RISC-V Foundation moving to Switzerland over trade curb fears
reuters.com
reuters.com
My only gripe being, there aren't many neutral countries which can stand up to powerful militarized nations.
Edit: The reason, I mentioned lack of military power of neutral countries is because of the existence of law such as 'Hague Invasion Act'[2] which allows U.S. to invade Hague to liberate its personnel tried at International Criminal Court for war crimes. Neutral countries need military power to protect its Neutrality!
[2]https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...
But I understand where you are coming at, perhaps it is because major military nations poses A-Bombs. I guess, if they are democratic countries we have no choice but to hope that their citizens can prevent it from getting used; My real worry is the non-democratic/pseudo democratic countries with A-Bombs.
Edit : N-Bomb->A-Bomb.
Switzerland's terrain wouldn't see regular war but guerilla warfare (including mined bridges and everything). Having trained marksmen in almost every household helps a lot in such a situation.
> Atomic weapons or other WMD goes against the ethos of neutral countries which traditionally are pro-Human Rights.
I think Switzerland would adopt a "whatever it takes" approach when attacked. At least that's what they credibly project, and so it's unlikely that they'll end up having to play it out.
There exist no country in the world where citizens have any say on nuclear weapon use. "Pseudo democracy" is the norm.
A n-bomb is more likely to refer to use of a slavery related term, and is very frequently used in some circles which include the current US president. So demonstrably democracy does not prevent the use of n-bombs, which happens to be true historically for a-bombs as well (which were used by a democracy essentially because the war wasn't over by the time they've built the thing).
>which were used by a democracy essentially because the war wasn't over by the time they've built the thing).
But the same U.S. President Harry S. Truman relieved General of the Army Douglas MacArthur when he wanted to drop A-Bomb on China during the Korean War.
Realistically, our armed forces are at a strength of about 140K soldiers right now (pretty sure that's not a state secret).
The parts of the terrain that are actually inhabited are not particularly forbidding (let them build their RISC processors in a hut nestled beside an 8500ft mountain pass. Don't forget to bring popcorn as you watch them).
And nuclear power plants make a big fat bombing target for opponents too lazy to make their own dirty bombs. Conveniently placed smack in the middle of the inhabitable part of Switzerland, too.
I highly doubt it'll come to that. It would be much easier to just infiltrate the fab and replace stock going to an important destination.
> it's enough to give an enemy a bad time
That depends a lot on the objective, I think. The defenses against an enemy controlling the transalpine transportation axes are fairly strong. But I think this scenario gets talked up a lot for exactly that reason.
The defenses against an enemy controlling 80% of the population and 90% of the economy are much weaker. Then again, it might only take a few sysadmins armed with SQL queries to deal significant economic damage against any attacker.
> It would be much easier to just infiltrate the fab and replace stock going to an important destination.
True. And if I've understood the article correctly, no fabs would be changing location. RISC-V is an open source design, so the fabs in question would probably be located in the "enemy" countries anyway.
Switzerland is filthy rich, too. Private fortunes thought to rival or surpass the biggest public billionaires, money pipes throughout the world beyond measure — the result of centuries of diligently building a discrete but very real financial empire... all of that has to count for something in the age of PMC's and acts of surgical retaliation projecting force accross the globe.
Taking on a too-rich enemy in modern times is choosing an all-out, extremely mobile, stupidly costly, and above all likely painful war. You'll lose a lot at the hand of the best weapons and talents money can buy.
That's why an extremely indebted USA is still very valuable. Because they can park a few aircraft carriers off the coast of whomever they desire (although this may be changing, namely due to China).
A country like the US can invade any country they want. International law is irrelevant. But they can pressure a country like Switzerland without needing to resort to military action, which would be crazy anyway in the case of Switzerland.
Delaware, Nevada, New Mexico, et al. make it easy to set up shell companies. Multiple layers of corporate veils make it easier to evade taxation, if the business is so inclined. But it's also easier to legally avoid taxation, which is the goal of the next-generation tax haven.
The deal is that you pay some taxes to Delaware, as the unavoidable ones, and then use its business-friendly jurisdiction to set up a network of sub-companies that can more easily slide through all the loopholes in all the rest of the world's tax laws. So the Delaware company owns the Irish company, and the Dutch company, and the Bermuda company, and the Singapore company, and the Cyprus company, and it can optimize the on-paper accounting so the money generates the least tax possible whenever it moves in the direction of the owners. If someone goes after a mook company, it can be cut loose and replaced, but if someone goes after the mastermind company, they have to do it in Delaware's courts.
The tax haven version 1.0 relied on banking secrecy to hide financial information from taxation authorities, so they wouldn't know what to tax. Tax haven version 2.0 is about playing those taxation authorities against each other, so that all their weaknesses (relative to the other authorities) are attacked at once, and laws are only broken or ignored outside of the jurisdictions in which they are enforceable. The information is not kept secret, but it is managed so that the only entity that can see the whole picture has no particular reason to pry too deeply or to leak it to anyone else.
The Paradise Papers may spur additional legislative action, pending the results of the 2020 elections.
Those countries are huge.
The US truly are the bully in the room.
I think that was in 'Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission', it's not a U.N. recognised body.
Probably some boring demands and Netherlands will comply because big bad USA and such.
This, incidentally, is why it's hard to take seriously the idea that US positioning against China is aimed at genuinely improving human rights and not just using them as rhetorical cover.
Like how non-USA financial institutions have to care about whether their clients could be considered USA citizens, just because USA law says so.
Or like USA export control laws apply to devices which were not manufactured in the USA, just because the device includes an USA-manufactured screw or something like that.
You must be saying this in jest, or you have been brainwashed. Without even touching on the interment camps, which are definitely worse than the US prison system; here is demonstrable evidence that the US cares more about global human rights than the Chinese.[1]
[1]https://www.hrw.org/report/2011/11/04/youll-be-fired-if-you-...
All that says is that other “democratic” “human rights advocating” countries are also to blame.
NATO tried several times to assassinate Gaddafi, killing his family members instead. For example, one airstrike in Tripoli killed a son and three grandchildren of his.[1] Of course, they did eventually bomb his caravan, leaving him to be brutally murdered on the side of the road. None of this was authorized by the UN. Western special forces were also not authorized to operate in Libya, but they did anyways.
Anyways, years after this wonderful exercise in protecting civilians, the country is still in a state of civil war, torn between different warlords. People forget that as bad as Gaddafi was, Libya used to have the highest living standard in Africa. Now, it's a nightmare.
1. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya/libyas-gaddafi-surv...
https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/11/21/uk-govt-summons-china-...
> The US hasn't kidnapped and tortured any consulate employees recently, which China just did.
Perhaps not (though it does have a recent history of kidnapping and torturing people on a global scale), but the US is busy blasting away pine nut farmers in Afghanistan.[1]
1. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-attack-drones...
Also I do not subscribe to the view that Democracy is somehow morally superior to other forms of government. Anyone who has read Plutarch, can understand that figures like Pericles can manipulate the minds of the masses and rule as an authoritarian under the guise of being a democrat. The same playbook is being used for thousands of years with the same effect. See Erdogan in Turkey, I don't see him ever outsted from power democratically, aleast not in a long time.
Same reason products with the better advertisment sells better than the better product.
That's what I mean - if you go looking for incidents where the Chinese are involved and build up a prosecution argument against them, that's a very different approach to trying to systematically and without favour deal with all human rights abuses of all scale by all parties. Which is a huge job.
Do you have any idea about the history of the United States in Africa? The overthrow and murder of the first elected President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the installation of an American-friendly dictator. Support for the coup that overthrew the first elected President of Ghana and replaced him with a military government. Opposition to Angolan independence from the Portuguese empire. Support for the Apartheid regime in South Africa.
And you're comparing this to what? Chinese companies overfishing in African coastal waters? You're really lacking a sense of perspective here.
https://www.businessinsider.com/leaked-chinese-papers-on-mus... : "Xi pushed the party to use the "organs of dictatorship" to move millions of the minority group, Uighur Muslims, into the camps in western China and cited the United States' war on terror following 9/11 for an example of how to limit civil liberties. "
I agree that post 9/11 US foreign policy making has been disastrous and utterly corrosive to America's ability to hold the moral high ground. But surely we can differentiate here. Putting millions of Uhyger men into camps and forcing their wives to share beds with Han men is on a whole another level[1].
[1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/muslim-china-u...
The US, in general, is defensive of its sovereignty. We have our own institutions and we are very protective of them. For example, we have a right to a jury trial by one’s peers n a criminal case. The ICC has no juries, and panelists are generally foreigners to the defendant. Criminal convictions in US federal courts (and nearly all states) require a unanimous verdict. The ICC requires a simple majority. The ICC allows trials in abstentia, regularly relies on hearsay evidence, etc. Our highest court is the United States Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court cannot hear appeals from the ICC and cannot issue judgments binding on the ICC. Our practices in these areas, such as jury trials, are the part of an unbroken line of law and tradition dating back to the Magna Carta in 1215. Those practices can be refined and improved, but that’s completely orthogonal to submitting to the jurisdiction of supra-national organizations like the ICC. Our institutions can always be improved. But that doesn’t mean we have to submit to someone else’s institutions.
In my view, the real question is why others are so willing to give up their sovereignty and right to self determination? Why submit to the will of some foreign court that’s totally outside the framework of your own country’s laws, constitution, and institutions?
It's an easy question to ask when you're the guy at the top of the pile with the biggest guns and the ability to kill or capture your perceived enemies anywhere in the world.
For everyone else, global institutions based on universal human rights are a welcome safeguard against the abuses of 20th century style sovereignty.
The US is making it very explicit that they are above rules. They have the right to commit war crimes, while holding other countries accountable for their war crimes, and even for things that aren't even crimes at all. The US is a bully, and is very explicit about it.
You are an anarchist then? Otherwise as an sovereign individual, how can you justify being part of nation with laws over you?
It's not so much giving up sovereignty as pooling it. ie you trade your right to do so as you wish, for a guarantee that others can't just do as they wish on agreed areas - like rape, murder, stealing etc.
Same argument applies to countries - they submit to the ICC, but are also party to shaping it - it's an agreement between countries about what is 'beyond the pale'.
The sad fact is, however the US see's it's self, the rest of the world is increasingly seeing the US as the largest threat to world peace. https://fullfact.org/news/america-world-peace/
In my view, the US need to have a long hard look at themselves and re-discover their moral mojo.
What would effectively be the difference for you as an individual. You don't have sovereignty, you don't have self determination, the huge country you live in does. You have zero influence over your country's laws, constitution and institutions.
Why do you prefer to be ruled over by the US, which is corrupt to the bone and ruled by whoever pays the largest 'campaign contributions' (a.k.a. bribes). vs. something like the ICC ?
They why be subject to U.N. and it's ICJ? Submitting only to institutions in which we have extraordinary influence or can veto out of unfavourable circumstances is not 'protection of sovereignty'; it's hypocrisy and disregard to delivering justice.
ICC members follow universal jurisdiction when it comes to war crime.
“The Court may exercise jurisdiction in a situation where genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes were committed on or after 1 July 2002 and:
the crimes were committed by a State Party national, or in the territory of a State Party, or in a State that has accepted the jurisdiction of the Court; or the crimes were referred to the ICC Prosecutor by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) pursuant to a resolution adopted under chapter VII of the UN charter.”
The only way the ICC can exercise jurisdiction over a non-member is through referral from the UN Security Council.
Because in doing so in the form of an agreement, others can be made to give up their freedom to do bad things while you also give up the freedom to do those bad things? Like the normal social contract, but explicit and on a larger scale.
This dates even to the 1899 Hague Convention, which the US was very keen on following earlier work by Abraham Lincoln. The way to get the enemy to treat your prisoners of war humanely is to agree to treat theirs humanely, and this held fairly well even in the horrors of WW2.
The post-Holocaust international order is devoted to the idea that there is always a risk of rogue states deciding to end the freedoms of their citizens or engage in mass murder and other crimes against humanity. There are also risks of states turning on one another and escalating economic disputes to actual wars. In order to guard against these, supranational institutions were built. Not just the United Nations and the ICC, but the whole Bretton Woods system, the WTO, the NATO mutual defence organisation, the ECHR, and the EU and its antecedants.
How can the US ask China to end its human rights abuses, and expect to be taken seriously, when the US refuses internal or external accountability for its own human rights abuses and war criminals? The official position of the United States, having determined that Edward Gallagher was deliberately murdering civilians and prisoners of war, is that he should be pardoned and have his position reinstated? That's fine and no reason for imposing sanctions on the United States?
Yes, this is a tu quoque argument, but at the level of international propaganda it works.
The point is that human rights are above national laws. If an American citizen commit serious human right abuses abroad he/she should naturally be put on trial.
In particular American involved in kidnapping and torturing foreigners to obtain information ought to be put on a human rights trial. I am thinking in particular about all the human rights violations during the Bush/Cheney years.
The world is a very fragile, dynamic balance of power and the US is the only thing holding it together.
Despite many grievances, it's sad to see people fail to grasp this.
RISC-V Foundation just calls it 'open ISA' and Wikipedia states as 'RISC-V is an open-source hardware instruction set architecture'.
Developing countries want to protect their fledgling industries from much stronger competition from the developed world. This hurts consumers in developing countries, who are forced to buy substandard domestic products at higher prices.
Developed countries want as free of trade as possible, so that their advanced companies can sell everywhere, and their consumers can buy the best products at the cheapest price.
A good analogy is to weight classes in boxing. They protect lighter fighters from the heavyweights. The heavyweights themselves would be fine if the weight classes were abolished. They'd win every fight.
I'm not saying we necessarily need to roll back those protections, but it's worth mentioning out that as the cost of hiring domestic labor in developed countries go up, companies begin to off-shore labor as soon as they are able.
My point is that we already don't have "free trade". The question is whether tariffs are a good way to balance the scales between domestic and foreign labor.
Productivity of labor is also much higher in developed countries. What matters is comparative advantage.
Even from a strictly economic point of view, it is often better for rich countries to off-shore a lot of low-level manufacturing. That decreases prices for manufactured goods in rich countries and frees labor for more productive jobs. If you somehow force companies to bring back manufacturing jobs to the US, two things will have to happen:
1. Prices will increase for consumers.
2. People will be transferred from their current jobs to the new manufacturing jobs. You may actually be transferring people from more useful, productive labor into less productive labor, leaving the entire society worse off.
Furthermore, at least some of the people affected by the displacement of manufacturing jobs in developed countries do not have higher productivity. The opioid crisis in the US is to some extent an example of this. I know of blue collar communities where the level of productive employment is lower now than it was a generation or two ago.
That doesn't mean these communities could not adapt to the changing economic landscape (as people did when there was the transition from an agricultural to a manufacturing economy). Patterns of specialization and trade are bound to change, but government imposed prices on labor can create a hindrance to a society's ability to adapt.
Not necessarily, but they correlate very strongly. It's the rich countries that tend to have strong labor protections, mandatory pension schemes, high healthcare costs, etc.
> at least some of the people affected by the displacement of manufacturing jobs in developed countries do not have higher productivity.
Some of them don't, but overall, developed countries have moved on to higher value-added sectors. Moving large numbers of American workers into things like mass hand-assembly of smartphones would not make economic sense.
> That doesn't mean these communities could not adapt to the changing economic landscape
Government could much more strongly redistribute the overall gains from world trade to those who lose out to trade. That would make a lot of sense, though it would go against the right-wing economic thinking that has dominated American politics since Reagan.
Obviously they correlate. The question is whether such labor regulations run ahead of labor productivity and inadvertently price labor out of the global market place. It's certainly not a given that labor regulations are proportional.
If it's not proportional, you either need to roll back some of those regulations or enact protectionist measures (tariffs, etc.) to enable fair competition.
It's not just labor regulations either. Environmental regulations also play a role. While I agree with having environmental regulations, if they are too stringent, then the result is that resource extraction moves countries without any protections.
> Some of them don't, but overall, developed countries have moved on to higher value-added sectors.
Those "left behind" could be a fairly large number. Democratic societies need to balance the interests of all of their citizens.
> Moving large numbers of American workers into things like mass hand-assembly of smartphones would not make economic sense.
If those large numbers of Americans are otherwise unemployed, or even working in low-skill service jobs, then moving them into smartphone manufacturing absolutely makes sense.
> Government could much more strongly redistribute the overall gains from world trade to those who lose out to trade. That would make a lot of sense, though it would go against the right-wing economic thinking that has dominated American politics since Reagan.
We are already redistributing to those who lose out on trade. I don't think more redistribution is what they want. My impression is that they would rather have jobs. Indeed, it makes much more economic (and psychological) sense to have as much of your population engaged in productive occupations as possible.
If you think Switzerland is particularly "open" in terms of intellectual property law it would be interesting to understand why.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/world/asia/china-surveill...
What the foundation avoids by moving to Switzerland is fragmentation of their ecosystem due to US foreign policy decisions.
Note that China is already among the technology leaders in the world. Even if cut off from the remaining world, they would have no issue in manufacturing and operating sophisticated surveillance infrastructure. So I can't see how the foundation would help suppressed minorities in China by staying in US.
Definitely. Next up should be punishment for the EU nations with those restrictions on cookies and tracking technology in general.
>“The Chinese Communist Party is trying to circumvent our export control system to support national security threats like Huawei - we cannot let it succeed,” Representative Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin, told Reuters.
I mean, one cannot make this more obvious. The rest of the world really doesn't want to be subservient to US paranoia
Open source is certainly a big step in the right direction toward a world where we can better rely on technology. But we're not there yet, when it comes to hardware.
Truth is, no one can stop any one doing anything.
Free market can dissuade your competitors from creating their own supply chain because that won't make economical sense. But once that illusion is gone, the ones that are getting hurt is the current market leaders.
[1]https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/11/12/chinese-firm...
[2]:https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2019/sep/23/footage-...
It's a fool's errand to try to impose your morals on another person as if they were somehow superior (though that arrogance is the foundation of the American psyche). You literally just can't.
>You literally just can't.
Right, which is why we let Hitler exterminate the Jews.
You mean the ones that the US routinely violates for "terrorists" and "criminals"? China uses the exact same rhetoric for the people whose rights it violates. The situation with the Uyghurs mirrors a lot of the tactics used in the 70s by American police against black Americans under the guise of the "war on drugs" (hint: our police and prison guards were way more abusive than many people realize).
> Right, which is why we let Hitler exterminate the Jews.
What else could we have done? Anti-semitism was considered morally acceptable at the time. The American people were completely against the war until Pearl Harbor. Then we locked anyone who looked Japanese or spoke German up in camps. What we were doing was the exact same thing Hitler said he was doing with the Jews.
Obviously in hindsight Hitler was awful and the Holocaust was frighteningly real. But the extent of the Holocaust was not understood until after the war. By the standards of the time, what Hitler said he was doing to the Jews didn't cross any hard moral lines -- to both the German people and most Americans.
I actually believe it's the belief in moral absolutes like this that allow monsters to perpetuate atrocities: people assume "well, no rational human would round up all the Jews and murder them" -- which is exactly why it was possible.
We could have engaged with the Japanese in the Pacific and let Europe duke it out and weaken themselves to nothing. Then rolled into Europe with tanks and taken over the whole world? Seriously. I'm not a historian, but I'm pretty sure we could have taken a very different route in WWII. If we really lacked morality, why didn't we just take over the World after WWII, or force the countries we helped out into terrible economic deals like China is doing in Africa. The Marshall plan was charitable.
Today, America is the thug that everyone wants to replace.
Both the UK [1] and US [2] developed plans to do just that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable?
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-pentagon-estimated-20...
We didn't do both of those? That's news to me, because I thought that's what the Cold War was about. We just learned from Europe's colonial failures and allowed the countries to remain nominally politically autonomous while being economically bound to the US. The only thing that stopped us was the USSR, and it really only delayed the eventual US takeover by about 40 years.
> The Marshall plan was charitable.
It absolutely was not. It was designed to prevent nationalism from taking hold by making economic conditions in the defeated nations tolerable to the populace and to make those countries economically dependent on the US. It also led to former global powers Germany and Japan becoming proxy states of the US -- they are still occupied by US forces today. But it wasn't about charity by any means, it was a response to the lesson we learned from WWI that if you leave the losers destitute, resentment and nationalism follow.
Americans would be less safe had foreign contributions to cryptography been kept out. In addition these export rules act as price subsidies for foreign companies (much as the recent agricultural tariffs have helped Brazilian farmers).
If you consider it a national security issue, just note that 1940s Germans had to develop everything themselves while the allies developed and swapped around technology with trans-national teams.
Let 'open' stay true to its very meaning. It is a good chance , or may I say the best chance for RISC-V to seize influence, because now the will and capitals are aligned to make an alternative ecosystem that is not controlled by US single handedly.
[1] https://riscv.org/2018/07/ieee-spectrum-article-darpa-plans-...
This opinion is due to the longer tenure as tech “hub” of various places in the UK, France, and USA.
There is some great tech coming out of Switzerland but I’m not sure there’s a really a connection between hosting standards organizations and having a technical infrastructure.
There was a blockchain era?
Read as:
> wants to ensure that China...
Let me see if I understand this correctly. US tax dollars funded (in part, via UC Berkeley) this technology, and now this organization is moving outside of the US specifically so that it can work with China in ways that the US would not appreciate. And we (“we” being an audience almost entirely based in the Occident) are all cheering this on?
Do you think they are worried about that US blocking them from working with Oxford, or with the Spanish government? This is because they got money from Alibaba.
Is this the same group that was defending South Park and bashing on the NBA just weeks ago?
Gimme a fuckin break.
Also, Blizzard, South Park, NBA are part of popular culture in the west. Cooperation with China is endangering that culture, so you see backlash.
Standards related to RISC-V are not part of popular culture and there is no danger of Chinese censorship. There is however danger of USA protectionism.
And yes - I can see Americans using microchip intellectual property against Europeans. EU is right there on the list of trade foes with China and Russia according to USA president.
What I’m not ok with (and why I think there’s backlash toward the cooperation with China by these companies) is the way the Chinese government treats people.
Harvesting organs from political prisoners and the violence toward protesters isn’t ok. Ever. I don’t care if it’s Trump or Merkel or Xi that’s doing it it’s not ok and that’s not something people should cooperate with.
Is it just maybe possible that the US public is waking up to the ongoing genocide, ethnic cleansings, and widespread human rights violations in China, which may lead to the state being sanctioned like so many other despicable regimes?
The point is that "we are doing the humane thing" is not an argument that the US has legitimate access to anymore.
Also let's not forget that Saudi Arabia treats women as third-class citizens. Let's not pretend they're some paragon of virtue.
- they whole problem here is that Hauwei and other state-sponsored Chinese firms are flooding the market with below-cost, compromising devices in order to give the Chinese government broad access to sensitive information [0]
- Hong Kong is dying under the Chinese boot [1]
- China is running concentration camps [2]
Our community isn’t used to thinking about open source software - or technology in general- in the context of geopolitics. We seem to agree IBM was wrong to help the Nazis manage the Haulocaust [3] but don’t apply that logic to China. Yet. Maybe our children will; that’s on us.
This is another skirmish in the long war around the Chinese Rise. America is by no means perfect, but I think we’ll miss Pax Americana when it’s gone. We need to search our souls and find our spines.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/17/18264283/huawei-security-...
[1] https://www.vox.com/2019/11/18/20970453/hong-kong-protests-2...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/fina...
I'm old enough to remember when open-source distributions had special "non-US" sections for cryptography that actually worked.
All I ask is that if you have a "this software may not be used to run an internment camp" license, it gets even-handedly applied.
e.g. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/complying...
Spying aside ( probably - just like US firms ) - isn't the real reason this is an issue at all is because Huawei actually has a technological lead.
Even this very biased article acknowledges that lead. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/12/huawei-china-5g-race-te...
To paint them as winning because they are 'flooding the market with below-cost' is frankly xenophobic - note they have out innovated - not copied - you can't copy yourself a technological lead.
The US appears in panic - imagine a world where CISCO kit ( a company that has obligations to the US state ) isn't installed everywhere - rather some other countries stuff.
If you want to constrain China, then you have to accept the rules that constrain everyone. The time where the US can lord it over everyone ( for better or worse ) is coming to an end - just as the British empire came to an end.
Same reason I favor exiting NATO and building a European alliance only. The US cannot be trusted. Look at what was done at a whim in Turkey.
Look at how the current US administration screwed us in the Iran deal.
Trump did not commit to defending other NATO allies, when asked. Hence what is the point of NATO? There is no point in being member of a defense alliance which the US uses when it suits them but which they are not committed to when it is inconvenient for them. That isn't an alliance at all.
If it was only the current US administration then it would be easier. Didn't the bush administration also had a policy "You're either for us, or against us"?
Even in the case the current administration is replaced, it's only 4 or 8 years until they are again replaced by another administration willing to blow up alliances for domestic politics.
I always have a hard time swallowing the bullshit that is the American government ever held any other concern above American interest, whether the results were favorable notwithstanding.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_67655.htm
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-biggest-standing-arm...
Usually, that's the case, but these days: all roads lead to Putin.
Term 'open-source' license seems to be conveniently left behind in the 'Read as'.
Linux kernel was first funded by the Tax money of a Finland Citizen, the reason everyone can use it incl. large U.S. corporations entirely dependent upon it is because it is under the 'freedom' of open-source license.
RISC-V, is moving to protect the 'freedom' of it's open-source license. If there is anything to feel agitated about it, it is why some entity had to take such drastic action from the so called 'land of the free'.
Sorry if this is a first for you. It's been a very long time however that the US has been successful (and this is a compliment) at commercializing tech that was invented elsewhere. US is a huge beneficiary of the bad business climate elsewhere and international brain drain. This is just a taste of how it works when e.g. european companies emigrate to the US (again, because the US is a better place for them). Consider that the US won the business world because of its openness, not in spite of it.
OK Rudyard Kipling.
> Let me see if I understand this correctly. US tax dollars funded (in part, via UC Berkeley) this technology, and now this organization is moving outside of the US specifically so that it can work with China in ways that the US would not appreciate.
Given the open source nature of the tech, one assumes they are (rightly or wrongly) moving out of the US so they can continue to work with whoever they want.
https://pandaily.com/ieee-forced-to-ban-huawei-employees-fro...
What has it gone through? I haven't seen any news stories specifically about this.
They resumed after the ban was kinda temporarily suspended... but there's a risk.
As for ARM, they initially stopped shipments to Huawei (it was an internal email that got leaked) but since it used less than 25% US-origin technology, US export controls don't apply and ARM could ship it
To me, this smacks of the kind of legalist thinking that software engineers are prone to: Assuming that if some legal construct is implemented according to some rules, governments and the legal system will disregard the actual physical reality, and will refrain from employing their political leverage.
Then again, I'm sure the RISC-V Foundation has professional legal advice at their disposal.
However, given that much of the early work was done by US institutions, if any US contributions were considered to be unallowable exports, that would surely include contributions that already make up foundations of the specification. This move won't undo that, and thus could result in a worst of both worlds situation where members in other countries can't make use of current standards (if they want to export to the US), and US members can't contribute to future standards.
Of course this is all assuming that RISC-V standards are actually covered by US export control laws, and that those laws will be enforced. Probably nothing would come of this either way, although the pessimist in me worries that this move itself might trigger protectionists in the US government to go looking for reasons why RISC-V technology might infringe.
To avoid scenarios like the one described in the middle of the article where it's unclear if it's legally OK to work with sanctioned organizations: In June, more than two dozen standards groups - including those overseeing SD memory cards and Ethernet and HDMI cables - wrote a letter to U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross asking for clarification of the rules on working with Huawei.
If bodies that work on open standards can't predictably work openly (with anyone) this risks the standards getting fragmented in non-compatible ways, or could even give rise to viable competing standards like US WiFi 7 vs. Chinese/European WiFi 7ce
On a virtual level (software, intellectual, legal), Switzerland is not more neutral than any other small country on Earth. It could have been Iceland.
Automatically centralizing to Switzerland everything considered 'neutral' (neutrality is a debatable concept btw) is risky, stereotyping and doesn't look legit.
Switzerland is a reasonably neutral in the on-going trade and IP disputes, so it a good choice for now. If that changes, the RISC-V foundation could always move again and relocate to Iceland or Singapore or somewhere else.
As it becomes more and more common for teams and companies/foundations to be globally distributed, I think we'll see more of this movement, with talent flowing to the countries that have the most favorable environments.
I do not see why they would not do open-door technical discussions then. Transparency is good.
What doesn’t shock me though is his complete misunderstanding of how open standards work.
Assuming what I wrote above is how it happened (95% likely) it should not reflect poorly on him. I have a low opinion of the man but I doubt this quote reflects anything on how he might vote if some related issue comes to the senate floor.
This is just comedy.
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2019-11-18%20PSI%...
This is one example of how elites in this country get to have their own form of socialism whereas say a humble computer scientist must be subjected to the whims of the invisible hand for the sake of preserving market efficiency.
The recent few cases are just baffling. The guy resigns and gets caught on the border exfiltrating trade secrets. For one thing, why resign? Just go - you'll get fired automatically when you don't return. For another, why carry this stuff in your suitcase? Just upload it to AWS in encrypted form sail through the customs with no problem at all. They are clearly not sending their best.
You can though, it's called defecting. There's a long history of it. E.g. see this list of defectors from the soviet union: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soviet_and_Eastern_Blo...
Place bets on how long this guy will survive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdR-I35Ladk. I strongly suspect he won't last a year.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Program
Strange and I still do not understand why they so explicit about it.
The key is you cannot easy reside, study, work in China key U and technology program freely. But seems you can in Usa. An one sided war with one side powerful but leaking key assets. Hence all these shooting using software and chip.
They are probably just sending some poor students who are pressured into it an exchange for whatever, if they get anything at all besides "not being punished".
It also makes me laugh that they think they can control the development of open standards.
You know for my parent’s generation, being able to study and immigrate to US is their unreachable dream. Nowadays it’s faded and quite a lot people just came to gain the experience.
What puzzle us is why they still support the communist when they are free. Even positively attack eg the lady Canadian student rep. Or of course my fellow hkers.
Any Russian leaving Soviet Union fighting for the interests of Soviet Union after they left. Openly. Not as a spy. I more remember one day in the life of .... kind.
Treating chinazi arising is a fair raise of a nation is totally wrong. Look just as the treat of minority like us as an exception is also wrong. When you feel the hit like lots of nba, apple, google etc and everyone has to kneel down to live, you will know that
First there is ...
Chinazi is chinazi. Forced Harmony especially without understanding is a crime against humanity. It would be too late when you get the the truth personally. Find it out earlier and fight.
I can assure you the majority does not support the party wholeheartedly and for one thing it’s certain: if you tell them they should go ahead overthrown everything and re-establish the system they’ll think you are out of your mind. Chineses like to have concrete and feasible plans, Democracy slogans doesn’t work for this culture.
As to the integrity of China, it won’t be something that can be easily changed, given Chineses are obsessed to regain what was lost during early 20 century.
If you want to fight I’d respect it since HK deserves most of it and for such a small place I do think there are better plans. For entire China no, it will cause chaos and regressions, don’t even talk about long term
Instead, they'll just try again in a few years.
And the secrecy was annoying as well.
What anti-consumer, anti-worker and anti-environment clauses are you referring to?
Of course, from the standpoint of mainstream economic theory, trade agreements are moot for their stated purpose: everyone is better off just opening up to unilateral free trade. No need for an agreement.
(Trade agreements can still be useful in practice to organize political coalitions for trade.)
The IP issues were the big criticism within the tech community, because we care a lot about IP laws, but AFAICT not the big issue for unions, left-wing orgs, right-wing populists, etc who were much, much more concerned about tariffs, workers rights, etc and had barely anything to say about IP.
I was also reading economists' opinions. Though as you can guess, they are quite in favour of lowering tariffs.
The mentioned IP clauses would be anti-consumer, criminal penalties for trade secrets, and the horrifyingly 'standard' investor-state arbitration, which can throw a wrench into any pro-consumer/worker/environment law, as they usually impact corporate profit, meaning lawyers can argue that this is an indirect form of expropriation. It has a chilling effect on legislation. E.g. Canada backed off cigarette plain packaging and pesticide registration due to the arbitration clauses in NAFTA: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141121/07460329216/corpo...
A law professor made the same argument specifically in reference to the TPP - that the government would basically have to pay a tax to corporations on any legislation that cuts into their profits: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/gord-miller/trans-pacific-part...
"Dean Baker argued that Article 18.78, under which countries should ensure that they protect trade secrets and impose criminal procedures for violators, could be used to enforce non-compete agreements.": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership
And much of the TPP's more noble language, such as environmental and worker protections, is non-binding, and even explicitly subordinate to other parts of the agreement: "In the event of any inconsistency between this Chapter and another Chapter of this Agreement, the other Chapter shall prevail to the extent of the inconsistency.": https://theconversation.com/the-trans-pacific-partnership-po...
Basically, if it were remotely good, it would not have been negotiated in such secrecy. Think about who it was kept secret from - not the counterparties in the negotiations, so it cannot be argued the secrecy was to preserve some 'advantage'.
More info on the CPTPP here: https://tpp.mfat.govt.nz/
- Alexander Fraser Tytler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Switzerland
Also, local reporting on Swiss poverty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yI4ygNr5Mg
The problem is that one cannot just look at income, rather what someone has to pay for as well, and in Switzerland you pay for everything.
I think that many Swiss can relate to this, when I lived there we used to joke that only breathing is free.
The situation is bit more complicated than that.
The voters aren't one monolithic entity. So government has lots of principle-agent problems. Check out Public Choice theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice).
A politician promising tax breaks for an industry is no different than a politician promising tax breaks for low income people.
Liberal economics reeks of colonialism. "As above so below, everything in its rightful place. Let mexico grow avocados and let india make t-shirts and let the chinese build semiconductors. Lets's put all these people in their rightful places and engineer foreign policy to make sure they stay there forever."
And investor-state arbitration? The ability for some random joe schmoe to sue a foreign government for violating a trade treaty? We saw how that shook out with the tobacco industry; the experience was so unpleasant that tobacco was actually banned from making use of the ISDS system laid out in TPP. Interfering with a state's ability to make and enforce it's own laws is NO BUENO.
TPP makes sense from the perspective of a walmart shareholder, but to the states which walmart exploits, it's complete and utter lunacy backed by big guns and fat wallets.