
Grow a pair
Intel does not depend on China for its business.
Instead of bending over, Intel should have told Beijing to fuck off.
It's like paying malware criminals, agreeing to their bullshit just encourages them.
Intel has expressed regret for the way its warning its suppliers not to use labour, or source goods, from China’s Xinjiang region, has been interpreted inside the Middle Kingdom. China is credibly accused of conducting genocide in Xinjiang, a region whose inhabitants are mostly members of the Uyghur people and practice Islam. …
100% agree. I'd avoid everything marked as Made in China (as opposed to Taiwan) if I had a choice in the matter.
Shovelling the worlds problems with slave labour and pollution under the invisibility cloak of the CCP only doesn't fool anyone.
Intel is possibly being vaguely cautious because TSMC dependency and the Middle Kingdom is hell bent on re-uniting the island in time for the 100th anniversary of the formation of CCP.
And what about stuff made in China by a Taiwanese owned company, or stuff made in China using Taiwan-sourced components?
If a law was passed requiring companies to give a rundown of the provenance of every component inside their product, including subcomponents, materials, etc. I doubt it would be possible for any tech company to comply. And even if they did, to keep their hundreds of suppliers (and suppliers to those suppliers, etc.) in line.
Like it or not, there is a worldwide supply chain today and nothing is going to put that genie back in the bottle. Other than war, of course, which is the only thing that sever all those unknown and unseen relationships. Unfortunately that means war would devastate everyone's economies, but maybe that's a good thing as it will cause cooler heads to prevail before considering rushing headlong into WW III even if it could be fought without nukes.
I do.
Sadly for a guy of my age I still enjoy model railways (yes, I blame it on the kids, first the son and now obviously the daughter love to play trains so of course I only maintain the model for them dont I :):) )
But its very sad that today there are NO supposedly British manufacturers who dont make almost all stuff in China. Peco make track and some wagons in the UK as do Dapol but unless someone cares to correct me there isnt one that makes the engines in the UK. So I dont buy new, I only buy stuff that is old enough to be UK made. To tell the truth, they all run better than the modern junk anyway.
By the time you factor in shipping costs and other supply chain issues it's not really any cheaper to manufacture a lot of stuff in China apart from high volume commodity items. I think any cost saving has long been eroded and it's just momentum and corporate fear of change that keeps Chinese contract manufacture chugging along.
I don't believe that people wouldn't be willing to pay $1-2 more for something like a model train if it was made locally.
Intel does not depend on China for its business.
Well, it looks like they do. If not directly then indirectly.
That's the problem of corporations not wanting to pay decent wages and outsourcing labour to maximise profits, regardless of human rights abuses.
They thought they can have the cake and eat it too. Hope it will come to bite them big time.
Apart from the fact that Intel, along with many of well-known companies, does indeed depend heavily on sales in China, the biggest problem with this virtue-signalling is that it's so selective: if we shouldn't trade with China because of Xinjiang (or should that be Tibet, or Hong Kong?), then shouldn't we also stop trading with Saudia Arabia - because in its own way it's equally as repressive and also heavily involved in a very dirty war in Yemen? What about Nigeria or Equatorial Guinea, where oil companies have, for decades, been polluting and supporting repression? Then there's Russia, where we get most of our gas from. Not forgetting Egypt or Israel (which gets to runs tests that would be illegal in the US). And what about India after Modi flagrantly broke both Indian and international law by rescinding the autonomy of Jamul and Kashmir and putting it under direct control of the national government?
Or how about stopping trade with Texas because of its recent anti-abortion law?
If trade sanctions against China were all about virtue signalling, your point would be very strong.
But China is being subjected to a "double standard" for a very good reason. It isn't just a country with human rights shortcomings. It's also a threat to the national security of Taiwan, a friend and ally of the United States.
So we would hardly want China to equip its airplanes and ships - that might be confronting American airplanes and ships in the event of an attempted invasion of Taiwan - with the latest microchips.
It's also a threat to the national security of Taiwan, a friend and ally of the United States.
So much a friend that America refuses to acknowledge it officially. And, again, no one from the US is in Saudia Arabia telling them not to bomb Yemen, even though the US has for at least twenty years considered Saudia Arabia to source of most islamic terrorism (cf. Nicholas Negroponte's Rebuilding America's Defenses and the weird post-hoc justification for invading Iraq).
Your slippery slope argument is not well taken. You've done nothing to show that one of those leads to the other or should, and those are a large number of situations you're referencing each of which is completely different from the other in every way.
To answer your question however? Yes. We shouldn't be trading with probably half the places you list. Exactly what response did you expect? Someone to say 'oh no, if I can't trade with those places slavery is fine!'? China is the most pressing because they're making the most threats and throwing the most military hardware into other people's countries right now. Until proof of full blown genocide came out (and to some degree covid) priority number one was Iran as your selective memory may recall.
Whoever is most likely to kill the most people soonest gets the attention. Right now that's China.
It's also pretty silly to frame it in America vs China terms tbh, practically the entire planet is appalled with China right now including many countries that do not see eye to eye with America. Only a vanishing few friendly dictators are throwing any support their way.
Instead of bending over, Intel should have told Beijing to fuck off.
.. and do something about how people of colour are treated in their own country. Not to imply that that in any way justifies what happens in China, but if I see what has been happening to non-whites there over centuries and systematically so I don't think they are as yet in a morasl position to throw the first stone..
While there is nothing wrong with the sanctions on Xinjiang, those effect of those sanctions are de-facto overwhelmed by consumer dependence on CCP controlled manufactured goods, due to the high convenience/cost ratio of those goods.
Consumer expectations in the the West are vastly higher than those in China - even as the West's working classes in the have seen relative income drop and drop over the past 40 years. Any attempt to lessen that dependence will inevitably decrease convenience/cost ratio, leading to inflation - but also higher wages. That's the bullet that has to be bit, somehow.
If not planned for internally in advance by choice to optimize use of domestic populations, it will eventually be imposed externally with no choice about it, in an ugly way with far fewer options.
It's not really that bad of a bullet, we're just pretending it is because we're scared.
Companies have been moving manufacturing from China for easily a decade now, primarily to other East and South Asian countries but also back to their home countries. What we've learned from that is that China really is a fairly minor optimization at the end of the day, even more so once you account for the cost and complexity of moving all the goods back out when they're done, and the bullet is actually more of a bb.
China doesn't have anywhere near the lowest wages in the region anymore, the average annual salary of a person working in a Chinese urban centre is a bit over 15k USD. For an important point of comparison that's about the same as the average income in Mexico, and is comparable to or significantly greater than the average income pretty much anywhere on the planet outside North America, Australia, Korea/Japan and the EU. That's a lot of options in a lot of regions that don't require multi-month waits on boats full of crates to return the goods. Even within the EU places like Slovakia, Hungary and Portugal are actually quite competitive with China (slightly higher incomes but your goods get finished right in the EU).
Moto X probably provides one of the more illustrative examples of how small the gap can be (MSRP $400 for a mid-range phone made in Texas), and it has shrunk significantly since then.
That's without discussing the risks of operating in China, just on benefits it barely makes sense anymore. And if you want proof from the horse's mouth, look at the levers China is pulling. China is well aware that at this point their consumers are more valuable to companies than their labour, it's not their labour they keep threatening to cut off access to, it's their consumers.
Reminds one of the old adage "No one ever got fired for ordering IBM". In other words, "No one is too big to fail"! Intel better stick to it's guns. If your profits from China are dependent on genocide then you better look out. i.e. Just tell the bad guys to fuck off! Unless of course you believe evil wins out in the end?!
If you have Jewish ancestry, would you avoid buying computers from IBM up to this day, would you refuse to work at IBM?
IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and IBM
Well, there's a difference between holding a company accountable for what it does today, versus holding it accountable for what it did before any of its present management or shareholders were born. If moral blame is something that follows you through generations not only genetically and nationally but also professionally and commercially, we're all pretty much screwed.
> If moral blame is something that follows you through generations not only genetically and nationally but also professionally and commercially, we're all pretty much screwed.
I feel that bringing genetics and nationality into the conversation - traits which most people have little to no control over - is disingenuous at best. By contrast, one's profession, and who one does business with, are explicit choices - as is accepting financial benefits from past collusion with criminals.
If, for example, a person lives in the lap of luxury because of wealth they inherited from their granddaddy, who made bank from actively enabling the Holocaust, then yes, I would say that person would still have some moral liability.
It could be argued that, if a company colluded with Nazis, it is morally tainted by that action - no matter how much musical chairs they play in the boardroom. I would say that a purge of that taint would necessitate not only surrendering all revenue gained from that collaboration, but all benefits accrued over time as a result of that revenue (eg. if they used that income to expand their business). So for example, if a company would have gone under if it weren't for that business deal, then the company should be dissolved, or ownership handed over entirely to the victims.
Otherwise, the message being sent is "it's okay to collude in acts of genocide, so long as you can invest the profits for long enough"
Pretty much everyone alive today lives on the back of acts of genocide committed by their ancestors. Consider the settlement of America, for instance.
But the only reason it's easy to cite America is because the brutal treatment of its former natives is recent enough to be well documented and remembered. Long before that, the Normans were kicking Saxons off all the best land, and the Saxons in turn had driven off Celts and Anglo-Romans, and so on back through history. And every other country in the world has a similar history to tell.
If you really want to erase all the injustices of the past, that would require a truly radical change, such as abolishing inheritance (of money, nationality, status, name, education or any other artificial advantage) entirely. You're welcome to advocate for a change like that if you want to, but I doubt you'd win over many people.
I read the book.
The book appeared to have gotten its facts right - but the facts in the book pretty much all showed that IBM did just about everything a private corporation, which had invested in Germany before the Nazi rise to power - could possibly do to prevent its equipment and technology from being misused.
Since it was misused anyways, IBM did make some efforts to cover up the use of 80-column cards in the management of the concentration camps that the Nazis got from Dehomag - to avoid an irrational association which would harm IBM's image.
But IBM shut down its operations in Germany when it saw what was coming. It couldn't order its employees to destroy everything, as that would have put their lives at risk. And it's not as if IBM could have conducted bombing raids on Germany itself before the U.S. was even at war with Germany.
The facts said one thing, even if the authors' tone all through the book tried to say something else.
Companies have no issue publicly kowtowing to China like this because ultimately, as much as there's some PR hit, there's no real cost to doing so. And there's certainly a cost to not doing so. Their home markets are still more important to these companies than China, if we as consumers were smarter about this companies like Intel would be terrified of pulling these stunts.
People are used to low prices and if production was moved back to the West, most people wouldn't be able to afford anything for a long time.
For example, a phone made entirely in the West would cost easily 5-10 times phones are currently being sold for.
That would also require stripping workers rights to minimum and so on, basically moving what's happening in China to the West.
That being said, that should have been done a decade or two ago. Today we would have been already past the growing pains...
I see this argument rolled out a lot and it's total nonsense.
Would a phone made in the West cost more? Yes.
Is it anywhere near 5-10x? No, it's not even 2x, I don't think it was even 1.5x. We know this for a fact because there are/were smartphones made in the USA and the premium isn't large.
Would the people in the US be getting paid more? Yes, why is bringing good paying jobs into a country a bad thing?
Would people in the US afford the phone? Well, the premium is tiny and it comes along with an influx of jobs and wealth back into the country. Your call.
That argument is and has always been cobblers.
Two reasons
First, take a look at Germany, now I know they are a bunch of racist thugs to this very day but if you stick made in Germany on a dog turd they will queue to buy it, even more so if you make it more expensive than a pound of steak. They will buy German regardless, and frankly whatever else comes out of it the economy is stronger, the wages higher and they arent always panicing about the level of debt like the UK and USA governments.
Second, cheap production relies on a very few things, first machines (we are pretty good at those - have you looked at a western car plant or a machine shop.... lots of gleaming machines and very very very few workers). Cheap energy for those machines (China doesnt care about CO2 or burning coal so has cheap energy, the rest of the world doesnt care about CO2 because it lets China produce the products and therefore the CO2 for it.... if it did care it would run fuel from air plants and then provide the energy needed to factories without the CO2 emissions). Cheap land to put the factories in (we could create that simply enough, demolish offices and have office bees work from home and use the freed up lands and the reduced need for roads provide room for factories. And cheap capital - the Chinese provide this, we managed to find enough for the banks because all the politicians like their bank jobs so why not do it for factories?
Why don't you believe in communism? What's the big deal...
Basically people with more than two brain cells see that is an organised theft and slavery. That's why pretty much any iteration of this system ends up with high body count. Then it lacks people able to do jobs beyond menial and then collapses.
China, however, managed to amass enough capital, so that they are always able to pull enough skill from the west, copy and then adapt so running it does not require skill and send western engineers back.
Rinse and repeat.
I would suggest it would be even more important to also have a sober look at what is going on at home.
To quote:
"We really have to start telling these unprincipled yobs - and their Trump chums - to eff right off. At the moment, it's 1930s appeasement all over again. Personally, I'd love to offend the Republicans, or more specifically, the GOP.".
Doesn't drawing equivalencies like this ever get embarrassing for you? I'm guessing you've also done a lot of comparing Trump to being "identical to Hitler" and other such disgusting and offensive takes? You're drawing direct moral equivalency between a tweet not any worse or more stupid than what you wrote above and raping a family to death. Meditate on that.
Trump is a dogshit politician and was a worse President, but even beginning to compare him to actual ongoing genocide is just fucking ignorant at best. You have so much to work with and this is the best you can do? Pathetic.
And throwing 50% of the American population casually in with the assessment is just the best.
More interestingly I would say Trump may have been bad but Biden is certainly a lot worse. Trump didnt abandon million, billions of pounds worth of military kit to his enemies. Nor did he manage to leave a country totally fucked up while signalling to China that taking Taiwan would be fine because the yanks still havent learnt to win a war despite the lessons everyone else keeps giving them and the Russians are now walking into Ukraine because the senile git Biden mutters on a phone call that its ok because all that will happen if Russia does is a few economic sanctions which have zero effect with the whole of europe buying every ounce of russian gas or oil the chinese havent already taken. Putin is not scared of a few economic mumblings and has no reason to be. Besides, America will find an excuse a week later to let the profits flow again and Russia will have just started its reconquest of eastern europe, that will go so well and so easily it wont stop until the west coast of Portugal
Only alternative is an all out confrontation with China. That means military machines and millions of lives lost .. not to mention the fact that the outcome is far from certain for either side. Diplomacy done nothing and will keep doing nothing. The only possible way to fight them is cutting them off from all supplies , monies and total embargo on their products. Isolating tyhem completely is the only way to go. So .. War or embargo ? Cause we know diplomatic solutions do not exist. They can pretend but in the end it's their way or the highway , perhaps it's time to take the highway and leave china behind.
And Biden gave into a few bearded goatherds with out of date rifles because he didnt have the balls to wage war, this gives the green light to China over Taiwan and Russia over Ukraine, he can yell about economic sanctions that wont stick and neither opponent cares about and by the end of 2022 Ukraine will be part of Russia and Taiwan 'reunited' ... this is appeasement all over again and will eventually lead to the enslavement of millions of people
Intel's real opinion is this: Uncle Sam made us do it! But, in reality, we don't give a flying monkey f... about 'human rights' and such nonsense, really! And we are VERY, VERY, VERY SORRY, PLEASE FORGIVE US that we have created an impression we did care about such silly, irrelevant, and in fact, incorrect mis-portrait of real situation. SO SORRY AND PROMISE NEVER TO DO IT AGAIN. EVER. Now, is it good enough or should we get MORE apologetic? PLEASE tell us HOW, and WE WILL!
Anyone who wants to go all in on China right now should be encouraged to do so and aggressively boycotted outside China. They won't learn until they learn the hard way. I'd love to see some of these companies that tried to fuck over workers there and consumers here simultaneously lie in their own filth and then violently implode.
Speaking of imploding depending on who you listen to their housing market is either going to or already imploding.
In China about the only thing you can invest in is property and the housing bubble is so massive and property prices so high the price of property makes New York and London look cheap.
If you want to see how bad it is look up ghost cities of China and be prepared for some funky stuff (think wild west ghost towns but build never to be lived in)
To further underline the potential impact and how it's profoundly larger & more traumatic than it would be for Western economies:
40% of the income of China's local government bodies comes from land&property sales.
So a collapse won't be a case of paper-value falls on some investors' books plus some carnage in the construction industry -- it would affect the whole country, very directly, in terms of lost jobs and sharp declines in basic services etc, and in terms of affecting ~100% of people personally and ~daily.