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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

I could believe the first statement (almost) but the second (unlikely to come back) has to be a paraphrase. He's old: it's unlikely to see significant return in his lifetime, in his field, which is highly subject to national-strategic interest.

I don't see any end to globalisation in the information economy up top: kids worldwide do tiktok, don't want to use the Licenced disney version in hypothesis...

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tiktok ( for one example ), is already highly segmented and containerized by country. The tiktok Russians see isn't the one Ukranians see.

In this case, I don't think segmentation is the inverse of globalization. They're both using a service that originates outside their country.

Is it? I use tiktok and the app routinely tries to throw content outside my bubble at the wall to see what sticks, even in languages I don’t speak.

It is currently showing a lot of Argentinian videos on my feed even though I’m European.

I’m sure that the Chinese version is different and censored, but other than that my experience is that it’s tailored to your personal engagement patterns much more than to the groups you belong to.

I think they're referring to this article: https://www.nrk.no/osloogviken/xl/tiktok-doesn_t-show-the-wa...

It came up on HN a few months back

Not sure how they partition it, because you can obviously still see users you follow while you move around, but I noticed my fyp was completely different when I went back home. It could just be that IP geolocation is more important a signal than your taste profile.

It is. Leaving China aside. Once tiktok 'segments' you to a region, the experience is totally different and unchangeable even if you move around.

Ewwww. Yet another reason to dislike TikTok.

I’m my experience, if you turn on a VPN with a different region, you’ll start getting that type of content.

funny thing is when you have a different OS language than your location, then you basically get both. But it's quite difficult to become entrenched into another (in this case a third) region/language.

It is, indeed. Nobody can honestly claim it isn't.

geolocking is not a globalization problem, it's a solution to globalization. It's not different from DVD region locking.

I can't see any tiktok as it's verboten in Hong Kong.

For context, here's the full quote:

> "Twenty-seven years have passed and [the semiconductor industry] witnessed a big change in the world, a big geopolitical situation change in the world," Chang said. "Globalization is almost dead and free trade is almost dead. A lot of people still wish they would come back, but I don't think they will be back."

What is the globalization information economy exactly? The broad suggestion and standard interpretation of globalization is that the movement of physical goods is coming to and end.

Thats also bogus: there is no end to extraction of goods, raw materials from overseas, the players are just shifting around.

You think lithium won't continue to be bought from Australia and Chile for use in Europe?

You think manufacturing in India and China and Vietnam and Pakistan and Bangladesh is all coming home to fruit-of-the-loom unionised labour in the USA?

You think EV will be Tesla, Rivian and never VAG, Volvo, or BYD?

There is no end to movements of goods, (and services) worldwide. The borders and boundaries on what moves to whose profit is shifting. "Globalisation" isn't ending. "We trade with anyone, irrespective of geopolitical blocs" isn't ending. Whats happening is re-balancing.

The global information economy is the profit being made from trading in electronic services. Rent on transactions in payments, funds transfer, arbitrage, the dutch-irish sandwich...

I think what Globalization skeptics like me are saying is actually really simple: you shouldn't outsource your critical shit to hostile countries.

Not really more complicated than that. If we're talking about the US, other countries can sell their EVs here, no problem, but you have to be in the club. Since the 1990s, we've sort of skirted our moral responsibility on who we trade with because it made a bunch of people rich, and then those rich people gave money to politicians who helped make other people rich, who then ran for office and so on. This responsibility isn't limited to "don't trade with countries that have concentration camps", it also extends to "be smart about how you trade and who you trade with such that you don't destroy your own industry and middle class".

Really not that complicated.

>The global information economy is the profit being made from trading in electronic services. Rent on transactions in payments, funds transfer, arbitrage, the dutch-irish sandwich...

This is a goofy way of saying "the global information economy" makes money on spying on human behavior and then selling ads based on that behavior. Yuck.

> don't destroy your own industry and middle class".

> Really not that complicated.

whenever somebody makes that claim they usually ignore all the nuances that make it complicated.

The reality is that especially the US( and to a lesser degree the rest of the developed world as well) has had a disproportionate high quality of life for decades precisely because of doing this.

It was the best thing for the generation that made this decision, even if it's terrible for the people today.

And we continue to make decisions like that. it will be even more obvious just how careless we are today once the limited resources are depleted. Thankfully that's going to be an issue for a future generation, not mine.. but reading statements such as that kinda ticks me off a little

> Since the 1990s, we've sort of skirted our moral responsibility on who we trade with...

What trade laws prior to the 1990s were created due to "moral responsibility"? I believe all trade policy from the start of the country was designed to make certain people rich for political favor. You can say NAFTA and the WTO are bad deals, but that doesn't mean what came before it met some standard of morality.

> This responsibility isn't limited to "don't trade with countries that have concentration camps"...

Case in point, in WWII, US companies were allowed by US law to trade with Nazi Germany. IBM even helped directly with the genocide. When did the US trade policy driven by "moral responsibility" appear?

> What trade laws prior to the 1990s were created due to "moral responsibility"?

Almost all federal revenue prior to the 20th century came from tariffs. The US still managed to industrialize just fine during that period. After which, and with the institution of the income tax, things get way more complicated.

It’s probably obvious to me but those trade laws did protect domestic industrialization, which is, again, obviously a good thing. You’re probably reading too much into my use of the word “moral”, and that’s my bad, because I should’ve used some word that denotes ensuring self sufficiency in your country. That’s all I’m really talking about. Don’t screw over your working and middle class so some nerds on Wall Street who can’t bench press 100lbs can make a couple basis points.

Thanks for clarifying.

I agree that the protectionist policies might have had some benefits for workers. However, they were primarily to the benefit of the landed gentry, and then industrial capitalists. Free trade reflects our switch to finance capitalism.

Marx made a similar point to yours: the interests of the industrial capitalists are more aligned with the workers than the finance capitalists, yet the industrial capitalists will choose finance over the workers.

In other words, no one has control over the hurricane and what it will look like, or where it will be heading tomorrow morning.

People are just riding it.

> You think lithium won't continue to be bought from Australia and Chile for use in Europe?

Globalization does -not- merely mean global trade. Globalization was the equivalent of centralized optimization applied to national economies. Far flung corners of the planet have been doing long distance trade for ages, long before globalization.

Physical movement of goods due to foreign trade is not the same thing as physical movement due to a distributed ("globalized") production chain.

Until Australia tools up to add value, lithium is substantially part of a distributed production chain. We're also the source of the feedstock silicon for some fab lines. Almost all manufactured meat product (bacon and the like) is using imported meat, sometimes as little as 15% Australian content and our meatworks are owned by a Brazilian company importing from Canada to Australia.

We ship iron ore to China, to buy back construction metal forms..

We are in the early phases of decoupling. Teenagers are not an appropriate barometer for what is about to come.

Neither are some old people...

Old people in power are the ones moving the needle, not the teenagers

Not for long

Why’s that

terminal decrepitude

they haven't moved shit and there's no incentive for them to.

> We are in the early phases of decoupling

In other words, slave moved up the value chain and no longer wants to slave for their masters.

Can you explain what you mean by this? Japan, Taiwan and SK all moved up the value chain and are still US trade partners. I'm pretty sure it's the US that has "broken up" with china, not the other way around. Lastly, using the word slave to describe something other than slavery diminishes the value of the word. The US does not force China to make products for them.

Or future generations will look at ours as we look at the British who exploited India, or the Europeans who exploited the Americas, or the merchants of the triangular trade, or any of the other thousands of episodes of mass exploitation for profit. Fingers crossed for that and not a fascist uprising.

This is laughably absurd. The last few decades have seen a massive reduction in poverty in China. China has had a huge trade surplus with the US for decades, and probably the rest of the world too. How on earth is that exploitation?

It is laughably absurd.

Despite this, someone in the future will write their dissertation on this topic in the affirmative. They will be considered one of the great visionaries of their time in certain circles, despite being totally wrong.

They'd be totally wrong if you are an entrepreneur and they'd be totally right if you're a lower class worker. Doubt you'd find a synthesis there.

Yes, of course. They will rest their argument on the asinine and unfalsifiable "lived experience" canard.

We can only hope that smarter humans will win the day.

What value does that word hold for you and why would it diminish it for you?

That word has been used to describe many things for many years in many different ways. It is not a holy or forbidden word and it wasn't used in anyway that deviated from standard use.

I don't think slave is a forbidden word. Maybe I was too strong in my own wording. I didn't mean "slave" specifically, but any word used incorectly, and especialy those with negative connotations, used as a quick way to "win" an argument.

>and it wasn't used in anyway that deviated from standard use.

Slave:[0]

1 a person held in forced servitude

2 disapproving : a person who is completely subservient to a dominating influence a slave to fashion/technology

3 : a device (such as the printer of a computer) that is directly responsive to another

4 : drudge, toiler

While 4 could have been the intent here (2 has a negative conotation for the slave) if we only look at it's ability to descibe the relationship between China and the US, looking at the whole sentence:

In other words, slave moved up the value chain and no longer wants to slave for their masters.

It is clear that 1 is being used here. We are using slave as both a noun and a verb, and describing the US as the master. I should also note that 1 is by far the most common definition, and other dictionaries have only that one when used as a noun.[1]

[0]https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/slave

[1]https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/slave

How so? Teenagers, with some maturation, are literally "what is about to come". They're future adults.

Yes. In a few decades they will have power. Over the next one, they have very little.

I agree. TikTok going down wouldn't be the end of the world. But there is so much other reliance on Chinese manufacturing in the West: electronics, furniture, machinery, etc. https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/china-mongolia-taiwan/peo...

The transition to a bipolar world with a U.S. sphere and a Chinese sphere would be a huge shock to both sides. I don't know if it would be a fairer world or not; regardless, we all seem intent on doing this.

This article is another in a long line of very scary news about the U.S.-China tensions. I hope diplomacy and peace will prevail eventually.

> This article is another in a long line of very scary news about the U.S.-China tensions. I hope diplomacy and peace will prevail eventually.

Write your representatives and ask them to bend the knee!

I disagree with your suggestion that diplomacy is necessarily a form of submission. Peace can still be made while maintaining a position of strength. For example, U.S.-Soviet relations.

Also wanted to add the famous quote attributed to Goering at Nuremberg. https://www.mit.edu/people/fuller/peace/war_goering.html

"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

I wonder if the statement was limited to semiconductor manufacturing.

> I don't see any end to globalisation in the information economy up top

Maybe that's a later stage but it's definitely on the agenda... I mean they openly flirted with banning it just a few years ago. I think it'd be silly to assume the hawks pushing that (or their allies of convenience who are just running US social media companies) just shrugged their shoulders and gave up.

Globalization is dead if we hit peak world energy. Then it's every country for themselves. Most products contain energy, so why export energy in the form of finished goods? As energy gets more scarce, countries will get more stingy with exports and tend toward autarky.

Energy isn't all that limited though, especially with ever improving generation technology in wind and solar and in storage such as grid scale battery facilities.

Wind, solar and grid scale batteries fall somewhere between pipedreams and nightmares.

The resources needed to build much less maintain these at scale is a disaster, one that's largely inflicted on 'not us' but that requires massive economic transfers through globalization. You're not building these at this scale without globalization.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the breakdown of 2021 US new energy capacity added:

- 41% wind

- 36% solar

- 19% gas

- 4% other

I was actually kind of pleasantly surprised. 28 GW capacity added, 8.5 GW capacity retired.

Total capacity 1115.68 GW generated summer 2020

Total breakdown 2021 is more like this:

- 36% Petroleum

- 32% Natural gas

- 11% Coal

- 8% Nuclear

- 12% Renewable energy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...

are those percentage in peak theoretical capacity or base load

I think it’s peak output

Keep in mind that "renewable" includes hydro and geothermal, both of which are reasonably substantial and largely fully exploited.

There've in fact been several notable decommissionings of hydro projects, and extant geothermal (such as The Geysers in northern California) are producing well below their peak due to field exhaustion (various factors, typically groundwater and/or actual thermal flux).

Wind and solar have grown markedly, but remain a small fraction of total electrical generation. Which itself remains a fraction (roughly 1/3) of total energy consumption.

This opinion is highly incorrect. We are not headed to "peak world energy". Energy consumption will continue to rise, not fall. Even countries with extreme amounts of imports and population decline still continue to grow energy usage.

Nah. They're both ludicrous. China is no longer a free-for-all labor bonanza for a number of reasons but global trade is all-time highs after the pandemic dip. His statements are purely calculated propaganda to influence US policy.

This is how I interpret it: more countries will

- invest in domestic technologies development + reinvest the proceeds into whatever it takes to keep the profit pump pumping (e.g. engineering education/training/"re-skilling" programs)

- de-incentivize equivalent foreign technologies as insurance against getting squeezed by international geopolitics (see e.g. Russia getting blackballed by global financial system essentially overnight, US restricting Nvidia from selling top GPUs to China, COVID->global shipping supply chain meltdown etc.)

- occasionally dip into low-cost free trade as a short-term growth strategy (as ruling political parties play musical chairs and swap leadership/opposition roles)

- exert dominance in intellectual property disputes as ruthlessly as possible (my fave example: fallout of the huawei/qualcomm 5G dispute - every country's communications authority has to ratify a device according to the 5G standard -> whoever owns the patent to the algorithm for the standard collects money for each device -> nasty wide-ranging political dispute that appears to have nothing to do w/ the original patent issue)

Nothing is as addictive as 'short-term' growth strategies and staying in power.

Which is both why free trade and free trade are respectively the future and not the future

Not the future because governments have so much self control? OK.

It's either global trade or dark times. Global trade is the only thing maintaining peace. Thankfully it's too useful to all involved to go away

"He" is an American. Not a Chinese.

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