Do they just not care?
Some day soon a war will not be started with an assassins bullet but with a tool like this. I wonder when we start looking at them the same way?
The audience is other Asian and African states. The message is "we can act with impunity". The US will probably do some tit-for-tat exchange, but the US scope to do anything is limited due to the potential for impact on US businesses.
They're also directing lasers at helicopter pilots, which is much closer to a actual war than mere bits.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-06/chinese-fishing-vesse...
After the meeting, Franz wanted to travel to the hospital to visit the civilians who'd been wounded by the errant grenade. En route, his driver, confused, took the same route from the morning procession. When they realized what was happening, they told him to turn around and get the out if there. When the driver stopped to turn around, they were ~1 block from the site of the first assassination attempt. One if the co-conspirators (who had lost his nerve the first time, and had been milling around and hoping that Franz would come back by), was standing where the car came to a stop. Two shots killed Fran's Ferdinand and his wife.
Fun fact about this--Franz Ferdinand's death was not the cause of the Great War in the way that people tend to think it was. The assassination caused the war in the sense that it was a convenient excuse for a war that the Austro-Hungarians already wanted, but not because (Austro-Hungarian Emperor) Franz Joseph wanted revenge or anything like that. In fact, Franz Joseph's secretary later said that he "almost seemed grateful" that Ferdinand (whose marriage was so problematic that he had been forced to proactively abdicate on behalf of his children) was out of the way.
The cannon doesn't have to work all the time, just once effectively, and possibly even accidentally.
0 - Peace 1 - Trade War 2 - Financial War 3 - Electronic War 4 - Shooting War
Note that 1 & 2 are different types of Economic war, and could be grouped together. The steps occur in order, but steps can be skipped.
From a US-centric point of view, North Korea and Iran seem to be at #3. China & Russia are at a limited version of #2.
Chinese/HK seem to be at #3 with each other.Given how invisible Electronic War can be, it's possible that they are deep in #3. It's also possible that #4 might be initially fought with HK Police forces as a proxy. Think of that as "4a".
"Countries that trade with each other don't make war with each other."
As we isolate countries and disrupt trade we definitely are increasing the risk of conflict.
Tons of CPP members are getting rich off the economy which includes a lot of trade and foreign debt.
There’s plenty of correlation here.
It's impossible to prove causality, but Europe has never seen longer and more widespread peace than the last 70 years.
But then you go on to claim that war among countries on the Western side was prevented by memories of war and not the EEC, without any reasoning as to why. I don't buy it. The first World War was already terrible, yet these countries were at each others' throats only a few decades later.
At worst, it was an affirmation repeated, as with most affirmations, in the hopes that the repetition would make it true, which it doesn't, and for the usual reason, that it generally wasn't.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers...
https://www.phactual.com/8-american-companies-that-worked-wi...
https://www.toptenz.net/top-10-american-companies-that-aided...
Nobody really cares, except for those directly involved. Sad but true, nobody will ever go to war for that, for foreign citizens.
> I want my cheap plastic consumer devices!!
People do actually want that. And their cheap shoes and clothes and...
Foxconn's suicide rate is lower than China's, along with all 50 US states. They just employ a gargantuan amount of people (400k). I don't know much about the working conditions there, so I don't have a position, but it doesn't look like there's evidence to suggest that the working conditions have anything to do with the fact that some of their employees committed suicide.
To put it another way, there's roughly as much evidence of this as there is that working in a factory in Nigeria causes sickle cell anemia.
Page 25 (but see also page 23) https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Fencing off tall buildings is a useful short-term suicide prevention measure.
This was a common argument as to why WWI couldn't happen, countries were far too economically dependent, everyone would be ruined.
Except it did happen, and everyone was ruined.
I'm pretty sure this was the prevailing thinking prior to World War 1. A large scale conflict would be so damaging on a human and economic level that most assumed the people in power would find away to stop a massive war from breaking out. Well, they were right about the first assumption, but very wrong about the second.
There's plenty of good things from a moral perspective about power being diffused away from a hyperpower hegemon, but stability and peace have never been among the side effects.
Here's what Otto Mallery said though:
"If soldiers are not to cross international boundaries, goods must do so. Unless the Shackles can be dropped from trade, bombs will be dropped from the sky."
As the grandparent said - steps can be skipped. Since 3 is a relatively new medium for offensive actions, I suspect there are not a lot of well-known examples around. Would be interesting to see if any currently active conflicts were preceded by DoS (not necessarily Distributed, could be just a "cable cut" from outside), and how long before it escalated to active conflict.
"Peace" is built from war's stalemates. As the most violent (and therefore effective) means become ineffective, combatants shift towards less effective means, to the point that the war (which is still ongoing) continues through diplomacy and trade.
Hence, "war is diplomacy by other means."
Diplomacy and trade are means of gaining an advantage in the underlying (now "cold") warfare. They're maneuvers to defeat the existing stalemate. If either side is able to obtain an economic (or other advantage) sufficient to defeat their opponent in a more violent form of warfare, then they will return to violence because that is the basal state of nature.
The worst thing you could ever have in trade / diplomacy is a good working relationship that isn't balanced and equal. A trade failure is itself a stalemate which can strengthen peace, so long as it occurs before too great of an advantage is gained any group.
https://www.amazon.com/New-Confessions-Economic-Hit-Man/dp/1...
How many major wars in the last 100 years were preceded by trade wars or electronic wars (I don't know what a financial war is, trade embargoes? - embargoes are not trade wars)? Perhaps my view is a bit us-centric (there have been many small wars in africa that I don't know the history of), but I don't think that us conflict participation in Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Grenada, Vietnam, Korea, WWII, or WWI were preceded by those sorts of policies. To find a trade war that preceded a war I think you might have to go to the US fighting in central america (banana wars), or maybe the civil war.
Meanwhile the US has engaged in trade wars with plenty of countries it hasn't fought with, dominantly europe (via the banana trade wars, not to be confused with banana wars, e.g.), and Japan.
The whole point of the cannon is that you can leverage the bandwidth of other countries. The CCP already controls the telecoms in China. They don't need to hijack Chinese computers for DDoS attacks when they can directly DDoS from their ISP's backbone.