Threat Level Midnight
Threat Level Midnight
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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We can, we just choose not to
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Very true.
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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.
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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?
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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.
Isn’t the UN supposed to help out with those issues, like Ukraine?
UN isn't a military alliance. So no. NATO is Atlantic-focused, so they're not the right group either.
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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.
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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'.
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Maybe a few tech companies would lose profits and people would have to pay more for phones, not that important to me.
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Um yeah. I'm a programmer. My livelihood kind of requires computers.
people would have to pay more for phones
No. You don't understand. TSMC is the only factory that can make the iPhone chip in the world. When Taiwan is attacked, we're almost certainly going to lose iPhones all together as the supply line locks up. If China permanently captures Taiwan, then it is going to be years before Apple can switch to Samsung / Korea or some alternative. Literally years, maybe nearly a decade. This isn't "few less phones", its "literally no iPhone chips for an extended period of time".
Do you remember the big chip crisis of 2020 ? That was TSMC falling behind on a few orders. No chip factory ever got shutdown, it was just a minor supply blip from TSMC. Do you remember how that little blip cascaded into no cars, record high prices in electronics and other such disastrous events to our economy?
Now we're trying to build a new supply chain that's resilient to minor blips like that. But that takes even longer (and the Arizona TSMC plant continues to face delays in opening).
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I don't really think it's important enough to go to war over. We have enough chips here to run things as is, and if there is a need we can have factories elsewhere. There are enough used phones to go around in the meantime. Most people don't need new devices all the time. Our economy is based on the lie that growth is infinitely possible and that that's something we want.
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Every single Li-ion battery has a safety chip inside of it, a computer, likely made in Taiwan.
An EV requires absurd numbers of chips to build the battery management system, as well as all other electronics.
At a minimum, electrification will be stalled out when Taiwan gets attacked. Much like how we ran out of cars in 2021, it will be far worse.
This isn't just consumer electronics yo. It is fucking everything of the modern world. Antilock brakes? Thermostat. Industrial plant automation. Weapons. ECG monitor / healthcare.
Even the COVID-19 vaccine was made on a supercomputer simulation.
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That implies the US is trying to stop it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
“We can’t even stop a genocide”
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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Well, I'm more implying that US is politically incapable of it more than militarily incapable. But yes, they're not trying to stop it.
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with direct spying concerns
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.
The 3rd case is more of honest competition
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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
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A federal employee installing any social media app on a work phone is a big deal
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 looked at domestic automobile manufacturing in the last, I dunno, 3-5 decades?
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?
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107 comments