this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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First two are communication platforms with direct spying concerns and the car industry always was a proxy for Tank production.
Yeah. If China is a better country at manufacturing EVs than the USA, that means they can make more war material than us. That's absolutely a national security threat.
The 3rd case is more of honest competition. But it's a huge concern to any warfighter. USA won WW2 by making more vehicles than the Nazis and Japanese. If China can out-manufacture us, we absolutely have to consider the new realities of the modern battlefield
It's a well known fact that Nazi tanks were a lot better than American tanks. We just outnumbered the shit out of the Nazis.
I don't think EV production will lead to tanks like how WW2 did. But EV production almost certainly is a modern drone / Li-ion battery.
Actually EVs collect a huge amount of information including video and audio of the participants. It's a huge privacy issue regardless of manufacturer country but you obviously should distinguish the difference between a foreign country collecting information on your citizens compared to your own. Neither is good but one clearly has more authoritarian tendencies and less scruples about finding and coercing compliance with any means at their disposal.
There isn't anything inherent with an EV to necessitate video/audio recording capabilities.
If you're concerned about an EV having that ability, you should be equally concerned about traditional vehicles as well.
I literally read something this morning on how you can now get cybersecurity insurance for your car. For a fucking CAR. Why tf do the circumstances exist that that's even a possible market?
Honestly why should I care if China has more military power than the U.S. It's not like the USA is doing going things with our military power. We can't even stop a genocide.
Because China is about to attack Taiwan, which has 60%+ of the world computer chips.
That means no iPhones, no Snapdragon (Android phones), no XBox, no PS5, no AMD (Servers), no AMD/Xilinx (aka: F35), no NVidia GPUs if that attack goes off successfully. It'd be a major effect on the US technology sector, which is where I'm employed (and where many others are employed). This is a vital economic and technological issue.
If we lose the upcoming China vs Taiwan fight, its not just like "Oh I feel bad" like the Ukrainian situation (trust me, I'm hugely supportive of the Ukrainians). But Ukraine doesn't have a major economy / export tied to the USA's economy like Taiwan does.
China has made something like 400 nuclear weapons in the past 5 years or so. They're preparing for something. The current bets are on a Taiwan invasion, which has been a sorespot for them for the past century.
I don't think China is going to use those nukes per se, they just want nuclear parity with "somebody". So its clear they're likely planning to attack USA (or some other major nuclear power), which would coincide with a Taiwan attack (USA would almost certainly rush to protect this vital economic center for us, leading into a China vs USA war). The nukes are the just-in-case option for China, its likely going to try to stay conventional.
Are you saying the United States is planning to conduct an imminent war, by ourselves, on China on behalf of Taiwan?
Isn't the UN supposed to help out with those issues, like Ukraine?
If China shoots first, it won't be USA alone. Philippines, Japan, Korea, and Australia will rally because they'd be most concerned about an expansionist China fucking up their side of the world.
But USA's Navy and Marines would be expected to put in some degree of work for sure.
UN isn't a military alliance. So no. NATO is Atlantic-focused, so they're not the right group either.
I guess I don't see why the United States needs to be the world police with our military. We have tried this before and it's not gone well.
This isn't a world policeman be the good guy situation though. This is a simple 'our economy won't work without Taiwan so we probably want to protect them'.
We can, we just choose not to
That implies the US is trying to stop it.
No. This is a political meme.
This is implying that a huge chunk of Americans are too stupid to recognize the obvious threats here, and are making incredibly dumb memes to proudly state how ignorant they are on this issue.
I'm trying to figure out if you think I'm replying to you or not...
What I'm responding to is the "We can't even stop a genocide" part of the comment I'm replying to. Which is a political stance the US is taking, and not really directly related to the meme in question.
Also, taking memes (of all things) as some kind of mass endorsement is... some kind of twisted logic.
Ehhh, sorry for messing up the reply chains. Your comment came after mine so I guess I thought you were replying to me. I see now I was mistaken.
Which one? The Ukrainian one? The Uyghurs? Or the Taiwan (Kuomintang/Chinese) ?? We're trying to stop different genocides. Anyone saying "The Genocide" simply isn't being specific enough.
So yeah, everyone has political views on different genocides around the world. USA absolutely ignores major ones (ex: Uyghurs) though, because China is quite powerful and its not really worth it for us to work against it, even if we all agree that its a bad thing. Taiwan would be crossing a line though because we have substantial economic ties and geopolitical ties (they were our allies in WW2).
Probably the one that's been in the news for the last six months, the one you didn't even mention. The one in Palestine.
Yeah that's cool.
But the other ones are the ones the "anti-genocide" people seem to have forgotten about. We're talking about China here, so the Uyghur genocide (still ongoing) is the one that's topically relevant.
You don't just switch the topic to Palestine every god damn topic. There's other parts of the world and other issues that go on.
Oh yeah, that other one the US hasn't tried to stop.
Of course, the US also isn't financially, politically, and economically invested in that genocide, so I can see how it might not be as relevant to the conversation.
Yeah, and I'm cool with that. We gotta save our powder for the people we do care about.
And Taiwan is one of the people we should care about. Or do you think otherwise? The chip thing alone is a big deal, but there's also the 70+ years of cooperation. Taiwan has been extremely good allies to us. There's no reason why we should throw away that friendship as the going gets tough.
Another note: Gaza hasn't done anything for us. I'm fine with yall kids white knighting for a forsaken people and everything, but there's also some geopolitical realities we need to talk about. We absolutely, 100% should focus on protecting our friends. And maybe some neutrals (ex: Ukraine is a good neutral party that we should support). But Gaza... you're leaning into people who actively hate us actually. I'm fine helping them but I'm not entirely sure what we get out of it.
But when it comes to our friends (ex: Taiwan), we 100% should rush to their aid when they're in trouble.
That's fair, if you don't care about people dying unless you're financially motivated... that's your own cross to bear.
No you.
Seriously.
YOU are the one arguing for us to give up on Taiwan. I'm the one trying to bring up how important Taiwan is to us.
YOU are the one ignoring the economic, historic, and geopolitical ties to the region. In the most fucking stupid way too (ex: crying about Gaza).
I'm simply pointing out: Taiwan is a much better friend of the USA than Gaza. Of course I give a bigger shit about them than the Gazan people. The people of Gaza have NOT been our ally for 70+ years like the Taiwan people have been. The people of Gaza didn't return the hero Doolittle (from WW2) back to us like the Taiwan people did. Etc. etc.
When the Taiwan / China war starts up, I hope to see you on the correct side by then. Now is the time to discuss our priorities. If your "care" has been spent all on the Gazans, to the point that you give up on our actual allies, YOU are the one who needs to stop caring about the Gaza people and to start putting your priorities in order.
We help our friends, and maybe some neutrals. And we should reserve our political powder for helping our friends when they need it. I get that you've woken up the the troubles of the world recently but there's always been people dying, or getting genocided, or whatever. But picking and choosing our battles is the fundamental debate of foreign policy. I can 100% say without a doubt that we must prepare for Taiwan. They're a much bigger deal than anything else going on right now (Ukraine included).
Your argument is "We don't care about Gaza so we shouldn't give a shit about Taiwan". Well, okay. If you like throwing away 70+ year friendships like that sure, whatever. But I'll call you out on that bullshit.
Bruh...
A federal employee installing any social media app on a work phone is a big deal. With a foreign app it's probably a bigger deal, but an American developer would still sell the same data to the highest bidder.
Banning tiktok just means China has to pay an American company for the data.
It wasn't like tiktok has some super secret spy mode, it collects the same as all the others.
Which is why we need real data protection laws regardless of where the home office is.
...
Have you looked at domestic automobile manufacturing in the last, I dunno, 3-5 decades?
We don't make shit anymore, but home offices are based here, so their profit is GDP.
So every American gets shafted and can't buy the insanely cheap EVs that are better than what's sold in America.
A cynic would say what also factors into that, is for the past 6 years we've had record breaking fossil fuels production. And those giant corporations don't want cheap EVs, and also make up a large chunk of GDP
Huawei makes phone servers. Its not a social media app. That 5G network is literally the thing that routes phone calls to each other. You're grossly underestimating the threat at play in this meme.
Whenever a cell phone makes a phone call, it goes to a cell-tower, and inside of a cell-tower is a "phone server" so to speak. I don't know the full details, but 5G, 4G, (etc. etc.) are the different generations of phone servers available.
That's every phone call, every text message, every packet, everything that goes to your cell phone goes through that cell-phone tower / 5G network. And for "some reason", China has dumped the prices of Huawei equipment and highly encouraged the USA to buy their phone equipment and servers. Uhhhhhh.... yeah.
If you're looking at the "Tik Tok" ban whatever, that's peanuts. Huawei was brought up by the meme. So lets talk Huawei. Dumbass meme doesn't understand how telephones work. Its a serious national security concern for good reasons.
Have you literally heard of the United Auto Workers?
I think you're bullshitting me. Last I heard, UAW pointed out huge productivity gains for their union and make a shit-ton of cars across hundreds of factories across the USA. Like, what the fuck man, do you even know America?