in the EU) need to register. I can stay with friends abroad for some time without having to tell the government, as long as I don't take up residency.
I am talking about non-EU citizens who enter some of EU countries. No matter if they stay at the hotel or privately at relatives or friends they will be registered or must register at the police.
The rise of China has done a lot to destroy the neoliberal, globalist dream.
Letting them cheat the globalist system (e.g. violating IP laws, human rights violations, Uyghur/Tibetan genocide) may have been fine when they were desperately poor, but there was always an implicit assumption that they would eventually start playing by the rules and culturally liberalize. But they're not. How can we hold onto ideals like "diversity is our strength" and open borders are good when China is kicking ass and threatening the balance of power as an insular ethnostate with one of the lowest rates of immigrants on the planet?
And now they're growing to a power level that threatens to rival the US and its authority to police this global system we've created. That isn't stable, and the west would be insane to not shut China out and take a step back from our open, globalist ideals until we sort out this geopolitical game of thrones.
But the IP laws are visibly stupid, their role in the system is prevent success stories like China where some plucky upstart vaults to the forefront of the industrial world and drags a billion people out of poverty. The response to China achieving such success by ignoring IP laws should be to recognise the laws have been disasters and then to release the limits worst of the limits they impose on Western innovators.
A huge part of the software industry is there because of explicit GPL-style agreements defang the intent of IP laws while working inside the legal requirements they impose. The west should allow good ideas to be deployed in its own industrial processes.
So this shows how much the West considers liberalism and open markets to be its "values" when they throw that completely away when they're economically threatened. This tells me that in hardship is when people show their true colors. The money is the true "value", everything else is just a side show.
When you're playing prisoner's dilemma games, and your co-player is consistently defecting, you can only play cooperate for so long. Tit for tat is the only way you don't get majorly screwed by the defector over time.
Its quiet easy to understand, you can be liberal and free so long as wealth keeps flowing into your part of the world. What are you going to do make fun of becoming more wealthier.
The liberalism and freedom stops once too much money flows out of your part of the world, hence companies like palantir popping up like mushrooms. No one likes to be made fun of when they are in a declining trajectory.
No, just no. I get where you’re coming from, but I disagree in the strongest terms that copying China is the way forward. Closed, centralized models can scale quickly, as China did, but open models generate more frontier innovation and resilience. Iirc, nearly half of our unicorns have immigrant founders.
Sure, let’s harden IP and other trade laws, and punish China for violations (start treating them as an adult, a nation peer, instead of a rowdy child). But giving up our strategic advantage because China was able to semi-copy-us without having that advantage would be a huge mistake imo. I’m not saying America doesn’t need major changes, but I don’t think the way forward is to close our borders to global talent. Instead, let’s take advantage of our superpower status to implement UHC and UBI, to make our nation even more attractive to talented immigrants.
this is what most WEIRD people do not understand: (Western-Educated-Industrial-Rich-Democratic) - by today it looks like that the Chinese system may proof to be more "performant" on most/several (all?) levels. Its hard to accept for libertarian minds, i guess.
Once here on HN someone wrote like: "democratic systems seems to be too slow to adapt in world changing at our current speed".
China did some vey wise decisions from their perspective; think about this joint-venture thingy that foreign companies need to have a JV partner which always holds at least 50.1% - very clever! Why did no western state do this? Its one of the by far smartest decision that you could do.
This JV obssession is weird, China basically admitted that they can never compete on ICE cars and bet on EVs instead, either this JV model doesn't actually work or what was transferred do not have much value.
Now people claim they stole their IPs through JVs and that's why they are good at making EVs, this theory doesn't add up.
Also, what China offered is a vast untapped market, no one forced these companies to go to China to set up JVs and start picking up gold down the street, this was way before WTO and China was not at all obligated to open it's market, let alone for free.
Now ask one question, what the EU has to offer to "force" China to set up JVs? Guaranteed billion dollars profit?
EU car market is crowded and full of incumbents, Chinese cars represent a low single digit market share despite the weekly "China is taking over the EU car market" news article.
China bet on EVs because of national security. China has less reliable access to oil than many other countries and the US can choke off delivery of oil to China through bottlenecks if it comes to war. Investing in solar, wind and nuclear makes sense in their predicament. "Green energy" and "saving the planet" are secondary and mostly marketing by comparison.
Countries hitting their industrialization stride have a bloom of real world applicable talent that they can direct to these things in a way that is a little harder for others. Especially when you have a huge population.
It isn't just the US, Russia has oil and shares a land border with China. However, Russia isn't always friendly with China, nor is the middle east, and anyways, it just seems like a headache to deal with them + the petro dollar when they have plenty of energy to tap at home.
Air pollution was also a huge problem, aside from national security. China's empahsis on STEM and the fact that they've been a huge source of engineering/science/tech talent meant China could just tap its own human resources rather than making them go abroad for decent jobs. The fact that they also know how to build things and have set up all the infra for that is just another bonus.
China is willing to play ball in less developed countries, and the deals they setup is not just Chinese companies coming in and dominating the market, they are also partnering with and trying to raise local companies as well. That won't work in Europe or the US, at least for now.
It's true that Russia and China share a border, but the infrastructure to move oil across it at large scale barely exists and I got the impression the geology is very unfavorable for it. It's probably easier to ship it, but future pipeline expansions may still happen.
The whole Belt and Road initiative seemed to mimic a Korean style labor export to increase the inflows of currency into the country while keeping people employed, but I also kind of figured it was aimed at reducing the friction of future resource transportation between the countries.
Remember 10 foot tall Ivan? Apart from eugenics experiments on the basketball court, neither are the Chinese. In light of gross over-spending on showcase infrastructure projects, and overbuilding housing where people don't want to live, over-praising the CCP's system for training and promoting leaders is not going to make assessments of China more accurate.
I agree that our system (America’s, specifically) is too slow, but it’s not inherent to democracy, it’s the fact we only have elections every few years, because these rules were written in the 1700s when holding an election / voting in an election was difficult. No snap elections when the government is about to shut down (would’ve prevented all the nonsense of the last month and a half).
This isn’t cope. China has virtually no cultural exports of note compared to its size, except some gacha games (that are still mainly voiced in Japanese, which does have cultural exports). Every time I visit, I have to accept that my internet is going to be ridiculously unreliable and throttled and flaky.
I’m not saying China is “wrong”, but it’s not the obvious winner to me. Nor is it to my Chinese-born spouse who moved here for the greater opportunities and freedom.
It's difficult to export culture when the receiving cultures don't speak the language, don't share religion, etc. US has a big benefit of being part of the Anglophone world going back to it's founding and more recently with Western European dominance from WW2 where basically everyone there knows some level of English. Also, don't forget China has suffered from great "humiliation" for the last few hundred years and hasn't been in much of a position to export much of anything until recently. Furthermore, the main reason the US has absorbed some SK and Japanese cultural things is we brought them into our neoempire.
Kids in America are hopelessly addicted to Tiktok but that doesn't count as a cultural export.
Most the items in people's homes are made in China but that doesn't count either.
Chinese rappers could be dominating the pop charts and we would just say rap was invented in America so that doesn't count.
All the American kids could be learning to play the guzheng and we would just say we invented a new American style of playing the guzheng, doesn't count.
Who forced 'the west' to do that?
American and European companies lived well this way for decades. Buying from and selling to China has been highly profitable.
In fact Germany is doing terribly right now as China is buying LESS than before.
So the answer is to do... erm... even less trade?
Trumpian anti-globalist idiocy is growing in people's minds like a brain cancer
I don't get why Huawei gets specific hate? Shouldn't this equally apply to all Chinese vendors? I wouldn't expect any are less susceptible to government control?
ZTE is also under scrutiny. The reason it's only Huawei and ZTE is that other Chinese providers are so insignificant that the telecoms will likely be able to replace the infrastructure themselves with spares or consolidation. However, in an emergency, the government would have to foot the bill for replacing Huawei/ZTE systems quickly, as the telecoms couldn't finance this and lack of capacity would mean very high prices.
Huawei simply accumulated a much more court-defensible paper trail—dominant presence, documented code issues, clearer evidence of state leverage, and heavier export-control exposure.
Huawei is often blamed for stealing information from Nortel that led to Nortel’s bankruptcy, both information about deals being made that let Huawei undercut them and technical product details that allowed Huawei to more easily be a substitute for Nortel products
Nortel collapsed long before Huawei even started competing outside of China in any serious way.
Nortel was severely hit by the bursting of the tech bubble, and then it got caught faking its financial figures. To blame that on Huawei is just a rewrite of history.
The concern comes from the legal environment these companies operate in. Any vendor that can be compelled by its government to cooperate in ways we can’t verify becomes a risk in critical infrastructure.
They just found kill switches in Chinese buses, so any Chinese network equipment is 100% guaranteed to be backdoored.
Who do you think hacks our hospitals? Who do you think attacks infrastructure? Some kid in Lebanon isn’t going to attack a hospital. We’re at war, everyone knows it but us.
The fundamental problem with the newer Huawei equipment is it's the best stuff. Others just aren't competing properly at all.
As the west detaches from China, for quite plausible security concerns, it's going to find it expensive on both ends: they will be paying more and getting less.
Is 6G even a thing? From either a bandwidth demand perspective or a financial perspective? Every US wireless service just about bankrupted themselves rolling out 5G.
I guess you must live in a much more heavily populated environment than I do. For myself, I'm still trying to figure out remote 5G IOT connectivity that doesn't require $1k in hardware. Non-consumer-grade 5G hardware is incredibly expensive still, which is why we are still deploying new 4G stuff.
> 6G aims to achieve higher data rates, lower latency, and greater energy efficiency than 5G.[8] Planned advances include new air interface designs, improved coding and modulation, and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces.[9] Research also explores integration with satellite, Wi-Fi, and non-terrestrial networks, as well as distributed edge computing for AR, VR, and AI applications.[10]
5G is a thing (5Ge excepted). 6G is aspirational and recycling use cases that go all the way back to 3G, like telesurgery. It's going to stay aspirational at least until 5G millimeter wave really works and can be widely deployed.
"According to the NGMN Alliance, 6G development should focus on demonstrable user needs and avoid unnecessary replacement of existing 5G radio access network equipment."
Which company will design and make 6G telco hardware in Germany?
I guess it will be 3/4/5G for a while, until they can someday cover the country just barely, and then 6G a decade and half later than everyone else (or is it by giving up sovereignty by buying US stuff instead?)
Sorry for being hopeless, but Germany has been very good at proving its inability to fix telco issues (or its train issues…).
Blackrock and Vanguard own surprisingly large portions of Rheinmetall, Siemens, Airbus, SAP and other German government/defense/security contractors. If avoiding their investments is the goal, there’s a lot of work to do.
blackrock and vanguard do index funds, yeah? They have substantial investments in everything on the market that's doing well enough to get on indexes. I don't see how you can avoid that?
Of course, that's the whole plan. The thing about index funds people don't see is they're giving away the voting rights to institutions controlled by who knows...
This is retaliation for China recently phasing out European gears, which should be expected after Europe already banned Chinese gears in effect.
China for years has been allocating a share of the market to European gears, considering their domestic offerings are much cheaper, this was basically a reciprocal gesture, but it's not needed now for neither side.
Germany has been reluctant to completely remove its Huawei gears, but now that German cars are losing ground in China, they probably felt it's time to make the move.
Wouldn't it be wiser, fairer, and less xenophobic/nationalistic appearing to simply require particular audit/compliance/certification requirements and then disallow nonconforming equipment/systems?
Because if something can't be sold under brand X specifically, then brand Y will be invented to circumvent it, hence it's a superficial and ineffective process to forbid a brand by name.
Rigorous audit and compliance processes should assure products are tested, supported, and hopefully minimize the risks of hostile anti-functionality.
Perhaps some key tech bits are so fundamental that they should be grown domestically without necessarily a huge profit motive to offer reliable components for strategic infrastructure.
Good. Don't forget their incredibly affordable and attractive smartphones and the fact that they have almost completely captured the market for cellular transceiver chips used in USB mobile modems, both of which are excellent products for espionage and weaponization just like their cellular network equipment.
If secure phones were legal, we'd be treating the modem chip as part of the hostile network - the application processor would encrypt all data before sending it.
I’m not familiar with the Huawei matter because it’s similar not something I have to concern myself with, but can you point to something specific or a place where I could get some facts on why Huawei is justifiably frowned upon?
I have never seen anything but the various broad claims in the news and by politicians that seem to always just kind of come down to “China bad” as evidence. Maybe I just didn’t care enough to notice, but I would have thought that if there was something real to how Huawei hardware will make the sky fall, the powers that be would have surely made that case with clear and irrefutable proof.
Thanks for providing anything you might be able to point me towards that goes beyond “China bad”, regardless of how anyone feels about China.
None of this really backs up the idea of "cheap crap", though, or really concerns me as a consumer. Hell, if anything "IP theft" sounds like "competitive product" to my ear. May we all live to see an explosion of IP "theft".
> I’m not familiar with the Huawei matter because it’s similar not something I have to concern myself with, but can you point to something specific or a place where I could get some facts on why Huawei is justifiably frowned upon?
Try to use their routers as someone with needs greater than "get into the internet". Their UI is horribly slow and clunky, you'll need to reboot them every few months because something hangs itself and about every year or two they manage to get 0wned by a wormable exploit. On top of that, analyses have shown their firmware to be utterly rancid [1], although I do admit that this analysis is six years old.
> Maybe I just didn’t care enough to notice, but I would have thought that if there was something real to how Huawei hardware will make the sky fall, the powers that be would have surely made that case with clear and irrefutable proof.
The thing Western politicians are afraid of is running into another scenario like in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where Viasat was hacked by the Russians leading to serious outages [2], or that the equipment - particularly anything with radios attached - can be "remote bricked" similar to how Israel detonated Hezbollah's pagers. It's bad enough we can't be sure that our own equipment is reasonably secure from cyber attacks, but Huawei is a complete blackbox. We need to prepare for a war scenario with China, either directly (the worst case), but at the very least as a side effect of an invasion of Taiwan. In either case I expect the CCP to behave like Mossad, cripple us piece by piece.
Even if the CCP never decides to invade Taiwan, it still makes sense to refuse their companies entry into our markets as long as our companies aren't welcome in theirs. I am a big friend of reciprocity and China hasn't given us much.
On top of that, Huawei was under fire for alleged sanctions violations and IP theft [3].
You and I are content with it, but these standards were never really about our individual and immediate experiences. It's about concurrent capacity for the growing grid as a whole.
Unless you live in an urban environment where millimeter wave is competently deployed, you should curb your contentment with 5G. 6G sounds like a distraction from the lack of full 5G capabilities in most places.
On the other hand Spain is using Huawei servers for almost all of their sensitive data. I wonder how the UE, and NATO, will react to that, because they're using Huawei for Social Security data, wiretapping data (SITEL), or even Intelligence Services data.
Scale. Huawei has 1.4 billion customers just in China. They have double this around the world. The US and European markets have become small for the scale of next generations telecom.
All this is because they're afraid $COUNTRY inserted malware in the chips, right? So industry can solve this. Make a device that has all the hardware for networks, but without the chip. Make a simple hardware standard for the chip interface. Publish the standard.
Now any country can make a chip that plugs into the networking device. Just buy your own country's spyware-laden chip, plug it into the NID. Install your software in the NID, the same way you'd install Linux on an AMD vs Intel computer. Works for PCs; it can work for routers (they're all just computers). Choose open source or an expensive proproprietary OS. Choose open hardware or proprietary hardware. Let people assemble them from parts so they can choose their level of surveillance-avoidance.
And you're done. No more banning entire manufacturers; just ban those specific kinds of chips, but buy the cheap chinese hardware sans-chips. Feels a lot more sustainable than global instability and trade wars over what is essentially just a lack of design.
(I'm aware how specialized router hw/sw is, I worked for Cisco once upon a time. but it can all be abstracted. it's just not in the interest of corporate profits to do so; but at this point, i think ramping down the china-phobia and stabilizing trade is a bigger concern)
No. In the 2019 EU 5G Risk Assessment and the 2020 5G Toolbox, EU regulators gave three reasons why no US vendors triggered the "high-risk supplier" designation: US vendors weren't building the 5G core in Europe; EU regulators concluded that US law does allow compelled cooperation but accompanied by independent courts, adversarial process, and statutory limits; and no European regulator found technical-assurance failures in US vendors comparable to Huawei's.
If you don't like what the EU Commission is doing, you can vote them out. (Just kidding, no you can't.)
Cisco complied with the NSA PRISM program (Snowden leaks) and were putting hardware backdoors in their hardware on request from the NSA, for hardware that was destined for overseas.
This summer i was traveling through Germany and god fucking dam their telecommunication infrastructure is just 3rd world tier, so freaking bad. Constant signal loss, 5g was a rare sight etc.
Amazing to read in a site full of devs and cybersecurity experts how willing they are to use Huawei's tech despite all the international theft and security issues, some exposed, and but most of it kept under wraps until investigations are complete.
And some even shill the conspiracy that the NSA will install backdoors in US equipment... I would like to think it's Chinese agents at work, but most likely it's regular people.
For this reason I'm glad politicians are taking the initiative, despite the population's awareness of what Huawei really is. And sry but I don't have time to "prove it with irrefutable evidence" as some may demand. Plz spend your own time researching the facts.
I feel that the majority in this thread are acting less in Europe's interests than effectively saying "fuck you" to Germany here for acting against China's interests. Or perhaps they're reaching as quickly as possible to blame everything on USA. But that's the consequence of letting outsiders into the conversation, everything has really turned into a "water armies", as defined by the Chinese themselves.
In any case, I do hope that outsiders in this thread realize this isn't indicative of what Westerners think, so as far much as what their enemies are thinking. Do you really think people like these who are so quick to mock Europe are really your friends?
"When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together".
I’m working my way through “The End of the World is Just the Beginning”, and the main thesis is that everyone is preparing for demographic collapse. Global populations are declining almost everywhere, and this breaks the current global order. For example, what does the Chinese economy look like when all the people subject to the one child policy retire? What are the knock on effects of labor becoming more expensive almost everywhere? Can immigration solve this problem? What about the cultural friction of mass immigration? What happens to the places that everyone emigrates from?
The book basically argues that a significant amount of the world is headed for destabilization, and a destabilized world involves a lot less trust.
Side note: personally, I find the writing style and general tone to be hyperbolic, but some of the analysis is interesting.
I think we are already seeing this happening as it is not rocket science. US is not willing to be the world police anymore, because it is more and more expensive and some of the elites and many ordinary people feel that they are not gaining much as return.
So this left and is going to leave a lot of power gaps around the globes, and regional wars are picking up paces.
China is not particularly happy about this, because it is not ready and perhaps don't even want to be the next world police. US has always wanted China to share the responsibility but China is hesitant, which is understandable. Plus most of the people in China do not want a destabilized world, for now.
What I'd expect that China will gradually lose steam (actually people on HN already observed since like 10 years ago) when the people born in the 1970s/1980s retire. The officials who are resistant to the idea of expansion (because it damages their power base) are going to retire then. I'd expect the world to be a LOT hotter then. So that's about 2030-2040 and might come a bit earlier as the other players are already moving the pieces(e.g. Russia).
Not sure how to prepare my family through that time, though. I mean, it's just my guess, so my wife just rolls up her eye and wants to buy more houses/stocks because "houses/stocks always go up if you look at the chart". What I think is that the whole economical-geopolitico logic is going to change forever, and what is gone is gone for good. The next globalization is maybe 50 years away but we will never see it. From hindsight, I believe the 2008 financial crisis was the turning points. They managed to drag it for another 20 years, which I send my kudos.
Again, just my guess. I have always wronged in the pessimistic side so I hope I'm wrong this time again.
So fun that the west is moving in a direction where we are subject to all the negatives of both capitalism (wealth consolidation) and socialism (lack of competition).
Whose sovereignity though? And to replace it with what? As almost all 6G kit builds on 5G kit which is at most 40% Huawei FRAND patented.So whatever the path HW gets paid.
As an aside the whole OpenRAN debacle to replcae 5G kit seems to have peterd out after the initial hype. This move also ignores economies of scale - if the rest of the planet is on HW kit lowerig cost even with razor thin margins.The opps Nokia/Ericsson would either have to get massive subsidies to make financial sense or have a worse cost/benefit ratio.
One thing that gets glossed over though , is that the end user speeds/stability arent the main driver for 5/6G advancement (even though thats where all the marketing hype went) of course mobile device connectivity is growing and most users interaction online is primarily mobile. The big draw use case is the industrial and automation applications, where HW has a signifiant lead - from autiomated ports that aut load/unload to automated 'dark factories' that run without human intervention.Thats where the 'real' application is. The other use case for end users most likely will be in the autonomus cars and humanoid robots once they take off to any significant degree.
The only other way to make up the requisite volume from such an endeavor is one that Brussels was floating about a month ago. The Global Gateway funds to assist developing countries will come with ano HW clause.Might just be the final nail in the coffin in EU efforts to retain friends and influence with the rest of the planet.Whose main concern is living a modern life with the infra not requiring you mortgage your childrens future.
You don't need a crazy fast connection for most of this automation stuff, because it has to be able to operate offline successfully to start with. Any dark factory should be running on its own wireless network anyway, not some cellular network. Who would do that? Even for a local wireless network, why would a Huawei router be any better?
To me, this was never about 5G or 6G. This was always about CCP controlled network hardware getting installed across the globe taking advantage of a natural iterative next step in network improvement which would be fine if the CCP wasn't absolutely psycho and immoral, but they seem to be. I'm sure there are many well-meaning and smart people who work at Huawei, but unfortunately any advantage a Chinese company gets in a foreign market becomes potentially leveraged as CCP advantage and control.
Many countries leverage their companies abroad if something is important enough, but few countries are as bold or blatant as China in this regard. Nobody is worried about most of these countries excessively abusing their influence abroad, because most care about their reputation. China is basically untrusted by all of its neighbors and doesn't seem to care about authentic reputation over manipulation. To them, "harmony" just seems like a way to misspell "control". Balance to them means nothing if they aren't the center of gravity.
For as old and advanced as China has become, it discarded all of its slow wisdom to be wrong as fast as possible. Can a country like that really be trusted? No, it can't. There isn't any country on Earth that can be trusted 100%, but the CCP is just far below the threshold of even tolerable levels of trust.
There is nothing 5G or 6G provides that is worth letting the CCP control your networks. Aside from just spying or hacking, imagine World War 3 comes around and the CCP just decides it's time to shut off all our networks? Trust is almost always more important than speed.
To steelman some of the points youve posted
>You don't need a crazy fast connection for most of this automation stuff, because it has to be able to operate offline successfully to start with
As i mentioned youre looking at it as a consumer, this is industrial systems.Its not about speed primarily but latency - costs of deployment and maintainance.Your COTS router is not being installed wher million dollar assembly lines are operating, and for any serious business concern low opex/capex are first and foremost as well as reproducibility for expansion. KUKA robot arms are not being connected to TPlink routers.Together with the nature of Just-In-Time manufacturing , instant data for maintainance and logistics is crucial. Ditto for the automated ports [1]
>There is nothing 5G or 6G provides that is worth letting the CCP control your networks. Aside from just spying or hacking
The two standards are currently accelerating both consumer and industrial changes worldwide.There are some networks in GlobalSouth countries whose speed/latencies will rival even those deployed in major US cities. Its a question of leveraging future infrstructure for productivity and improving living standards.
As for espionage and hacking that was stillthere even with dialup modems and fax machines.
Regarding countries using their leverage via multicorps abroad , you really should read up on the US CLOUD act, patriot act etc and cast a cursory glance at entities as benign sounding as Nestle(child slaves in W.Africa) Chiquita(Death Squads in S.America) PullMan Cigarettes (suing to block ati cigaratte ads in SE.Asia) ,not adding historical ones like Swiss CryptoAG.
In short multicorps are immoral profit extracting entities and on the global stage they act sometimes directly with their parent county to further whatever agandas they have. Thus far no Chinese companies have been implicated in any such shenanigans - as im pretty sure if it had happened it would be published about in banner headlines 24/7/365.
As it stands all the accusations are simply alllegations of a future scenario , which most people specify any sensible person should be able to mitigate with good security architecture and practices.
[1]https://govinsider.asia/intl-en/article/how-huaweis-5g-solut...
If you want to steel man the argument it’s worth acknowledging that China is also concerned with backdoors in what they import.
> allegations of a future scenario
There’s been plenty of CCP aligned hacking, backdoors, and industrial espionage people can point to. Expecting a bad actor to continue there behavior is a little more than allegations of a future scenario.
The dollar value of the assembly lines isn't as important as the scale and architecture of the information that has to move.
I could see scenarios where there is a high level of variability on the line and it requires a very large machine learning model to process the many possible variations, so maybe you send a realtime video feed or still images to a server and try to optimize for the fastest response time rather than paying to run all that compute at each station. Maybe you're doing this for 5000 stations.
You can also imagine small instructions needing to arrive with very low latency where bandwidth isn't the issue really and straight line of sight wireless should presumably be the lowest latency.
Neither of those problems require or justify Huawei anything and those are not likely to be most factories.
> Its a question of leveraging future infrstructure for productivity and improving living standards. As for espionage and hacking that was stillthere even with dialup modems and fax machines.
You don't improve the lives of future generations in your country by letting an adversary control your infrastructure. That is easy. Why would you even consider that? There's a list of priorities. You aren't starting at the top.
> Regarding countries using their leverage via multicorps abroad
No doubt, people should always push back against any companies proven to be doing things that are problematic. It doesn't only apply to countries. Still, I restate my point about trust. A lot of these companies (and countries) legitimately care about their reputations, not only because a destroyed reputation can hurt their profits (if you believe that's all they care about, which is very cynical), but because many people would rather do the right thing than the wrong thing if given the choice.
Sometimes these organizations are so big, they don't even know all the details about what's happening at the ground level until it gets reported on by 3rd parties.
In terms of US government influence over networks, the US government is structured very differently. In the US, it's a national tradition to not excessively trust the government, because the history of the world says that's a bad idea. If the US abuses its trust to a critical degree, it can face pushback in a real way that isn't even allowed in China. I believe in the feedback mechanism loop within the US more than what China has, by far.
Your argument comes across very empty to me in this regard.
Why don't you steelman your own intial argument?
ignoring the weird moralizing about china, i think the parent comment is indeed referring to factories etc running their own 5G networks, that is very much a thing; ie aws used to have a private 5g offering, there are some open source projects, more that i can't remember
That's fair, I just don't see 5G or 6G being make-or-break for any kinds of manufacturing. Do any examples exist where this is the case?
The good old ccp rule. You can tell how deranged a comment is by the number of times it has "ccp" in it.
> CCP wasn't absolutely psycho and immoral
As opposed to what? The US? The EU? Germany? Seems like the CCP is the least psycho and immoral of the bunch.
> but few countries are as bold or blatant as China in this regard.
China is the least bold and blatant out of the major players.
> Nobody is worried about most of these countries excessively abusing their influence abroad
Everyone is. It's just that "those countries" are in no position to fight back against the US.
> Trust is almost always more important than speed.
If trust was important, then germany woud choose "ccp's" huawei. After all, it's germany's "allies" that spy on them the most. And the "ccp" would win by providing the world with the most trustworthy network hardware.
The reason I specify the CCP specifically rather than always stating China, is because the government is not "of", "by" and "for" the people. There are many Chinese people and only a small fraction of them are part of that government structure. The propaganda battle around whether Taiwan is a part of China or not also doesn't help.
The rest of your commentary suggests you need to broaden your horizons for where you get information.
We could start treating Chinese patents with the same respect they treated the rest of the world’s, maybe.
We could. But then we throw away the basis on how we treat European, Australian, Japanese, American, etc. patents.
You either respect patents or you don't. There is no middle ground.
Why would we change the way we respect those? None of those nations engage in the same uncompetitive practices that the Chinese do with respect to patents and IP.
> The Global Gateway funds to assist developing countries will come with ano HW clause.
So they only want to "save" the Planet and its (presumably poorer) people if said poorer people acquiesce with their imperialistic reflexes, tale as old as time when it comes to the West.
But not sure why would they need the Global South's money for all of this? Aren't they, the magnificent West, big enough to shoulder almost any costs? Especially when it comes to "strategic" concerns. Or so they were saying.
The way most of these deals get structured especially when multicorps get involved is requiring the donor gov to guarantee the loan. Which gets routed to the recepient country, kickbacks get shaved off and re-routed back to the donor country. In this instance though my thinking is that for competeive pricing they would need volume , and prerequisite demand. This would be one way to generate that demand.In a way similar to the whole Tariff circus just more upfront.
Good attempt comrade. China + Russia + Iran fueling the war with Europe. They openly declare a war on way of living of western world . Sure , build critical infrastructure independently is insane.
The Russia, China, and Iran axis doesn’t exist. That’s American propaganda linking together three countries it dislikes.
Iran has loose relations with both which are not dissimilar to the one it has with the EU. Its conflict is also fairly limited to Israel and the Middle East.
Meanwhile, Russia and China have an ambivalent relationship where they are key economic partners with complementary economies but have no official military alliance and are somewhat wary of each other as Russia fears a potential Chinese invasion.
Isn't it the other way around? I mean, I keep seeing western people advertising that the ways of living in those countries are wrong and they must change, while I don't often see anyone urging western countries to change their way of living.
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> China + Russia + Iran fueling the war with Europe.
It's the other way around. Europe fueling war with china + russia + iran.
It isn't china sending warships along german, british, european coastline. It wasn't russia that overthrew democracy in ukraine. And it isn't iran bombing europe.
> They openly declare a war on way of living of western world .
No. You once again have it backwards. It's the western world declaring war on them. The genuine head scratcher is why china, russian and iran haven't formally joined forces to fight back.
Does China enforce western patent laws?
> “We’ll discuss with industry what we can do, not only to make ourselves independent from China, but also for example independent from the USA, independent from the big tech companies,” Merz said.
Good to know it's not just China.
> Merz ruled out fully decoupling from China, which is Germany’s second-biggest trading partner. “We can’t do that,” he said. “China can’t do that, but we can do it even less.”
And even better to know that the move is practical and understands who has the upper hand.
At the same time they are exploring the use of Palantir and want to use more of Microsofts 365 cloud.
This is all just talk. Either there are very real security concerns or someone lobbied heavily.
This is the most incredible thing about it. As soon as Palantir has a foot in the the door of the authorities, only a disaster will be able to get them banned. And that disaster is way past the point of all the citizen's data getting collected and analyzed in real-time, because that's what our authorities want: full insights.
> Good to know it's not just China.
If you believe this I have a bridge to sell you. They're using this to hide the real reason for the move, which is to do Washington's bid, just like a good colony does.
Yeah, it's just lip service until a democrat is president again. Same happened last time, it's like we time-travelled back to 2016, every argument is exactly the same in politics and media.
I won't be surprised if they do the Washington's bid. A few years ago, they wouldn't even consider it. By the time we all die, may be they will.
And use American Cisco equipment with definitely no NSA backdoors instead?
The article states that they're pushing for independence from American tech as well
I guess they will use Ericsson and Nokia equipment instead.
That is called being on the other side of an airtight hatch (h/t Raymond Chen)
The US has troops, tanks, aircraft, even nuclear weapons stationed in German.
Sovereignty vis-a-vis the United States is not something on the table.
It's an east vs west thing.
More like west vs rest of the world. Its cold war round 2 but this time its the west that is starting to hide behind a iron/cyber wall.
lmao China is already in a cyber wall. What's wrong with building defenses if your opponent already has? What have they built the defenses for?
At the current rate the US will become an "even further east".
What does this even mean?
What it means is that in the future Europe will have to consider a Trumpist USA to be like a 21st Century version of a totalitarian Eastern Bloc or Soviet country: Orbanism, absurd projectionism, dangerous allies, the state demanding a share of businesses and directing sales and mergers, openly describing the EU (and now the UK) as not friends or even as enemies, trumped up prosecutions of political enemies, assuming that foreign surveillance is built into its products, etc.
Some of these things are already here.
*protectionism
More expensive US Cisco equipment, at least Trump will be happy for it.
[dead]
Better late than never.
China has so many anti-Foreigner laws for doing business in China.
West has made China rich and powerful in exchange for cheap labour.
I'd more say: they made clear rules if you want to play business in China.
Europe never set any boundaries. Honestly our fault.
Now EU is making clear rules against China. EU should apply exactly the same laws against Chinese like Chinese do against foreigners.
China shouldn't complain, especially don't bitch about racism.
> especially don't bitch about racism.
The "most racist" places are typically the most diverse and most multicultural. They have more exposed tissue than places where minorities make up single digit percentage points, so you see injustices more often in these places. And it follows that it gets reported on at volume.
By that same coin, these places also have more friendly interactions by volume than places without diverse racial makeups. You just don't see that reported because it's not news.
America, "racist", simply has a very diverse population.
The American South, "racist against Black people", simply has the nation's largest population of Black people almost to the point the racial makeup is bimodal.
Texas, "racist against Latinos", - same thing.
You see the bad apples, but you don't see the overwhelming degree to which society works with people together in a melting pot.
I grew up in the South, where every second person is Black. I fly to SF where there are barely any Black people at all and have dinner conversations with people calling my region racist. Sometimes the people saying these things grew up in all-white cities in New England. I have to laugh inside.
SF region is gonna be racist among other things itself. That is true of all of America but there’s levels to this and American south is more racist. Don’t have to grow up in a diverse place to see/know that.
That's the same emotional dumb thought process that is sending US economy into tailspin with traiffs.
> they made clear rules if you want to play business in China.
Not really:
https://www.hudson.org/technology/china-ignores-rule-of-law-...
Apple CEO Tim Cook "secretly" signed an agreement worth more than $275 billion with Chinese officials, promising that Apple would help to develop China's economy and technological capabilities - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...
Our leaders in the West have been very naive. Also the Chinese "elite capture" program has been very effective.
You mean old we-don’t-care-bout-human-and-environmental-rights trick?
Let’s face it, nobody would care if China just would be a subordinate receiver of orders.
As soon they became a competitor there was a problem
China was suppose to become a giant sweatshop which would be allowed to gain subsistence wealth. Just enough to produce and consume western product but not wealthy enough to ever outgrow their station in the world.
And that is the core contention for the anti-China rhetoric. That they are a competitor. There are a billion and one reasons people say they don't like China, but the core issue is competition.
> As soon they became a competitor there was a problem
Was there? It seems to me trade and offshoring continued even after they became a competitor. And then continued after they strong-armed Western corporations to invest in China [1], destroyed Western corporations through espionage [2,3], or through subsidy-enabled dumping prices and preferential treatment [4,4.1], after they extracted groveling apologies from Western firms [5], and after they started operating literal police stations on Western soil [6], while turning Western countries into subordinate receivers of orders [7,8].
I guess you were hoping your framing would guilt people into not seeing the threat?
[1] Apple CEO Tim Cook "secretly" signed an agreement worth more than $275 billion with Chinese officials, promising that Apple would help to develop China's economy and technological capabilities - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33758673
[3] https://globalnews.ca/news/7275588/inside-the-chinese-milita...
[4] https://www.dw.com/en/from-solar-to-evs-how-china-is-overpro...
[4.1] EU: Anti-dumping probe into China solar panels - https://apnews.com/general-news-e16007adf4bd468d9acf849734d2...
[5] Mercedes-Benz apologizes to Chinese for quoting Dalai Lama - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mercedes-benz-china-gaffe...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic...
[7] FIPA agreement with China: What's really in it for Canada? - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/fipa-agreement-with-china-wha...
[8] Posters depicting Hong Kong protests removed by Massey University within 12 hours - https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/116723925/posters-depicting...
Western state department and corporations aren’t the same thing. China is New Democracy where the classes are all represented with the state at the top. That’s not how Old Democracy (liberal democracy) works where the hierarchy between state and corporations is more mixed with corporations in more power.
You’re equating things that corporations are doing as if that’s in the best interest of the American state.
China is being seen the way it is by white people and white societies because they see a competitor.
the west made a deal with the devil for cheap plastic trinkets and reaped what it sowed. that's why switching the manufacturing to India won't do any good either.
domestic production or nothing. the "service economy" is a stupid concept.
Nobody would care if China were a democracy or at least not actively threatening Taiwan.
You've got the "elite capture" story the wrong way around. Most of the Chinese elite send their children to study in Europe and the US.
The only rule the Chinese play by is, "It's only immoral if you get caught".
I thought this law was invented by American business.
American business has this law:
"if your business practices are not immoral, then you're not doing it right!"
The Germans invented that too. That’s why the label Made In Germany exists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Germany
Well, as European, i have to clearly state - unfortunately - this is only because of what happened in the 20th century: WWII. This "event" changed somehow the psychology, not allowing the EU to "stand up straight with our shoulders back".
Unfortunately. With around 500m customers, we could be powerful. But we arent: Stumbling upon our own feeds.
The countries that comprise the EU had been among the biggest warmongers for centuries. The EU is the most successful peace project the continent has ever seen. And the reason for that is that every country refrained from trying to be a superpower on the continent.
The European mentality has real, tangible upsides for its continent. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work well in a larger world where other actors don’t share the same experience and values.
Just wanted to put that into perspective.
Not just for business. All foreigners in China must register their stay with the local police. Large hotels handle the registration automatically through their electronic reporting systems. However, if you’re staying at a friend’s home or another private residence, you need to go to the local police station and register in person.
It is exactly the same in every EU country. Foreigners get registered or must register in person.
Wrong. People that live here (in the EU) need to register. I can stay with friends abroad for some time without having to tell the government, as long as I don't take up residency.
I am talking about non-EU citizens who enter some of EU countries. No matter if they stay at the hotel or privately at relatives or friends they will be registered or must register at the police.
When you check into a hotel in Europe, they ask for your passport. Why do you think that is?
The rise of China has done a lot to destroy the neoliberal, globalist dream.
Letting them cheat the globalist system (e.g. violating IP laws, human rights violations, Uyghur/Tibetan genocide) may have been fine when they were desperately poor, but there was always an implicit assumption that they would eventually start playing by the rules and culturally liberalize. But they're not. How can we hold onto ideals like "diversity is our strength" and open borders are good when China is kicking ass and threatening the balance of power as an insular ethnostate with one of the lowest rates of immigrants on the planet?
And now they're growing to a power level that threatens to rival the US and its authority to police this global system we've created. That isn't stable, and the west would be insane to not shut China out and take a step back from our open, globalist ideals until we sort out this geopolitical game of thrones.
But the IP laws are visibly stupid, their role in the system is prevent success stories like China where some plucky upstart vaults to the forefront of the industrial world and drags a billion people out of poverty. The response to China achieving such success by ignoring IP laws should be to recognise the laws have been disasters and then to release the limits worst of the limits they impose on Western innovators.
A huge part of the software industry is there because of explicit GPL-style agreements defang the intent of IP laws while working inside the legal requirements they impose. The west should allow good ideas to be deployed in its own industrial processes.
> Letting them cheat the globalist system
They didn’t cheat, we did.
China didn’t force the west to make them their workbench.
China isn’t the first authoritarian country the western industry loved as workforce.
No human wasn’t a negative, it was one of the main selling points.
So this shows how much the West considers liberalism and open markets to be its "values" when they throw that completely away when they're economically threatened. This tells me that in hardship is when people show their true colors. The money is the true "value", everything else is just a side show.
No, it's just game theory.
When you're playing prisoner's dilemma games, and your co-player is consistently defecting, you can only play cooperate for so long. Tit for tat is the only way you don't get majorly screwed by the defector over time.
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Its quiet easy to understand, you can be liberal and free so long as wealth keeps flowing into your part of the world. What are you going to do make fun of becoming more wealthier.
The liberalism and freedom stops once too much money flows out of your part of the world, hence companies like palantir popping up like mushrooms. No one likes to be made fun of when they are in a declining trajectory.
No, just no. I get where you’re coming from, but I disagree in the strongest terms that copying China is the way forward. Closed, centralized models can scale quickly, as China did, but open models generate more frontier innovation and resilience. Iirc, nearly half of our unicorns have immigrant founders.
Sure, let’s harden IP and other trade laws, and punish China for violations (start treating them as an adult, a nation peer, instead of a rowdy child). But giving up our strategic advantage because China was able to semi-copy-us without having that advantage would be a huge mistake imo. I’m not saying America doesn’t need major changes, but I don’t think the way forward is to close our borders to global talent. Instead, let’s take advantage of our superpower status to implement UHC and UBI, to make our nation even more attractive to talented immigrants.
this is what most WEIRD people do not understand: (Western-Educated-Industrial-Rich-Democratic) - by today it looks like that the Chinese system may proof to be more "performant" on most/several (all?) levels. Its hard to accept for libertarian minds, i guess.
Once here on HN someone wrote like: "democratic systems seems to be too slow to adapt in world changing at our current speed".
China did some vey wise decisions from their perspective; think about this joint-venture thingy that foreign companies need to have a JV partner which always holds at least 50.1% - very clever! Why did no western state do this? Its one of the by far smartest decision that you could do.
This JV obssession is weird, China basically admitted that they can never compete on ICE cars and bet on EVs instead, either this JV model doesn't actually work or what was transferred do not have much value.
Now people claim they stole their IPs through JVs and that's why they are good at making EVs, this theory doesn't add up.
Also, what China offered is a vast untapped market, no one forced these companies to go to China to set up JVs and start picking up gold down the street, this was way before WTO and China was not at all obligated to open it's market, let alone for free.
Now ask one question, what the EU has to offer to "force" China to set up JVs? Guaranteed billion dollars profit?
EU car market is crowded and full of incumbents, Chinese cars represent a low single digit market share despite the weekly "China is taking over the EU car market" news article.
China bet on EVs because of national security. China has less reliable access to oil than many other countries and the US can choke off delivery of oil to China through bottlenecks if it comes to war. Investing in solar, wind and nuclear makes sense in their predicament. "Green energy" and "saving the planet" are secondary and mostly marketing by comparison.
Countries hitting their industrialization stride have a bloom of real world applicable talent that they can direct to these things in a way that is a little harder for others. Especially when you have a huge population.
It isn't just the US, Russia has oil and shares a land border with China. However, Russia isn't always friendly with China, nor is the middle east, and anyways, it just seems like a headache to deal with them + the petro dollar when they have plenty of energy to tap at home.
Air pollution was also a huge problem, aside from national security. China's empahsis on STEM and the fact that they've been a huge source of engineering/science/tech talent meant China could just tap its own human resources rather than making them go abroad for decent jobs. The fact that they also know how to build things and have set up all the infra for that is just another bonus.
China is willing to play ball in less developed countries, and the deals they setup is not just Chinese companies coming in and dominating the market, they are also partnering with and trying to raise local companies as well. That won't work in Europe or the US, at least for now.
It's true that Russia and China share a border, but the infrastructure to move oil across it at large scale barely exists and I got the impression the geology is very unfavorable for it. It's probably easier to ship it, but future pipeline expansions may still happen.
The whole Belt and Road initiative seemed to mimic a Korean style labor export to increase the inflows of currency into the country while keeping people employed, but I also kind of figured it was aimed at reducing the friction of future resource transportation between the countries.
As said: They made clever decissions while the greedy western company went into their trap :-)
Remember 10 foot tall Ivan? Apart from eugenics experiments on the basketball court, neither are the Chinese. In light of gross over-spending on showcase infrastructure projects, and overbuilding housing where people don't want to live, over-praising the CCP's system for training and promoting leaders is not going to make assessments of China more accurate.
I agree that our system (America’s, specifically) is too slow, but it’s not inherent to democracy, it’s the fact we only have elections every few years, because these rules were written in the 1700s when holding an election / voting in an election was difficult. No snap elections when the government is about to shut down (would’ve prevented all the nonsense of the last month and a half).
This isn’t cope. China has virtually no cultural exports of note compared to its size, except some gacha games (that are still mainly voiced in Japanese, which does have cultural exports). Every time I visit, I have to accept that my internet is going to be ridiculously unreliable and throttled and flaky.
I’m not saying China is “wrong”, but it’s not the obvious winner to me. Nor is it to my Chinese-born spouse who moved here for the greater opportunities and freedom.
It's difficult to export culture when the receiving cultures don't speak the language, don't share religion, etc. US has a big benefit of being part of the Anglophone world going back to it's founding and more recently with Western European dominance from WW2 where basically everyone there knows some level of English. Also, don't forget China has suffered from great "humiliation" for the last few hundred years and hasn't been in much of a position to export much of anything until recently. Furthermore, the main reason the US has absorbed some SK and Japanese cultural things is we brought them into our neoempire.
It is also the way we keep score in America.
Kids in America are hopelessly addicted to Tiktok but that doesn't count as a cultural export.
Most the items in people's homes are made in China but that doesn't count either.
Chinese rappers could be dominating the pop charts and we would just say rap was invented in America so that doesn't count.
All the American kids could be learning to play the guzheng and we would just say we invented a new American style of playing the guzheng, doesn't count.
K-pop from Korea, Anime / mangas from Japan, are example of asian cultural worldwide successes
>>China has virtually no cultural exports of note compared to its size,
++1
And? So what?
Who forced 'the west' to do that? American and European companies lived well this way for decades. Buying from and selling to China has been highly profitable. In fact Germany is doing terribly right now as China is buying LESS than before. So the answer is to do... erm... even less trade?
Trumpian anti-globalist idiocy is growing in people's minds like a brain cancer
I don't get why Huawei gets specific hate? Shouldn't this equally apply to all Chinese vendors? I wouldn't expect any are less susceptible to government control?
ZTE is also under scrutiny. The reason it's only Huawei and ZTE is that other Chinese providers are so insignificant that the telecoms will likely be able to replace the infrastructure themselves with spares or consolidation. However, in an emergency, the government would have to foot the bill for replacing Huawei/ZTE systems quickly, as the telecoms couldn't finance this and lack of capacity would mean very high prices.
Huawei at least is giving their source code to be scrutinized. What can be said of other vendors?
Huawei simply accumulated a much more court-defensible paper trail—dominant presence, documented code issues, clearer evidence of state leverage, and heavier export-control exposure.
Huawei is often blamed for stealing information from Nortel that led to Nortel’s bankruptcy, both information about deals being made that let Huawei undercut them and technical product details that allowed Huawei to more easily be a substitute for Nortel products
Nortel collapsed long before Huawei even started competing outside of China in any serious way.
Nortel was severely hit by the bursting of the tech bubble, and then it got caught faking its financial figures. To blame that on Huawei is just a rewrite of history.
Nothing here is about hate.
The concern comes from the legal environment these companies operate in. Any vendor that can be compelled by its government to cooperate in ways we can’t verify becomes a risk in critical infrastructure.
Nortel
Isn't the same true for American tech companies?
https://archive.li/18QJs
They just found kill switches in Chinese buses, so any Chinese network equipment is 100% guaranteed to be backdoored.
Who do you think hacks our hospitals? Who do you think attacks infrastructure? Some kid in Lebanon isn’t going to attack a hospital. We’re at war, everyone knows it but us.
The fundamental problem with the newer Huawei equipment is it's the best stuff. Others just aren't competing properly at all.
As the west detaches from China, for quite plausible security concerns, it's going to find it expensive on both ends: they will be paying more and getting less.
Is 6G even a thing? From either a bandwidth demand perspective or a financial perspective? Every US wireless service just about bankrupted themselves rolling out 5G.
Bandwidth demand is very much there...
My connection is 1.5 Gbits at 3am, but at peak time (7pm) I'm lucky to get 10 Mbits.
My network needs more capacity, and if 6G can offer it cheaper than building 5x more 5G masts, that's the route they'll have to take.
I guess you must live in a much more heavily populated environment than I do. For myself, I'm still trying to figure out remote 5G IOT connectivity that doesn't require $1k in hardware. Non-consumer-grade 5G hardware is incredibly expensive still, which is why we are still deploying new 4G stuff.
> Is 6G even a thing?
Currently being researched:
> 6G aims to achieve higher data rates, lower latency, and greater energy efficiency than 5G.[8] Planned advances include new air interface designs, improved coding and modulation, and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces.[9] Research also explores integration with satellite, Wi-Fi, and non-terrestrial networks, as well as distributed edge computing for AR, VR, and AI applications.[10]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6G
5G is a thing (5Ge excepted). 6G is aspirational and recycling use cases that go all the way back to 3G, like telesurgery. It's going to stay aspirational at least until 5G millimeter wave really works and can be widely deployed.
"According to the NGMN Alliance, 6G development should focus on demonstrable user needs and avoid unnecessary replacement of existing 5G radio access network equipment."
Which company will design and make 6G telco hardware in Germany?
I guess it will be 3/4/5G for a while, until they can someday cover the country just barely, and then 6G a decade and half later than everyone else (or is it by giving up sovereignty by buying US stuff instead?)
Sorry for being hopeless, but Germany has been very good at proving its inability to fix telco issues (or its train issues…).
Both Nokia (Finland) and Ericsson (Sweden) are great european alternatives. There is no need to reinvent the wheel in every EU country.
Both Nokia and Ericsson have substantial Blackrock and Vanguard investment.
Completely irrelevant. What matters it that the company itself is in a place where the EU/Germany can have oversight and control over it.
Blackrock and Vanguard own surprisingly large portions of Rheinmetall, Siemens, Airbus, SAP and other German government/defense/security contractors. If avoiding their investments is the goal, there’s a lot of work to do.
blackrock and vanguard do index funds, yeah? They have substantial investments in everything on the market that's doing well enough to get on indexes. I don't see how you can avoid that?
Of course, that's the whole plan. The thing about index funds people don't see is they're giving away the voting rights to institutions controlled by who knows...
Both Nokia and Ericson are owned over 10% by Blackrock+Vanguard
This is retaliation for China recently phasing out European gears, which should be expected after Europe already banned Chinese gears in effect.
China for years has been allocating a share of the market to European gears, considering their domestic offerings are much cheaper, this was basically a reciprocal gesture, but it's not needed now for neither side.
Germany has been reluctant to completely remove its Huawei gears, but now that German cars are losing ground in China, they probably felt it's time to make the move.
Wouldn't it be wiser, fairer, and less xenophobic/nationalistic appearing to simply require particular audit/compliance/certification requirements and then disallow nonconforming equipment/systems?
Because if something can't be sold under brand X specifically, then brand Y will be invented to circumvent it, hence it's a superficial and ineffective process to forbid a brand by name.
Rigorous audit and compliance processes should assure products are tested, supported, and hopefully minimize the risks of hostile anti-functionality.
Perhaps some key tech bits are so fundamental that they should be grown domestically without necessarily a huge profit motive to offer reliable components for strategic infrastructure.
Good. Don't forget their incredibly affordable and attractive smartphones and the fact that they have almost completely captured the market for cellular transceiver chips used in USB mobile modems, both of which are excellent products for espionage and weaponization just like their cellular network equipment.
If secure phones were legal, we'd be treating the modem chip as part of the hostile network - the application processor would encrypt all data before sending it.
Well, people will buy Huawei routers at home anyway.
TBH the solar stack from Huawei, Slim modular batteries and Inverter are pretty solid. https://solar.huawei.com/en/products/luna2000-5-10-15-s0/
Is that commonplace in Germany?
No, nobody in Germany uses Huawei routers. All big ISPs provide FRITZ!Boxes.
Sadly yes, cheap crap tends to be Huawei. Everyone with a modicum of technical understanding goes for a Fritzbox though.
I’m not familiar with the Huawei matter because it’s similar not something I have to concern myself with, but can you point to something specific or a place where I could get some facts on why Huawei is justifiably frowned upon?
I have never seen anything but the various broad claims in the news and by politicians that seem to always just kind of come down to “China bad” as evidence. Maybe I just didn’t care enough to notice, but I would have thought that if there was something real to how Huawei hardware will make the sky fall, the powers that be would have surely made that case with clear and irrefutable proof.
Thanks for providing anything you might be able to point me towards that goes beyond “China bad”, regardless of how anyone feels about China.
Look at the Wikipedia article “criticism of Huawei” for a massive list of IP theft, espionage, backdoors and more, including references.
None of this really backs up the idea of "cheap crap", though, or really concerns me as a consumer. Hell, if anything "IP theft" sounds like "competitive product" to my ear. May we all live to see an explosion of IP "theft".
They even manage to steal IP before the original inventor actually invents it. Imagine that.
> I’m not familiar with the Huawei matter because it’s similar not something I have to concern myself with, but can you point to something specific or a place where I could get some facts on why Huawei is justifiably frowned upon?
Try to use their routers as someone with needs greater than "get into the internet". Their UI is horribly slow and clunky, you'll need to reboot them every few months because something hangs itself and about every year or two they manage to get 0wned by a wormable exploit. On top of that, analyses have shown their firmware to be utterly rancid [1], although I do admit that this analysis is six years old.
> Maybe I just didn’t care enough to notice, but I would have thought that if there was something real to how Huawei hardware will make the sky fall, the powers that be would have surely made that case with clear and irrefutable proof.
The thing Western politicians are afraid of is running into another scenario like in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where Viasat was hacked by the Russians leading to serious outages [2], or that the equipment - particularly anything with radios attached - can be "remote bricked" similar to how Israel detonated Hezbollah's pagers. It's bad enough we can't be sure that our own equipment is reasonably secure from cyber attacks, but Huawei is a complete blackbox. We need to prepare for a war scenario with China, either directly (the worst case), but at the very least as a side effect of an invasion of Taiwan. In either case I expect the CCP to behave like Mossad, cripple us piece by piece.
Even if the CCP never decides to invade Taiwan, it still makes sense to refuse their companies entry into our markets as long as our companies aren't welcome in theirs. I am a big friend of reciprocity and China hasn't given us much.
On top of that, Huawei was under fire for alleged sanctions violations and IP theft [3].
[1] https://www.securityweek.com/many-potential-backdoors-found-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viasat_hack
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/13/huawei-ne...
I've only encountered a fritzbox in Germany, it's amazing how ubiquitous they are in Germany, yet so unknown elsewhere in Europe let alone elsewhere.
I do Openwrt on my HP
Why 6g? who asked for it? I am content with 4g, 5g was a push as it was.
You and I are content with it, but these standards were never really about our individual and immediate experiences. It's about concurrent capacity for the growing grid as a whole.
The grid must grow!
It's Bieber 6G Fever!
Unless you live in an urban environment where millimeter wave is competently deployed, you should curb your contentment with 5G. 6G sounds like a distraction from the lack of full 5G capabilities in most places.
On the other hand Spain is using Huawei servers for almost all of their sensitive data. I wonder how the UE, and NATO, will react to that, because they're using Huawei for Social Security data, wiretapping data (SITEL), or even Intelligence Services data.
https://therecord.media/spain-awards-contracts-huawei-intell...
And Spain will have 6G and all the niceties of telecom technology, while Germany will be stuck forever on 5G.
What makes you believe Huawei is the only company that will ever be able to build 6G hardware for the entire remaining lifetime of the universe?
Huawei and other Chinese companies laid huge patent minefields around pretty much every modern high-speed radio technology.
If you ever worked in 5G/6G/Wifi/etc. standardization you will quickly see one thing: they know their job.
So even if you rip out all Chinese hardware - you will still have to pay money to them if you replace it with local stuff from Nokia/Ericson/etc.
Scale. Huawei has 1.4 billion customers just in China. They have double this around the world. The US and European markets have become small for the scale of next generations telecom.
I get why you do so, but the European Union is always shortened to EU, not UE.
It would be as if I wrote a sentence, "The EWG was created by the treaty of Rome in 1957".
What is EWG? Oh yes its the German abbreviation for the EEC. But we're writing in English?
“I think you meant EU instead of UE" sounds much less passive-aggressive.
All this is because they're afraid $COUNTRY inserted malware in the chips, right? So industry can solve this. Make a device that has all the hardware for networks, but without the chip. Make a simple hardware standard for the chip interface. Publish the standard.
Now any country can make a chip that plugs into the networking device. Just buy your own country's spyware-laden chip, plug it into the NID. Install your software in the NID, the same way you'd install Linux on an AMD vs Intel computer. Works for PCs; it can work for routers (they're all just computers). Choose open source or an expensive proproprietary OS. Choose open hardware or proprietary hardware. Let people assemble them from parts so they can choose their level of surveillance-avoidance.
And you're done. No more banning entire manufacturers; just ban those specific kinds of chips, but buy the cheap chinese hardware sans-chips. Feels a lot more sustainable than global instability and trade wars over what is essentially just a lack of design.
(I'm aware how specialized router hw/sw is, I worked for Cisco once upon a time. but it can all be abstracted. it's just not in the interest of corporate profits to do so; but at this point, i think ramping down the china-phobia and stabilizing trade is a bigger concern)
They are not wrong, but will they also ban Cisco in their "Sovereignty Push"?
No. In the 2019 EU 5G Risk Assessment and the 2020 5G Toolbox, EU regulators gave three reasons why no US vendors triggered the "high-risk supplier" designation: US vendors weren't building the 5G core in Europe; EU regulators concluded that US law does allow compelled cooperation but accompanied by independent courts, adversarial process, and statutory limits; and no European regulator found technical-assurance failures in US vendors comparable to Huawei's.
If you don't like what the EU Commission is doing, you can vote them out. (Just kidding, no you can't.)
Why should they?
The United States honors international IP law and doesn't cheat its way into threatening domestic production of other countries like China does.
> The United States honors international IP law
May I introduce you to a somewhat recent concept people like to call AI.
Cisco complied with the NSA PRISM program (Snowden leaks) and were putting hardware backdoors in their hardware on request from the NSA, for hardware that was destined for overseas.
Sounds pretty untrustworthy to me.
So did the EU intelligence agencies and governments. You just route traffic through your neighbor so they spy for you and you do the same for them.
Mentioning Cisco the context of honoring IP is a bit ironic: http://pdp10.nocrew.org/docs/cisco.html
> doesn't cheat its way into threatening domestic production of other countries
Can you still say this with a straight face with everything that is coming from Washington?
> Why should they?
Because bashing all things American while ignoring the threat posed by China is part of Europe's cultural DNA.
laughs in unhinged head of state that imposes arbitrary tarrifs on half of the world and mistakes dementia test for IQ test, says it's difficult
Your deranged rambling isn't too coherent, either.
Ditto Russia.
Ah yes, the country that has perfected industrial espionage... https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/960011/trans-atlant...
https://archive.is/tDC0W
https://archive.is/IQyBG
and this was before the US elected an overt fascist
archive.is down. Perhaps you mean archive.today
This summer i was traveling through Germany and god fucking dam their telecommunication infrastructure is just 3rd world tier, so freaking bad. Constant signal loss, 5g was a rare sight etc.
I know some open 5G hardware project exists as I read about it about a month ago.
However I wonder if that will remain true with 6G, or if it will even be affordable.
Amazing to read in a site full of devs and cybersecurity experts how willing they are to use Huawei's tech despite all the international theft and security issues, some exposed, and but most of it kept under wraps until investigations are complete.
And some even shill the conspiracy that the NSA will install backdoors in US equipment... I would like to think it's Chinese agents at work, but most likely it's regular people.
For this reason I'm glad politicians are taking the initiative, despite the population's awareness of what Huawei really is. And sry but I don't have time to "prove it with irrefutable evidence" as some may demand. Plz spend your own time researching the facts.
Even worse, apparently Huawei allows the CCP to daily update their nodes, lol.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfuBdhPJAbU&t=798
I feel that the majority in this thread are acting less in Europe's interests than effectively saying "fuck you" to Germany here for acting against China's interests. Or perhaps they're reaching as quickly as possible to blame everything on USA. But that's the consequence of letting outsiders into the conversation, everything has really turned into a "water armies", as defined by the Chinese themselves.
In any case, I do hope that outsiders in this thread realize this isn't indicative of what Westerners think, so as far much as what their enemies are thinking. Do you really think people like these who are so quick to mock Europe are really your friends?
Nice, in 2025, the world is a place where China can not be trusted, Russia can not be trusted, USA can not be trusted, Europe can not be trusted, etc.
We are very far from the "imagine all the people, living live in peace". I wonder why that is...
Nice how you put them all on one row.
How Isaac Asimov said in "Relativity of wrong":
"When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together".
I’m working my way through “The End of the World is Just the Beginning”, and the main thesis is that everyone is preparing for demographic collapse. Global populations are declining almost everywhere, and this breaks the current global order. For example, what does the Chinese economy look like when all the people subject to the one child policy retire? What are the knock on effects of labor becoming more expensive almost everywhere? Can immigration solve this problem? What about the cultural friction of mass immigration? What happens to the places that everyone emigrates from?
The book basically argues that a significant amount of the world is headed for destabilization, and a destabilized world involves a lot less trust.
Side note: personally, I find the writing style and general tone to be hyperbolic, but some of the analysis is interesting.
I think we are already seeing this happening as it is not rocket science. US is not willing to be the world police anymore, because it is more and more expensive and some of the elites and many ordinary people feel that they are not gaining much as return.
So this left and is going to leave a lot of power gaps around the globes, and regional wars are picking up paces.
China is not particularly happy about this, because it is not ready and perhaps don't even want to be the next world police. US has always wanted China to share the responsibility but China is hesitant, which is understandable. Plus most of the people in China do not want a destabilized world, for now.
What I'd expect that China will gradually lose steam (actually people on HN already observed since like 10 years ago) when the people born in the 1970s/1980s retire. The officials who are resistant to the idea of expansion (because it damages their power base) are going to retire then. I'd expect the world to be a LOT hotter then. So that's about 2030-2040 and might come a bit earlier as the other players are already moving the pieces(e.g. Russia).
Not sure how to prepare my family through that time, though. I mean, it's just my guess, so my wife just rolls up her eye and wants to buy more houses/stocks because "houses/stocks always go up if you look at the chart". What I think is that the whole economical-geopolitico logic is going to change forever, and what is gone is gone for good. The next globalization is maybe 50 years away but we will never see it. From hindsight, I believe the 2008 financial crisis was the turning points. They managed to drag it for another 20 years, which I send my kudos.
Again, just my guess. I have always wronged in the pessimistic side so I hope I'm wrong this time again.
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Wonder if this was one of the secret requirements Trump made to avoid more draconian tariffs
So fun that the west is moving in a direction where we are subject to all the negatives of both capitalism (wealth consolidation) and socialism (lack of competition).
Unchecked capitalism inevitably leads to a lack of competition, it's just a matter of who gets the benefits.
The west went wrong when it stopped checking capitalism