Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

Getting upset about the TPP is a waste of time. The provisions of the TPP are a red herring. We should be much more concerned with what is not present in the TPP. It only has 12 signatories!!! There are 160+ "countries" in the world. How much could an agreement between 12 of them really increase "free trade?" There are notable absences (CHINA) that make the treaty effectively meaningless. If 30% of the world is not covered by it, then who cares what it says.

The people getting screwed by this treaty are not the spoiled first world EFF supporters, but the people who assemble all our gadgets and gizmos. If you want an agreement that actually benefits humankind, it better include some protections for the outsourced labor that first world nations continue to exploit.

Regarding the fearmongering bulletpoints in the EFF article... Let's be honest. Any mildly technical person knows that these kind of legal measures are technically impossible to enforce. If you want to bend or break the rules, you can find a way, and you can avoid detection. "The Internet routes around censorship" as John Gilmore says. He's also an EFF founder so I'm not sure why EFF is fearmongering so much when they should know these measures are meaningless until they're enforced, which will require implementing impossible, nonexistent technical solutions.

If you don't like the rules, route around them. Or just leave the country trying to enforce them on you. There are 150 other countries you can go to if you don't like these rules.

Honestly the concern over this treaty is so overblown that it almost seems insensitive to the people in the world who are actually suffering from global commerce. The real victims are the millions of people starving, working 12 hour days as children, losing their families to warmongering nation states, and running along a hopeless treadmill of despair.

If you're going to get upset over what amounts to a relatively small set of unimplemented, highly unenforceable rules affecting your "digital rights," then you should at least devote 1% of your complaints to acknowledging the plights of the people who are actually suffering in the world.

> There are notable absences (CHINA) that make the treaty effectively meaningless

Don't be fooled by the headlines, the TPP changes "rules of origin" which will reduce US tariffs for Chinese-made auto parts that will now count as "Japanese". This will negatively affect North American auto parts manufacturing, https://theintercept.com/2015/11/11/trump-was-right-about-tp...

"Right now, the U.S. reserves the right to slap large tariffs on China, as it has done on steel (up to 236 percent), solar panels (up to 78 percent) and tires (up to 88 percent). But under TPP, many products, from agriculture to chemicals to plastics to leather seating, can include up to 60 percent of material from a non-TPP country ... China would not have to raise any standards or comply with any TPP rules, yet still be able to produce millions of auto parts and textiles for TPP countries at a lower cost, without the burden of tariffs."

> There are 150 other countries you can go to if you don't like these rules.

Europe has TTIP. China, India and other Asian countries have RCEP. The provisions are similar or worse than TPP. This is a race to the bottom, which is why the first trade agreement (TPP) matters so much. Stop the TPP and it will be easier for countries to push back on TTIP and RCEP. There is also TiSA which spans 50 countries. All of these agreements need to be renegotiated with additional corporate and civil society stakeholders, rather than favoring the small number of corporations that hijacked the TPP for their own purposes.

China regularly interferes with the ability of foreign corporations to compete in a fair Chinese market. Whether through crippling communications infrastructure (the GFW), subsidizing domestic counterparts, or ignoring US IP laws, China had no problem favoring domestic companies over foreign ones.

Yet the US needs an international treaty to authorize itself to slightly increase the fees it charges to China.

(personally I prefer the slow moving democracy of the US)

The TPP will decrease the fees the US charges to Chinese-made goods.

I read it as the US redirecting 40% of imports to TPP countries. Even if China produces the cheapest widgets, someone buying 100 widgets needs to buy 40 of them elsewhere.

Compared to the pre-TPP, NAFTA (US, Canada, Mexico) status quo, that's an increase from 0% to 60% in favor of China.

China being absent from the tpp is not an oversight. One of the points behind tpp is to have a trade agreement against china (without being overt about it). It somewhat reduces china ability to increase influence in the markets of countries around it.

> actually suffering from global commerce

I'd love to see some actual evidence of globalization and global commerce harming the world's poor.

Literally every shred of evidence I've seen points to the opposite: it has lifted people out of starvation agriculture into the lower classes.

We don't like seeing people in miserable conditions (and nobody denies that primitive manufacturing conditions are miserable), but that doesn't make them inferior to the silent misery of traditional agriculture. [1]

Just look at people's revealed preferences. To this day, millions of Chinese move from the agricultural hinterlands of the country (where farming looks largely the same as it has for centuries) towards the manufacturing centers along the coasts. If manufacturing is inferior to primitive village life, why do you think they're doing that?

[1] http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html

"Let's be honest. Any mildly technical person knows that these kind of legal measures are technically impossible to enforce."

I'm sorry to tell you but you're wrong, videogame industry is a foretelling of where we'll be in years to come, stuff that is locked down on oneside of the internet and rented in perpetuity, that is the end game for our upper class.

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