While I'm wary for Taiwan what does that have to do at all with this story??? This sort of sentiment reminds me of those Americans who want to stop drinking Vodka over the invasion of Ukraine.
Every tech company in China is in part owned or supported by the chinese government. Hard to talk about "independent tech". They're more like "national tech".
Today and the next 50 years in tech is being defined by the competition between the two superpowers. Their national objectives differ vastly. China: aiming to invade Taiwan; proving everyone that their totalitarian system is competitive with democracy; proving that they can lead the world. US aiming to stay a leader; maintaining the global stability; maintaining the economic & military supremacy. Both economies are trying to slowly decouple from each other, gain independence, and prove their superiority. This is the story of our ages.
In the past 3 decades, it was repeatedly shown in China that government subsidies was only useful to a extent and created incredible amount of waste. The state-owned enterprises never hired or supported the most vibrant part of the community (middle classes in urban areas).
The success of companies in China, like in the rest of the world, can be attributed to the wits and lucks of their founders.
TBH, that is why the future of China looks grim to me. The current leadership seems unable to properly recognize the contribution of the private sector.
OTOH, people in the West looked at China, and imagined all the private enterprises are secretly owned by the government and the government picked winners / losers. That was simply not the winning formula in the past 30 years.
I can have a longer essay to establish this with data and examples, but it is too late. Probably save it for another day.
Now I thank to Gods, for my friends decisions, who where not agree with me and evacuated their families, before I change my mind.
- For me one possible explanation of all these crazy things, that Russian officials in reality are puppets of Chinese, and this way China tests, what will happen if... And now Chinese have received dataset, an will decide, are possible consequences acceptable for them.
30 years is a long time for forecasting though, afaik forecasting accuracy in tournaments drops as a function of time.
I really don't see how that's any more accurate than tea leaves or bones...
One could just as easily argue it's 84%, because a crackhead gave him that number in response to a cheeseburger.
Granted this tells us nothing about the accuracy of any one particular question, but on aggregate Metaculus is pretty well calibrated.
That said, there is a longstanding academic debate between "forecasting can tell us useful things" (Telock) and "black swans will ruin your life" (Taleb).
I think this is where my skepticism comes from.
Just because one can make certain predictions with reasonable accuracy (e.g. Scott Morrison will lose the upcoming Australian election, Joe Biden will die in office, Elon Musk will be the richest man in the world by 2030), it says nothing about their ability to predict other questions with far less information (such as if and when the CCP will invade Taiwan).
Even if we were to fix this particular bucketing issue with a large enough dataset of foreign policy predictions X months into the future... one could still say this tells us nothing about this specific question because... maybe even among the geopolitical questions, this question is somehow different in some way which makes it noncomparable.
Or by analogy it would be like we were flipping what we think are coins and someone snuck a dice roll on one of the tries. Maybe the Taiwan question is the dice roll and therefore not subject to comparison with other geopolitical questions X years out.
This is of course afaik an unknowable problem, and Taleb would agree that we should just assume these predictions are tea-leaves.
At the same time it may be a valuable source of info (certainly imo more empirical than pundits and the news)
For consideration:
https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2022-03-26/is-it-pos...
So it’s exactly like the US.
>China: aiming to invade Taiwan
China hasn’t invaded anyone for decades. US had.
> So it’s exactly like the US.
Here's a bit of news for you. "China’s Global 500 companies are bigger than ever—and mostly state-owned" - Fortune https://fortune.com/2015/07/22/china-global-500-government-o...
Here's top 500 companies in USA. Do you know how many of them are state owned? I think that number is zero. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies
Are chinese tech companies really state owned? Well they're mostly funded by the government based on this news article (venture capital), so they're at least in part state owned. https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/technology/in-china-tech-is...
"An executive at a Chinese search engine recently summed up the new dynamic: We're entering an era in which we'll be fused together. It might be that there will be a request to establish a Party committee within your company, or that you should let state investors take a stake, you know, as a form of mixed ownership. If you think clearly about this, you really can resonate together with the state."
Us government spending and support compared to these effort is miniscule. Yes, they have some green energy initiatives (e.g. Tesla, Solar City benefited from those). But in the big scheme of things, us public investment in tech is about zero.
Learn some capitalism, my friend :) Remember Chinese (state owned and controlled) capitalism isn't what we call capitalism around here. Chinese capitalism is a bit like "chinese democracy". Not quite the real thing :)
>> China: aiming to invade Taiwan
> China hasn’t invaded anyone for decades. US had.
Not every invasion is wrong. The world needs a police, otherwise bad guys create chaos. China? They think Taiwan belongs to them. Which is crazy if you ask 26M Taiwanese.
Do you know history? There where at least two big open struggles - against USSR and against India. Also there where lot of hidden interventions - to Vietnam, to Korea, to Afghanistan, where China don't look as main hero, but without their intervention, world will be totally different.
For example, without China intervention, we wouldn't have North Korea; probably capitalist South Vietnam would have survived and would be very strong player on world markets; we wouldn't have Taliban, which destroyed civilization level historical monuments; etc.
Without US we wouldn’t have North Korea either - the only reason it exists is that this prevents US from placing military bases there. Taliban was literally funded and trained by CIA; not sure what Chinese involvement was?
North Korea appears because of Russian intervention, lead by Joseph Stalin.
Taliban was toy movement, nothing serious, before Russian intervention to Afghanistan in 1978.
You should understand one thing - US, Britain, France, even modern Germany are really strong players, but Russia after 1917 becomes small player with inadequate ambitions, so Russia could not play solo. And because of this, Russia constantly tried to break games of strong players, or as it named now - they try to break world game.
US after WWII becomes something what Russian named world gendarme (this is direct translation), so US have to spend resources and send military to other parts of world, to keep peace there.
BTW answer question (yes, this is test) - why do you think, mostly US military was in Yugoslavia (center of Europe), not European?
As for Russia or Yugoslavia - you are doing the same thing Putin’s shills like to do, which is changing the subject. We were talking about China.
I become fan of these books unfortunately after phenomenal Russian series (unfortunately, because Vasily Livanov, who played Holmes, in last years become involved in Russian politics, and was supporter of Putin course, even when all respectable intelligent people began to criticize).
So, Sir Arthur, said by mouth of his heroes - if you see something, which could not explain by common sense, that is - you just have opportunity, to see another or NEW reality.
In this new reality, Russia is small country, which have not enough resources to compete with big players, but Russia have huge ambitions. So what it have to do? - It switches to espionage, to propaganda, to support terrorists. What it got with such activities? - It make active interference for Western policies, and like child, happy that so small, but have success breaking activities of adults.
Sure, my version is not accurate, but reality is cruel - just cup days after US left Afghanistan, Russian authorities said on official channels, that they will try to find common language to speak with Taliban leaders.
You may ask, where is China in this equation? Ok, are you really sure, that Russian have not speak about this with Chinese authorities before such statement?
- Look on map, where is China, where is Afghanistan. - Look in wikipedia, compare sizes of economy and military of Russia and China. - Look for Russia-China economy relations in news, look who pay and how much.
Are you still sure, Russia could make independent from China statements in such circumstances?
"60 mins" from 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxjwhk1ktNw
I live in Kiev, Ukraine, and just 46 days ago I thought nearly same about possible Russian invasion to Ukraine. Now I few days per week spend on finding products to eat, because we have real war and we have some problems with supply (I will not ask you to talk here about military needs, but they are also exists and they are very significant).
Now I thank to Gods, for my friends decisions, who where not agree with me and evacuated their families, before I change my mind.
And also I'm very enjoyed by decisions of NATO countries in Europe, to enhance their defense, because this is not the end.
- Predator will not calm down, when/if he capture Ukraine or Taiwan - he will continue looking for other capture opportunities - next could be Kazakhstan, or Vietnam, or South Korea, or even Japan. Just read history of Second World War - it have begin in Africa, and than where millions victims in Europe.
Before Russian annexation, Crimea where part of Ukraine, but they have large level of autonomy, they could make their regulations on languages, on culture.
Sure, Crimea authorities have to consider, that unlike Nazi Russia, Ukraine is really multinational country, so Crimea have to build Ukrainian language schools, and Crimean Tatar language schools, not only Russian language schools.
Very similar thing could happen with Taiwan. - Now it have autonomy, but China authorities want to assimilate Taiwan, to make it much more Chinese and much less Western.
Before China assimilated Tibet, and also China make bad things in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and adequate people don't want for these things to spread to Taiwan.
Nobody in this world could make such sophisticated equipment alone.
Unfortunately this is truth, which is not studied in typical University.
Even more - in Russia Universities teach people, some sort of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche
And their government constantly spend huge resources for propaganda, to keep people minds in this perverted world.
So Russians believe on some esoteric things. For example they believe, that Russia grows, when isolates from world (this is not true).
This is totally typical way of totalitarian societies - they create their own closed mythology and once isolate from truth so much, so they do weird things, and then fatal things, like Russian invasion to Ukraine, which for my believe have started countdown for disintegration of Russia.
I'm not too much philanthropist, I just know too much about Israel, which suffer from constant visits of terrorists from the poorest countries around it.
I prefer to have something like North Korea - mostly harmless country-museum.
Until China can re-invent semiconductors on their own (an inevitable event, but probably not anytime soon), they are reliant on the west to product any semiconductors at all.
This is case of extreme complexity, which could not handled by one country, even by so big country.
In reality, all G7 economies involved in semiconductor produce, and they also use lot of resources of other countries - this is how reality look.
When somebody will create General AI, capable to substitute scientist, but to be strict, when this somebody will have thousands or maybe 100s thousands of such artificial scientists, this somebody will have opportunity to make his own semiconductor monopoly, but not earlier.
And to avoid complications, China prepare to live under sanctions. I must admit, this is smart behavior, even when I don't support, what China plan to do with Taiwan.
Of course that's not what your comment was reaching for.
If you like this type of drinks, I suggest you to drink Ukrainian vodka, it is really much better :)