Re: Risks
Not all skillsets are available in one country these days. Tesla's motor designers, for example, live in Greece (AFAIK). Battery makers are in China. This is what was meant when we signed up for Globalization.
The problem isn't the bogeymen we've been told to hate, Putin and Xi. The problem started when politicians, having encouraged Globalization when it favored the US, decided to try to control the flow of commerce, work and information to suit their constituency (which is rarely "We, the People"). They did this by unleashing economic warfare on other countries, often using very tenuous pretexts that are chosen more because of how they sell to the often gullible public than for sound long term reasons. This results in a climate where we pick on some countries for often relatively minor reasons but tolerate other countries for being the same or (often) much worse. This artificial Cold War climate then ratchets up tensions which gives an excuse for the arms vendors and the like to move in.
Looked at rationally, we (the US) are causing the problems because we are troubled by threats to our global hegemony, threats that we blame on external actors rather on decades of bad internal and foreign policy. We're like the kid that's forever provoking the dog behind the fence who acts all innocent when the dog gets loose and chases him. (Of course, these days its never the kids' (or his/her) parents' fault.) We ddin't have to do this. Yes, I think Russia's moves were unwise and unnecessary, war is never the answer, but just going around calling Putin a madman, Hitler or whatever completely whitewashes our culpability in this matter. Make no mistake -- we've got 'form' (to use that UK expression), we can be traced to all sorts of underhand dealings and coups over the last 70 years or more. This might not be general knowledge here but the rest of the world is listening and watching and a lot of it isn't convinced we're the good guys any more.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
