Comment by _DeadFred_ 3 days ago
How does a Bay Area tech site, when Bay Area tech has sooo many individuals who originally came to the USA as students but then couldn't go home due to tiananmen, have this kind of 'enlightened thought' on China, day in and day out?
Too much interaction with falun gong.
Regardless, I'm talking about competency. I don't endorse any particular state, culture, or ideology.
I believe the point GP makes is not that China is a good place. More like that we are oblivious to all the points that make our own place pretty bad too.
On one hand, you can claim that it's a well-known propaganda technique (e.g. the soviets using "...And you are lynching negroes" as a rebuttal to anything). But on the other hand, the most satisfying way to avoid that form of propaganda would probably be to fix our own flaws rather than calling whataboutism.
I mean American's seem like about the most 'bring our flaws out into public and deal with them' society I have ever interacted with. Daterape is no longer acceptable. The entire way men treat women has changed in my lifetime. How we respond to domestic violence has completely changed (we don't just ignore it). LGBT+ rights have greatly changed. Race relations have completely changed (they may need work but they are so much better than the 80s where people rampantantly used the N word at work, in social situations).
The average American is much more aware of our issues, not China's. Our own place isn't pretty bad just because we have past history nor ongoing problems. It's a matter of 'what are we doing to change and improve', and are we willing/free to bring up problems that need changing, and does our societies structure allow change? Or does society pound down those nails that dare stick out? Every society is a flawed human constructed stumbled into not intelligently/humanely designed. The American systems is the most dynamic/flexible of all the ones I have been exposed to. There are more liberal ones, but less dynamic and flexible (no free speech laws in the UK which might cause the lack of reflection that you lament). There are more conservative ones that are again less dynamic/flexible.
Look - I agree. But at the same time, I've seen what the Bay Area puts out, and their product designers are more concerned with designing the next cigarette than improving anyone's life or ensuring domestic security. The US is currently relying on contractors that are asleep at the wheel.
Plainly speaking, China already took our iPhone manufacturing and our electric car business. They've got the chops, the supply chain and the export network to keep doing that for everything from the JSOW to the Harpoon missile. Unless the US makes a serious effort to invest in domestic R&D, our Bay Area vanguards are going to spend more time jerking off than participating in a healthy defense business.
> China already took our iPhone manufacturing
It may well be coming back over time; from 4 hours ago:
Apple Mobile Processors Are Now Made in America. By TSMC. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41574844
Additionally, iPhones were never assembled in America. Enough manufacturing had been offshored to the PRC it just wasn’t even a consideration of any sort until late last decade, and the response from Apple has been to reshore some assembly elsewhere, not bring it into the States.
"over time" is right - if TSMC's roadmap isn't getting the US onto 3nm before 2026, then Apple could buy cheaper/denser silicon from fucking Samsung if they wanted. You know, the fab Apple has avoided for density issues and concerns that they aren't competitive. Taiwan still has the golden goose, and unless Apple's products stop relying on node upgrades (they won't) then we're not going to manufacture the majority of Apple chips in America. We'll be lucky if American fabs yield high enough to make memory controllers, let alone entire SOCs.
"Our" it ain't ours, that's the whole point of not being communist. So who cares where the products come from
It's very easy to say that during peacetime. But you can't depend on adversaries for cheap labor, period. The US federal government, communist or not, just spent billions ensuring that those manufacturing jobs aren't forfeited by our multi-trillion multinationals. Our strict adherence to capitalism is just about pushing us to USSR-collapse levels of market abuse. Our consumers are completely braindead; our manufacturers aren't being given reason to stay by the government; even US agencies like NASA and DARPA are getting outdone by Chinese state-run agencies.
Regardless of how you feel about it, the CHIPS act is a line in the sand the US has just crossed. We are heading back to cold-war style economics, because this is an economic cold war.
I think the point is that the US and its allies (e.g. Israel) do similar things to what China is criticised for.