Sure we can. It may hurt a lot at first but we'll get over it. Think about how hard it was to rebuild after WW2. This would be nowhere near that difficult since none of the west is a bombed-out ruin today and all of the west is made up of advanced economies with highly educated populations. Furthermore, there are developing countries (such as Vietnam) that are going full-steam-ahead with ramping up production, especially in heavy industry.
The ones who can't afford to be without China's manufacturing are big tech companies like Apple. Perhaps they will take a huge hit but it's hard to imagine them going out of business. I remember the Apple of the mid 90's and how close they came to going out of business. Now, with the enormous cash hoard and other capital they've accumulated, I can easily imagine them surviving for many years even if they were cut off completely from all their manufacturing in China.
The sole reason USA leapfrogged the rest of the developed world economically after WW2 was because they didn't have to rebuild everything from scratch.
Cutting off all reliance on China would be economic suicide for any individual nation unless every one mutually agrees on it. Best of luck getting that to happen.
> The sole reason USA leapfrogged the rest of the developed world economically after WW2 was because they didn't have to rebuild everything from scratch.
It's possible, but the US and much of the western world would have to tolerate a decade or so of severely diminished standard of living when judged by consumption standards. The country as a whole would also have to work a lot harder and for more years.
In the past I would have said "there's no way that we would tolerate that," but for the last two years we have seen substantially diminished standard of living already due to [redacted], the monetary response to [redacted], and the policy response to [redacted], but now that we've seen that it is conceivable that the US would go a more austere route now. I also have seen now that no one in our leadership believes in anything or has any principles, so radical shifts really are possible.
With Vietnam, a lot of its recent development is related to expansion of Chinese foreign direct investment with substantial percentage increases every year in recent years. A lot of the notions about Vietnamese hostility to China and Chinese business is out of date and becoming more out of date.
There's virtually no US industry that is not heavily dependent on Chinese industry for refined materials, intermediate goods, and consumer goods. A lot of substitution could conceivably happen at higher prices, but really the way that we get out of it is defaulting on the government's medical obligations to the boomers and rededicating the money that was slated to giving them their to-the-grave care to industrial redevelopment.
The endgame is robotic replacement for skilled labor.
The pandemic has forced technology companies to push harder on communication products and development of virtual places.
Severely diminished trade with China would require an acceleration in manufacturing technology on a scale that could only be borne out of necessity.
Recognizing that robotics technology is orders of magnitude more challenging than an improved Zoom interface, It won’t come easy. But the demand will be there and so would be the creativity to overcome the challenges.
Sure that will be a lot of it. Robots also require lots and lots of both skilled and unskilled labor to maintain. Christopher Mims has a great pop business book out this year about the state of automation in logistics and industry. One of the emphases he makes is which things are being automated now and what types of jobs for people that automation creates at multiple skill levels and social classes.
I think when it comes to articulating this to the public and to the government, I would never say "robots are replacing all skilled labor," because that would predispose the legislator or the staffers supporting the legislator to think about what they could do to quash it.
> because that would predispose the legislator or the staffers supporting the legislator to think about what they could do to quash it.
Fwiw, I see only a downward trend in the effectiveness of governments larger than cities to contain or regulate technology. What is possible is changing too fast.
> A lot of the notions about Vietnamese hostility to China and Chinese business is out of date and becoming more out of date.
Note that the last major riot against China in Vietnam was way back in 2014. As long as China doesn't do anything aggressive in the SCS, the Vietnamese should come to like China again, however the chances of the former happening are very slim.
You forget the resources the west gets from China, partly China is not only the main source but the only source.
The economy nowadays is much more fragile than back then, the price increase alone would be destructive enough, especially for low-income earners.
I'm actually not sure why this is being downvoted.
I'm not a fan of the heavy dependence on Chinese manufacturing as it comes at huge human rights/ecological costs (in that order), but companies typically care about the bottom line above all else. How the product is made is less important typically than whether or not it __is__ made.
And it's a simple truth that right now a lot of companies are heavily dependent on China for production of goods, and if the US/UK unilaterally were forced to drop Chinese Manufacturing without time to plan, it would be pretty devastating to a lot of businesses.
Please don't misread this as "no action should ever be taken against China", as absolutely that is not my position; moral stands sometimes have a significant cost. Same with changes for a more sustainable future, you might need to have a higher upfront cost than you may want.
That doesn't mean these changes are bad, it just means that there is a non-trivial cost to consider. For me, this is a no brainer, as I like to look more towards the future and have the comfort zone to do so. Many businesses do not have that comfort zone, and regardless of the reason they're in that position, it's a reality for them that losing their chinese suppliers is a deathknell for them.
I'm not trying to propose anything except that I can understand why some businesses are against taking strong stances against Chinese manufacturing; I don't action _shouldn't_ be taken if China is not behaving well, just to be clear. But I can understand where people are coming from if they are opposed to it, as they don't want to bite the hand that feeds so to speak.
Yup, that’s what decoupling is about - gradually shifting production out of China, either to other low-cost producers or back home where robots and AI can do the job cheaply and sufficiently. It’s a prerequisite to ending economic dependence on a totalitarian nation, and their leverage over you.
But I don’t imagine Western nations will ever remove their embassies from China, as OP suggests. Those are useful for both official and backchannel communications, and have no bearing on nation’s leverage over the other.
We = the people, maybe. However, the corporate class has a lot more decision making power over the government in most western nations, and they definitely cannot do without rampant consumerism.
China's economy would crumble a little if it could not sell anything outside anymore. Imagine a few billions of people losing their current level of life in China... a good recipe for regime change.
All that would happen is that the Chinese government would become even more authoritarian and a whole lot of people would be worse off. These fantasies always seem to ignore the human cost.
> All that would happen is that the Chinese government would become even more authoritarian and a whole lot of people would be worse off. These fantasies always seem to ignore the human cost.
Your suggestion is that the rest of the world should play nice with China, and accept an invasion of a free nation (Taiwan) and its people because not doing so would hurt Chinese nationals within China?
Chinese people suffering due to the CCP is bad, certainly. But what's worse is another country (having nothing to do with the CCP) suffering for it.
Not quite as small. Combined EU has the largest economy in the world, is by far the wealthiest region on the planet, possesses a huge & advanced military force and despite decline still has pretty substantial manufacturing capacity. (only reason US tops these rankings is because in EU each metric is tracked separately for each country).
So if EU got its shit together and formulated a coherent unified foreign policy - it would be at the very least on equal terms with both US and China. Hence why everyone (from Putin, to China to even our allies the US) are so invested in breaking EU apart (and even succeeding - the Brexit).
> Combined EU has the largest economy in the world
Unfortunately (?) not. By nominal GDP the US is the largest. By PPP-adjusted GDP China comes first.
> So if EU got its shit together and formulated a coherent unified foreign policy - it would be at the very least on equal terms with both US and China.
The West will not go, and die without one xmass season, and a new Iphone 99.
But Western elites all holding stocks of companies valued in trillions will do.
I requires a healthy conversation in society about this. It will come to a time when people will have to decide what to do with these people.
Potential adversaries now do things which just 15 years ago would've meant a real hot war with the whole Western world by leveraging their financial influence on Western elites, and a threat of bankrupting them.
I hate that China vs US thing comes down to race things, like it’s us white americans vs those bad chinese. Even American companies are now bad since they dare to sell to chinese people and only care about profits but not the fragile white american ego. It’s especially visible on Hacker News, asian bashing is so common but I guess it’s mostly due to demographics (right wing white americans mostly lurk forums like these, just remember how BLM movement was discussed here).
What a farce
i don't pretend to read everything on here but i have yet to see any "asian bashing". i have seen people raise their concerns about the CCP. i hope that's not what you are calling "asian bashing".
You realize many American are from Chinese decent.
Not selling to a citizen of China regardless of race (not all Chinese are from the same race) is much different than not selling to anyone who has a Chinese gene.
The nation state you think China and the US to be doesn't exist.
Voting D, and being very right wind doesn't preclude each other. This election was really an outlier.
As the article already mentions: "While Biden performed well among Asian Americans, the data suggest that Trump didn't lose support with the group, either."
This is the truth the way I see it. I don’t care if I have to go back to coming over a wood stove with a stick if it meant stopping China. The only area of concern I do see is they provide a lot of pharmaceutical with the chemicals they need and they would not be able to produce the drugs they currently make. As for the rest, I’ve lived without a cell phone for decades I would love to go back to suck a time. Is there any other critical industries reliant on China and for what?
You might be content with living like a pre-industrial peasant but how many other Americans or Europeans would be? I would wager very few. People care about their own immediate needs (or what they perceive to be their immediate needs) first and things like China, HK, Taiwan do not even register in their minds. I would bet that most Americans would rather live in a vassal nation than to not have any of the convinces of modern day living, and I quite frankly, would also. When gas gets over 4 dollars a gallon, people get mad. When lumber prices jump by 25%, people get mad. When steel prices jump by 10%, people get mad. How do you think people would react if the next iPhone cost 5k or the BigMac cost 10$, they would vote out the current government and replace them with a new one.
I think you are being a bit too idealistic and have quite honestly drank the Kool-Aid and forgot about the original purpose of why America dislikes China. They are a rising power seeking to disrupt the current one. Good playing American jobs have been cut and Chinese jobs have sprang up in their place. People who had those jobs are now experiencing a reduced quality of life.
I do agree with much you write, I don't think many care as long as their status quo stays the same. I have not drank any Kool-Aid I just find it hard to watch the suffering in China. The changes needed would effect the people at the bottom the most as it would be too expensive to live if the cost of everything went up 25%. I don't know the final answer but I don't think we can turn a blind eye to China's human rights violations forever.
If everyone went back to wooden stoves climate change, deforestation, and air quality would all be much much worse. Remember, degrowth is wrong! Economic growth is the only way to pay for environmentalism.
In the end they could, though it would be a hard transition. The western world pre-Chinese manufacturing was better off than China pre-Chinese manufacturing. But in reality, we're in a relationship neither side wants out of, so we should probably learn to compromise, and that compromises cut both ways.
No, they were fined because bankers must only communicate via channels that are monitored. By using whatsapp, they bypass all the internal and external audit/compliance teams.
unknown. seems like they were being punished because their employees used whatsapp for business communication, not that it was discovered the employees used whatsapp and did something illegal
If WhatsApp encryption can be broken, there is no way the agencies capable of doing so would share it with the lowly SEC. That would be a top level state secret.
On top of that I assume that the NSA (mostly) still has a PRISM-like programme in place, it would be foolish to assume otherwise. More exactly I do think that they (NSA and some other agencies) still have direct access to the servers of Google, MS, Facebook and Apple.
But I 100% agree with you, such lowly use-cases like the SEC chasing some bankers don't register on NSA's (and similar agencies') radar, it's only money, after all, I think they're more interested in dealings involving power itself.
The SEC is pretty much a nobody when it comes to 3-letter agencies. See how Elon Musk challenges them publicly and all he got in return was a slap on the wrist.
On a related note, the major issue with the SEC as highlighted by every knowledgeable commenter is that they have a revolving door shared with the same banks and organizations they are supposed to monitor. People leave SEC and join Goldman Sachs or JPM and then when new administrators come in they rejoin the SEC. It’s corruption at an unprecedented level.
He got much more than a slap on the wrist, he go removed from his chairman incestuous position from Tesla. It's the first red flag of bad governance when the CEO is also the chairman (others are to have the board full of family members and overly paid sycophants, I let you google who s on Tesla board).
This will eventually be the starting point of a very slow reform at Tesla, so not a bad deal.
Biological taxonomy is largely arbitrary. From a practical perspective it has very similar characteristics, so not much is gained from distinguishing it.
"Even though there have been practically no cases of clinical infection, wastewater samples show that the new omicron variant is now the dominant strain of COVID-19 in the Florida county that is home to the nation's largest theme park resorts, officials said this week."
I wonder if they saw more traces from the theme park wastewater...
Business idea: device that you plug to your home wastewater output, scans it, and reports to you anything interesting.
Of course it'd need to be connected to the cloud and have a stupid subscription fee. /s . At least then "Internet of Shit" will apply to the name non-sarcastically.
Unfortunately, the mutation differences between Delta and Omicron are more significant than from the early Alpha/Beta which it appears to be more related.
It's fitness is driven (in South Africa) largely by the ability to avoid Delta immunity, where a majority of the population has already had that.
Whether Omicron is more mild or not seems still up in the air. Saying that it is more mild in Southern Africa (or a theme park?) where the average age is in the mid 20s (rather than 38 for the whole US) isn't all that relevant since we know symptomatic illness falls more than an order of magnitude between those two.
That said, I've been expecting COVID immunity in the US to look something like Pfizer-Pfizer-Delta-Omicron-Omega since it was clear that we couldn't get more that 60% vaccination. The goal should be keeping the hospitals available for actual catastrophic accidents (heart attacks, car accidents, ladders) rather than complex suicide lottery attempts.
Frankly, at this point it's a choice. You can be a rude nudist/antimasker, a filthy contagion/antivaxer who will spread disease or you can be a regular human who goes about their life. Other than the old/infirm we don't need to protect people from their (bad) decisions any more. I'm glad I'm not immune compromised, 80 years old, or caring for a very young child... it would suck!
From the article this thread is about (italics emphasis added by me):
> The researchers found a significantly increased risk of developing a symptomatic Omicron case compared to Delta for those who were two or more weeks past their second vaccine dose, and two or more weeks past their booster dose (for AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines).
> Depending on the estimates used for vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic infection from the Delta variant, this translates into vaccine effectiveness estimates against symptomatic Omicron infection of between 0% and 20% after two doses, and between 55% and 80% after a booster dose. Similar estimates were obtained using genotype data, albeit with greater uncertainty.
That is an accurate statement I believe. However, given it is the only available evidence we have, it is probably the most accurate prediction that we have, so let's call it our prior.
Not really, evasion is a continuum rather than a binary distinction. So Omicron seems like it evades immunity acquired from infection with previous variants or vaccines to a certain degree, but from what I have read with vaccine + booster you are still ~60-80% protected from symptomatic infection and almost entirely protected from severe outcomes.
If you ripped those CDs while contracted by these record labels, I don’t see how it is legal for you to keep the files after the job and call them yours.
You assume that once the job was done, he washed his hands of it and it was over.
I once digitized a large media collection for a company (not audio, though), and it regularly used me as a backup source of last resort for when the files failed/got lost/needed to be transferred in bulk to another company/whatever on their end.
