Exactly who do you think is going to stop them? The citizens of Western nations may sympathize with Taiwan, but that's very different from them being willing to send their sons and daughters to fight and die for someone else's country.
If China decides to invade Taiwan, I don't see anyone realistically trying to stop them militarily. I imagine a bunch of nations will "strongly condemn" their actions, but I would be shocked if the West is even willing to impose economic sanctions in that scenario.
Bjorn managed to get couple cars in coldgate condition - so cold and such low SOC that it's just not enough power to heat up battery and now you going highway at 60 km/h. IDK, maybe just a software fix, maybe an edge case, but it can happen.
The "most racist" places are typically the most diverse and most multicultural. They have more exposed tissue than places where minorities make up single digit percentage points, so you see injustices more often in these places. And it follows that it gets reported on at volume.
By that same coin, these places also have more friendly interactions by volume than places without diverse racial makeups. You just don't see that reported because it's not news.
America, "racist", simply has a very diverse population.
The American South, "racist against Black people", simply has the nation's largest population of Black people almost to the point the racial makeup is bimodal.
Texas, "racist against Latinos", - same thing.
You see the bad apples, but you don't see the overwhelming degree to which society works with people together in a melting pot.
I grew up in the South, where every second person is Black. I fly to SF where there are barely any Black people at all and have dinner conversations with people calling my region racist. Sometimes the people saying these things grew up in all-white cities in New England. I have to laugh inside.
SF region is gonna be racist among other things itself. That is true of all of America but there’s levels to this and American south is more racist. Don’t have to grow up in a diverse place to see/know that.
Apple CEO Tim Cook "secretly" signed an agreement worth more than $275 billion with Chinese officials, promising that Apple would help to develop China's economy and technological capabilities - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...
China was suppose to become a giant sweatshop which would be allowed to gain subsistence wealth. Just enough to produce and consume western product but not wealthy enough to ever outgrow their station in the world.
And that is the core contention for the anti-China rhetoric. That they are a competitor. There are a billion and one reasons people say they don't like China, but the core issue is competition.
> As soon they became a competitor there was a problem
Was there? It seems to me trade and offshoring continued even after they became a competitor. And then continued after they strong-armed Western corporations to invest in China [1], destroyed Western corporations through espionage [2,3], or through subsidy-enabled dumping prices and preferential treatment [4,4.1], after they extracted groveling apologies from Western firms [5], and after they started operating literal police stations on Western soil [6], while turning Western countries into subordinate receivers of orders [7,8].
I guess you were hoping your framing would guilt people into not seeing the threat?
[1] Apple CEO Tim Cook "secretly" signed an agreement worth more than $275 billion with Chinese officials, promising that Apple would help to develop China's economy and technological capabilities - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...
Western state department and corporations aren’t the same thing. China is New Democracy where the classes are all represented with the state at the top. That’s not how Old Democracy (liberal democracy) works where the hierarchy between state and corporations is more mixed with corporations in more power.
You’re equating things that corporations are doing as if that’s in the best interest of the American state.
China is being seen the way it is by white people and white societies because they see a competitor.
the west made a deal with the devil for cheap plastic trinkets and reaped what it sowed. that's why switching the manufacturing to India won't do any good either.
domestic production or nothing. the "service economy" is a stupid concept.
Well, as European, i have to clearly state - unfortunately - this is only because of what happened in the 20th century: WWII. This "event" changed somehow the psychology, not allowing the EU to "stand up straight with our shoulders back".
Unfortunately. With around 500m customers, we could be powerful. But we arent: Stumbling upon our own feeds.
The countries that comprise the EU had been among the biggest warmongers for centuries. The EU is the most successful peace project the continent has ever seen. And the reason for that is that every country refrained from trying to be a superpower on the continent.
The European mentality has real, tangible upsides for its continent. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work well in a larger world where other actors don’t share the same experience and values.
Not just for business. All foreigners in China must register their stay with the local police. Large hotels handle the registration automatically through their electronic reporting systems. However, if you’re staying at a friend’s home or another private residence, you need to go to the local police station and register in person.
Wrong. People that live here (in the EU) need to register. I can stay with friends abroad for some time without having to tell the government, as long as I don't take up residency.
I am talking about non-EU citizens who enter some of EU countries. No matter if they stay at the hotel or privately at relatives or friends they will be registered or must register at the police.
The rise of China has done a lot to destroy the neoliberal, globalist dream.
Letting them cheat the globalist system (e.g. violating IP laws, human rights violations, Uyghur/Tibetan genocide) may have been fine when they were desperately poor, but there was always an implicit assumption that they would eventually start playing by the rules and culturally liberalize. But they're not. How can we hold onto ideals like "diversity is our strength" and open borders are good when China is kicking ass and threatening the balance of power as an insular ethnostate with one of the lowest rates of immigrants on the planet?
And now they're growing to a power level that threatens to rival the US and its authority to police this global system we've created. That isn't stable, and the west would be insane to not shut China out and take a step back from our open, globalist ideals until we sort out this geopolitical game of thrones.
But the IP laws are visibly stupid, their role in the system is prevent success stories like China where some plucky upstart vaults to the forefront of the industrial world and drags a billion people out of poverty. The response to China achieving such success by ignoring IP laws should be to recognise the laws have been disasters and then to release the limits worst of the limits they impose on Western innovators.
A huge part of the software industry is there because of explicit GPL-style agreements defang the intent of IP laws while working inside the legal requirements they impose. The west should allow good ideas to be deployed in its own industrial processes.
So this shows how much the West considers liberalism and open markets to be its "values" when they throw that completely away when they're economically threatened. This tells me that in hardship is when people show their true colors. The money is the true "value", everything else is just a side show.
When you're playing prisoner's dilemma games, and your co-player is consistently defecting, you can only play cooperate for so long. Tit for tat is the only way you don't get majorly screwed by the defector over time.
Its quiet easy to understand, you can be liberal and free so long as wealth keeps flowing into your part of the world. What are you going to do make fun of becoming more wealthier.
The liberalism and freedom stops once too much money flows out of your part of the world, hence companies like palantir popping up like mushrooms. No one likes to be made fun of when they are in a declining trajectory.
No, just no. I get where you’re coming from, but I disagree in the strongest terms that copying China is the way forward. Closed, centralized models can scale quickly, as China did, but open models generate more frontier innovation and resilience. Iirc, nearly half of our unicorns have immigrant founders.
Sure, let’s harden IP and other trade laws, and punish China for violations (start treating them as an adult, a nation peer, instead of a rowdy child). But giving up our strategic advantage because China was able to semi-copy-us without having that advantage would be a huge mistake imo. I’m not saying America doesn’t need major changes, but I don’t think the way forward is to close our borders to global talent. Instead, let’s take advantage of our superpower status to implement UHC and UBI, to make our nation even more attractive to talented immigrants.
this is what most WEIRD people do not understand: (Western-Educated-Industrial-Rich-Democratic) - by today it looks like that the Chinese system may proof to be more "performant" on most/several (all?) levels. Its hard to accept for libertarian minds, i guess.
Once here on HN someone wrote like: "democratic systems seems to be too slow to adapt in world changing at our current speed".
China did some vey wise decisions from their perspective; think about this joint-venture thingy that foreign companies need to have a JV partner which always holds at least 50.1% - very clever! Why did no western state do this? Its one of the by far smartest decision that you could do.
This JV obssession is weird, China basically admitted that they can never compete on ICE cars and bet on EVs instead, either this JV model doesn't actually work or what was transferred do not have much value.
Now people claim they stole their IPs through JVs and that's why they are good at making EVs, this theory doesn't add up.
Also, what China offered is a vast untapped market, no one forced these companies to go to China to set up JVs and start picking up gold down the street, this was way before WTO and China was not at all obligated to open it's market, let alone for free.
Now ask one question, what the EU has to offer to "force" China to set up JVs? Guaranteed billion dollars profit?
EU car market is crowded and full of incumbents, Chinese cars represent a low single digit market share despite the weekly "China is taking over the EU car market" news article.
China bet on EVs because of national security. China has less reliable access to oil than many other countries and the US can choke off delivery of oil to China through bottlenecks if it comes to war. Investing in solar, wind and nuclear makes sense in their predicament. "Green energy" and "saving the planet" are secondary and mostly marketing by comparison.
Countries hitting their industrialization stride have a bloom of real world applicable talent that they can direct to these things in a way that is a little harder for others. Especially when you have a huge population.
It isn't just the US, Russia has oil and shares a land border with China. However, Russia isn't always friendly with China, nor is the middle east, and anyways, it just seems like a headache to deal with them + the petro dollar when they have plenty of energy to tap at home.
Air pollution was also a huge problem, aside from national security. China's empahsis on STEM and the fact that they've been a huge source of engineering/science/tech talent meant China could just tap its own human resources rather than making them go abroad for decent jobs. The fact that they also know how to build things and have set up all the infra for that is just another bonus.
China is willing to play ball in less developed countries, and the deals they setup is not just Chinese companies coming in and dominating the market, they are also partnering with and trying to raise local companies as well. That won't work in Europe or the US, at least for now.
It's true that Russia and China share a border, but the infrastructure to move oil across it at large scale barely exists and I got the impression the geology is very unfavorable for it. It's probably easier to ship it, but future pipeline expansions may still happen.
The whole Belt and Road initiative seemed to mimic a Korean style labor export to increase the inflows of currency into the country while keeping people employed, but I also kind of figured it was aimed at reducing the friction of future resource transportation between the countries.
Remember 10 foot tall Ivan? Apart from eugenics experiments on the basketball court, neither are the Chinese. In light of gross over-spending on showcase infrastructure projects, and overbuilding housing where people don't want to live, over-praising the CCP's system for training and promoting leaders is not going to make assessments of China more accurate.
I agree that our system (America’s, specifically) is too slow, but it’s not inherent to democracy, it’s the fact we only have elections every few years, because these rules were written in the 1700s when holding an election / voting in an election was difficult. No snap elections when the government is about to shut down (would’ve prevented all the nonsense of the last month and a half).
This isn’t cope. China has virtually no cultural exports of note compared to its size, except some gacha games (that are still mainly voiced in Japanese, which does have cultural exports). Every time I visit, I have to accept that my internet is going to be ridiculously unreliable and throttled and flaky.
I’m not saying China is “wrong”, but it’s not the obvious winner to me. Nor is it to my Chinese-born spouse who moved here for the greater opportunities and freedom.
It's difficult to export culture when the receiving cultures don't speak the language, don't share religion, etc. US has a big benefit of being part of the Anglophone world going back to it's founding and more recently with Western European dominance from WW2 where basically everyone there knows some level of English. Also, don't forget China has suffered from great "humiliation" for the last few hundred years and hasn't been in much of a position to export much of anything until recently. Furthermore, the main reason the US has absorbed some SK and Japanese cultural things is we brought them into our neoempire.
Kids in America are hopelessly addicted to Tiktok but that doesn't count as a cultural export.
Most the items in people's homes are made in China but that doesn't count either.
Chinese rappers could be dominating the pop charts and we would just say rap was invented in America so that doesn't count.
All the American kids could be learning to play the guzheng and we would just say we invented a new American style of playing the guzheng, doesn't count.
Who forced 'the west' to do that?
American and European companies lived well this way for decades. Buying from and selling to China has been highly profitable.
In fact Germany is doing terribly right now as China is buying LESS than before.
So the answer is to do... erm... even less trade?
Trumpian anti-globalist idiocy is growing in people's minds like a brain cancer
Are you confusing the NTP Foundation (the group asking for donations) with NTP the protocol or the NTP software itself?
This donation request isn’t even for the public NTP pool. Read the donation page carefully.
The big companies you’re angry at are neither dependent upon nor leeching from this group. They run their own NTP infrastructure, which in some cases has their own developments and adjustments.
Google’s, for example, uses time-smearing to handle leaps. This is different than the standard and therefore you shouldn’t mix Google’s leap-smearing NTP system with NTP servers that don’t leap smear.
> Let it fail and see what happens.
This is a real “cut off your nose to spite your face” moment, but worse: Those public companies don’t depend on any of this. They provide their own server pools and in some cases develop their own software with their own advancements. Cheering for the NTP Foundation to fail because you think it will hurt big companies is very uninformed.
It would hurt the big companies though because the employees of those big companies rely on Ntp. It may not directly impact them but it’s better than letting them continue to rake in billions and then never support the core foundational tech.
Maybe letting Ntp fail will wake up some of the employees of other companies to the absolute sad state of the software world.
> Maybe letting Ntp fail will wake up some of the employees of other companies to the absolute sad state of the software world.
Big companies run their own NTP servers (which you can use for free) and do not use the reference implantation.
There is nothing to “fail” in this project which would cause big companies to have infrastructure problems.
The saddest state of the software world is that some people here have convinced themselves to cheer for this project to fail because they don’t understand that big companies do not depend on this project that is asking for donations.
> Google’s, for example, uses time-smearing to handle leaps. This is different than the standard and therefore you shouldn’t mix Google’s leap-smearing NTP system with NTP servers that don’t leap smear.
So we can use or not?
If we can then well good, then there will be no problem then if the funding fails.
> If we can then well good, then there will be no problem then if the funding fails
The funding is not for the NTP servers or pools. Please read the actual page and all of the comments trying to explain that the HN title is a lie. NTP will not “go down” if this project fails.
You can use Google or Amazon’s NTP servers if you’d like. Just be aware of how they represent leap seconds differently.
You’re just validating my reasons to not donate which is what this discussion is about. It’s not about the way Ntp specifically works or what the money will go to. My reasons for not donating are that bad acting corpos have destroyed any reason or trust to support these smaller outfits whether directly impactful or not.
100% true, but they shouldn't have to. If FAANG is using it, they should fund it. I don't want to work in a culture where the employees pay for the corporations' tools.
I totally agree. I wasn't explicit enough I just wanted to point out the absurdity of the major corps not bothering to just automatically fund these things. I.e. it being such a small amount compared to salaries which presumably are low enough to maintain large profits.
I’m sick of having to pay for my own tools to do my job at your company. Either find a way to build using free tools or fork up the license for that Visual Studio Ultimate or IntelliJ Idea Ultimate license. Pay for your database vendor. Your corporate IdP. Why not $300/yr for a high value output employee?
We have a price for the total infrastructure spend per dev, and that includes things like AWS prices and all of the tooling like jira and github.
But you absolutely shouldn't have to pay for your own tools. (That said, blue collar people often have to, unlike us, and that's also awful.) But also, it's their productivity. If you are all laboring under the same constraints, it's their choice to make if they care about your productivity.
My brother is a plumber and his company reimbursed him for every tool he has bought for the job. After 5 years, he started his own plumbing business and he supplies all the tools, trucks, benefits, contracts, and customer support for his employees in the field. For what it’s worth.
That's actually decent. Too often you're stuck with whatever gear your shop uses - Bosch, Hilti, Makita are the most common power tools here in Germany. It makes sense for the penny pinchers who purchase on volume and get discounts, but chances are high it ends up pissing off the employees rather sooner than later.
Yeah, sure, but in many places (for example in my country) they do not work for a company. They are not even legally working for themselves. You call them, they do the job, then ask for money. That's it. I think this is illegal though, but happens a lot when it comes to anything handyman-ish.
FYI the big companies provide their own NTP servers and pools. You can use them if you’d like.
They also don’t use the reference implementation (which is maintained by the group this donation is for). Your distros and software probably doesn’t use it either.
The commenter above who thinks shutting down the NTP Foundation will hurt FAANG because they “leech” off of NTP Foundation is completely uninformed.
This seems incredibly unlikely. They all want clients to have accurate time, because it underpins things like sessions and TLS certs. It would also almost certainly be trivial to proxy back to regular NTP.
Even if the NTP pool somehow died, all it takes to make your own Stratum 1 NTP service is a GPS chip. An old phone probably makes a great small-scale NTP server, or an ESP32 with a GPS chip attached. 20 years ago it would have required exotic parts, but they're mundane, cheap and omnipresent these days.
Not only that, but the owners of big companies are actively lobbying to pay even less taxes. They are ideologically opposed to supporting public benefit projects.
This raises a lot of questions. Did they actually ask for money to these big companies? Did they get rejected?
Another approach could be to move this under the umbrella of any of the other OSS foundations. I can imagine the Linux Foundation would be a good place. Well funded, already has most of the stakeholders involved, and this clearly falls in their scope of interest at least. It would not surprise me if that wasn't discussed at some point.
This smells a bit like something that might be more complicated than it looks.
I'd happily donate to NTP if and only if AI companies are barred from using free software like this in the future via the sw license. I don't WANT to be part of this internet that's hostile and exploitative towards users anymore.
Ideologically pure, but for all practical purposes miserly. Trillion dollar companies are very hard to move that way and very unlikely to take the first step. We need a "Foundational Software and Services" fund that says very nice things about each donor and spends 100$ on publicity for every 1$ to software to even get them to start looking, I bet.
Donate some time: Ask your boss if their company could chip?
Something like money to the endowment from the big corp, then would be recipients petition the endowment for ongoing funding, some board decides based on a set of open protocols...
Because honestly I've seen this a bit recently - major infrastructure projects looking for effectively pocket change; a couple thousand.
They shouldn't ever have to beg for money, this is stupid.
I agree with you in this, I donate to a few Open Source Projects, I really cannot afford to donate to one that multi-billon $ companies use for free.
For example, OpenSSH. Used everywhere yet IBM gives a big fat 0 to that project even though OpenSSH is even used in AIX. Even though I love to complain about Microsoft, M/S does donate a decent amount to OpenSSH via OpenBSD, so M/S gets my respect for doing that.
Time companies like IBM steps up and give, if not, we are back to playing with CMOS date/time. Which is how things were when I started programing at a large company decades ago.
Not sure why this comment is being downvoted. The trillion dollar companies not only run their own NTP servers but provide free public access to their pools
You don't need to be dependent on trillion dollar time companies to get an extremely accurate time source. Just get your own GPS receiver that supports timing output. You can get an GPS-based NTP server for pretty cheap.
I've had an inexpensive GPS antenna "puck" on my roof attached to a 2nd or 3rd gen raspberry pi inside, providing accurate time to my home for over a decade. This is a sub-$100 project and very fun.
They invaded Tibet and East Turkistan. Those people suffer from Han-Chinese oppression.
Like with Russia, if the rest of the world doesn't draw a line, these horrible regimes start looking for the next victim.