Comment by nixpulvis

Comment by nixpulvis 21 hours ago

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Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on external production, so to do other countries want to reduce their own. We used to live in a world converging toward maximal international trade, when in fact it was exploiting underdeveloped nations. As we progress globally, and as the development gap shrinks, we have noticed power dynamics which weren't well guarded against in the old way.

So now what? How do we preserve a lot of the efficiencies of the past, while strengthening the resilience and redundancy. How can multiple nations create policy which drives business on partially compatible protocols?

If I allow myself to be optimistic, I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements. Protectionism is natural, but taken too far, isolationism is a death sentence.

dmix 20 hours ago

> we have noticed power dynamics which weren't well guarded against in the old way

The clearest example is a dependency on a single wealthy nation for military and world policing. It's a good thing for individual countries to be able to project their own foreign policy goals like containing Russia without having to rely on the whims of another country's politics. Even here in Canada we should be able to defend their own arctic border reliably and be able to project power to China/India beyond strongly worded letters.

> I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements.

Ignoring the US's recent moves there does seem to be more trade deals than ever between 'middle powers'.

> isolationism is a death sentence

The best way to maintain global relationships is to offer tons of value. Similar to how China can get good trade deals and influence simply because they have so much to offer economically. This isn't just issues of diplomacy.

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  • nixpulvis 20 hours ago

    Well said.

    One of the USA's greatest exports is intelligence and higher education, and what has been happening with that and the general anti-intellectual atmosphere is to me the most concerning as an american. Ironically, public education in america has been pretty bad for a while. But I'm going to start rambling here... way too many problems, and no damn leadership.

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    • gottorf 20 hours ago

      [flagged]

      Reply View 11 replies
      • netfortius 19 hours ago

        A country were a lot of its citizens don't have access to basic human or social needs, and equate a demand for that, already available in the rest of developed world, to "far left political activism" - that is really ironic. There is nothing left on the left (pun intended) in today's America.

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      • jonnybgood 18 hours ago

        What is the American spirit to you? It seems to not include political activism. Or at the very least political activism you disagree with.

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      • gchamonlive 19 hours ago

        Could you elaborate on what constitutes far-left political activism?

        Reply View 6 replies
      • Henchman21 18 hours ago

        Sports teams and "after school activitie" are a much much higher priority than teaching. It isn't even close. It seems the only thing we prioritize in education is... entertainment? I'm sure that will be GREAT in a few generations?

        Reply View 0 replies
      • monkey_monkey 18 hours ago

        Couching nonsense in faux-politeness just makes you look even more googly-eyed.

        Reply View 0 replies
  • FpUser 18 hours ago

    >"like containing Russia"

    I think at the moment Canada faces way bigger problems from the south.

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    • locknitpicker 16 hours ago

      > I think at the moment Canada faces way bigger problems from the south.

      Exactly. Not only there's the absurd campaign from the Trump administration on how Canada should be a state but there are also the recent treasonous talks between representatives from the Trump administration and the Alberta separatists.

      https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/eby-alberta-separatism-9.70...

      Putin's regime might be a cancer of humanity, but Canadians have far more reasons to feel threatened by the Trump admin than from Putin, even if Trump is a proxy for Putin.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • FpUser 15 hours ago

        >"Putin's regime might be a cancer of humanity"

        It will go away at some point unless global west will start behaving in the same manner.

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  • littlestymaar 20 hours ago

    > like containing Russia without having to rely on the whims of another country's politics

    That's true, but at the same time it was probably already the case before invasion of Ukraine, and it is definitely the case now.

    The main issue is political fragmentation: would Paris and Berlin risk lives of French and German people (soldiers and civilians due to retaliation) to save Vilnius?

    But if the answer is true (as obligated by the Treaty of Maastricht, independently of NATO) then Russia stands no chance with conventional weapons against the whole Western Europe, the balance of military, demographic and industrial power is ridiculously lopsided (involving nuclear weapons would also raise the same political question about the French willingness to nuke Russia in retaliation to Russia nuking Poland but if the answer is yes, Russia cannot win a nuclear war either (which everyone would lose)).

    Reply View 14 replies
    • HPsquared 20 hours ago

      The answer is always going to be "maybe", but hopefully enough of a maybe to deter hostile actions. That puts everything in an uncomfortable state of uncertainty.

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      • bornfreddy 19 hours ago

        Better uncomfortable state of uncertainty than comfortable state of war. Nuclear or conventional.

        Reply View 1 reply
        • hilbert42 4 hours ago

          "…comfortable state of war."

          No war is "comfortable", it's a distaster for all involved participants—even the victors.

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    • dvfjsdhgfv 19 hours ago

      > The main issue is political fragmentation: would Paris and Berlin risk lives of French and German people (soldiers and civilians due to retaliation) to save Vilnius?

      This is a wrong question. If one day Russia feels brave enough to attack any NATO country, the right question to ask is, "Do we want to fight this war on someone else's soil or on ours?". This is the reason why Europe is so focused on helping Ukraine BTW.

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      • vasac 14 hours ago

        > Do we want to fight this war on someone else's soil or on ours?

        Russia thought so too.

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    • tokai 17 hours ago

      >would Paris and Berlin risk lives of French and German people (soldiers and civilians due to retaliation) to save Vilnius?

      Yes very much.

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michaelt 21 hours ago

> Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on external production, so to do other countries want to reduce their own.

If anything, I'd say for other countries it's more urgent.

If China embargoes deliveries of light bulbs to Europe, all the light bulbs already in place keep working. The pain would grow over time - giving a grace period, to ramp up local production.

If America embargoes AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft? The pain would be instant and severe.

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  • hilbert42 3 hours ago

    In case of war AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft and others would be immediately directed by government to adopt its war strategy—like it or not—just as US manufacturing was forced to retool for war production during WWII.

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  • agubelu 18 hours ago

    That would be as close to a declaration of war as you can get without firing a bullet.

    The immediate and obvious response would be for the foreign branches of those companies to be declared "of national interest", nationalized and forced to keep operating.

    Reply View 5 replies
    • FpUser 17 hours ago

      >"nationalized and forced to keep operating."

      Assuming there is no some kill switch which would render a whole infra including hardware inoperable.

      Reply View 4 replies
      • gopher_space 14 hours ago

        I'd imagine the government would be in talks with the highest ranking local Amazon employees long before, but I can't imagine a country trusting the hardware or wanting to manage the jank.

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      • martijnvds 17 hours ago

        It's called us-east-1?

        Reply View 1 reply
        • solatic 15 hours ago

          AWS China is a completely separate partition under separate Chinese management, with no dependencies on us-east-1. It also greatly lags in feature deployments as a result.

          Reply View 0 replies
      • hdgvhicv 14 hours ago

        We saw the damage crowdstrike caused in a few hours

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  • nixpulvis 21 hours ago

    I'm absolutely not an expert, but critical things for power and food production not to mention medical supplies and emergency equipment are also tied up pretty deeply in international trade.

    The world would break pretty quickly if we all just stopped trading with each other.

    Reply View 2 replies
    • michaelt 19 hours ago

      Sure, but many products can be sourced from a load of countries.

      If you can't get natural gas from Russia you can get it shipped from America or Australia or Qatar - it's expensive as hell, and you might need to quickly build new regasification plants, but your economy keeps running. And there's no remote kill switch that disables the gas you already have in-country.

      That's not the case for the services provided by AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft though - the 'competition' is one US provider vs another.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • GoblinSlayer 23 minutes ago

        Self hosted ms installations have no instant kill switch, only a slow one.

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bborud 20 hours ago

It is risky to believe that the development gap alone makes for higher economic efficiency when manufacturing things in China. There are very real structural differences in how various industries are organized. Not least in terms of geography.

This is an aspect the west seems to have missed entirely as there are no attempts to learn from it or emulate it.

Everyone knows about Shenzhen. Not everyone knows that this is how every major manufacturing industry is clustered in China in various cities and regions.

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  • SoftTalker 17 hours ago

    The US did this with automobile and steel industries concentrated around the Great Lakes. It's not some kind of profound insight on the part of the Chinese.

    The downside is that it decimates entire regions if/when the demand for what they produce drops.

    Reply View 1 reply
    • bborud 14 hours ago

      Yes, it has its risk, but that isn’t why the US or Europe don’t cluster industry to create higher efficiency. The risk can be mitigated. The political willingness and ability to do it deliberately just isn’t there.

      Reply View 0 replies
  • nixpulvis 20 hours ago

    My point was that the development gap is what lead to the current situation, not that it's just cheap labor that makes Chinese stuff cheap.

    My point about maintaining higher economic efficiency is actually the same point you're making. How can the globe (not just the west vs the east) learn from the past and build for the future. We live in a magical world with translation services available to billions of people, how can we empower them to organize around the right ideas. How can we preserve culture and art while flooding ourselves with technologies developed globally? Who pays for security and research? Intellectual property law in general?

    So many big issues and questions still need a lot of work.

    Reply View 7 replies
    • bborud 19 hours ago

      I think Congress is actually the biggest obstacle to efficient manufacturing in the US. It is a body where the primary motivation of representatives centers around what they can get for their constituents, not what makes sense nationally. So any government spending (eg procurement) will actually tend to drive fragmentation as representatives fight for their states.

      Take for instance the space sector. It is fragmented by design. By Congress. Not only is it spread all over the country, making collaboration expensive, time-consuming and clumsy: there are essentially six different federal space agencies of which NASA is just one. This is terribly inefficient.

      I remember when reading about the Apollo missions it was astonishing just how much time they lost by different parts being built all over the US and then shipped across the country to be integrated. Utter engineering madness that was only made to work because one could pour immense amount of cash on it.

      This is why companies like SpaceX was able to run more efficiently: they do a lot more in vastly fewer locations. Ditto for Lockheed during their golden years: Skunk Works was famous for having "everyone under one roof and within walking distance of each other". (That Skunk Works neither exists anymore, nor can it exist, but that's a longer story which is also about extreme inefficiency).

      It is reasonable to assume that Europe wouldn't do any better. Or any setup where politicians are inclined to optimize for regional gain. You'd probably end up with the same political fights over who gets what if the EU were to push towards more of the kinds of manufacturing that you find in China.

      We know we're inefficient and we have some idea of why. We like to blame factors that are easy to politicise or evoke emotion (environment, exploitation of the poor etc), but I don't think they are as important as people tend to think.

      We just don't want to change. And there are legitimate reasons for that. Chief among them that we're uncomfortable with strong central control. (Well, we used to be. It only took a majority of republicans about a decade to turn 180 degrees on that question and prefer an all-controlling federal government dominated by the executive branch)

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      • detourdog 18 hours ago

        I think Susan Collins is a great example of this. Her support of Kristi Noem is based on deals she finds acceptable for Maine residents. The fact that other states suffer at the hands of ICE doesn't effect her decision's. Collins feels she only is responsible for Maine and not humans that live outside of Maine.

        I find this sort of compartmentalization offensive to the common good.

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      • hilbert42 3 hours ago

        "It is fragmented by design. By Congress.…"

        That's only in peacetime. During WWII the Government directed US industry to gear up for war production and the transformation was not only remarkably swift but also the largest retooling effort in history.

        In these fraught times it's worth revisiting that history to remind ourselves of what's actually possible. By today's standards, the US's industrial response to war was truly remarkable.

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pyrale 20 hours ago

> How do we preserve a lot of the efficiencies of the past, while strengthening the resilience and redundancy.

Open source with clear international governance and maintainer/contributor base, in such a way that a geopolitical rift leaves both sides with working software.

That works for tech and the infrastructure, of course, but not for the corporations built upon them.

> more international lawyers

I don't see that as a significant source of safety in our current world.

> isolationism is a death sentence.

The current US admin isn't isolationist, it's merely reverting back to 19th century imperialism.

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RobotToaster 19 hours ago

> If I allow myself to be optimistic, I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements.

One of the issues with the current system is that the WTO appellate body, which is effectively the court of world trade, requires USA approval for any appointments, which both Trump and Biden have refused to give. This effectively makes the WTO completely impotent.

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

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  • direwolf20 16 hours ago

    Didn't the rest of the world form their own WTO without the USA in it?

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    • RobotToaster 12 hours ago

      Which seems completely pointless if they don't also revoke the USA's "Most favoured nation" status.

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FpUser 18 hours ago

>"but taken too far, isolationism is a death sentence"

I would argue that few large countries have everything to be self sufficient. For the rest - they would have to band together to avoid being at the mercy of their bigger overlords.

As for efficiencies of the past: I think they lead to a complete monopoly / near monopoly in few critical areas. The result - the monopoly power becoming a political weapon and or critical vulnerability.

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