USA restricts Swiss access to AI computer chips | Hacker News Reader

USA restricts Swiss access to AI computer chips

bluewin.ch

73 pointstimermore133 comments

This is odd, ETH Zurich is one of the top ML research labs in the world. They routinely work with Disney! Are they going to block Germany and Max Planck Institute as well? (who commonly work with ETH Zurich)

https://studios.disneyresearch.com/researchlab/disney-resear...

https://www.youtube.com/disneyresearchhub

Let's be realistic EU would be dump to think that US under Trump will reliable continue to stay a alley of the EU (which doesn't mean they become a foe, either, reality is more complex then a dump black and white world few a lot of fictional stories love to have).

Meta, OpenAI and similar have made it through their action very clear that they:

- Want to abuse legislation to make sure no future competition can rise to rival them (When it comes to foundational models, close to all AI startups use fundational models from tech startups even if they speak of "having their own model" (which nearly always is just a minimal domain adaption of a foundation model from a US tech giant). OpenAI was very well open okay, or lets better say visible, about that

- Are not okay and will penalize any country with legislation which states you can't just train on copyrighted content without getting a license which allows training (i.e. it's not fair use, which it theoretically shouldn't be either in the US as it's in general trying to replace the people of which content they train on). E.g. various "open source" models from Meta aren't available in the EU and that was before export restrictions.

- Both have no access to influence US government decisions, so removing access from a Uni or even Country which tries to create their own foundation models. Which much less legal copyright issues. Is just kind of the natural consequence of giving tech giants which try to make sure they stay quasi monopolies to much governmental influence.

So I think if the US wouldn't be worried of EU then teaming up with China for ML compute ships the EU might already have been on the "reduced access" list. Or at least some key EU states which have understood how important it is to have a non US foundational model.

Through also to be fair Swiss "neutrality" is complex, and involves having decent political and trade relationships which any super power as far as relevant for them and viable (e.g. not really Russia anymore). Which includes China. This didn't prevent them to criticize China e.g. about Honkong but they are in discussions to improve trade agreements between them and China since last year (see Wikipedia).

So my guess is the main reason is to put pressure on Swiss wrt. future "improvements" of trade agreements with China.

But I think the points listed first still are something the EU has to highly worry about and they might have very well played a secondary role for this decision. You know like testing out the waters how exuding alleys from free chip access will be treated by other alleys.

This restriction was made by Biden not Trump

fair, but realistically who trusts Biden? Especially after his behavior to the end of his terms?

"EU would be dump to think that US under Trump will reliable continue to stay a alley of the EU (which doesn't mean they become a foe, either"

Threatening with violence (over greenland) is something enemeys do. Not partners. Especially since denmark considered himself a close ally to the US. They are seriously reconsidering that part.

Now Trump being Trump it was of course mainly words to get a better deal. But to other parties, words have more meaning. So the long term effects are probably not beneficial to the US. Neither are moves like excluding Swiss from Chips. Now if the Swiss would have sold those to sanctioned countries - that might have been a understandable reasons. But like this, people are looking for new ways not involving the US.

I think that Germany is much more of a bona fide ally of the US at this point than Switzerland.

Switzerland is not an ally to the US. Switzerland is a neutral country, although on friendly terms with many countries.

"Only 18 trusted allies will be granted unrestricted access to this technology in future, wrote the online portal of French-speaking Swiss television RTS on Sunday. These include Germany, France and Japan."

Switzerland restricts access to its own allies of weapons that it sold to other countries because of internal concerns about how that could affect the country in the future. This seems to be at least partially similar to that.

At this point AI could absolutely be considered potentially threatening in the future.

> Switzerland restricts access to its own allies of weapons that it sold to other countries because of internal concerns about how that could affect the country in the future.

This is regarding resale, right? IIRC pretty much every country does that?

Yes, but in this concrete case it meant, that the Swiss prevented germany from transfering ammunition to Ukraine (over ammunition of the anti air tank Gepard, if I recall correctly).

That argument would bite itself in the ass. Switzerland doesn't have issues with selling arms to neutral countries. So the presumption would be that Switzerland might turn non-neutral and wage offensive war with this technology? But at the same time the underlying tone is "we're punishing you for 'not being as ally,' aka for being neutral". And during all of this the US is delivering recently purchased F35s to Switzerland as well.

>Switzerland doesn't have issues with selling arms to neutral countries.

That's a very poor case. Any country declaring itself neutral stops being neutral the moment it gets attacked by another country (see Belgium and Netherlands in WW2 when they declared themselves neutral but still got steamrolled by Nazi Germany anyway, and Ukraine today).

So then you won't be able to get any ammo or spare parts for those expensive Swiss arms you bought making them paperweights (again see Ukraine right now with it's Swiss Oerlikon AA guns on the German Gepards).

So why would anyone buy swiss arms then if the moment you actually need to use them to defend yourself you can't because the Swiss government puts an embargo on you?

Well, Switzerland should restrict access to what is now called "The Magnificent Seven" (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla):

https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/u...

This article falsely claims that "the US leads AI development right now". A very high percentage of research and implementers is from the EU, China and Russia (e.g., Sutskever).

Restrict access how? To imports?

Russia is laughable in this list. Sutskever left it after high school. Canada would be more apt, as the top 3 famous AI dudes share U of Toronto alma mater.

A good example of how fragile technology really is.

First off, you need rare metals to make chips, so you need access to them. Then you need complex chip frabrication technology that a single company[1] in The Netherlands creates and owns. Then you need to build these incredible sterile and complex factories of which there are only a hand full across the global.

Or having built up a relationship to a country that can get you the chips that you can't manufacture yourself, either that country has a change of political system or a third country threatens you with sanctions if you continue to have dealings with that country.

It all seems to be built on shifting sources of silicon.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/24/asml-the-biggest-company-in-...

How realistic is blocking anyway? Europe’s sactions on machine parts towards Russia are just being bypassed by buying via intermediaries in countries which are not sanctioned. I dont see how this can be different for tiny computer chips.

Recent discussion:

"Poland fumes over US block on AI chips" (114 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42778386

This restriction makes no sense.

The US says "18 countries may purchase our AI chips", but what I understand is "90% of the world may purchase Chinese AI chips".

China just needs to infiltrate Taiwan, which is geographically and culturally closer than the US.

> China just needs to infiltrate Taiwan, which is geographically and culturally closer than the US.

Taiwan is China. Their official name is the Republic of China, and they're the remnants of the losers from the civil war that ran away go to an island and assimilated the locals. They still officially claim to be "the one and only real" China. For Americans, think it the Confederation ran away to Puerto Rico (assuming it used to be American before being occupied by Spain for a few years, before they went there) and was still there.

But today Taiwan is de facto independent. More and more of its people consider themselves Taiwanese, not "the real" China. Ideally, they should be left to self-determinate. Unfortunately China (PRC) considers itself to be the one and only real China too, and wants all of it. And it would consider Taiwan, with which it has a lot of bad blood (its former dictator literally preferred fighting the Communists over defending over the Japanese that were invading and committing mass atrocities; and he started all that with multiple purges of anyone left aligned), becoming "independent"/separate as a big humiliation. But they also know that any war will probably result in TSMC being sabotaged, so it might be all for nothing, economically. The question is will they risk it for "prestige".

Are the machines German or am I misremembering? The ones in the video were maybe 14nm and I vaguely recall the machines being manufactured in Germany and flown and assembled for TSMC.

I know, for example, that Motorola and Texas instruments know how to fab, and a dire shortage would be things like 680x0 and 6502 and 386 (see intel quark for the state of 386/486 processors a decade ago...) And ideally there'd be national RISC-V chips or something idk let's keep it fun.

Dutch. ASML is in the Netherlands.

Oof, my dad would never let me hear the end of it.

The machines are Dutch, but there's more to it than just the machines (or we'd have cutting edge fabs in Germany, France, US, China, South Korea, and all around).

They are Dutch and insanely advanced and complex machines

https://youtu.be/h_zgURwr6nA?feature=shared

The bad blood is mutual. Mao's armies stood aside while the NRA tried to hold off the Japanese, with the sole intention of weakening the NRA. They could have prevented several blood baths.

That's a strange reversal of history.

Chiang Kai-Shek's policy was to prioritize the fight against the Communists over the fight against the Japanese. He only agreed to a united front with the Communists against Japan after he was kidnapped by some of his own generals, who forced him to talk with the Communists.[0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an_Incident

No. As the sibling comment points out, Chiang ignored the Japanese invasion until he was forced by his generals to take action. After that the much smaller Communist forces (diminished after multiple purges and military campaigns by Chiang's Nationalists) fought a guerilla war against Japan, which is the only thing they could do with the forces at their disposal. Meanwhile Chiang had a proper army, and as such fought proper battles against the Japanese.

> Taiwan is China.

This is a sever case of word nit-picking and misinterpretation.

When (western) people say China they mean "China (PRC)" _never_ Taiwan and pretending they don't isn't helping anyone.

And just because two countries have the same root in a civil war of a past now gone country which both claim to succeed doesn't mean they are the same country. Nor is today's China the same country as idk. China during the Ming dynasty. Yes they are political successor, yes they use the same name, but no they aren't politically the same country if we really nit-pick. I mean if they where then we also would need to treat Austia and Hungary as the same country. Or say the BRD (i.e. today's Germany) is the same country as the 3rd Reich, Weimar Repulic and the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation. They are all predecessors of Germany, Germany has to take responsibility for some of it's past predecessors, too. But they aren't the same country from a political nit-picking POV. Same for Russia and the UDSSR etc. etc.

And yes it's complicated as both countries still claim sovereignty over the territory of each other. But for Taiwan that is ironically more to appease China, i.e. dropping that claim would signal Taiwan trying to finally fully break away from China (PCR) which China would never allow.

Per HN guidelines, that "just" is load bearing.

It doesn't even matter at this point. As evidenced by DeepSeek. A growing portion of the world is distancing themselves from the west, and It's a good thing. People should have the ability to choose who they do business with without a third party strongarming them.

Can you please explain to me why AI chips don't matters anymore because of DeepSeek? I thought it was just a better model, but perhaps I didn't get it?

Deepseek used older generation chips and developed a model that takes significantly less compute. Making having access to tons of the latest nvidia hardware unnecessary.

Being forced to live with more HW restrictions usually results in more reliance on SW creativity and better optimizations instead of lazy developers bloating SW to fill all available resources.

Just like how it's no surprise that websites developed where everyone has the latest and grates fully loaded M silicon MacBooks also sufferer from horrible lack of optimizations because "it works on my machine" while being a stuttery mess everywhere else.

Yeah, seen the same with PC gaming. Minimum specs absolutely exploding for no real reason other than the fact most gamers were buying the latest top tier cards. Then the Steam Deck came out and devs are forced to consider the fact that a 2D pixel art game shouldn't be lagging out on a SoC capable of producing stunning 3D graphics in a properly optimized game.

Well, the Steam Deck's release coincided with the popularity of reconstruction techniques. The Deck didn't "force" devs to consider optimization so much as it just gave them a low-end reconstruction target to play with. Without FSR and XESS, there's no doubt that the Deck would be a solidly last-gen console.

Strictly speaking, a lot of games really shouldn't be playable on the Steam Deck. Baldur's Gate III and Cyberpunk 2077 are both CPU-bound before reaching 60fps and can barely keep their head above 30fps running at 360p internal resolution. The Deck's saving grace is that it can tap into the same dynamic resolution mode that last-gen consoles depend on for consistent framerates.

Websites and the like are a different world from ML training, where devs seem to be more performance-conscious. But there's a weird reliance on CUDA because devs (rightfully) don't trust the alternatives.

This does not make sense. If R1 scales similarly to other GPTs, throwing 100x more compute at it will produce an even stronger model.

It's not that they matter anymore.

But there has been a long term suspicion in the AI community that the ultra expensive to compute and very expensive to run humongous LLM approach is a dead end, or at lest fully unnecessary (and as such monetary wise a dead end).

I mean think about it, the target crown jewel of AI was never to find ways to train on insane amounts of data, but to be able to get as good as possible results with only as much data as necessary but no more. Because for a lot of use cases there simply isn't that much data.

And from everything we know the structure of language is not so complex that you need this insane amount of data and model size.

It's just we worked around of problems by throwing more compute and data on it instead of solving them proper. Similar we try to reformulate any little-data use case by reformulating it in a way where we hope to take advantage of the mass "causal text" data modern foundational LLMs where trained on and fine tune and instrument the model using the "little data" of the use case.

But conceptually this is ... sub-par and non desirable. And sure that we made it work with this trickery is quite magnificent.

And sure this huge LLMs do more then encode language, they encode miscellaneous knowledge/data, too.

But a messy, hallucination prone, non properly updateable and potentially outright copyright or privacy law violating encoding of data...

So many systems already do use RAG like approaches to get supply the knowledge in a updateable much more well defined fore and "only" use the LLM to find the right search queries and combine things together into human readable responses.

In turn the moment we have small LLMs which still work well for language structure they likely will very reliable win through a lot of reasons (the ones mentioned above and they are also much cheaper) and that even through they are _way_ more complicated to use then "just prompting a LLM". But most advanced assistants are anyway already way more complicated then "just prompting a LLM".

Or in other words the technical breakthrough anyone (including OpenAI) would like the most (OpenAI: financially, as long as it's an internal secret) is one which eliminates the need for having the latest bleeding edge ML chip tech. And DeepSeek is seen by some as a signal that exactly such a change is going to happen. Also I have heard rumors (which I don't believe) that one reason for OpenAI to go non-open was because they realized that, too. And with cheap to run open models they would lose the competitive benefit of competition not being able to do from scratch training even if they want to.

well I mean the US itself distanced itself from the west

depending on your definition of what "the west" means

or it doubled down on what "the west" means, if you take different and in which case the EU is slowly moving away from "the west"

either way using "the west" to lump together EU+US+Canada+Australia+... seems to be becoming increasingly meaningless

It makes perfect sense if they're laundering Russian assets to circumvent US Sanctions.

Isn't this going to erode Nvidia's CUDA advantage? I thought that was way more important than their hardware.

Well seems Deepseek still used CUDA at least

What does Taiwan have to do with this? Because it’s a US ally China could get GPUs through Taiwan if china invaded Taiwan?

Maybe old ones if this is what you are saying.

Most bleeding edge chip manufacturing is currently done in Taiwan, Taiwan has both the machinery and know how to produce state of the art AI training chips. And while they are not quite at NVIDIAs knowledge about chip design by far the largest source of performance differences between NVIDIA and China based completion is the manufacturing not the design (which still is better, but not to the margin where it's not something you can somewhat "good enough" bridge by "throwing more money and (electric)power at it", for the manufacturing differences on the other hand "throwing money/(electric)power at it" to bridge the gap isn't viable. The difference is to big.).

Through then if we are realistic both Taiwan and the US did take measurements to make sure the even if China attacks Taiwan and wins they aren't getting their hands on this tech.

Except Taiwan would have been not very clever if they didn't try to find ways to work around this, so that they are a lever to negotiate in case the US abandons them... (it's unclear if they did find ways tho).

I said "infiltrate" as in "send their best engineers as undercover agents to work at TSMC".

> US President Donald Trump has also announced that the USA will not introduce the global minimum tax. Corporations are the legal structure

Well well well, who'd have thought!

3 months ago on "Italy stiffens terms of digital services tax in 2025 budget":

> I thought this was what was being implemented to fix that -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_minimum_corporate_tax_r...

> You can sit around and wait for decades until this might get meaningfully implemented, loopholes get closed and enforcement is strict. Great step by Italy to refuse that and just implement a measure in the meantime. Can always be repealed if indeed things get fixed on a global level.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41942974

Ironically Swiss has recently ordered a batch of F35, supposily to maintain good relationship w/ the U.S.

is this somehow linked to greenland ?

This was a Biden administration decision. The new administration will probably do worst.

Switzerland had much better relations with the US under the Trump administration (especially thanks to the very friendly ambassador) than under the Biden administration (with a new, very hostile ambassador).

They started talks about a free trade agreement under Trump, which was frozen under Biden.

It doesn't matter now as deepseek has shown. Also this was done under Binden so we have no idea what Trump will do.

However it does spoil the relationship and maybe the next time around when Switzerland is ready to spend 6B Swiss Francs on planes it won't be US made ones.

Additionally if Trump doesn't follow the agreed upon global minimum tax which Switzerland also bent over backwards for why would it do any such agreement with the US in the future?

Why? Serving is still a massive effort, requires massive amount of GPU memory to hold those models.

I don't understand the logic that deepseek somehow is a blow to GPU demand. If anything, more people will try to build on top of R1 style model now, it is only going to drive demand, for customized training.

We can buy old chips at any volume. The restriction is only on the latest and greatest.

DeepSeek has shown that you can achieve the same or better result on old hardware with less computing power.

H800 is essentially H100, and it is not old. And GPUs do expire, it breaks down constantly. You need to swap them in and out.

Buying old chips isn't related to deepseek what so ever, you can buy A100 also.

> It doesn't matter now as deepseek has shown

People keep saying that DeepSeek R1's training cost is just $5.6M. Where is the source?

I'm not even asking for the proof. Just the source, even a self-claimed statement. I've read the R1's paper and it doesn't say the number of $5.6M. Is it somewhere in DeepSeek's press release?

Google just gives me a lot of medium articles and journalist sites. It sounds awfully like a number made up by some analyst and got parroting around. I've even seen people on X saying DeepSeek is "lying", while I can't even find what the exact DeepSeek's claim is.

It's in the DeepSeek V3 paper, not the R1 paper. https://arxiv.org/html/2412.19437v1#abstract

"assuming the rental price of the H800 GPU is $2 per GPU hour, our total training costs amount to only $5.576M."

Note that's for V3, the base model; we don't know how much extra R1 cost to train.

I see. Thank for the source.

So all the claims of DeepSeek R1's cost [0] is indeed bullshit parroted around...

[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=deepseek+r1+training+cost

Not really; R1 is post-training on top of V3, which is considerably cheaper than training V3 itself. You can see this in the existence of multiple reproductions of the RL training technique by much smaller labs: https://hkust-nlp.notion.site/simplerl-reason

any source?

CNBC: https://noagendaassets.com/enc/1737931632.132_cnbctechceosso...

I don't wanna do all the work, folks.

It's no surprise the Swiss have been classified as second tier country given plenty of evidence Switzerland has enabled money laundering for an adversary.

You can't both deny an ally amo to claim neutrality while holding their enemies cash amo.

Russia’s Alpine Assets: Money Laundering and Sanctions Evasion in Switzerland.

https://www.csce.gov/press-releases/hearing-russias-alpine-a...

Switzerland is historically neutral going back 500 years. You can’t be neutral while picking sides, and the munitions block was precisely to protect that neutrality. It’s not difficult to understand.

They picked the side of Russian oligarchy cash it seems.

They did not - Switzerland valiantly guards plenty of dodgy assets for the US oligarchy all the same.

Do the Swiss want to be considered someone's ally or neutral?

Yes.

All of them at the same time, they want to eat their cake, have their cake, sell their cake and rent their cake. Neutral means you get to profit from doing business with all sides at the same time while spinning some virtuous BS PR how you don't take any sides while you deal under the table with bloody war lords. That's how Switzerland and later Austria got rich in the cold war, by being the middle men between the NATO and USSR deals. Today it's being a middle man between NATO, China, Russia.

There's always gonna be demand for middle men to wash dirty laundry of various countries' deals that they prefer to keep secret so they can pretend to stay clean on the public scene.

European countries would do well to stop being so complacent and relying on US for high-tech and defense since the US never hesitates to flip the switch from "you're a valuable ally" to "you're our bitch, whaddaya gonna do about it?" whenever it needs to strong-arm you into complacency, and so the EU should invest heavily on having a competitive local defense and high-tech industry, but who am I kidding, this is always falling on deaf ears and nothing's gonna change.

It also means not wanting to interfere into other peoples buisness so much. Swiss has not invaded anyone in a long time.

To be fair, what country doesn't act like they have this cake replicator technology? Certainly the U.S. and England are firmly in cakeism territory.

I don't think it's too much wrong with using the exploits you've got since every country would do that if they could, just don't piss on peoples' heads and tell them it's raining.

Pretending you're neutral while you're dealing with all sides is a very hypocritical definition of neutrality that people aren't buying.

> Pretending you're neutral while you're dealing with all sides

That's the very definition of it though.

> European countries would do well to stop being so complacent and relying on US for high-tech and defense, and invest heavily on having a competitive local defense and high-tech industry,

Yes, I like this speech better with the von der Lyon accent, when I heard it a couple days ago.

Got a source to that? Knowing VDL I don't doubt it, just would like to hear it for myself to have a laugh, since she's the most hypocritical, useless, corrupt, champagne socialist in Europe.

Depends, do you want those words nearly verbatim? Here's a clip I heard today: https://noagendaassets.com/enc/1737931650.953_queenursulaind...

Here's "its in no ones interest to break the bonds of global economy": https://noagendaassets.com/enc/1737931650.953_queenursulaind...

Working backward: https://noagendaassets.com/enc/1737672200.295_davos-queenurs...

I may have conflated someone else talking about defense at Davos this week with her speech(as). Apologies.

Even when preceded by "champagne", the word "socialist" shouldn't be allowed to appear in the same sentence as her name.

Switzerland is not that neutral anymore. For example, they have been adopting the same EU's sanctions against Russia, so they do not have the same role of middleman.

Being from Denmark I have always been puzzled by how US/UK media portray us as neo-Hitlers for being slightly more critical of MENA immigration than our neighbors. Meanwhile Switzerland has been doing what almost amounts to white-only immigration to the point that their "troublesome" immigrants are Europeans from Albanaia and Serbia.

Neutrality is good for PR.

I'm also from Denmark, Our immigration policy is no better.

Being from the US, I would say that US media does not portray Denmark at all. Except once every few years as Greenland hodlers.

Pretty much everything I know about Denmark is from watching Danish language TV on Netflix.

> Except once every few years as Greenland hodlers

Only definition of Hodler seems to be: a true believer in cryptocurrency

Is there some secret project going on in Greenland? :-)

In this sense I meant hodl as in “hold”, “refuse to sell”. Completely unrelated to the lost Atlantean technology hidden under the ice, which can compute hashes 100x faster.

Half of the US media portrays half of the country as neo-Hitlers for being slightly more critical of immigration than their neighbors. We generally have one of the most open borders, relatively straightforward legal immigration paths and more than twice as many Green Card holders than Denmark has people. We also, at least for the moment, still have unrestricted birthright citizenship, a policy pretty much no countries in Europe have.

So, don’t feel so alone.

You have the added problem of 1% of them actually being neo-nazis.

Sure. Racism never died. The problem is when you lump a bunch of people who don’t deserve it in with the actual Neo-Nazis and paint them with an extremely broad brush as all of the same kind. If you look for Nazis, you can find them, but if you simply see Nazis everywhere, you don’t even have to look.

Sorry but I'll respectfully disagree. I've lived in Copenhagen, Zurich and the US anf traveled allt hose countries extensively. Danes are not portrayed as hitlers nor is CH doing "almost white-only immigration." Check out at least the french parts of Switzerland as a counter example. But I am sorry for any country that doesn't enforce their laws. Immigration only works if the rule of law works and when that's the case, it doesn't matter where people come from.

> to the point that their "troublesome" immigrants are Europeans from France and Italy

Depending on the canton, it is virtually impossible to become a Swiss citizen, even if you are married to a Swiss national and have been resident for ten years.

IME the Swiss national football team has more Albanian and Serbian last names than Italian, and that's usually a pretty good proxy. They clearly managed to get residency. Easier for the kids of the foreign parents?

That's not true. If you are married to a Swiss, it's easy: https://www.eda.admin.ch/countries/china/en/home/services/ci...

Also, otherwise, it's easy but not automated. Lots of foreigners get a Swiss passport every year.

The US media doesn't portray Denmark this way. The only European countries whose immigration policies I've even heard of are Italy, Greece, Sweden, Germany, and the UK, and even those were only a couple of times (e.g. I vaguely remember something about Brexit).

> almost amounts to white-only immigration

This is wrong.

> In 2023, 30,223 people applied for asylum in Switzerland, an increase of over 20% compared to 2022. The main countries of origin were Afghanistan, Türkiye, Eritrea, Algeria and Morocco.

https://ecre.org/aida-country-report-on-switzerland-2023-upd...

Compared to only 2,122 asylum applications from refugees in Denmark in 2023 overall.

https://www.worlddata.info/europe/denmark/asylum.php

This article makes it seem like the Swiss have been somehow singled out, but the same restriction applies to a number of countries, many of which are firmly US allies.

The URL is Swiss.

It applies to everyone except 18 countries. Gonna post them here as many articles mention "18 key alies" without naming all of them:

Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Republic of Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.

I'm stunned they put Korea on the list, given this is dressed up as an anti-China measure, and Korean leaderships flipflops between anti-China and pro-China every ~4 years when the opposition replaces the government. There's also lots of cases of e.g. Korean Samsung employees happily moving to Chinese companies to leak IP for a boatload of cash.

TW semi employees also happily move to PRC. Korea got clipped too hard by CHIPs, Samsung needs AI unless you want PRC phones proliferate even more globally.

I'm just one Swiss guy but here's my two cents... Are you asking in a war-related scenario or about regular non-wartime trade? I think the "we trade with allies only"-rhetoric makes the discussion sound much more martial than the trade-related language Switzerland would have expected (notice how the Swiss response only uses economic and commercial terms). Totally understandable if either country was at war or the products in question were directly arms-related. But as it stands, moving the discussion from CH buying AI-chips to military neutrality feels a bit besides the point from a Swiss perspective.

So to your question, I think Switzerland wants to be considered as: someone's trade partner, generally yes (or maybe we call it "trade allies" now?), but not someone's potential ally in war. Military neutrality has always been the number one principle in the Swiss Confederation's foreign relations. If this now is supposed to be an unspoken economic sanction against Switzerland then is the message behind it: "Hey everyone, be our military ally or have nothing to do with us"..?

Trump is winning the intimidation wars so far. But I wonder when "everybody else" the 7.6bn or so get fucked off and start creating treaties and deals that are bad for the US.

This policy was introduced by the Biden administration.

Policy is from Biden admin not trump.

I expect this refrain a lot; US eggs are 90 days farm to table give or take a month, so egg shortages began at least 3 months ago. Drborah birx explained we culled 107mm fowl in the US last year to prevent human mutation of bird flu. Started in June. Also the menthol ban was a biden admin sneak.

Anyhow I'm a big fan of accountability and I'm already seeing this phrase pop up.

He is only wining the intimidation wars, the same way everybody on a flight tries to tolerate and ignore a drunk and disruptive passenger....

> US President Donald Trump has also announced that the USA will not introduce the global minimum tax.

Corporations are the legal structure that enables, creates and sustains modern life. Taxes reduce the amount of money that will be pushed through that structure. There are people who's entire worldly possessions were made by companies. It is a little more qualitative, but the people with the most and best corporations are typically the people with the most rapidly improving standards of living too.

Although it makes sense that people want to tax them, instituting a global minimum tax has always been a stupid idea. It is like mandating a minimum number of days people must not work, or that they have to ingest poison on. If anything there should be a global maximum tax rate. Leave countries the option to make the world better.

This is a bit of a nieve view and I also get the sentiment you think taxes are some kind of punishment. Taxes are a charge on running the country and infrastructure good enough so that your business can profit and enhance an economy. If you think compabies are being taxed too much then you don't grasp how much profits they're actually making. And how much of the countries resource and infrastructure they take up.

I don't think you have gotten the sentiment at all. How did you get from what I wrote to seeing taxes as a form of punishment?

> It is like mandating a minimum number of days people must not work, or that they have to ingest poison on

Sounds like you think that’s a bad thing (aka punishment).

By the way, the former is called “holidays” and is regulated by law in the majority of the world, the US is the odd one out. Even China has a 11-day minimum vacation policy.

Ah, fair enough. If you read the entire paragraph you will note that that was as out of stupidity and ignorance of the damages, not as a punishment. Nobody is trying to punish companies. I mean, case in point. Do you think holidays are an attempt to punish people? Obviously not.

And nobody forces people to take holidays. There are people who work two jobs, work on weekends, work over Christmas and founders that work 30 day months. All legal.

I guess the comparison to drinking a poison and having to not work, which sounds like you think that taxes are damaging. Taxes are the whip part of the monetary system, that compels everybody to work significantly more than they would otherwise, and which is behind the good things that you attribute to corporations.

> It is like mandating a minimum number of days people must not work

This is exactly how it works in many European countries. By law, you can transfer a few vacation days to the next year (or have them paid out in some scenarios) but most of the time you’ll be strongly encouraged to simply use them all.

Which is dumb as hell. I didn't want to take more than 15 vacation days in 2024 and wanted to take much more/longer in 2025. Not possible because fucking eu politicians know what is better for me. Reasons like this are why EU is on a free fall.

> I didn't want to take more than 15 vacation days in 2024

You probably did not have to. Your employer could have simply paid you for your remaining days.

> and wanted to take much more/longer in 2025.

Again, you can do that. You can actually transfer your free days from year to year. This is not something the EU forbids so it may be dependent on how your country does it.

> Reasons like this are why EU is on a free fall.

It seems that the reason why EU is in a free fall, according to you, is your lack of understanding how things work.

Yes, I could take payment but I chose to take days off instead.

I wanted to but I'm limited to max five days transfer. When the biggest player in eu does this, that's a sign of how things are in eu.

Did I hit a nerve? Here's more for you: most people in eu are fucking lazy, incompetent, have no vision, bureaucratic with no eyes on the outcome/goals.

Corporations aren't the whole deal. You need governments too. Without governments COVID kills a billion people not a few million. Also without governments you don't have the structure to have corporations. You would have effectively flotillas of pirate ships shooting at each other, not the modern economy.

> Without governments COVID kills a billion people not a few million.

That's an absurd claim. There was no statistical evidence of any positive effect of lockdowns etc. on mortality: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... "Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people."

"Using an event study approach and data from 43 countries and all U.S. states, we measure changes in excess deaths following the implementation of COVID-19 shelter-in-place (SIP) policies. We do not find that countries or U.S. states that implemented SIP policies earlier had lower excess deaths. We do not observe differences in excess deaths before and after the implementation of SIP policies, even when accounting for pre-SIP COVID-19 death rates."

The lowest mortality rates were in Africa, where governments did no intervention. Because the covid mortality rate was under 1% for anyone not very old or obese, and there aren't a billion very old/obese people in the world.

Covid kills a billion people without government?

Covid response is still one of yhe dumbest most cruel over reactions done in modern time. And the response and its after effect ( including the increase in vax mistrust and inflation ) probably killed and will continue to kill more than the virus ever would.

Polio or smallpox response is a much better description for government necessity.

Covid response is why the extreme libertans are gaining so much support.

Without government response we would still have smallpox and our children would still face paralyzation by polio. Those are much bettet examples of how critical good healthcare and vaccines are and they are provided via governments.

All covid response has done is ruin trust and split us up. O credits to any government exeot Sweden. 1 country on the whole planet kept reasonably sane.

The governmental over reach nutcracker covid response, backed by hysterical reddit, twitter and facebook users, has brought the danger of preventable lethal diseases back on the table.

I have never seen so much mistrust in authorities, healthcare and safety information since the utterly incompetent c19 response and media coverage.

I still cant get over how MAGA rallies killed people but BLM rallies a week later somehow did not.

  I even saw an article in Nature defending BLM rallies.

If democracy ultimetly fails Id day the covid response was the first step its demise .

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