ARM cuts ties with Huawei, threatening future chip designs
theverge.com
theverge.com
Whatever one might think of the Huawei story - for people living outside the US, one starts to wonder if tech's over-reliance on Silicon Valley engineering has gone too far.
Besides, Huawei gets no sympathy from me. Too many years of stealing IP. Someone had to say no.
So, wait: do we like intellectual property and patents stiffing innovation, or do we not? Only when it benefits us? I can never keep this straight.
That's how I heep things straight. Patents work when they help people be rewarded for real work that they have done.
There is a lot of hypocrisy in order to feed the current anti-Chinese campaign but the fact is that everyone behaves the same.
And we all have heard of the many reports of counterfeit goods being basically scavenged from the same assembly lines as the original products. And also seen people try to cut out their business partner and go to their vendors directly, often directly in conflict with their NDAs, because they can save money by going upstream. I can't blame them for the intent, but it's unethical to do so if you promise not to.
These are easy to distinguish from patents. Patents suck for almost everyone, and only have gotten worse now that it's not even clear that I can create something and publish it to the public and actually rely on no one filing patents later down the road for stuff in my public disclosure.
This used to be my strategy with LED lights, I'd just release the schematics, board files, firmware, concepts, etc on my blog and send it to various popular news sites because I'm not interested in getting patents for my stuff (including, it seems, the world's first direct wifi LED color changing lights in 2010, two years earlier than LiFX, but I haven't researched in depth). I just don't want Philips patenting the idea and suing me for doing it later (they did anyway I'm sure).
Example: https://slashdot.org/submission/1393662/arduino-based-high-p...
Getting your companies 10 years of work to develop something commandeered by government fiat, espionage, or corporate malfeasance is very different and I think hurts innovation. Why bother if you know as soon as they copy you you won't be able to compete anymore because you've already spent $100M to develop it and have R&D to pay back.
Other companies implement and manufacture them.
for people living inside the US, one starts to wonder if over-reliance on China has gone too far.
Also in the news today a report on tariffs (taxes) and the U.S. footwear business. Nike, ADIDAS and others are begging the Trump regime to call a halt to the trade war as normal people will not be able to afford shoes. Apparently 1.04% of shoes bought in the U.S.A. are made in the U.S.A. which is shocking, it is one thing to have lots of nuclear weapons for security but what use is this? Having a shoe industry is nearer my ideas on 'national security' - at least people can walk.
The shoe industry say that their business is capital intensive and they cannot just relocate back to sunny America in three months or so. Even if they wanted to setup shop n the U.S.A. they would not be able to hire the staff, get them trained and get them working in Trump timescales.
Which is the problem with this trade war. The U.S.A. isn't working to a grand plan, China are. China have goals for 2020/2025/2030/2040/2050 and stable leadership. Having the Trump regime just tear up trade deals and impose tariffs on a monthly basis is not how it works, there are better ways to regenerate economies than that, as evidenced by China.
Recently the Russians tested if they could survive their internet being disconnected from the American controlled internet. Everything worked fine. There are Russian apps for everything plus Yandex. They no longer need Silicon Valley. It is the same with China, they don't entirely need U.S. tech. Europe is slipping behind, there should be French/German/Italian/Spanish and other language/nationality based efforts. It is a bit lame and unambitious to use Google's services for everything.
How come?
The current situation shows that the US hold massive power and benefit massively by selling high value items to China while taking advantage of cheap Chinese workers.
The US have and do benefit massively.
The real issue here is power. The US obviously want to hold on their global dominant position, but should realise that it's no more possible for them that it was for Britain.
The U.S. is not taking advantage of cheap Chinese labour any more. U.S. labour is not competitive because the U.S. has to carry a rentier class that sponge off the efforts of hard working Americans thereby making U.S. labour noncompetitive.
The U.S. have the petro-dollar to uphold their empire, plus the world's most bloated military. It ain't working any more.
It's another thing for Russia, but they are already well aware. India? Probably still in a role where US-dependence does more good than harm. For Africa, it doesn't matter as much, and South America likely remembers that it's unwise to stray too far from the northern neighbor's wishes.
Trumps current heavy-handedness in international relationships is instead a direct response to this disintegration of the empire, and it's just hastening the demise. The worrisome part is how the US (and all its hurrahh-boys) are signalling that they will not accept this turn of events peacefully.
What China or Russia do is this: key industries must be domestic. The EU countries never did this, they've accepted the US as the provider for information discovery (search), information transmission (news) and communication, granting them enormous powers. Merkel's own BND (certainly not without her knowledge, it's closely lead by the Bundeskanzleramt) cooperated with the NSA to provide access to virtually all German internet traffic so the NSA could spy on German citizens wholesale.
Good luck with that EU army. If the state of Germany's Bundeswehr is any indicator, we'll be lucky if the EU army has a functioning bicycle in 2040.
That's the only possible end result.
We already know that they are capable of building their own designs or software. The thing is NOBODY will ever use it outside of China.
The whole point of this situation is to force China to open more their market so we can at least pretend we have a fair trading environment.
It will be beneficial since it will give third countries a choice and help reduce their reliance on the US/monopolistic incumbents.
Trump's game really is to hurt China so that they don't become "number one on his watch" (his words). It's a good old power struggle behind the rhetoric of "fair trading environment".