U.S. to spend $1.5B to jumpstart alternatives to Huawei | Hacker News Reader

U.S. to spend $1.5B to jumpstart alternatives to Huawei

axios.com

52 pointssigna1117 comments

It's funny how zealously pro free trade / ricardian "theory of comparative advantage" America was in the early 2000s when it was the industrial top dog.

Economists who drank the koolaid even paternalistically tutted at developing countries like China for doing stuff like this - genuinely believing that they were doing actual harm to their people by not just eliminating every subsidy and tariff.

The tables have really turned.

i would guess there's still a large majority of americans, esp in the intellectual/managerial/upper classes, who believed and still believe all the 'free trade' stuff -- the dynamism and creative energy of capitalism, etc.

if i had to put a number on it, prob 95% of people in the upper 10% of income/wealth in america believe all the standard myths about capitalism and free trade and competive advantage, etc. and 99% of VC-types.

chomsky always says how the countries that do best mimic what we do instead of what we tell them to do.

there's a reason people like matt y and ezra k and myriad others get so highly paid -- they have to write and speak complete nonsense on a daily basis. they prob even believe what they're saying sometimes. how could they not? the cognitive disonance would be too much for anyone.

I recommend reading some of the original economic theory that undermines the “Chicago School” free market thinking of Milton Friedman and others who it seems you are so fed up with.

One good place to start might be the work of Friedrich Hayek.

If you are like me, you might start to have a more nuanced view than “It’s not true!!”.

Hayek for example despite being in many ways the father of this work was very explicit about the role of government and the many areas he considered government intervention essential.

austrian school guy? like von mises? one of the early neoliberals?

i went thru a bunch of that 20 years ago after stumbling on antiwar.com.

i think hayek and i prob have diff views on how to use state power.

https://chomsky.info/20210916/

  Friedrich Hayek, the moral leader of neoliberalism, visited and said he was impressed by the freedom under Augusto Pinochet and said he couldn’t find a single person in Chile who didn’t think there was more freedom under the Pinochet dictatorship than under Allende. Somehow he couldn’t hear the cries of anguish from Via Grimaldi and other torture chambers.

that guy?

Yep that guy, except I suggest reading his actual work instead of basing your thinking on what someone else thought he thought.

Is China actually conducting Free Trade to the United States?

yes, they are just better are managing their industry incentives, and have better regulation that cap profits and cause the 20pct investment back in R&D the top comment mentioned.

shrug emoticon

How does this relate to Free Markets? Or is this sarcasm?

Silicon Valley VC culture still believes in this mythology whole-heartedly - but they add an extra layer of not really understanding what all this actually means because its written in books and those are not blog posts so it's hard to read them

Rest in peace, Nortel.

https://nationalpost.com/news/exclusive-did-huawei-bring-dow...

Huawei is one of a handful of companies in the world that spends more than $20B USD on R&D per year, which just happens to be approximately ~20% of their revenue.[1]

I know the $1.5B from CHIPS is effectively a kickstarter of sorts, but the sheer size of the R&D budget of the baseline should be kept in mind to understand how much further US private industry needs to catch-up, let alone overtake.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/huawei-ri...

Well this is clearly a free money grab which will result in greater inflation and no real benefit.

Didn't Cisco and Juniper have issues with NSA sponsored backdoors/vulnerabilities, and then following that disclosure no one trusted them because they lacked credibility?

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. If you don't make any change to fix the issues of the past, you know the saying...

So ORAN is a specifications layer for telecom? But who's actually manufacturing the equipment, and how do you stop them from being bought out by conglomerates (possibly Chinese) in a few years...?

The USA has 51% American ownership laws for certain industries.

Actually ORAN (there also were Open Ran and V-Ran) it's kinda break-through by itself. Traditionally vendors supplied vertically integrated solution that you couldn't swap and replace parts of it with third party offerings. ORAN opens up interfaces and allows telecoms to mandate it's supports in solutions procured from vendors. But the bottom line for telecoms is to drive prices down by trying to increase number of vendors on the playing field and maybe a bit to diversify the risks. For small vendors that manufacture telecom equipment it's not trivial to stay afloat (very long sales cycles, low margins, lots of conditions) so been bought out by conglomerates in many cases it's their exit strategy

Ericsson, Nokia

my bet too.

they will just open an office at 1209 North Orange Street. Wilmington, Delaware.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com