Implying it’s *morally* wrong for a Chinese company to bypass US sanctions is hilarious. You really say that with a straight face when even the president admits this is only protectionism?
These export controls increasingly look like "tax".
The White House said the US government would take a 25 percent cut of the chip’s sales, similar to a deal with AMD and Nvidia earlier this year that allowed them to sell lower-powered AI chips to China while paying the US government 15 percent of the proceeds.
Technically, yes. The CCP, though, wants to incentivize Chinese firms to use domestically-manufactured chips.
https://www.silicon.co.uk/e-innovation/artificial-intelligen... / https://archive.vn/B2pah
This couldn’t be playing out better for Xi. Trump is China’s best president.
I used to think Trump was clueless and being outplayed, but now I realize he’s just looting and couldn’t care less about protectionism or the American worker.
Every single action from this administration can be explained by greed and ego.
Eradicate the Republican party as an organization, split the Democrats into "normal right" and "maybe a bit left" factions, and see if you can get preference voting in there as well while asking for a pony.
The CIA (and every other intelligence org.) is literally a weapon designed to operate in the grey area to fit the mandate of the policy makers and elected leadership. Many of the things they do are questionable or worse. In the case of the DoD, they do these things at the behest of democratically elected leadership.
Of course US and China will operate in their own best interests. Of course they will both play chess, both name call, both sanction and impede. When it's not a hot war, it is still a never-ending battle for each country's total economic, soft, and hard power market share.
This is every country.
It's geopolitics.
Competition is inevitable, especially between geopolitical rivals, but we don't have to engage in Minitrue-style "the enemy has always been our enemy" rhetoric.
It would be interesting to see what life would be like today had that not happened. It might be better, it might be worse. Probably a little of both for different groups of people.
As the world returns to multi-polarity, there are signs of increases in violence.
The last time the world had multi-polarity, we had far more wars. Including the worst wars the world has ever seen.
Citations? Simply saying that World War 1 happened during a time of multi-polarity is just begging the question. Multi-polarity of varying degrees has always been the case throughout human history, and often times single-polarity is achieved only through extreme violence.
A big reason for that, as far as I can tell, is that if one side has the USA on its side, they're basically unattackable for many places since the USA is so over powered militarily and can project force anywhere
It stands to reason as the USA recedes from the world's stage it will get more violent as more nations stand at parity with their adversaries again. And we're certainly seeing wars cropping up lately as the US continues to undermine its traditional allies, bully adversaries, declare trade wars, and withdraw from agreements.
Pax Americana, by contrast, was essentially a standoff between ideological opposites that were equipped with enough nuclear weapons to assure mutual destruction. The choices were clear - coexist or die, and there were many opportunities where we narrowly escaped the second option.
You could point to many possible causes of WW1, but I think that a lot of the causes can be traced back to a hot-headed emperor who desired a larger and more prestigious empire but lacked the statecraft to do so without pissing off nearly all of his neighbors. Looking around at our world today at the number of unserious leaders who govern like a bull in a china shop, I would be lying if I didn't see any similar causes for concern.
https://davidgraeber.org/books/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-...
"Moral imperative"? No country was ever created out of a moral imperative. None. Also, no country was ever created to optimize for its citizens' economic prospects. Every country was created by the elites for the benefits of the elites.
The intent is there.
It's an incredibly complex distributed system with millions of actors and interactions, entrenched powers, regulatory capture, Citizens United, etc. It has to be defended and garbage collected.
The declaration of independence was written by one of the wealthiest slave owners in the country. "Moral imperative" was certainly not behind the american revolution. The economic interests of the elites were. There are no saints in politics. Just interests - mostly of the elites.
He was definitely that.
> but is it economically smart to declare independence from the most powerful empire of the day?
Yes, if that empire was unfairly taxing you, taking your wealth and impeding your growth/development. But you already knew this.
> Indeed, many of the "elites" at the time sided with the British!
Yes. Some of the elites felt that sticking with britain made the most sense to them. Others did not.
> There had to be something more than just "class interests" at play to convince these wealthy elites to renounce their fealty to their government, giving up all legal claims to their property and indeed their very lives, should the revolutionaries have lost.
Nothing more than "more wealth and power".
stated intent goes nowhere to the harm done.
Moral???
There is some truth, but this is how you get a crappy-ass intelligence agency.
Good intelligence agencies are focused on gathering intelligence, not performing random tasks that benefit from secrecy.
Surely there are constraints on this, because otherwise, it would be the moral imperative of every country to enslave non-citizens for the benefit of (some subset of) citizens.
Which is to say, in a world that's -- you know -- a society; not screwing over the other guy is often, if not usually, a good way to "optimize your own citizens economic prospects," too.
The CI is, in my experience, not a moral system about personal or group advantage, but about rules the can govern everybody.
*operate in areas too dark for Anish Kapoor
> When it's not a hot war, it is still a never-ending battle
no, battle is not a moral imperative.
And for GPU trips without a country in between, the plausible deniability is close to zero.