There are two sides to that classic example. The one you mentioned, and the one where the other person isn't calm but also lacks self awareness and just becomes more upset.
There's a broader lesson about how if your stated solution is simple and obvious then in most cases it probably isn't actually a solution.
Nobody claims Ford invented the car. Its undisputed in the mainstream that Karl Benz did. What Ford achieved was making it into a viable mass market product. Ford's inventions had less to do with the car itself and more with the process of mass production. Ford's system was incredibly influential and very wide reaching. But the car was very much invented and known before he did that.
Exactly. Ford didn't actually invent anything. Kinda like Jobs and Woz didn't invent the IC or CPU or even PC. Ford was in tune with the innovations of the time and composed them in a novel and appealing way. His success came from his skilled execution and were more financial and social than technical in nature. Ford marketed cars to the middle class, and paid his employees well enough to buy the products they built.
I'm not even sure I would compare ford to Jobs or Woz. Woz is a talented engineer. Jobs was a great product guy. I've always thought of Ford as process/production expert. The Model T wasn't a particularly great car compared to its competition. What made it and Ford succeed was his production process made it cheaper than the competition. But his processes also allowed him to make it faster and he came up with the franchise system which gave Ford national reach at a time when every other car maker was regional. The Model T wasn't just cheaper than the competition, in many parts of the country it was realistically the only car you could buy for awhile.
There's already a process for this, its called chain of custody. If you cant prove the evidence has a solid chain of custody then it was potentially tampered with and isn't reliable.
The usual chain of custody goes something like: The store has a video surveillance system which the police collect the footage from, so the chain of custody goes through the store and the police which implies that nobody other than those two have tampered with it.
But then you have an inside job where the perpetrators work for the store and have doctored the footage before the police come to pick it up, or a corrupt cop who wants to convict someone without proving their case or is accepting bribes to convict the wrong person and now has easy access to forgeries. Chain of custody can't help you in either of these cases, and both of those things definitely happen in real life, so how do you determine when they happen or don't?
Surely chain of custody applies if the accused has access to the evidence? Perhaps I’m missing your point or I’m overly optimistic about the legal system.
Suppose the store manager is having a dispute with a kid who keeps skateboarding in the parking lot, so the store manager decides to commit insurance fraud by robbing the store herself and then submits forged video of the kid doing it to the police.
The store manager is in the chain of custody but isn't a suspect, the accused is the kid. The kid doesn't even know who actually committed the crime. How is the kid supposed to prove this?
In this case, chain of custody needs to extend to the capture device itself, and to any software that exists in the supply chain for the video content.
There are some experimental specifications that exist to provide attestation as to the authenticity of media. But most of what I’ve seen so far is a “perjury based” approach that just requires a human to say that something is authentic.
Chain of custody isn't real as long as the judiciary gives the government a 'good faith' pass when chain of custody isn't maintained/documentable in court. Go into Lexus Nexus and look up 'good faith' related to 'chain of custody'. Any 'protections' that can be waived away at the judges whim when the standard isn't met by the government are not actually real but pure theater to lend legitimacy to the American judicial system that it doesn't deserve.
> In this case, chain of custody needs to extend to the capture device itself, and to any software that exists in the supply chain for the video content.
There are two major problems with this.
First, is all footage from existing surveillance systems going to be thrown out because it doesn't use this technology? Answer: No, because it would be impractical. But then nobody cares to adopt the technology because using it isn't required. How's that IPv6 transition going?
Second, that sort of thing doesn't actually work anyway. Surveillance cameras are made by the lowest bidder. Their security record is appalling. They're going to publish their private keys on github and expose buffer overflows to the public internet and leave a telnet server running on the camera that gives you a root shell with no password. Does it sound like hyperbole? Those are all things that have actually happened.
There is only one known way to prevent this from happening: Do not allow the hardware vendor to write the software. Any of the software. Instead, demand hardware documentation so that the firmware can be written by open source software people instead of lowest bidder hardware companies. This is incompatible with using the hardware vendor as the root of trust, which is a natural consequence because the hardware vendors are completely untrustworthy.
But let's suppose we find some way to do it. We'll pass a law imposing a $100 fine on any company that has a security vulnerability. Then there will never be a security vulnerability again because security vulnerabilities will be illegal; I'm assured this is how laws work. At that point the forger takes the camera and points it a a high resolution playback of the forgery, and the camera records and signs the forgery.
I kind of wish people would stop suggesting this. It's completely useless but it creates the false impression that it can be solved this way and then people stop trying to find a real solution.
Yep, "chain of custody." Came here hoping to see that concept discussed since it's how the system already deals with cases of potential evidence tampering. If the evidence is of material importance and there's no sufficiently credible chain of custody, then its validity can be questioned. The concept started around purely physical evidence but applies to image, audio and video. The good thing about the ubiquity of deepfake memes on social media is that it familiarizes judges and juries with how easy it now is to create plausible fake media.
Chain of custody only covers from when the evidence came into the hands of the police; the real issue here is original provenance, which chain of custody doesn't solve.
Evidence of provenance is already important, to be sure, but the the ability to have some degree of validation of the contents has itself provided some evidence of provenance; lose that and there is a real challenge.
Who needs a whole blockchain? Just basic public-key cryptography would do the job.
Imagine if you will, that the NVR (recording system) has a unique private key flashed in during manufacturing, with the corresponding public key printed on it's nameplate. The device can sign a video clip and its related meta-data before exporting. Now, any decent hacker could see possible holes in this system, but it could be made tamper-resistant enough that any non-expert wouldn't be able to fabricate a signed video. Then the evidence becomes the signed video and the NVR's serial number and public key. Not perfect, but probably good enough.
This is such BS. The government is ALWAYS deferred to when the chain of custody is broken because 'good faith' is applied. As long as 'good faith' is rountely dispensed 'chain of custody' is nothing but propaganda for the justice system not an actual tool used for justice.
As long as chain of custody ca be discarded because 'good faith' whenever it becomes inconvenient it is not a real thing.
China doesn't want Taiwan for TSMC. They want Taiwan because they see them as a rebellious province. In their mind, the Chinese civil war never ended and that island is the last bastion of the Kuomintang. One way I've heard it described in a way that is easier for Americans to understand is; Imagine at the end of the American Civil War, a confederate army retreated to an island like Cuba or Hawaii, they took it over and have been calling themselves the real America ever since.
I'm not saying China is right in wanting to invade Taiwan. But that's closer to their real motivations than anything having to do with economics or technology. And its important to understand your potential adversaries motivations because that will inform their decisions and tactics.
> They want Taiwan because they see them as a rebellious province.
We can argue about what the exact desire is - there's 100M people in the CCP - we'll probably never know an exact answer.
The important thing is - China is willing to spend a LOT more money to take Taiwan than it is economically worth.
So this idea that 1) China wants Taiwan for chips, 2) War would cost more than chips, 3) Therefore, Taiwan is logically safe - is a fallacy.
The war in Ukraine is never going to pay off for Russia. They're not fighting that war to make money. They're fighting that war because a bunch of dick bags got together in a room and decided it was expedient for them for millions of people to lose their lives.
> They're not fighting that war to make money. They're fighting that war because a bunch of dick bags got together in a room and decided it was expedient for them for millions of people to lose their lives.
Please stop saying things like this. It doesn't help anyone.
What's wrong about this idea? Russia is actively sending men from provinces to die to lower the possibility of secession of those provinces. It might have been one of the main goals of the war.
There's one big strategic thing the Ukraine war offers Russia and that's a nice balmy port and (if they'd managed the original 3 days to Kiev) removing a potential invasion front on it's juicy underbelly.
It doesn't freeze which by Russian standards is balmy, an accidental shiboleth that trips up Russians pretending to be American online is they'll mention unprompted "warm water port" as a notable feature.[0]
This invasion is partially an extension of their goal of securing Crimea with a more solid land connection rather than the more easily interrupted bridge connection that was their only connection until they pushed up to their current lines in Eastern Ukraine.
> an accidental shiboleth that trips up Russians pretending to be American online is they'll mention unprompted "warm water port" as a notable feature.
That's just reddit paranoia. "Warm water port" is a term of art which means a port that stays free of ice. It's not about comfortable swimming temperatures.
Reddit just uses this as an excuse to say that anybody discussing reasons Russia might have started this war, other than "they're being evil for the sake of being evil, just like in my manchild Marvel/Harry Potter/Star Wars movies" is secretly a Russian bot, because even if you know such reasons might exist your willingness to discuss them, or unwillingness to go along with a simplistic groupthink narrative, is something which must be suppressed and punished. The cause is more important than your desire to have an honest conversation!
Anyway, this kind of language policing and "shibboleth" crap lame slacktivism. Go enlist. Ooh, that's probably a shibboleth too. Beep boop, Imma robot because I don't walk in lockstep with Reddit!
>"they're being evil for the sake of being evil, just like in my manchild Marvel/Harry Potter/Star Wars movies"
The amount of times I've seen people on reddit reply to (presumably real) Ukrainian redditors with a show of solidarity composed of some slogan from a Hollywood movie or to try to explain/compare their situation in Ukraine / on the world stage to an Avengers movie is honestly baffling. I genuinely can't believe that people live framing their existence and perspective of the world without the context of cheap power fantasy fiction. It's so cringingly out of touch that I'm almost far more willing to believe people talking like that are the Russian bots people are constantly harping on about trying to make Western public support look bad.
It isn't paranoia because for most counties all of their ports are "warm water" and only Russia has an obsession with "warm water ports" and is likely to use this phrase. For most countries it is like saying "car with wheels" it is just redundant.
No it's when it's used in contexts outside Russia, note I've been saying it but I'd be a shitty Russia astroturf account to be calling myself out too..., people can say warm water ports. It's mentioning it like it's a notable feature elsewhere in the world that's the telltale sign because it's pretty much only a notable feature for Russia because their other ports freeze in the winter. It's not a notable feature of Texas that it's ports are warm water ports. Every US port except small ones in Alaska that serve the fishing industry are warm water and the same is true of most of the world where all non land locked countries have at least a few lovely balmy ports to choose from.
> The only reason Russia is against NATO is the article 5
Nah, they are also against Article 4 (regional security), which while not as concrete of a commitment, applies much more broadly, and which leads to things like the current support for Ukraine, not just Article 5 (mutual defense), which only affects hem when they would want to target a NATO member’s territory in and in a couple areas close to Europe or North America.
> "They're fighting that war because a bunch of dick bags got together in a room and decided it was expedient for them for millions of people to lose their lives."
Pretty sure Putin needs to start wars, conflicts, terrorist events to maintain political stability. That is to say, he can't lose power because they'll kill him.
I use China in this context to mean the Chinese state which given their system is interchangeable with the CCP. So you can subv in CCP in my statement or even Xi if you want since he is unequivocally running things.
In the case of Ukraine, Russia's (read: the russian government which is synonymous with Putin who dictator in all but name) motivation is somewhat similar. But they don't see Ukraine as a rebellious province. They see it as a vassal state as they do all of the other former SSRs and members of the Warsaw pact. Putin and his nationalist group have a very old world view of things and a very specific concept of what their rightful sphere of influence is and what exactly it means to control it. This isn't even unique to them. After securing power, the Bolsheviks quickly attempted to bring former Russian imperial possessions back under their control. That included Ukraine, Poland and Finland. Poland and Finland were able to secure their independence, Ukraine was less fortunate. For all the talk of anti imperialism, they were just as imperial as their predecessors. So this is just russians being russians and an inability for their world view to evolve past the 19th century.
There is no “reason” or justification. The decision to invade has already been made, all these explanations exist for the sole purpose of making it easier to do nothing about it when the invasion happens. Chinese people feel they way they are taught to feel.
China's fundamental argument distilled to its most pure form is "we are strong enough to do this, what are you going to do about it?" A world where the strong do whatever they want because no one can do anything about it is not a world anyone should want to live in.
All of the Chinese expressing these opinions from a position of safety can’t seem to put themselves in the shoes of Taiwanese. The inhumanity of an invasion is being hidden by high level ideas like history.
The American civil war comparison fails. No American sits and thinks about invading the UK to “complete” our revolution and that’s much closer than your scenario.
> A world where the strong do whatever they want because no one can do anything about it is not a world anyone should want to live in.
You're fooling yourself if you don't think we live in, and have always lived in, this world.
Citizens like me, living in a relatively just society, can tell ourselves the world is not like this because of our daily lives, but the reality is if some group of people even stronger doesn't care, the strong get to do what they want.
I thought the whole Russia/Ukraine thing snapped people back into the reality of the world we live in, and I'm quite amazed that there are still people that don't realize this is how the world is, and always will, be.
So we're back to promoting slavery then? Because that is a thing that happens if we just allow the strong to do whatever they want. It seems to me that this kind of cynical "realistic" pessimism is part of what fuels totalitarianism. Russia has succeeded in falling back into this because their citizens believes that might makes right.
But might isn't one thing. Might arises from complex underlying relationships between people and it arises from what people believe in. Might makes right yes. But what people believe is right also makes might. When people stop believing that it's impossible to stand up to totalitarianism - that's when it wins.
I mean reality have aspects of both. We have the capacity to make things how they ought to be, to an extent - especially if we agree on what ought to be. This discussion boils down to how far we think that extent goes.
I think we tend to both under and over estimate how far that goes. We underperform when we lack the means to coordinate. When we align and stay motivated we can push ought to to is pretty damn far.
> You're fooling yourself if you don't think we live in, and have always lived in, this world.
While I agree it is different now because everything is in the spotlight and you can’t get away with things like you used to. So not sure I would go as far as “always will be”.
Also not sure there is a need to say how amazed one is about one other’s opinion, since it belittles it.
Freedom is a function of solidarity -- each man's willingness to sacrifice for his fellow man. If some are willing to make the sacrifice you can be free. If none are willing to make the sacrifice then all will die a slave. Unfortunately this means that some of the architects of a world we want to live in won't get to experience it.
Everything has a reason. Xi didn't make that decision for the lulz. The reason is they see Taiwan as part of China and in active rebellion. Simple as. That doesn't make it right, but that explains why they are doing it. You don't have to accept that but that's what actual chinese and taiwanese nationals have told me and I'm inclined to believe them.
In my opinion it is a populist movement, and we should accept this hard truth. Trump is in office due to "manipulation" to the same extent that any speech is manipulation. He is a salesman and has sold his vision for the country successfully.
The downvotes for your comment are quite telling of the demographic of Hacker News. But even leftwing media are admitting the Democrat party has a problem:
"We cannot solve this problem without an honest assessment of who we are. How we see ourselves as the Democratic Party—the party of the people, the party of the working class and the middle class—no longer matches up with what most voters think."
"For the first time since the mid-20th century, the central fault line of American politics is neither race and ethnicity nor gender but rather class, determined by educational attainment. But in the intervening half century, the parties have switched places. Republicans once commanded a majority among college-educated voters while Democrats were the party of the working class. Now the majority of college educated voters support Democrats"
But I suppose there's too many well-off, well-educated, white collar elites on this site who aren't willing to face the reality that their politics have been ruining blue collar lives for decades, and the political backlash has finally hit a crescendo powerful enough to wash over Washington. So I guess we blame it all on disinformation campaigns?
Almost daily, Michigan’s Arab Americans voters in precincts of heavy concentration are receiving glossy mailings with messages like: “Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff: Unwavering Support for Israel” or “Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff, the ultimate pro-Israel power couple” or “Kamala Harris and Elissa Slotkin [the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan]: The proven team we can trust to stand up for the Jewish community.” And targeted video messaging on social media sites saying things like “Kamala Harris stands with Israel.”
Meanwhile, in areas of Pennsylvania where there are heavy concentrations of Jewish voters, homes are receiving messages like: “Kamala Harris will embolden anti-Semites” or “Donald Trump always stands up for the Jewish people.” And targeted video messaging on social media platforms saying “Kamala Harris will not be silent about human suffering in Gaza” or “Two-faced Kamala Harris: Standing with Palestine and not our ally, Israel.”
These mailings and social media posts are paid for by a dark money group, Future Coalition PAC. Researchers have identified that one of the major donors to this group is Elon Musk, the principal owner of X and a strong supporter of Donald Trump’s presidential bid.
This to me is the correct answer. A lot of times in war it's not about logic or reason, it's about emotion and feeling. Throughout Chinese history, a leader is only "legitimate" or dare I say, have the Mandate from Heaven, when they have unified the country under one banner. It is a stain on their authority that there is "rouge" state outside the CCP's control. They will do anything to unify their country for national pride.
Jesus, you realize people just mistype things sometimes? It really annoys me when people feel like they have to come in and correct others this way, it's so condescending.
Personally, I'm grateful to be corrected on a casual and anonymous forum if it saves me from making the same mistake on a formal document, condescension notwithstanding. My response to grammar cops is either, "Thank you!" if it was due to my ignorance, or "Oops, damned autocorrect/typo/ brain fart," if a lack of attention was at fault.
Sometimes, we know just the word we want. And we know how to spell it. But we fat-finger it. Or our fingers trip. Or our brains just get the finger-tapping order a bit off.
None of these things requires an education in using the incorrect word. “Irregardless”? Give ‘em what for! Their/there/they’re? A nice reminder. Swapped a couple letters is a plausible explanation? A simple correct spelling followed with a * would suffice.
There have been many periods of Chinese history with multiple competing dynasties, including transition periods. The Later Jin, for example, who became the Qing, took three generations to defeat the Ming dynasty; and they had been around since before the Song dynasty.
THe lands and territories also wax and waned throughout the centuries. A map of the territories controlled by the Qing at its peak is vastly different than that of the Tang or that of the Han dynasty.
This is more like the game of weiqi than it is the game of chess. The endgame isn't necessarily a decisive action with a win condition, but more of an accumulation.
I’m not sure I agree, Xi already proofed that he’s a great political mind by his actions with in the inner politics of his own party.
I think he’ll treat the war with Taiwan rationally as the political tool that it can be.
When the set of constraints and what he has to gain will be in his favor he may do it.
I’m not an expert but I honestly can’t not see him risk what he built for so many years for that amount of potential destabilization.
This is an interesting theory. Under this line of political thinking, it’s just as important that the U.S. project that they would come to help if the aim is political stability or maintaining the status quo.
Yes, communist nations especially need to protect the narrative that their way is the best way. Having the Taiwanese sitting off shore thriving outside of party control is embarrassing.
On a daily basis here on HN, capitalists and libertarians and others with the SV mindset work hard to protect the narrative that their way is the best way.
I'm so happy to live in the US, a country without ceaseless propaganda about how our way of life is the best and our democracy is the best and our freedom is the only way and there is no alternative to unfettered capitalism.
The entire justification for Musk's DOGE & MAGA is that the status quo in the USA is not good and needs to be torn down.
From my observation, the West suffers from the opposite of Chinese or Indian nationalism, in excessive self-flagellation to the point of self-destructiveness. Critical Theory, Identity Politics, Woke, Anti-Woke, Postmodernism (both left & right), etc would be immediately crushed in those nationalist societies, they are very much a unique artifact of the Western order.
It's really a result of the US being so heterogeneous. One side's status quo is the other side's in-progress radical reinvention. The pendulum is always on the move. You have to take the average position on a longer time scale to figure out where the country stands.
I mean on one hand we can do better but on the other, last I checked there's not been a time where citizens were hauled off to prison in the US for disparaging capitalism. Closest we came was the red scare in the 50s and that was tame in comparison to what Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and Castro and Ho Chi Minh and (do I need to keep going?) put their subjects through.
On the other hand, historically speaking, the various dynasties of China had been able tightly control markets when it was one of the jewels of the Silk Roads.
I prefer a free market myself, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking there isn't a narrative being pushed by people who profit off of free markets or capitalism.
> China doesn't want Taiwan for TSMC. They want Taiwan because they see them as a rebellious province. In their mind, the Chinese civil war never ended and that island is the last bastion of the Kuomintang. One way I've heard it described in a way that is easier for Americans to understand is; Imagine at the end of the American Civil War, a confederate army retreated to an island like Cuba or Hawaii, they took it over and have been calling themselves the real America ever since.
We know this version is closer to the truth because Mao tried to take Taiwan
China is basically circled on all sides by US-allied forces and with Taiwan being one it really limits their force projection capabilities in the Pacific. That's the actual pragmatic reason, not some ideology thing, imho
Everyone wants to think there is always a "pragmatic" reason. It helps to think that there is always a rational cause for everything, every decision that is made. And we map cynicism about our own politicians onto everyone else, thinking that surely they don't mean what they say either.
There's not always a rational reason. Ideology and nationalism are real things. World leaders do not always act in "rational" ways, nor are they always playing 4D chess.
It's worse than a rebellious province. It's a more successful rebellious province.
For China, they hold up all of these technical accomplishments and quality of life improvements they have made under their one party system. But now over here is Taiwan that never bought in and is doing even better! It undercuts all of their messaging.
If the communist party could wave a magic wand, they would take Taiwan and not just extract wealth, but also pump out a lot of propaganda that says Taiwan is doing even better under party rule and Western-style democracy was holding it back.
> It's worse than a rebellious province. It's a more successful rebellious province.
That statement just made me LOL. In what dimension other than foreign investment do you see Taiwan as more successful than China? In 2025, it's pretty clear that China has self sovereignty, is the world's factory, leads in BRICS, and isn't subject to the US empire.
Per capita income? Percentage of people with education/clean running water/out of poverty? Things that actually matter to the daily lives of people?
Yes, China has lifted millions of people out of poverty over the last few decades, but the median person in China is still vastly worse off than the median person in Taiwan.
Chinese people know that Taiwan is only what it is because of money pumped by the US into the little island. It has always been the strategy of Western countries to support little states in the vicinity of enemy countries as a way to contain and divide the nation.
I mean, we are also going to brush past the infrastructure development done by the Japanese when they occupied Taiwan during the Meiji period that made it a valuable island to begin with. Or that Taiwan did a better, more equitable and less violent version of land reform than Mao did. And that Taiwan never expelled academics and didn't attempt the Great Leap Forward.
If so, it would sound like the Chinese people are being mislead about the economic history of the island they supposedly claim.
North Korea has self sovereignty, space rockets, nuclear weapons, and sends its troops to a war overseas to project its power!
South Korea is just much more successful at putting bread (and many other foods) on the tables of its citizens. It is also more advanced technologically, and, curiously, has a working democratic government instead of a hereditary single-party rule.
Norway, probably yes. Their population is more educated, and their civil society much better functioning than the UK. Their society is less unequal and (I’m pretty sure) their quality of life figures would be higher.
Monaco is just a tax wheeze and playground.
do you care about quality of life? literacy? about social justice? about women's rights?
or about who has the most richest billionaires or the strongest military?
or who has the best american football teams?
Not every people care about the same things. Some people would rather live in a country that treats others as shit, and take pride in that and absolutely don't see the point why other other countries have some better metrics on some they may consider useless stuff like education.
EDIT: I mean, I know it sounds silly, but failure to understand that there are so many people who literally don't give a shit about why education matters, or why empathy matters is the reason we are in this situation. We took for granted that there are universal values, and organized our societies around goals oriented towards those universal values and in the meantime we got this resentment brewing in part of the population that got exploited by populist forces
> they hold up all of these technical accomplishments and quality of life improvements they have made under their one party system. But now over here is Taiwan that never bought in
Never bought in to one party rule huh? It seems like people forgot about the 38 years of martial law:
Even so, this doesn't change the fact that anything that Maoists could take credit for was done better by the non-ideologue dictator next door.
But the fact that the martial law came to an end largely democratically is good evidence that both democratic reform was easier outside of the CCCP, and that the Taiwanese single party rule was probably not as totalitarian as some people claim.
This isn’t an abstract comparison. CCP mostly overthrew the existing government and Taiwan was a continuation of that existing system. So for that system be quantifiably better is an issue independent of things like elections.
It’s a clear demonstration that failures like the great Chinese famine simply wouldn’t have happened if the communist revolution failed. That’s a significant political issue, because people from that time period are still alive so they can’t simply erase the memory of it.
I mean, it depends on what you mean by "rebellious". There is a lot more nuance than that. From the Kuomingtang's perspective, the CCP are the rebels.
One piece of history is that after Sun Yat-Sen died, his successor Chang Kai Shek purged the Kuomingtang of any socialist, community, and otherwise left-leaning members of their assembly. When some members escaped the purge, this sowed the seeds of the CCP that came to fruit after fighting off the Japanese during WWII.
When the Kuomingtang retreated to Taiwan, it was not run as a republic or a democratic society. Martial law ended in 1987 and a second political party did not appear until it was illegally formed in 1986. The Kuomingtang and its coalition continues to identify with China -- the civilization -- whereas the DDP-lead coalition is done with that and wants their own national identity of Taiwain.
the US made China it's manufacturing arm and now the US wants to take that back? Kind of late. If China invades Taiwan, the US is to blame. Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket.
That's completely deranged. The CCP has intended to take Taiwan from day one. Before they even managed to drive the ROC out of mainland China they intended to take all of China, including Taiwan, and their failure to take Taiwan has never been something they were satisfied with.
Manufacturing has nothing to do with it. America only has anything to do with it insofar as they have helped Taiwan resist the CCP so far.
Yeah that weird logic is all too common recently. I'll paraphrase:
The ravenous wild beast is pounding at your door. The only thing standing before you and certain death is your front door that needs urgent repairs. You call your landlord begging for help but they say it's not their problem.
The beast smashes through the door and eats you up.
Some would agree that the landlord is to blame because of inaction. Some would argue instead that the landlord is not responsible for your problem. You should have not provoked the beast. Or fixed the door yourself. Or paid more rent etc.
This framing only works of the wild beast has no agency at all. It's by definition wild and we all know what it will do and it can't help itself but being a man eating wild beast. It has no moral obligation to not be a man eating beast.
But by applying this framing to Russia and CCP you're dehumanizing them. You're assuming that they are so evil they cannot possibly have any moral obligations and so the burden falls on third parties (or worse, you, their victim!) if they attack you!
> the US made China it's (sic) manufacturing arm..
i think it's more accurate to give credit where earned: one thing the CCP did smart was _win_ foreign business (US Apple and Dell etc) by building the rentable factory system with deep dependable supply chains directly adjacent. That was uniquely able , globally, to compete and win business.
The US didn't seemingly even think to do that, perhaps distracted by the Cold War?
The trade war reduces China's dependence on the US, whether through sales or holding US treasuries. This means China can invade Taiwan with less risk of economic sanctions. That said, without TSMC, and especially with the current administration, I doubt the US would step in.
> Imagine at the end of the American Civil War, a confederate army retreated to an island like Cuba or Hawaii, they took it over and have been calling themselves the real America ever since.
It is a great analogy. However, in this case, that small island was taken by China even before the American Civil War. To put it into perspective, it was during the time when Isaac Newton was working on gravity.
And one episode of Open To Debate [1] argued Taiwan is the worst possible place to confront China:
> I used to give battlefield tours at Gettysburg, an extraordinary place. ... a certain cavalry General John Buford ... surveyed the ground and he knew right away he looked at the hills and said, this is good ground, ... The geography favors us. Well, I want to tell you folks, he saved our country that with that appreciation. But this is the opposite. This is bad ground. This is the worst possible place to confront China
> and have been calling themselves the real America ever since
This isn't really the situation with Taiwan though. The main reason Taiwan is still officially called the Republic of China is because changing that will likely trigger the PRC.
> I'm not saying China is right in wanting to invade Taiwan.
I find it very surprising that a lot of otherwise intelligent people have trouble with telling endorsement from explanation. Like when I tell people about some political (or not) figure's opinions and worldviews, I'm somehow defending them. I'm not! I'm doing it exactly to
> understand your potential adversaries' motivations
You are unfortunately not understanding how you are being deceived. Confederate in this store didn't flee. They won and there really is the Real America on Long Island.
> a confederate army retreated to an island like Cuba
No, it's the other way around. Imagine that the South is victorious, and the last remnants of the North forces remain in, say, Long Island, calling themselves the original American Republic, claiming their lineage from the revolution of 1776. Technically they would be!
The Taiwanese regime is a remnant of the original Republic of China established in 1914, and Kuomintang is one of the original democratic parties of that republic. The Communist regime are the "rebels" of the Communist revolution of 1949. But, as they say, a rebellion can never succeed, because if it does, it's called another way.
> Imagine at the end of the American Civil War, a confederate army retreated to an island like Cuba or Hawaii, they took it over and have been calling themselves the real America ever since.
I mean, for a decade or so, try to re-unify, sure. But 75 years later, with slavery abolished and a completely different governmental system? I'd like to think most Americans would have accepted the New Normal by that point. If anything this tells me how irrational Chinese and Russian attitudes are.
> Imagine at the end of the American Civil War, a confederate army retreated to an island like Cuba or Hawaii, they took it over and have been calling themselves the real America ever since.
In reality while the confederate states were part of the United States, the Republic of China (Taiwan) was never part of the Peoples Republic of China (communist China), its the reverse.
Not really, because it likes to the conflate the negative connotations of the confederates and their slavery to the ROC, when it's more like if the Union Government was in a civil war with the Confederates with the Union controlling most of the land, but then the British/Mexicans/Canadians, etc invaded and the Union broke it's back holding that back, then when the invaders finally retreated the Confederates were able to reorganize and defeat the Union, so then it would be the Union that retreat to Long Island or something.
Instead of doing blind analogies, it would be alot better just to directly describe the events of what occurred, but that's going to be inconvenient for the CCP and their supporters to introduce some nuance into the conversations.
Insider knowledge? Not really, unless you count asking actual chinese and taiwanese nationals what they think about it instead of assuming their world view is the same as my own.
Thanks for clarification. Do you believe nationals of these countries (or any country in the world) know what the CCP actually wants i.e. its true goals?
I think their true goals are pretty transparent, but the specifics of how they plan to achieve them are more secretive.
The CCP primarily wants to gain power. Political, economic, and social. The levels of ambition probably vary by individuals inside the party, but generally involves a uniform level of control across all regions of China (including Taiwan from their point of view), and enough global power to give them a free hand in East Asia.
Chinese nationals may put more emphasis on increasing prosperity. Taiwan nationals may put more emphasis on strict control and global power. Individual reactions largely vary. Out of both groups, limitations on personal liberties cause the harshest criticism of CCP, with the one child policy almost universally seen unfavorably.
Older games used precompiled shaders. These are inaccessible to the game devs and usually handled by the hardware makers, so the platform OEM for consoles and the video card OEM on PCs. Game devs have begged for the ability to write their own shaders for years and finally got it with DX11 and Vulkan. And that's when things went to hell. Instead of the shaders being written and compiled for the specific hardware, they now have to be compiled for your GPU at run time. It's a messy and imperfect process. EA, Ubisoft or anyone else is never going to have the same level of understanding of a GPU that Nvidia or AMD will have. Often the stuttering is due to the shaders having to be recompiled in game, something that never happened before.
Compiling shaders directly from a high level representation to the GPU ISA only really happens on consoles.
In DirectX on PC, shaders have been compiled into an intermediate form going back to Direct3D 8. All of these intermediate forms are lowered into an ISA-specific instruction set by the drivers.
This final compilation step is triggered lazily when a draw happens, so if you are working on a "modern" engine that uses thousands of different material types your choices to handle this are to a) endure a hiccup as these shaders are compiled the first time they are used, b) force compilation at a load stage (usually by doing like a 1x1 pixel draw), or c) restructure the shader infrastructure by going to a megashader or similar.
> Compiling shaders directly from a high level representation to the GPU ISA only really happens on consoles.
When targeting Apple platforms, you can use the metal-tt tool to precompile your shaders to ISA. You give it a list of target triples and a JSON file that describes your PSO. metal-tt comes with Xcode, and is also available for Windows as part of the Game Porting Toolkit.
Unfortunately, most people don’t do that. They’re spoiled by the Steam monoculture, in which Steam harvests the compiled ISA from gamers’ machines and makes it available on Valve’s CDN.
metal-tt/metal-nt require you to specify the exact architecture, and that's not forward-compatible unless you update your application for every new device release. Even minor SKU revisions like applegpu_g13p/applegpu_g13g/applegpu_g13s/applegpu_g13c are different compilation targets, and that doesn't help you when Apple releases applegpu_g14.
> Compiling shaders directly from a high level representation to the GPU ISA only really happens on consoles.
No, that's not correct. In fact, it's mostly the other way around. Consoles have known hardware and thus games can ship with precompiled shaders. I know this has been done since at least PS2 era since I enjoy taking apart game assets.
While on PC, you can't know what GPU is in the consumer device.
For example, Steam has this whole concept of precompiled shader downloads in order to mitigate the effect for the end user.
> Consoles have known hardware and thus games can ship with precompiled shaders. I know this has been done since at least PS2 era since I enjoy taking apart game assets.
That's what I said. Consoles ship GPU machine code, PCs ship textual shaders (in the case of OpenGL) or some intermediate representation (DXIL, DXBC, SPIRV, ...)
The difference in the UK is, there is no recourse. It's actually why America exists as a state to begin with. They have parliamentary supremacy and no enshrined checks and balances against parliament. Nor do they have a formal constitution. And the populace is disarmed. A sufficiently united parliament can in theory do what it wants. The only practical risk they have is a coordinated coup by the military.
The US system, while far from perfect, does have enshrined checks and balances. A formal constitution that limits the powers of branches. And an armed populace with a history of protest and unrest when things don't go their way.
They wouldn't be moving, they would be expanding into the US market. Its a win-win. Hyundai get's access to a previously closed off market due to cabotage regulation. And we get modern ship building. The only loser here are established ship builders who would be forced to modernize and compete. But long term that's a good thing for them too.
As an analog, I believe South Korean terrestrial armaments companies are doing the same thing with Poland, in order to gain access to European buyers. (Granted, Poland also has a labor cost advantage in Europe)
Concorde was a large program backed by two governments and designed and built by nationalized aerospace companies. This is a strictly private affair, so no tax dollars behind it, just private funds. The end goal is also to be much more efficient than Concorde, which was a pretty brute forced effort which multiple large afterburning engines. They hope to make the production model capable of supercruise.
"No tax dollars behind it" is directionally true since it wasn't built by one of the Primes, but not literally true. As is the wont of every company these days, they've extracted tens/hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds..
The $200 million in north carolina is a discount on future taxes for when they start production. - seems a little unfair to count it against the company when they haven't even started production yet.
And the total amount of private funding raised to date is $700 million - so maybe 10% of funding to date is from the government? Seems like a good deal for the government?
Some portion of it is indeed a discount on future taxes - but a huge chunk isn't, whether it's direct grants, infra/hanger upgrades at the airport, a bunch of the subsidies are government spending to make the facility more useful for Boom.
It's not even that I'm opposed to that kind of spending, I'm a big believer in government support to bootstrap new industries! But the conceit that they're doing this without any government support should be disregarded. I'm only partially being pedantic on this because the CEO of the company in question is definitely not a proponent of that type of spending.
It's like when some of those other Thiel-adjacent goofballs kept tweeting things like "taxation is theft!" while ignoring that every one of their companies had multi-million dollar government contracts.
I think these types of arguments are somewhat disingenuous when it's referring to tax breaks on future taxes. It doesn't harm the state at all because the company wouldn't have located in the state in the first place without it. It just acts to remove the drag on the company being successful. If they're successful then the amount of tax revenue the state will get will be tremendous. So there's no downsides.
And it also doesn't immediately act as funding or tax dollars for the company.
Over half of the $200M is infrastructure upgrades to attract the new company as well.. so those are hard dollars spent in advance of a single new employee or anything positive for the state. It may end up being a good investment, but if you ask the voters, "Do you want to spend $100M in taxpayer money to get the airport facilities ready for a startup backed by the richest people on earth?" they might ask why those people don't just pay for the upgrades..
> "In addition, the state set aside in the state budget (via HB 334) $106.7 million for the site and roads improvement and for constructing hangers at the project site. "
“Jet airliners became 70% more fuel efficient between 1967 and 2007, 40% due to improvements in engine efficiency and 30% from airframes. Efficiency gains were larger early in the jet age than later, with a 55-67% gain from 1960 to 1980 and a 20-26% gain from 1980 to 2000. Average fuel burn of new aircraft fell 45% from 1968 to 2014, a compounded annual reduction 1.3% with variable reduction rate.”
Supersonic is different, but there was half a century of development in military supersonic flight, so a new design need not start where Concorde stopped.
While true, the catch is that very little technology relevant to civilian supersonic flight has changed since Concorde. We have composite fuselages and that’s about it. Concorde was close to optimal within the design constraints it was built for and those constraints haven’t really changed - airport parking docks remain the same size, runways are the same length, London and NYC are still the same distance apart, people don’t want to hear sonic booms, and few are able to shell out $$$$ it takes to pay for all the fuel. I have huge respect to Boom for giving this a go but it will be incredibly hard for an aircraft manufacturer to turn a profit.
There were plans for a Concorde "B" model that aimed to increase efficiency through wing and engine modifications, allowing the removal of the afterburners: http://www.concordesst.com/concordeb.html
> Concorde was a large program backed by two governments and designed and built by nationalized aerospace companies. This is a strictly private affair, so no tax dollars behind it, just private funds.
Because once things are paid by consumers things get better, more responsible, efficient, and so on, compared to free money granted by states to a few at the cost of many?
As other threads have pointed out, Google's copyright violation system is a process that's private. It's before the DMCA laws get involved.
So maybe it's a ToS violation?
(This isn't defending the person issuing copyright strikes. Their behavior, right or wrong, just isn't perjury. I think. Good thing I'm not anyone's lawyer.)
"Hey man calm down!"
"I am calm!"
One of the best ways to upset someone is to claim they are upset.