America is determined to sink Huawei
economist.com
economist.com
Should we nuke them?
I'm not answering the question; I'm asking it. I guess my overarching question in the end is whether or not it should be left up to the free market to resolve an issue that's spawned from an entity operating "outside" of it, either literally (e.g. in China) or figuratively (e.g. antitrust violations).
I think a starting point for discussion is to get past equating antitrust issues with monopoly status. In the previous century, these things went together coincidentally, but the scale of our economy has grown to a point where it is no longer necessary for the largest companies to have monopoly power in their market to engage in damaging anti-competitive practices. We instead see cartel-like cooperation between these companies instead of competition, such as apple-google wage fixing that was revealed years ago. Or their complete insulation from consumer feedback necessary for healthy capitalist markets to function, because their economies of scale insulate them by making consumer choices insignificant signals lost in the noise.
I'm not so sure. Yeah you could fork Chromium or Firefox (the only two browsers left), but "web standards" have ballooned and gotten so bloated that you'd need a pretty significant engineering organization to manage to support it yourself.
Regardless, it’s pretty certain Huawei does it and the possibility someone else is doing it and currently getting away with it does not justify someone else doing it.
Now that's out of the way, what I am a fan of is fighting for something instead of fighting against something. I don't believe or understand this narrative of fighting China. We've been outsourcing everything to China in the last two decades, we've helped a billion of their people come out of poverty and we've helped them build infrastructure that we only dream of. Now that they're a major power, we're starting to declare all sorts of wars on them. What if, instead of doing all these economic, military and other types of warfare, we would focus, together or alone (as states) in excelling. In building the best tech, in building the most awesome factories, in having the best quality of life for our people?
What if instead of declaring war on China and moving our production to South East Asia or Africa and then helping them grow out of poverty while extracting as much value as we can (and then in the future we declare wars on them as they gain a foothold in the globalized economy), we help ourselves be awesome and in the process help South East Asia, and Africa, and whoever else can get into a win-win situation?
I guess I'm a bit tired of this anti-China rhetoric sprouting up on Western social media. It's a classic case of identifying a 'common enemy' so that our people can be sheeped into whatever the powers that be want them to be sheeped into.
I live in Europe as well, and sometimes it feels like European leadership is extremely confused: EU is a shitshow that nobody seems to be able to lead (just look at how long it took for agreeing on debt mutualization/Eurobond, Brexit, VDL apologizing to Italy, etc), Germany working with Russia on Nord stream 2 after its actions in Ukraine, Sweden pretending like the lax virus approach has nothing to do with its hyper leveraged banks and heavily indebted households, list goes on... and all we can do is entertain ourselves by making fun of Trump. We are a joke, we can’t even keep our union together. We can’t even pay for our military because daddy America has to foot the bill and if they don’t our European leaders start whining about lack of US leadership.
The US Fed had enough vision to extend the dollar swap lines to more central banks including the Swedish central bank. For the ECB there is a permanent arrangement. Despite the “tough love“ we Europeans are getting on trade from the US, ultimately Europe will soon enough realize the US is its best ally.
We just want freedom and fair economic practices. We won’t get it if we let China play communist game theory with the only planet we have.
China can play any games it wants when the rest of us are locked on making cheap political points by pointing finger at eachothers inadequate response to this pandemic.
Maybe you can do one downvote for each dollar in the EU surplus with the US.
Multinational companies are not bringing profits home. This was perhaps the best decision Trump made was to even the playing field and brought it down to about the same as most EU countries.
Europe is a much larger population but it’s not as rich as US per capita so don’t expect europeans to buy more US goods. I agree that sometimes the tariffs are too high. But the situation is more complex. VAT in Sweden is 25%, a Tesla Model S cost about 100k$ here because of VAT mainly not just tariffs. Many US products are simply too expensive for the same reasons and a Europea generally lower purchase power. Americans like to buy European luxury goods many europeans themselves can’t buy. Trade is not a single transaction. I would love to own Tesla or buy more american, but I can only afford iPhone not Tesla. And iPhones are made in China...
Nato has protected EU, but not against the refugee crisis which affect EU much more than US. US seems to infact increased the problems and is simply trying to leave now. US cares about mexican immigration but don’t do much to help situation in ME.
At some point Trump got angry at us and said "OK no tariffs, but ALSO no subsidies". Obviously Europe didn't agree, and the US put tariffs in place.
All this is logical, I get it that Trump is hyperbolical and extreme, but he's not that crazy.
Out of curiosity, what's the legal basis for this? Is it just a threat, and if companines like TSMC don't follow it, they'll also be blacklisted from the US market?
Mark Liu, T.S.M.C.’s chairman, told The New York Times in October that T.S.M.C. had been negotiating with the Commerce Department about a possible U.S. plant, but said it would require substantial government subsidies. How much, if any, public money might be associated with the company’s decision was unclear.
And from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-48917705
The US State Department has approved a potential arms sale to Taiwan, estimated to be worth $2.2bn (£1.76bn), the Pentagon said.
Maybe TSMC thought it would be really good if Tawain were protected better thanks to these weapons, and TSMC would also like these subsidies.
Is there a link to what this new rule, is exactly?
The article states it in one line but doesn't reference it beyond that.
[1]https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/05/19/2020-10...
[2]https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2020/05/commerc...
Is it to sink a specific company? Send a message to a country with clear military aspirations? Reshore the semiconductor industry? Play to the president's political base? What?
If the goal is to reshore the semiconductor manufacturing industry, that's not going to work. Every country will have a competitive advantage in manufacturing against the US for as long as it prints the global reserve currency.
But remember who you are defending.
Great power rivalry is bad for corporate profit and amazing for wage laborer, which most of HN is.
If you are an worker in North America, this type of headline should be a moment of celebration.
When things change, so I will change my mind.
* Apple: 44.8 Billion
* Intel: 14.8 Billion
* Qualcomm: 14.6 Billion
* Boeing: 11.9 Billion
* Micron Technology: 10.4 Billion
Based on [1].
Meanwhile, "Europe's listed firms expect to glean $514 billion in revenue from China."[2]
I just don't understand where people get this idea that Western companies can't do business in China. They have a massive presence in China, unmatched by the presence of any Chinese company in the US or Europe.
1. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trade-war-watch-these-are-... 2. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-markets-eu/euro...
Let China develop their own technology and then we'll see a different story and nothing will stop them from taking over the world, by excellence not by IP-theft and benefit from others research. On the other I was quite happy to see China rising out of the poverty. It would have been a good counterbalance to the western Capitalistic world. Unfortunately they played the same game but with different weapons: cheap labor, IP theft and large pools of talent to pick from. Maybe the obedience of Chinese played a role behind this growth for they all benefited. However, since Xi's rise to power the ambition to dominate Asia with a fist only grew. I hope the Chinese people don't loose the opportunity to change their future for the better.
Is this true, though?
Huawei spends over 15 billion USD/year on R&D, which puts it in the same league as Apple and Google. Only a few companies in the world spend more on R&D. That's the real reason why Huawei is viewed as a threat. The US has been happy for China to produce cheap knick-knacks. Now that China develops and produces its own cutting-edge technology, it is perceived as a threat.
Your R&D budget becomes effectively your 15B (I don't believe that number btw) plus whatever Cisco, Broadcom etc.. spend. How convenient.
US companies can't compete in the market where they don't exist. Qualcomm sells components, not mobile networks. There are only four big companies left for for 4G/LTE/5G mobile infrastructure:
COMPANY MARKET SHARE
Huawei 28%
Ericsson 27%
Nokia 23%
ZTE 13%
Samsung 3%https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei
If the Chinese regime throws cash at a company to buy themselves into a dominant position to play their role in a geopolitical game, market share means nothing.
This shouldn't be mixed up with the other common case which is often discussed, 'American' as the demonym for people and things from the USA. That isn't quite as bad (though it still annoys other people from elsewhere in the Americas) because it's using the name of the superset - Americans, from the USA, are also Americans, from the continent. Whereas, when "America" (the USA) does something, it doesn't necessarily mean all of America does it. The USA is a subset of America, not a superset or the only entry.
Language isn't always logical, but if you won't draw the line at something so clearly backwards as using the whole continent's name for the actions of one country, you can only expect it will start an argument every time.
So, yeah... you can say brazil borrowed that word from the greek language via latin, and the greeks themselves borrowed it from an extinct language...
Am·a·zon /ˈaməˌzän,ˈaməzən/ Learn to pronounce Origin late Middle English: via Latin from Greek Amazōn, explained by the Greeks as ‘without a breast’ (as if from a- ‘without’ + mazos ‘breast’), referring to the fable that the Amazons cut off the right breast so as not to interfere with the use of a bow, but probably a folk etymology of an unknown foreign word.