Americans are going to be so fucked when the only companies producing consumer hardware at scale at labeled “Bad China Companies”.
I remember people hating Japan and Korea back in the '80s, before Sony and Samsung killed Magnavox and strangled Phillips.
I guess time is a flat circle
Absolutely nothing in the rules against it. “Being Offline” isn’t a protected class.
I love how Trump has exactly one note to play and he just wails on it at every opportunity
Facebook marketing across high schools and colleges is intense. And because it’s such a pivotal platform, you kinda need to get one and build up a - let’s call it a social credit score - just so you can endure admittance counselors and employers demanding to see your account as part of the screening process.
Sort of like getting a credit card as a teenager so you can prove you’re credit worthy enough for an apartment or car loan in your twenties. You just have to post generic mundane bullshit on the timeline and join generic mundane groups so people see you as “normal”.
But, they do conveniently tick the box of requiring a degree and do weed out anyone too who might question system too much or show too much empathy.
As someone who lives in a big city full of cops and who has to live next to a few people in law enforcement, it doesn’t seem as though my city college or even my state university system degree programs keep ugly, nasty people from going into law enforcement. Family friend graduated with a law degree from Harvard and became a DA down in Austin, TX. It wasn’t Harvard that cheese-grated away her soul. I’ll spot you that plenty of local schools can be corrupted by the financial advantage of funneling people through a Cop School curriculum. But the thing that really seems to turn people into assholes and monsters is the job of being a cop.
Are you truly implying it’d be more secure to buy Chinese tech then US specifically
Only if your primary concern was US-centric surveillance. If you cared about Chinese surveillance, idfk. Big hanging question mark as to whether American native systems are more compromised than Chinese native systems. All I can say for sure is that American systems are confirmed compromised by both US-friendly surveillance and Chinese hacker groups.
That’s quite the take lmao.
It’s very easy to believe “Thing from China bad because China Bad”. But once you look into the actual security schema for these tools and applications, you discover Americans did an excellent job of leaving their hardware exposed to domestic infiltration and a terrible job of securing it against foreign intrusion.
This is easily bypassed by having “college” programs that are literally just puppy mills for cops.
We just call them Police Academies.
Most of the people I worked with in that career field had “degrees” from online programs or schools in the middle of fucking nowhere
There’s definitely an attitude that the small town and community colleges are just diploma mills for local schmucks. And that degree inflation has made them a kind of young person tax on the way to earning a decent salary.
But I do recoil a bit at the notion smaller schools and “hand-holding” curriculum somehow don’t produce more educated people than the post-high school educational sucking sound of service sector/blue collar employment. That you need to be in a weed out course in order to prove you retained information. Or that TAs aren’t there to hand-hold students who are stuggling in a subject and only exist to fuck you over arbitrarily.
The idea that education needs to be painful or stressful in order to be useful produces a lot of schools with obscene drop out rates and - let’s be frank - suicides to get you to a place that a slower pace, more generous grading curves, and smaller class sizes with more attentive teachers could easily avoid.
That’s not to defend cops, of course. But it seems absurd to suggest the product of a more casual and cheerful time in college is hordes of glass-chewing thumb-headed fascist psychopaths.
You think the USA is going to start WWIII?
Greenland does. Venezuela does. Iran does.
You know what the best evidence is for “China Bad”? They promoted and endorsed Donald Trump
Honestly, where do you even get this shit? The people who promoted Donald Trump were Americans. And they’d been promoting him since the 1970s. Nobody in China gave a shit about Trump until January 6th, 2017.
Sure. But to say the American entrenchment around American tech companies is some kind of buffer to Chinese spying clearly hasn’t born out in practice. Americans have pockmarked their tech with security vulnerabilities and Chinese hackers have waltzed right through them. You aren’t safer from the CCP because you’re on American hardware. Just the opposite.
The argument - that goes back to the Bush “War on Terror” anti-China tech policy - is that any hardware produced outside the NATO sphere could leave domestic users vulnerable to foreign surveillance.
But scratch the surface of this critique and you find something very different. It’s the US technology that’s riddled with backdoors.
According to reports, the hack took advantage of systems built by ISPs like Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen Technologies (formerly CenturyLink) to give law enforcement and intelligence agencies access to the ISPs’ user data. This gave China unprecedented access to data related to U.S. government requests to these major telecommunications companies. It’s still unclear how much communication and internet traffic, and related to whom, Salt Typhoon accessed.
The problem with Chinese technology is that, in many cases, American surveillance companies haven’t penetrated it. A domestic market with Chinese phones and routers and other online gadgets riddles the Five Eyes Panopticon with blind spots.
But they still expect them to be literate enough to fill out the paperwork
Cops Forced to Explain Why AI Generated Police Report Claimed Officer Transformed Into Frog
No they’re not.
And even if they were… are we really going to put the abysmal literacy rates of the US public on the heads of individuals? That doesn’t sound like some kind of societal issue or the result of extensive downsizing in the educational workforce?
It’s funny to think these people aren’t dumb enough to be cops when the more common problem tends to be police forces that are already bloated with exactly these kinds of idiot assholes. It isn’t that they’re too dumb, its that they’re applying for a job that’s too in-demand for dumb guys.
Weird to see these folks described as “Too Racist / Dumb / Weak” when I see plenty of racist, dumb, and weak people in the first three roles.
I might suggest ICE has a common denominator that isn’t a superficial pejorative. And its that a lot of these guys fail drug and criminal background checks. ICE is becoming the one job you can get if every other HR company automatically trashes your application.
And before you read that as incitement of ICE policy, you might want to consider how prior iterations of mass incarceration and functional red-lining of professional accreditation might be contributing to a modern era of radicalizing the lumpen proletariat into the fascist labor force.
Like… why were we forbidding anyone with a pot conviction of getting a job to begin with? Maybe that added to the kindling that created this bonfire. Maybe our dogged economic orthodoxy around maintaining a 3-5% unemployment rate has produced this easily galvenized population of “unemployables” to do all sorts of bad things.
All the major telecoms are heavily exposed to the computer hardware market.
Sure, the majority aren’t seeing a payoff. But we only really care about the Magnificent Seven and their increased revenue from government contracts (particularly Pentagon weapons platforms and public-private surveillance deals).
Lol Volkswagen, the company that actively rigged diesel cars to pass the tests… ?
That’s the one. They’re run by absolute pieces of corporate shit, but they do still seem to recognize the market driven writing on the wall.
The German car manufacturers are hopelessly late at EV because they wanted to drain every last penny out of their ICE.
The pool in Europe is a lot shallower, especially in the wake of the Russia/Ukraine war. They don’t have the same access to cheap fossil fuels that the US enjoys, so they’re being forced to pivot to EVs entirely due to their regional limitations. They’re also competing internationally in a market with a growing Global South demand. Many of these countries are undergoing electrification far faster than they’re seeing a petrochemical expansion, in no small part thanks to the high installation costs of pipelines and processing plants relative to electric grids and renewables generation.
The Volkswagen id (EV) sales numbers are so disappointing they had to lower production and make employees stay home.
The entire EU economy has stalled out with the war. But they’ve seen a double-digit upswing in EV sales in Latin America, Africa, and the Pacific Rim.
There’s definitely an element of reflexive “China Bad!” in these predictions of imminent collapse. But I do feel like I’m talking to a KHiver doing the High Hopes dance in late October 2024.
The irrationality of the China Hawks feels endless. This country is simultaneously about the launch a Third World War on every regional neighbor and mere weeks away from complete societal implosion. It’s always on the verge of some kind of cataclysm that will Change Everything.
The sentiment seems to parallel people predicting the end of the AI bubble, people predicting that Trump will keel over and die from Oldtimers in the next few days, and people insisting they’re holding a winning lottery ticket two days before the drawing. Just total divorce from material conditions.
Don’t hold your breath on either one. The attempted phase out of Chinese electronics is its own self-imposed economic drag, especially as China’s semiconductor industry takes off while the western manufacturers are hobbled by their fixation on AI.
When CPU and RAM prices get high enough, you’re going to see some very lucrative black markets for sanctions evasion.
Did you also know solar panels have a theoretical limit of 33%
Did you know fractions are predicated on a base value?
So really we’re talking about pennies on the dollar at the end of the day
That’s definitely an aphorism.
This seems to be the bottom of every “America Good, China Bad” argument.
Just 😂🤣🇺🇸😹. It’s Obvious, Idiot. Just Think Logically.
Is it? Is this worth interrogating, even slightly? Is there any actual difference between industrial models or design philosophies?
No. Lolz. Roflcopter.