Daring Fireball [1] has another passage from the article which is illuminating with regards to any promises Apple makes about how it will resist governmental pressure to compromise its products, vis-à-vis Apple's CSAM scanning tool.
"Sometime in 2014 or early 2015, China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping told members of the Apple Maps team to make the Diaoyu Islands, the objects of a long-running territorial dispute between China and Japan, appear large even when users zoomed out from them. Chinese regulators also threatened to withhold approval of the first Apple Watch, scheduled for release in 2015, if Apple didn’t comply with the unusual request, according to internal documents.
Some members of the team back at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., initially balked at the demand. But the Maps app had become a priority for Apple, so eventually the company complied. The Diaoyu Islands, when viewed in Apple Maps in mainland China, continue to appear on a larger scale than surrounding territories."
Apple has, and will, fold to government pressure faster than a lawn chair.
Anyone who has worked in mapping/GIS at a company that sells in China has seen this in action. The "display these islands larger" requests, the obfuscated coordinate system for geo-aligning maps, and other map content regulatory issues[1] all need to be dealt with if you want your map product available in the country. Not excusing it, but every company with maps there is required to do this, not just Apple.
One thing about claims (say display Crimea as part of Russia within Russia and as Ukraine elsewhere), but distorting SIZES of the places on maps according to someone's political preference is well... plain out ridiculous, laughable. It displays how messed up China is more than anything else. It's seriously hard to expect the place that does things like that, as a next superpower. You can't build a superpower on silly, 4-year-old level lies like that one.
"In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?" — George Orwell, 1984
What is even the purpose of showing these tiny islands in a larger size? It's not like they are the backbone of China's economy or that they prove that the party still has the mandate of heaven.
There used to be an awesome online game where your challenge was to gerrymander constituencies. I had great fun and it was amazingly education. God knows what it was made in, possibly a Java Applet. I wonder if anything exists with modern tech.
Some US voting districts are very odd shapes, specifically to include/exclude factors which increase the chances of a particular political party winning.
Not to completely defend gerrymandering but districts are also drawn "oddly" to help ensure minority representation within a system with absurd constraints. If there were more representatives districts would be more granular and localized but because representatives are capped at 435 you have this bizarre situation of needing to give opportunities for equal representation across populations that are spread across a city/county/state.
If someone appointed me as the czar of legislative voting, my way to resolve this and reduce the incentives to gerrymander while improving minority representation would be to replace single district voting with a vote-point system.
If one candidate in a district gets 100,000 votes and another 85,000 votes, both would go to congress and each would get that many vote-points. Rather than number of representative votes, voting outcomes would be determined by who has more vote-points. That way if you have three similarly sized districts, District X and District Y where 40% want party A and 60% want party B, and then district Z where you have 90% want party A and only 10% want party B, you'd still end up with .4/3+.4/3+.9/3 (56%) votes for party A rather than 67% for party B, regardless of how you redistrict. Plus you'd have asymmetric interests where opposing parties would represent the same districts so they would be incentivized to work together, and also some representation for minority regional parties who may align with one party on some issues and another on others.
To limit budgets, I guess there would have to be a maximum number of candidates per district, maybe filtering out anyone who does not have at least 10% of the vote (or some other number determined by some reasonable formula), an option for candidates who don't meet the threshold to reallocate their vote-points to someone who did (or a ranked choice voting system that keeps going until everyone remaining has the minimum vote threshold), and maybe no matter what you'd at least send two candidates unless literally only one candidate had votes.
This would also have a side effect of incentivizing more people to vote and allow people to vote with a bit less strategy and more earnestness.
So... proportional representation? I think without PR you don't really have a full democracy. Things might be "democratic" in spirit, but it's never a fair and transparent democracy without PR.
I am not disagreeing at all, but most places have stupid regulations for petty nationalistic reasons. Saying that you can’t have a superpower with these is laughable, considering the history of the USSR and the US specifically. Though, again, this is very common.
> If I remember correctly, this used to happen on historical maps too, the UK and Europe were often made larger than they actually are.
A consequence of the projection chosen, applied uniformly (e.g. Mercator, which also makes Greenland and Alaska ludicrously large)? Or do you mean maps that enlarged Europe specifically? Mercator is dumb (for anything other than navigation), but there is a significant difference here. China is doing the latter.
> Many maps -especially US maps- enlarged USSR for decades.
Can you provide information or citations for this?
> China says "X must be visible at zoom level Y instead of at Y-5".
That's not the claim made in the thread above: "Sometime in 2014 or early 2015, China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping told members of the Apple Maps team to make the Diaoyu Islands, the objects of a long-running territorial dispute between China and Japan, appear large even when users zoomed out from them." Can you provide any citation to the contrary?
I say you remember incorrectly. Some map projections (see <https://explainxkcd.com/977> for an overview) make objects appear proportionally larger when we move from the equator to the poles, Greenland and Antarctica are greatly exaggerated. But this is motivated by stereometric reasons – everything on the same latitude is equally distorted – and not because the King wanted a huge Mappy McMapface.
> But this is motivated by stereometric reasons – everything on the same latitude is equally distorted
Expanding on this; Mercator is useful for navigation because it's conformal, i.e. it preserves angles. When you're plotting the course of a ship, this is very convenient.
It’s not “4-year-old level” if you have the power to back it up. Anyone who hasn’t heard of the trick will be deceived by it, which I suspect will be the majority of people.
It's a mistake to treat "China" as one coherent entity with a single unified purpose, which chooses to prioritize the mapping issue front-of-mind.
China has over a billion people. That one middle manager in the maps department is personally offended by territory appearing smaller, has zero relation to the rest of the country and shouldn't affect your opinion.
Many bureaucrats in the USA draw stupid lines in sand that nobody cares about, yet the USA is a strong superpower nonetheless.
This is not some middle manager's sensibility. This is a deliberate inner propaganda policy. When chinese people ask: "What we are fighting for there?", they can open the map and see some big island and not the shit of a fly visible only under a microscope.
Just as in any large political system, China cannot be entirely controlled centrally. There are three or four levels of regional and local control below the centre.
It would be impossible for Beijing to administer all of that detail.
In foreign affairs, Beijing is sovereign - including anything related to the Senkaku / Diaoyu islands which are presently owned by Japan. So in this respect you are right.
For local matters, there is considerable flexibility and internal conflict. Currently, Beijing encourages citizens to find fault and report administrative issues at local levels, but will brook no dissent of its own management. In domestic administration China is less coherent than your claim.
All of the above could be equally true in a non-authoritarian form of government. I would argue that China's authoritarian politics are largely orthogonal to its degree of federation.
>For local matters, there is considerable flexibility and internal conflict. Currently, Beijing encourages citizens to find fault and report administrative issues at local levels, but will brook no dissent of its own management. In domestic administration China is less coherent than your claim.
China has over a billion people: true, but everything is under the control of CCP. So for anyone outside China, it is one coherent entity which is the CCP.
Agree ... there are always factions etc and all these factions may manifest power within china, but external to China, CCP at projects a coherent facade unlike other democracies.
Even political scientists disagree what makes a "democracy" today.
I am pretty sure China considers itself a "democracy" in the original meaning of the word: "rule of the people" (thus the focus on "People" in "People's Republic of China" and in many other official names). Basically, anyone can rise to power by going through the ranks of the communist party, and people are elected and voted for.
I wouldn't consider it a democracy even in that basic sense because of the disregard for basic human rights and freedoms, and it surely is not one in the modern political sense of multi-party systems.
Similarly, one could argue that the de-facto two-party system in the USA is not very democratic either, as it's not unlike a single-party system in China: you go through the ranks of the *party* to progress. It's the other things that make USA more of a democracy (freedom of speech and protections against unsubstantiated persecution, for example, and sure, ability to start a party too — even if it's inconsequential).
The same exists elsewhere, in South Korea that I know of. Bridges and dams disappear or move on maps, Google Maps doesn't have high res sat pictures, etc. Just to say, it's not great IMO but not only totalitarian states have a need for such obfuscation; healthy democracies too.
> Bridges and dams disappear or move on maps, Google Maps doesn't have high res sat pictures, etc.
Not defending what I see as childish China the slightest, but one should be aware that even the best democracies don't necessarily publish entirely correct maps, and it is on purpose ;-)
If you can get perfect coordinates from Apple Maps and your missiles have GPS, you're good to boom. It's not as though the missiles have an iPhone inside them.
I don't think that follows. GPS access is universal; accurate mapping data is not. These rules are an attempt to ensure that precise coordinates for key targets are not available to anyone with a satnav system or smartphone.
To add, India has a similar law for maps. Any company serving maps in India has to show, for example, all of Kashmir - including the ones we aren't in control of - as belonging to India. I've made a small hobby out of noting websites which should be illegal in India because of that. A recent memorable incident (not a website, and not found by me) was when John Oliver's Last Week Tonight did a show on Asian-Americans and the Indian streaming service that hosted LWT had to crop the map out. It's pretty funny.
Ownership disputes exist in many places across the world. But making an island appear larger than it is, is a unique demand that reminds me of Indiana trying to pass a law that declared the value of pi to be equal to 3.
Projections were chosen for a variety of reasons. For example the Mercator projection distorts the size of things far from the equator, but it does preserve local bearing and shape.
Just do a Google search for the kinds of maps the some American schools use, you'll be amazed. Once, my wife had to hear from a university geography professor in America that Texas was larger than Brazil. When contested the professor said he was pretty sure.
I'm not supporting China territorial claims, but I don't expect anything different from their government. I did however expected better from the U.S.
I think you're assuming they are not available because they pushed back on the one specific thing about island size and not something else all together. It's not really proven that they are not available because they have that much integrity.
Google did actually make a stand here a decade back, and have been blocked ever since. The last straw for them at the time, however, wasn't political pressure to make some islands look bigger or censor some websites, but espionage.
No. They’re unavailable because they refused to go back into the market after China got caught using espionage. Were it not for that, it’s very possible Google would have caved; we don’t know how that would have fallen. It’s convenient they didn’t have to answer that, but not because they didn’t cave.
It’s not true though. They were under tremendous pressure to adapt their product and change it for the ccp (with censorship for example). They were constantly resisting by introducing workarounds. Until the espionnage thing when they said "fuck it, we’re done". I remember very well: I was living in China at the time.
Absence of evidence doesn't seem as definitive as you're making it here, but it's worth noting that we have two counterfactuals we can use as a prior: Bing still works in China and Yahoo only pulled out last summer, in spite of public espionage and hacking incidents.
Google had been running search in China up till 2010, and it has been censoring its results according to Chinese government wishes. Then, Google found out that China has been hacking them, got angry and left.
Leaky censoring, you could still find the banned stuff. Sergey Brin was very anti-authoritarian given his background, and Google's decision to leave China was far more principled than "we have no choice". They were given a choice to comply with onerous government restrictions and decided to say no.
(And yes, the "old" Google of the Brin area is gone. I also don't think Steve Jobs would kowtow to the CCP and compromise Apple like Cook is doing. The post 2010-era is now run on bean-counter ethics)
Yes, you’re totally right. When I was growing up in 2000s, Google was the epitome of cool, and I dreamed of working there. Then, when I worked there in mid-to-late 2010s, it was not at all what it had been before.
They still maintain a rather large office in the university neighbourhood in Beijing. They even moved to bigger one few years back and there was a fire [0]. In Andrew Blum’s book Google is quotes to even “have left a couple of boxes there”, referring to network equipment. They have not really ‘left’.
We should not give Google a pass on this. Google does whatever the US Government wants, and lately the US Government has a far worse humanitarian track record than the Chinese government (when you consider all the civilian death and suffering in the middle east over the past few decades).
Google also has an entirely different business model than Apple. You could say they would be in direct competition to the CCP so I don't think this is a reason to hold Google up for their "principles".
OpenStreetMap has a page[1] on this. TLDR: Private individuals surveying is illegal in China, which seems to outlaw the entire OSM project and any participation or contribution. I am not a lawyer or expert on Chinese law so who knows.
That is rather chilling, is it not? That a nation would prevent its citizens from looking around and measuring what they see? I can't help but wonder how the chickens will come home to roost.
No where near as chilling as to be constantly being anxious about your social score, getting disappeared for political speech, overstepping your bounds with a corrupt local government official, and a 100 other things.
They're preventing citizens from publishing that info, not looking around and measuring from what I found.
Imagine a country that prevents its citizens from recording a song they hear and sharing it with their friends. Oh, wait, US more or less does that and forces other countries to implement policies that prevent it or they will ban trade with those countries.
Well said. The level of blind jingoism on HN is chilling.
Not to mention that the US government gets any data it wants from banks, telcos, social media, google, etc., which is called metadata surveillance here in the US but it is used to formulate a variety of social "scores" such as one's likelihood to commit "terrorism", etc.
The US GPS system had the signals obfuscated for years so that precise geo coordinates were only available for non-civilian uses. Why bother altering the maps if you can alter the GPS signals. This was rolled back only because hacks were found to work around it.
Most of the things we care about on a map are man made too. Roads, tracks, bridges, shops, street addresses. I rarely care about where a mountaintop or a river are. I care for the track to get there or the bridge to cross to the other bank or the road to a restaurant.
USSR/Russia also had a very long history of restrictions on accurate maps (of just about anything!), on the basis that it is a national security threat if the country ever gets invaded. Street-level maps were broadly available but deliberately falsified:
Detailed (<1:2500000) topographic maps were automatically classified as a state secret, and restricted on a "need to know" basis outside of the military until 1989.
True, and people knew it. I used to travel on the bicycle with the help of USSR maps made in early eighties (due to unavailability of other options), and yes, what you saw on the map was sometimes very different from what was in the real life, especially if you were close to the external border.
Until 2000, the US reduced the accuracy of GPS for civilian applications. The UK removed street signs and railway station names in anticipation of German invasion in WWII. Kuwaitis removed street signs when Iraq invaded in 1990.
'Where the streets go' is strategically valuable information.
My understanding is that the resolution of commercially available satellite imagery is restricted by the US. I don't recall details, just passing references from the show "What on Earth?"
Commercial satellite operators licensed in the US are restricted to no more than 25 cm imagery resolution. Of course that limit doesn't apply to foreign operators. And it doesn't apply to aircraft either; many of the "satellite" images you see on Google Maps were actually shot from airplanes.
I am curious about this -- is it more complete to say that zero surveying is allowed without a permit, if it is an individual or company or school or anyone?
While these are in no way comparable to China's demands, several other countries have also forced satellite imagery vendors to blur out certain sensitive areas.
You can't attack another user like this on HN, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. You may not feel you owe them better, but you owe this community much better if you're posting to it.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
"Apple has, and will, fold to government pressure faster than a lawn chair."
As a publicly-traded, trillion dollar company, where profits are at stake, this would seem to make sense.
What does not seem to make sense is why anyone would believe Apple might ignore its own financial interests and those of its shareholders and deliberately sacrifice a major opportunity^1 in order to resist government pressure based on some political issue. Why would anyone hold such an assumption. There is nothing to support it^2 and it does not seem to make any sense.
1. That includes the opportunity for Chinese customers to purchase the Apple Watch, albeit with a disproportional size representation of some geographical aspect in the Maps application
2. NB. If resisting government pressure resulted in an increase or no change in profits then that is a different situation. In that case, resisting, or even appearing to resist governmental pressure, would seem to make sense.
To put it another way, no one should be surprised by decisions like this one, whereas some of us should be surprised if we ever learn that a publicly-traded company with the market cap of Apple deliberately sacrificed an opportunity like selling to the Chinese market^3 because of a political issue. It is doubtful we would ever learn about such a decision, for various reasons.
3. Or using Chinese manufacturing facilities
"But the Maps app had become a priority for Apple..."
Apple acts in its own interests. It seems strange that anyone would believe that it acts in someone else's. Unless it increases profits, that would not make any sense.
Generally, large companies do not protect citizens from abuses of government. It is supposed to the the other way around. Governments are supposed to protect citizens from abuses of large corporations.
Because that is what Tim Cook Apple's marketing and PR suggest Apple does. The force of good. Social Responsibility and Justice. Standing up against the government. ( They didn't explicitly say this but the message is something fairly similar )
Instead of creating "insanely" great product for our customers, friends and family. It is now about product that "enrich" people's lives.
Like you said, Apple has to act on its own interest. Most of these wouldn't be problem for many had Apple not paint itself as so righteous.
I know a fair number of Americans who are over 50 years old, and appear fairly intelligent - but who, a while after each election, seem actually surprised and offended that the recently-elected politicians are not energetically living up to their campaign promises of squeaky-clean ethics, plentiful jobs, open & responsible government, etc.
Do corporations have so much better a record of living up to feel-good marketing & PR, that a experienced and competent adult would actually take them at their word?
WHAT?? I'm over 50, and after 30+ years of voting and paying attention, have realized that politicians are by and large the lowest, sleaziest, most power-hungry and amoral creatures that can still perhaps be called human. I don't believe a word they say, and think that legislatures should be in session 90 days a year to figure things out and generally get their shit done, and the rest of the time they should have to live with the results of their decisions like the rest of us have to do.
No, they never marketed themselves as a company that stands up against the government (to do so means that they don’t understand how power works). Their PR centered around ethical practices is still true where they conduct business in democratic countries.
People should note that just because someone is aiming for an ethical ideal doesn’t mean that the way there is bound to be perfect—those who are quick to point out other people’s hypocrisies always rest on this fallacy. Apple isn’t perfect, but it seems to be the only big tech company making great strides towards being zero-carbon and pushing for user privacy in democratic countries, and when they were called out about parts of their supply chain using oppressed Uighur Muslim labor, they corrected it.
Your reading of that video couldn’t be more wrong. “1984 won’t be like 1984” easily means that they’re ahead of the competition (this was directed at IBM) because they were giving people the future then. It’s not a political or activist statement against the government.
I seriously disagree with this. I expect a whole hell of a lot more out of American management. Money is not the measurement of all things. Apple could have:
- pointed out China is confusing its politics with business
- thrown this out to a shareholder vote
- tried to see what customers outside of China thought
- threatened to pull all manufacturing out of China
- required China concede control elsewhere: Apple can operate in China without CP mucking around and could own 51% of more of everything it runs
Goodness gracious serious companies understand there's more going on in international business that top-line numbers.
1) 'Pointing out to China it's confusing politics with business' implies a total misunderstanding of their posture, their view of governance, and would probably be antagonistically insulting. It also assumes they are operating in 'good faith', which they are not.
'Politics is Business' to them, they know exactly what they are doing and they have most of the leverage so you risk only ire with that tact.
2) 'Thrown this to a shareholder vote' - so this is definitely not the type of things shareholders vote on, nor do they want to, moreover, the 'transparency' and news cycle this would create would be damaging. This is a 'secret agreement' for a good reason. Shareholders do not care about censorship, they generally just want to see performance.
3) What customers outside of China think is completely irrelevant to China.
4) Threatened to pull all manufacturing out. You definitely do not want to threaten your largest market with anything, but yes, you could hint that it might be best elsewhere. That said, it's a magnanimous threat for something relatively small.
5) There is absolutely no way the CCP is going to 'concede' on any of their red line issues. They are dictating the terms of leverage and oversight to Apple and everyone else. Apple has very little room to manoeuvre here.
The only choice cook had was to play friendly on a personal level, kiss ass, make sure that they felt Apple's interest were aligned with China, and to promise to do a bunch of things they were asking, and then hope they go away.
The issue with China's hyper nationalist economic strategy has to be dealt with at a higher level, i.e. US and European political leaders and industry leaders working together on one page.
> I expect a whole hell of a lot more out of American management.
> Goodness gracious serious companies understand there's more going on
That's what you get when your management is exclusively MBAs that never set foot outside of their bubbles and STEM-graduates that are naive in history/geopolitics/economy, etc
I thought it was literately illegal for publicly traded companies not to put profit first unless they were registered as a non profit (or similar special business classes)
Directors must use their powers in “the best interests of the company.” but "business judgment rule gives directors nearly absolute protection from judicial second-guessing about how to best serve the company and its shareholders."
Kowtow, which is borrowed from kau tau in Cantonese, is the act of deep respect shown by prostration, that is, kneeling and bowing so low as to have one's head touching the ground. In Sinospheric culture, the kowtow is the highest sign of reverence. -wiki
> it appears to only be happening in China - which I guess is fair game.
I'd say that depends on whether the subsidiary in China is financially independent from the mothership. If Apple in US profits from censorship in China or subsidizes it, it's not unreasonable for US to interfere with that.
I mean - companies are expected to follow the rules of the country they operate in.
I guess with tech companies - "operate in" is a little unclear. Someone in China can visit your website (assuming it's not blocked by TGF) - and it might be very difficult for you to know (they could be using some Proxy or VPN).
In Apple's case - they literally have stores selling phones in China. AFAIK, that's how most people get their iPhones in China.
In the US - you have to pass all kind of FTC obstacles to sell a device. In China & other countries - it's the same way.
It seems like an overstep for the US to say - "We get to say what devices are available in every country." It also seems like an overstep for the US to say China can't have a Great Firewall and Censorship even if that's extremely "un-American". Us having free speech is extremely "un-CCP" - but for the time being - we've still got it [=
It's not an overstep for the US to say "we get to say how American companies behave". This does not translate to "say what devices are available in every country", though - if Apple China can manufacture iPhone by itself, it's welcome to it. Ditto for the Great Firewall. But if the company profits in US from practices that we consider bad, I don't see what's the problem with cracking down on that company.
More abstractly, corporations are artificial legal entities that are created by governments in the first place. So why can't governments restrict what those artificial entities can and cannot do?
I don't think you're grasping the power issue here.
China could give a s*t what American laws are.
They are pressuring Apple to take some actions, if Apple doesn't want to take those actions, for whatever reason including 'American law forbids them' - then they're out of the market.
Those are the terms presented to them, and the CCP is not bluffing.
As far as 'censoring people outside China' that is actually a line that Apple can probably actually hold.
That's fine. China SHOULD NOT have the option to tell American companies that they need to not have free speech in the rest of the world because China doesn't have free speech.
If that starts happening - American companies need to be FORCED to exit the Chinese market and keep free speech. Otherwise, it's a simple P&L calculation - and China will win. Apple is not going to lose 20% of their global sales because they block some Wikipedia articles about Tiananmen Square. But if China cuts off their sales because they won't - they would lose 20% of their sales. If we allow companies to go down this path - the entire world will end up censored pretty quickly.
Just as China does not care about American law - US companies don't give a shit about human rights. They just give a shit about P&L.
"China SHOULD NOT have the option to tell American companies that they need to not have free speech in the rest of the world because China doesn't have free speech."
So again, that 'feels right' - but this is not a 'moral' issue, it's a 'power' issue.
That it's 'unreasonable' that China should be able to censor outside of it's borders is kind of besides the point.
What matters is the materiality of their power.
In China, they can basically dictate terms and that's it.
China could feasibly threaten to block Apple in China unless some 'foreign censorship' is done on their behalf, the reason US companies should not concede, is because they don't have to.
For a couple of small things, they might get away with it but on the whole, it's something Apple can push back on ... because they can, not because they have some kind of moral high ground.
The social/moral posturing will be used as part of negotiation, but it's just superficial dressing on the underlying power.
US, Can, Aus, Europe need to get on the same page with respect to China.
> US, Can, Aus, Europe need to get on the same page with respect to China.
I feel deja vu from the beginning of WWII - Germany growing and gaining power and becoming more aggressive while nearby countries (and further-away ones - US+CA+AU) are ignoring the threat, or trying to pacify them with small concessions and sacrifices...
If one made this assumption with respect to this example, then one would have made an incorrect assumption. No doubt we could make a long list of examples where this assumption would have been incorrect, but we would likely need better visibility into the decisions Apple is making behind-the-scenes. Apple is a very secretive company.
Because once it gets sufficiently well known, it may back-fire in the long run in their "home market" (which is still their most lucrative, even if the potential for growth is not that big).
This is why it's important for the public in stronger democracies to know about these deals and terms.
Compare the NBA reaction to Daryl Morey tweet about HK protests, and the WTA reaction to Peng Shui situation. Tides are shifting.
But, the appeal of such a large consumerist market (funny, since it's supposedly "communist") like China is not going to become any easier to ignore going forward.
I worked on the buy-side. I would make this assumption 100% of the time, 100%. Every single time I have seen a company ignore stuff like this, it has bitten them in the end. To flip this on it's head, I have also never seen a management team under pressure for failing to do something like this.
The weird thing about your viewpoint is that it gives the perception of capitalism without actually understanding anything about how businesses function. It is like the pro-capitalist government employee's understanding of capitalism. It accepts capitalism but also accepts that capitalism is evil...it is a very weird viewpoint (you also see this in the ESG departments of large fund managers...people who hate capitalism, view it as inherently unfair...but work at a fund manager, it is very 2020s).
But to spell it out: if you do not respect stakeholders other than shareholders, your business will die because no-one needs you. Your shareholders needing you is not why a business exists. A business exists because it creates value for other people. One of the biggest problems today is that corporate leaders do not understand this, and they end up losing shareholders massive amounts of money. But it is important to be very clear: Tim Cook is a wage worker, executives are wage workers, they are not business owners, they do not act like business owners, their aim is not to maximise shareholder value, their aim is to maximise their wealth. If there is ownership, it is a dual share class dictatorship, it isn't an alignment of interests.
The big problem with China is that, whether you sign deals with the govt or not, the govt needs to have direct control over businesses in order to maintain political control. We are talking about a country where large businesses have CCP officials inside the business, the red phone to the CCP in the CEO's office...business is politics, AAPL doing this deal means they are part of the CCP. The CCP don't care about your shareholders, they don't care about your employees or customers, their aim is to stay in govt and die at an old age in their bed, not violently hanging from a lamppost. That is why the govt heavily favours large businesses, that is why they have done deals with large US tech companies (MSFT is the other one, MSFT are neck deep in Chinese politics now) but it won't work.
I actually know people who are very familiar with the thinking on this at AAPL. They do not understand Chinese politics at all. They think China is just a better version of the US, more meritocratic (seriously), less political instability (again, seriously), and more accommodating to special interests (...seriously). I think the assumption people make is: AAPL understand what is going on...they do not, the reason they are doing things like this is because they don't understand (AAPL is one of the worst for this kind of thing, their executives are extremely aggressive in everything they do, they take home far more than they are worth, and they understand almost nothing outside of their business...if you look at GOOGL or AMZN, it is quite different).
I agree with most of what you wrote, but regarding Tim Cook working for a wage, most of his wealth has in fact come from Apple stock. He just received 5 million shares. His $15M non stock compensation is a lot of money for most but I wouldn’t classify him as being purely out for his own wealth.
The key word there is "received". He didn't buy stock himself, he was given it, he is a wage worker.
He is purely out for his own wealth. He is one of the most absurdly overpaid execs in the US. How anyone can become a billionaire as an employee is utterly beyond me. Taking no risk, getting all the reward.
> How anyone can become a billionaire as an employee is utterly beyond me.
You are thinking of all employees as fungible replaceable units, but employees are capitalistic units that can get monopoly power or economic rents.
An employee can provide a function that can’t be replaced, and that employee can capture a lot of the business profits, well beyond their actual “value” to the business. For example, Tim Cook’s personal relationship with Chinese officials might be very hard to replace.
Alternatively there is a kind of blackmail value, where losing a prominent employee can have high costs to the business, and the employee can get paid more than they are “worth” due to that. For example, perhaps Tim Cook leaving would cause more than a few billion damage in profits or valuation due to perceptions.
No, I didn't. I said execs are replaceable...and they are. If you replace Tim Cook with a ham sandwich, it will make no difference to AAPL at all. It is very rare (I have never seen it) where the SP will fall because of a CEO leaving, it is more common for it to rise when a CEO leaves.
Again, it is important to realise too...there are probably no other CEOs that have made as much as Tim Cook. Even amongst execs, he is wildly wildly wildly overpaid. Corporate governance at AAPL is basically non-existent.
I would presume that the board know what they are doing: hogFeast why do you presume you are better informed and can make a better decision than they can?
The obvious relevant example of replacing a CEO with a ham sandwich is John Sculley, which the organisation probably still has some fear about. The other relevant example is Paul Allen, a lost decade for Microsoft.
I totally get that people want companies to act with dignity, but the idea that a company, even one as large as Apple, is going to make any sort of difference with respect to China's oddities is wishful thinking.
Apple has a business to run. They abide by all sorts of requests in various countries in which they operate. Of course there has to be a line somewhere, I'm just not sure this is it.
It seems fashionable to preach helplessness. Apple can't change China by themselves, but they are not by themselves. If we all follow that reasoning, then nothing ever happens. To surrender and retreat from the field of battle is a sure way to lose. Despair is a leading psyops tactic - targeted at enemies; let's not help them.
It would be interesting to talk about what organizations like Apple can and cannot do; what is effective and what isn't. Is there any research?
Apple should not be deceiving people outside China with CCP propaganda, which is what the maps are.
Well, for one thing because we outside China would automatically assume they are showing the same thing inside China as we see. Now we know that is not true. That is deceptive.
... And a a shareholder, I was also kept in the dark -- Which is actually also pretty problematic and deceptive.
That just means you don’t know about China and the CCP. Anyone who did would never ‘automatically’ assume such a thing.
As for being a shareholder kept in the dark, that’s absurd. I am a shareholder too, and almost no operational details about apple are available to us, which is totally normal.
I wouldn't assume that because anyone who knows anything about different politics in different countries would know that companies there have to cooperate and comply with local laws and all that implies.
They don't have to do anything. If local law said Apple had to share all its technology with the CCP, I bet they'd find a way not to do it. It's a matter of priority and choice.
> Well, for one thing because we outside China would automatically assume they are showing the same thing inside China as we see. Now we know that is not true. That is deceptive.
Would you expect a big pop "WARNING: THIS CONTENT IS SHOWN DIFFERENTLY IN MAINLAND CHINA DUE TO REGULATIONS!"? Also, this will mostly yield a well-duh response. The only "appropriate" option in scale would be to put it somewhere in the fine print (IMO), but this is so close to not mentioning it at all that they might as well not.
Also, I don't think there's a general expectation for website to be the same everywhere. If you open google.com from Germany, would you be suprised to see Google in German? Project Gutenberg also was unavailable in Germany for quite some time; I don't think they informed every non-German reader about it.
> ... And a[s] a shareholder, I was also kept in the dark -- Which is actually also pretty problematic and deceptive.
I'm pretty sure they don't inform shareholders over standard legal requests. They probably didn't ping you about FCC restricted radio frequencies either.
It's not that I generally agree with censoring, but I don't think Apple acted unreasonably here.
Imagine getting an email from Apple telling you that you're laid off because you job is less important than sending a stern message to China. Apple then loses billions of dollars of revenue to Huawei and Xiaomi, but can you really place a price on feeling warm and fuzzy on the inside?
If you want to control what maps Apple shows in China, then ask the government to do it. Assuming you can convince Congress to do anything at all, they still wouldn't take any meaningful action against China because they aren't going to voluntarily widen our trade deficit. We barely have enough economic leverage to pressure them to be slightly better at enforcing IP. We aren't going to spare any for meaningless virtue signaling.
> It would be interesting to talk about what organizations like Apple can and cannot do; what is effective and what isn't. Is there any research?
It took extreme sanctions and the most sophisticated cyberattack in history to get Iran to make concessions on its nuclear program (until Trump decided to reject the agreement). China has a much stronger economy and more allies.
Congress and the US government take many aggressive actions against China. Recently, members of Congress personally visited Taiwan to express support for them. A current bill imposes sanctions on China for Xinjing human rights abuses, and President Biden imposed a 'diplomatic boycott' of the upcoming Olympics for the same reason. The Pentagon is openly focusing its efforts on China, including providing nuclear submarine technology to Australia - a historic first besides the UK.
A diplomatic boycott at the Olympics during a pandemic and sanction of a dozen or so people are meaningless virtue signals. The other actions align with American geopolitical interests. What is suggested upthread is that Apple ought to sacrifice interests in order to fight China.
> Assuming you can convince Congress to do anything at all, they still wouldn't take any meaningful action against China because they aren't going to voluntarily widen our trade deficit.
Clearly Congress (and the Executive Branch, which is responsible for foreign policy) does plenty that is meaningful.
By doing something meaningful, I mean doing good for the sake of doing good at the cost of something you care about. People are arguing that Apple should sacrifice their revenue just to uphold their principles. The government would never do the equivalent thing, e.g. sacrifice geopolitical leverage in exchange for advancing humanitarian causes.
That is just their own brand of virtue signaling. I doubt they actually care. China doesn't give up anything they don't particularly care about in the first place. They'll call for a boycott of Nike, which conveniently helps domestic companies. Manufacturers are still encouraged to offer their services to Nike though because they wouldn't want to their citizens to lose their jobs.
Its not reasonable for us "we the people" to expect a profit seeking company to turn its back on profit. If we want it to behave a particular way we need to make rules for it to follow. Companies are no people with feeling and morals. They are machines for making money.
> Companies are no people with feeling and morals. They are machines for making money.
Companies do moral things all the time, being run by people and being, like people, tied to a community that they care about (often, to a degree) and which greatly affects the company. Without enlightened self-interest, and some broader self-interest, the society that provides customers, investors, employees, roads, security, markets, etc. - it collapses. The Middle Ages weren't good for business.
It's funny that people quickly forget the meaning of the word "company": it's a "group of people" (companions).
There are some additional rules for public companies, but in general, businesses can have whatever purpose "members of the company" (it's actually a legal term in many jurisdictions) agree on.
I know this would never happen, but I wish companies would just default to not doing business in China, unless they are able to sell their product, uncompromised. I wouldn't mind legislation to that effect, though I'm sure that would come with a ton of unintended consequences.
If China (and similar repressive regimes) wants these sorts of products with onerous restrictions built in, they should have to build them themselves.
Of course, I do recognize that this is perhaps somewhat hypocritical: the OFAC list in the US comes to mind (which makes it illegal for US entities to do business with entities in certain "bad" countries). I'm reminded of GitHub's fight to allow people from Iran to use GitHub. I get the purpose of sanctions on Iran, but hurting regular Iranian citizens with these sorts of bans does nothing to punish or put pressure on the people who are actually the targets of sanctions.
I support that. At the same time I assume you have written this in a device manufactured in China together with many companies there object we have in our daily lives. Are enough of us willing to abstain from these devices?
Ah, the ol' "No ethical consumption under capitalism so I do not need to care about what I consume" argument.
Just because injustice is so widespread in the world does not mean that we do not have the responsibility of our own impact upon the world.
Nothing hypocritical there at all, in both cases you are against a government that is placing itself in the way of normal people and unfiltered access to information/tools.
> If China (and similar repressive regimes) wants these sorts of products with onerous restrictions built in, they should have to build them themselves.
I'd also like to add that they are, for the most part, already building our products quite literally. Being on the bad side of China might've a farther reach than just missing out on a few customers.
And apple is one of the few companies that could change that with more US or other non-dictatorship country investment. Apple has 200 billion in cash and other securities... Build some infrastructure, build a lobbying arm to get some of these infrastructure spending gridlocks fixed, build somewhere other than china.
Yeah it's hard, but if they aren't willing to do it, maybe we as a society should enact laws to force their hand? It's not like it's an impossible task.
When I see state capital or communist societies, I see "single whale that has to purchase at inflated prices"
I'll spin up a British Virgin Islands company or buy another passport first in response to any legislation aimed at preventing business with those whales
Private citizens don’t maintain the US’ national security policy, as this article clearly shows, but you are commenting on a theoretical reality that has lacked consensus or wasnt even on the table during every administration of the same country.
Alternatively, US citizenship doesn't guarantee any beneficiary of national security or evacuation from another place when shit hits the fan.
So before I answer your question, what did you mean specifically?
It's better to figure out an exit (imo) than continue to capitulate on these kinds of things, particularly in a country that is hostile to foreign companies and IP (and particularly if one of your company values is the privacy of your users).
---
>>Peter Thiel: Well I think, again those aren’t the only two possibilities, I don’t think they created very much, I think a lot of it was just handed over from the west so it wasn’t even stolen.
You know, I criticized Google a few years ago for refusing to work on its AI technology on Project Maven with the U.S. military, but working with Chinese universities and Chinese researchers. And since everything in China is a civilian- military fusion, Google was effectively working with the Chinese military, not with the American military. And there was sort of this question, “Why Google was doing this?” And one of the things that I was sort of told by some of the insiders at Google was they figured they might as well give the technology out through the front door, because if they didn’t give it – it would get stolen anyway.
>>Peter Thiel: I had a set of conversations with some of the Google people in the deep mind AI technology, “is your AI being used to run the concentration camps in Xinjiang?” and “Well, We don’t know and don’t ask any questions.” You have this almost magical thinking that by pretending that everything is fine, that’s how you engage and have a conversation. And you make the world better. And it’s some combination of wishful thinking. It’s useful idiots, you know, it’s CCP fifth columnist collaborators. So it’s some super position of all these things. But I think if you think of it ideologically or in terms of human rights or something like that, I’m tempted to say it’s just profoundly racist. It’s like saying that because they look different, they’re not white people, they don’t have the same rights. It’s something super wrong. But I don’t quite know how you unlock that.
Not disagreeing with what Thiel is saying here, but it's pretty hypocritical for him to be criticizing here considering he's the co-founder of Palantir, a company that feeds some tasty tasty morsels to the surveillance state and military-industrial complex.
Pointing out someone else's hypocrisy isn't an inconsistency. If someone says doing business with a military is unacceptable and then proceeds to do business with a military, they're a hypocrite. That's still true even if the person telling you this does business with a military.
> "If someone says doing business with a military is unacceptable"
Thiel hasn't even done that. His position seems to be that American companies should work with the US Military, but shouldn't work with the Chinese military. Such a position is certainly partisan, but it isn't hypocritical.
It seems he's drawing a distinction at domestic vs. foreign actors. The criticism at Google here is against working to enable the US military vs. what is a thin veil of enabling the Chinese military hiding behind a veil.
It’s also about a defense of the west and western liberalism over China and the CCP authoritarianism.
It’s Google leadership capitulating to the (imo naive) politics of its workforce to not work with the USG, while continuing to support the governments of adversaries (because largely American politics ignores the plight of people in places like KSA and China under a weak kind of moral relativism).
He's not opposed to the surveillance state or military-industrial complex (in fact, he's in favor of them in the US), he's opposed to China's government.
Thiel seems to genuinely believe the USA, and the west in general, is in an existential struggle with forces intent on destroying it. I can’t speak for him, but maybe Islamic fundamentalists, authoritarian autocracies like Russia, Chinese communism, etc.
If you genuinely believe that, then putting ever more powerful intelligence gathering tools in the hands of western governments, even at some risk of threats to freedoms in the west, might seem reasonable.
That’s especially true if you have good confidence in the checks and balances in the free west to prevent the worst abuses of such tools, and that the threats are truly dire.
Yes - Palantir was born out of 9/11. The idea being that US institutions need software that actually works and has tight controls around PCL.
Otherwise more attacks will happen and the reflexive response will be an increase in authoritarianism at the expense of western ideals.
I don’t personally agree with his support of trump (I see it as a partisan blind spot because of his Cato institute Republican identity) to me trump increases authoritarian risk in the US. Otherwise I agree with a lot of Thiel’s positions, even where I disagree it’s rare that his position is not thoughtful.
> Thiel seems to genuinely believe the USA, and the west in general, is in an existential struggle with forces intent on destroying it.
As much as I dislike Thiel, he does have a point there: Russia is actively funding misinformation campaigns with the aim of splintering Europe (e.g. by funding far-right political parties like the AfD in Germany or the Brexiteers in the UK), and China is a threat on a geo-political level (New Belt Road) as well as a military threat (e.g. Taiwan), not to mention their Third Reich-inspired genocide against the Uyghurs and Tibetans.
The world is in a "war of cultures" indeed - the remnants of the Western democracies versus strong authoritarian governments. And we haven't found a way to counter Russian or Chinese political ambitions yet.
> That’s especially true if you have good confidence in the checks and balances in the free west to prevent the worst abuses of such tools, and that the threats are truly dire.
Under normal circumstances, that confidence would be valid. Unfortunately, we have our own actors who have an interest in tearing down these "checks and balances" for their own gains (e.g. the Republicans systematically destroying trust in public institutions, from elections to the integrity of the FBI, or Poland and Hungary where the rulers want to stay in power and enrich themselves and their friends)... which means we as Western nations are in a "lose-lose" situation. We can't combat propaganda effectively for a variety of reasons, and as a result of that the propaganda tears down our societies.
> Thiel seems to genuinely believe the USA, and the west in general, is in an existential struggle with forces intent on destroying it. I can’t speak for him, but maybe Islamic fundamentalists, authoritarian autocracies like Russia, Chinese communism, etc.
I believe such a struggle exists as well. But I have my doubts whether one would find him fighting AGAINST the authoritarians.
"Apple" is not some abstract entity. There are people behind Apple (the shareholders, the managers, the employees). Real people, with real morals and values. I don't think that the only thing all of them care about is "running a business" and that all of them feel it absolves them from acting humanly. It's more complicated than that. (having said that, of course, greed is always strong).
I think that is precisely why this has been leaked. Some people inside Apple obviously are fed up with what Apple is doing. I would imagine especially those working in operation and supply chain.
There were lots of signs this was happening since 2016 if you are watching Apple supply chain over the years. But it is the first time we got some sort of evidence.
Like the same people that buy products knownligy that they were produced in China, and when given the option will always go for the cheaper version instead of the moral one?
Apple has an actual fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. And via survival bias, companies that act purely morally simply cease to exist as they are out competed by companies that focus on profit instead. Such entities simply can't survive via capitalism without, perhaps, government regulation that ensures everyone is playing with the same set of rules.
> Apple has an actual fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders.
That fiduciary responsibility meme needs to die already. The flimsiest business justification is enough to cover company leadership's ass. Instead of "We refuse to do business with China because it's immoral" they need merely say "because we believe it's in the long term strategic interests of the company."
> That fiduciary responsibility meme needs to die already.
Again, stop it. The companies you want exist, they just go insolvent before you ever notice them. If you want to change the way the companies operate, you have to change the system, you can't just expect companies to "do the right thing" in an environment that penalizes them for that.
You can't have the free market cake and eat the ideological high ground at the same time.
You take me for what, a libertarian? Do you think you know me? I never said anything about wanting a "free market cake."
Regardless, nothing you said refutes me. "Fiduciary responsibility" does not legally compel Apple to do business in China. If anything, such misconceptions about fiduciary duty are espoused by libertarians online, not rebuked by them.
My point was that if Apple didn't adhere to maximizing profits, they simply wouldn't exist and we wouldn't be talking about their behavior in China. Regardless of whether you are a libertarian or not, you are wagging your finger at the wrong party (or to say, the party isn't really in a position to fix things). If you want change, it has to be via whoever is setting/enforcing the rules (in our case, government). The USA, ironically unlike China, doesn't really have the framework to force companies to adhere to some kind of moral code (outside of national security, etc...).
And even if we go down that rabbit hole, we just become more like China with some kind of state mandated moral code that can be easily perverted...maybe we can't really win on this.
Well, for example, people and companies could target any of the employees directly, who work on those kinds of deals.
Target them personally, make them personally responsible for the actions that they did while thinking that they were some faceless entity in the machine, and make them toxic entities to hire or work with.
Sure, the company itself might be able to insulate itself from consequences, but not the individuals themselves. It would make people think twice about the actual negative effects of their actions, if they knew it would put them on blacklists.
Companies are run by people. It is not some faceless AI. Instead, decisions are made by individuals. And individuals are vulnerable.
All of that is completely irrelevant to my point, which is that fiduciary duty does not compel Apple to do business with China. You were peddling a falsehood.
Furthermore, this has already come up in the past for Apple:
When pressed about the financial prudence of prioritizing environmental outcomes Tim Cook snapped: "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI." It was also not limited to accessibility, but applicable to many areas Apple desires to lead.
The conclusion is that Apple is explicitly not interested in prioritizing individual liberty.
Companies have many focuses, including profit, of course, and also morality. Look at the behaviors of the world's leading companies. They need to survive and operate in society, not a Darwinian cleanroom, and they will lose a lot of customers, employees, investors, sympathetic elected officials, and more if they act like objectivists.
> Apple has a business to run. They abide by all sorts of requests in various countries in which they operate.
And then people rightly condemn them for it. Because not getting a pass even when the pressure is strong -- especially when the pressure is strong -- is the only incentive we can give them to even try to resist that pressure.
That sucks for them. It puts them between a rock and a hard place.
Too bad.
Because the alternative is that nobody fights against wrong.
Also, too bad because they are hardly orphan children caught on a battlefield. They are among the most power actors out there. I'd say, 'deal with it', but they don't complain.
We can have a very long debate about that but I think it's beside the point with regards to Apple's CSAM effort. The point is that Apple is inventing a tool that is very amenable to being wielded as a weapon of mass surveillance, and oppression.
The maps analogy is that it's one thing for the Chinese government to tell Apple to implement a mapping app from scratch so that it can be used to display bogus mapping data. It's quite another for the Chinese government to tell Apple to modify its existing Maps app data.
In light of the inherent amorality of companies that you are pointing out, the people working in these companies should be smart enough not to go out of their way to place themselves in situations with such moral hazards. Apple shouldn't be building weapons.
We’ll, what Apple built with CSAM checking is a tool that checks images uploaded to their servers, and only those images, against a digital fingerprint.
There is no novel technology in this. It’s very basic stuff doing a specific thing. It’s in no way a meaningful stepping stone to doing anything else.
If you’re against Apple scanning images uploaded to iCloud for CSAM that’s fine, say that, but it’s no stepping stone. If you’re not against Apple scanning CSAM uploaded to their servers, as they are actually required to do by law, then it’s a non-issue.
> We’ll, what Apple built with CSAM checking is a tool that checks images uploaded to their servers, and only those images, against a digital fingerprint.
No, that's not how any of it works. Apple scans and matches your photos, on your device, against a list of hashes that represent government provided images that Apple has no knowledge of. The stipulation that images are only scanned when uploaded to Apple servers is a courtesy, not a technical limitation. The exact courtesy that would be rescinded by pressure from the Chinese government.
> If you’re not against Apple scanning CSAM uploaded to their servers, as they are actually required to do by law, then it’s a non-issue.
The law explicitly stipulates that Apple is _not_ required to scan photos for CSAM. The text of the law [1] explicitly protects people's privacy in the section titled "Protection of Privacy".
>The stipulation that images are only scanned when uploaded to Apple servers is a courtesy, not a technical limitation. The exact courtesy that would be rescinded by pressure from the Chinese government.
The scan is performed in the code that does the uploading, so it is a hard limitation of the implementation. They can't push a button to make it scan other photos, they would have to make significant code changes. Not hard code changes, none of this is hard or a major technology achievement, but the current implementation does one specific thing and that thing only.
On the legal requirement, huh, it looks like you're quite right. They are choosing to scan for CSMA loaded into their service. Good for them.
There's nothing to stop the Chinese government requiring Apple to make whatever code changes they require anyway.
It was only when upload to iCloud was enabled which is functionally equivalent to a check on server (and enables future roll out of encrypted content on the sever).
The CSAM issue was mostly misunderstood by HN imo.
As long as we are clear about the circumstances, and we're not misrepresenting the situation so it appears it can scan photos not being uploaded to iCloud, sure.
The intention of the implementation is that if a user asks Apple to upload CSAM to iCloud, that Apple has the ability to check it and stop that CSAM landing on their servers. They don't want it there, and feel they have a right to check for it in advance so their servers are clear of CSAM and it stays on the user's phone. Frankly I think that's a reasonable attitude to take to CSAM.
> and feel they have a right to check for it in advance
Ok, and thats the problem. Because the scan is on the user's device. No, I don't think they should have the right to use someone else's device, that the individual owns, like that.
I dont have a problem with your narrative. Actually I agree with your narrative. Every companies has business to run.
I just have a problem with Apple suggesting they are doing "good" with X, promising "good" with Y, with a big smile on its face in marketing, pumping up PR to the maximum. But every time you scrutinize the details they just dont hold up.
BTW people may want to look at Samsung's market share in China. Hint: it is a single digit number.
IBM, Hugo Boss etc also had business to run. But for the western people Apple taking out the rainbow flag and talking about their social responsibility I'd enough.
That’s all op said. Regardless of the moralizing, if you buy into apple because they market themselves as the company who will stand up for your privacy, remember that it’s just marketing. Apple has a business to run, and they’ll fold to government pressure like a lawn chair.
> but the idea that a company, even one as large as Apple, is going to make any sort of difference with respect to China's oddities is wishful thinking.
They don't need and shouldn't make any difference at all. They could actually leave the Chinese market and make a difference for the rest of the world. They don't have and shouldn't have this responsibility anyway.
And they have the money, market share, and power to ignore China and not only survive it but continue to generate a lot of wealth for the shareholders.
I was at a company that defied the 1980s business embargo in South Africa. They said similar things at the time. The government of South Africa did fall, and most of the world applauded if I recall. The net effect for this business was, that they earned more money by ignoring the embargo, whatever the outcome. There are insulting names in most languages for this kind of behavior, it is not new.
The world as a whole never will. If Western powers try and sanction non compliant countries this will effectively split the world into 2 parts and it is not going to end well. I think this would be total disaster.
That is a good question about why there is more emphasis on companies doing political advocacy rather than one's own government. It seems too weighted in companies doing the heavy lifting when this is likely to interfere with business objectives.
Local investment requests however aren't novel - India have made similar requests which Apple have also fulfilled. China is only notable here because they have consistent human rights abuse issues, and with that there is a certain idealism that any kind of interaction with such a country is a form of consent.
While Apple's situation here isn't particularly noteworthy, it's a good proxy for a wider question about US companies reliance on China.
Also those with a keen eye would notice that China hasn't given Apple much here - they are still regularly admonished by the state-run press and Apple have only a handful of their most basic services available in the country.
> That is a good question about why there is more emphasis on companies doing political advocacy rather than one's own government.
Great point. Some movements are so anxious to minimize (or undermine) goverment that people get carried away, and forget all the things democracies can do and have done. We simply have to decide to do things as a people. China, for sure, is happy to see us divided.
I somewhat agree, I’m not saying it would be the right or intelligent thing to do, but if we as a country collectively feel that we should not do business with China in certain fields, the only answer with teeth is an embargo. Even then the risk of Apple sales to China doesn’t go to zero, everyone remembers IBM selling typewriters to the Nazis. Do we think companies today are less greedy than IBM?
Apple Maps is operated by AutoNavi (a Chinese company) in China [1].
It doesn’t really make sense that the Chinese government would be pressuring Apple directly to make political changes to the map provided by AutoNavi. If they wanted the map drawn differently they could just pass a law requiring it or go straight to AutoNavi with the request.
Of course the story could still be true (I have no idea), but not mentioning AutoNavi kind of strains its credibility.
The irony is the CSAM measures they were doing may have enabled them to encrypt the iCloud iMessage backups since they’d still be able to help the feds with CSAM.
Frankly it makes me doubt the veracity of some of the activists who go off the handle when these types of controversies pop up.
Literally every online storage service is analyzing user content for various reasons, but I don’t see any hue and cry over it. The Apple approach was a novel take imo.
Yeah - it's quite frustrating because dumb knee-jerk responses like what we saw on HN make it harder to push back on actual bad policy.
Another recent one was the Covid bluetooth exposure notifications that were cleverly designed in a way that preserved privacy. People on HN with no understanding of how it worked freaked out and as a result instead of that smart privacy preserving approach governments just bought location data or implemented other centralized information systems that are much worse for privacy.
If I worked in policy it'd be hard not to roll eyes at the privacy people and just ignore them - which is definitely not what we want.
You can use another messaging app that supports encryption. Some of us don’t want your laziness resulting in local scanners on devices that we have paid for.
Congrats, you “won” on an issue that wasn’t an issue and missed the actual problem.
Since the 90s, there has always been a mainstream private option. Be it Nextel, BlackBerry PIN, prepaid phones, iMessage, FaceTime, etc. Now that’s gone, and fringe stuff like Signal isn’t a replacement.
This level of pretense is really mind boggling to me. It underscores how certain regimes/people fear objective reality more than anything. And it's a very inconvenient position to take since objective reality is everywhere.
While tangential, when I last visited South Korea, only local mapping companies were able to offer maps of the country.
Apple / Google maps were so bare, even the proverbial crickets were missing from the maps.
When looked from my desk, Seoul's map is as detailed as any other big city now, I wonder whether it was geofenced or something. I installed a suite of apps made by local software houses to be able to navigate the city.
Well, you don't have accept the laws of nature and humanity is resisting a great deal, luckily, so that isn't necessarily something indicting. Depends on the context.
Does anyone have any insight into the motivation behind making the islands appear larger? I haven't been able to come up with any plausible guesses about what "make the islands look big" would be helpful in achieving.
It's pretty simple, China claims large parts of the south China sea, parts that extend far, far out of their maritime bounds and go into other countries' territories. They have a variety of justifications, one of which is they they dredge some reefs and make them into islands which they then claim. This particular instance is not in the south China sea, but it's all the same.
It might also be to get Chinese citizens to care more about having sovereignty over those islands. Laypeople in China might care more about the issue if the islands look big rather than looking like "oh who cares about that mound of dirt anyways".
This is mostly strategic: China is effectively hemmed in by Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and a bunch of SE Asian countries. They simply don't have easy access to the ocean from a military point of view (they are easily cut off during a war). They are trying to claim the whole of the SCS to fortify it and ensure open routes in case of a war.
It does seem awfully unfair looking at a map though, basically China's claim comes without 10 miles of other country land borders. Nobody but the Chinese would think these claims are fair.
Thinking about this other than things like existing social media, satellites... I've recently seen ads where it's like "get paid to take pictures of your neighborhood". Was wondering about that as a means to export out high res images of locations through an app.
Apple did all of this because they couldn't stand paying decent wages to US workers, so they outsourced Labour to China. Why people stand by this company...
You are making a very good point. There's no Facebook, Google, Twitter, Snapchat etc in China. But there are WeChat, Baidu, Weibo, QQ, etc.
China is more than capable to clone and/or make its own version of these companies. And these companies will do as the government says. So, I think that's an excellent example to show that tech "boycotting" China does nothing to change them.
Separately, you should also keep in mind that a bunch of these companies didn't even have a choice, since they were considered a threat to national security by the state.
Whether or not China will clone an app is immaterial to question of whether all companies will fold to Chinese government pressure.
There are many large examples that just didn't, and they exited the market.
There are also many large examples that struck varying bargains. I'm sure the CCP didn't get everything they wanted from the referenced Apple deal, and there were hardliners who were pissed about it.
And then there are probably a ton of examples that don't even care to bargain and just say yes to whatever is asked.
So, complicated spectrum.
Side note, if I'm doing my quick math right, Apple's worldwide revenue is equivalent to 1.6% of China's GDP. Which is pretty impressive.
> Whether or not China will clone an app is immaterial to question of whether all companies will fold to Chinese government pressure.
It is very material though. If your business is not special/unique in some important way, then you don't have a lot of bargaining power when the CCP officials come to negotiate the terms. Then your choices boil down to -- accept whatever is offered or exit completely. While some exited completely, I very much doubt they did so on ethical grounds, as you seem to be implying. Rather, the terms were unsatisfiable.
Trying to get some sort of an acceptable to you deal is the only thing that makes sense from a business perspective. The alternative is losing access the world's biggest market and watching the state prop up a powerful new competitor that may well compete outside the borders of China too.
If you want American companies to be able to resist Chinese govt pressure, then you need to have significant intervention from the US government and hope that they will be able to broker some sort of a deal. Failing that, it's a joke to think that any company has any actual bargaining power in a negotiation with the Chinese govt.
This brings up the long debated question about China and Russia before them. Is it better to have US/Western companies operating with some concessions or better to boycott.
I'm still of the opinion it's better to operate with concessions because there is a chance of influencing the local population over time. Otherwise we end up with a completely siloed environment like has happened with parts of China's tech scene.
I tend to agree. The other drawbacks of a boycott are (obviously) the lost revenue, but also creating a vacuum that will be filled with a powerful, state-backed competitor that may some day operate outside of China as well.
If you know anything about China, then you know they have more than an abundant supply of mass surveillance tools. If Apple doesn't play ball with the local government, what do you think will happen? They'll ban them and the new market leader will be some Chinese company that probably copied a bunch of their designs and is more than happy to preinstall the govt rootkit.
When businesses become so large, they no longer are a $countryOfOrigin company (A US company in the case of Apple). They become multinational entities that have no loyalty to a nation, just loyalty to pocket books.
Small companies don’t have loyalty to any specific nation either. Nor should they. Companies should serve customer needs and wants (profits are a measure of this), not become soldiers in political battles.
I’m confused as to why people think this is an $insightfulComment.
Would you rather have countries wall off their economic activity from each other so governments have to bomb each other to acquire resources by force?
Any economic intertwining of Chinese and American interests is a good thing, no matter how evil you think the Chinese are. Because the inevitable alternative is war (re: all of human history).
Historically, the only thing that prevents tribes of human animals from blowing each other up is mutually beneficial economic cooperation.
> Historically, the only thing that prevents tribes of human animals from blowing each other up is mutually beneficial economic cooperation.
That's correct, until someone thinks that he is being screwed and does not see mutual benefit. Mostly what Lenin explained in "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism"
That is an excellent point and one I have tried bringing up before. Allowing corporations and individuals to obtain such massive amounts of wealth is a national security threat.
You're unnecessarily reading into it too much. By nation, I meant whatever nation houses one of these corporations, particularly the country that houses the headquarters.
From news stories of the past decade or few - I was not aware that even mid-sized companies, operating near-exclusively within $countryOfOrigin, showed much actual loyalty to said country.
This will be the logical conclusion to every major American corporation unless someone puts a stop to this. If profit comes before everything, then so will China's 1.4B potential market vs US's 330M market.
It's growthism driving this. If you need to grow your revenue 20% year-over-year every year for decades, pretty soon you have to swallow ungodly amounts of new dollars. You can either gobble more of the market (higher market share), grow the market, or find new markets. And growthism will mine out every one of those possibilities.
It seems to be Apple's standard MO to comply with local regulations regardless of market size. They've complied with Russian demands[0,1] and it looks like Apple Rus accounts for something like 2.6% of Apple's revenue, a fraction that Apple could probably do without.
From a recent interview[2] with Tim Cook:
>"World peace through world trade," Cook said, adding that operating in foreign countries means Apple has to "acknowledge that there are different laws in other markets."
And here I was under the impression that most everyone - everyone important enough at least - understood that Fukuyama was (very) wrong. Perhaps his definition of "world peace" is different.
I'm not sure where Fukuyama and Friedman agree and disagree, but Cook's quote struck me as Friedman-esque. It sounds like he sees Apple as a player in Friedman's Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention: "No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain".
>In The Great Illusion, Angell's primary thesis was, in the words of historian James Joll, that "the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous."[4] For that reason, a general European war was very unlikely to start, and if it did, it would not last long.
While China is indeed an important and huge market for sales... approximately 100% of Apple's products are manufactured in China (save some tiny fraction that are assembled in India or Texas).
Every iPhone sold everywhere worldwide (except the few assembled in India) comes from China.
That's completely wrong. How is it that one of their largest global competitors, Samsung, exists despite having no factories in China for years now? Apple could leave China just fine as far as manufacturing is concerned. The question is would it be able to still sell to the Chinese market if it does.
Foxconn has an iPhone City of hundreds of thousands of people (something like 350k).
They make something like 200 million iPhones per year.
If you think that can be moved "just fine" then we will have to agree to disagree.
Producing something of the iPhone's quality, at the scale of a half million per day, every single day (that's 23,000 per hour, every hour, 24/7, for an entire year) is not something one can just pick up and move, even with Apple's resources.
It would take several years, if indeed it is possible at all. There are dozens or hundreds of managing workers at Foxconn who have been designing and producing iPhone manufacturing lines for a decade+, and I doubt China would give them and their families all exit visas to move to some other country to assist Foxconn and Apple in divesting themselves of the CCP's prerogatives.
>If you think that can be moved "just fine" then we will have to agree to disagree.
Then let's agree to disagree, as Samsung, with it's 253 million shipments[1] does exactly that having explicitly moved out of China[2]. It is not impossible.
If something has potential, then it will happen. The higher the potential, the faster it will happen. And laws, contrary to what many believe, only has limited potential.
So if leaving China has potential, then it will happen. Tariffs have already made the potential higher, but unfortunately it doesn't seem like it's breaking even just yet.
China is not the only cheap manufacturing hub. If Apple wanted to, they could be investing their 100's of billions (instead of stock buy backs they have been doing for years) in alternative locations to build their capability in other geographies.
Apple is still doing China because it wants to, not because it has to. At their size they have the time and money to invest in multiple locations and spread their risks.
Apple’s approach to China remains the most disappointing (and hypocritical) thing about the company. When privacy really matters for the users that need it most, Apple sells them out for continued access to the Chinese market.
I have a secret to share. Apple and others may virtual signal but at the end of the day it's all about profits. If you believed otherwise you were mislead. "Think Different" is just a commercial slogan.
I find this attitude, as common as it is, a bit of a non-argument. Every company is motivated by profits, and yet I have vastly different opinions on the behaviours of different companies.
Even when you have one ultimate goal, there are a thousand different ways to go about it, including to behave in ways I find admirable in order to secure my business going forward. It's fairly irrelevant to me why you're behaving the way you are, so long as you are.
> Every company is motivated by profits, and yet I have vastly different opinions on the behaviours of different companies.
Wrong, it is survival bias. Not every company is motivated by profits, but the ones that survive long enough for you to notice are. If the company isn't motivated by profits, is simply doesn't last long enough to be a major player.
That's fair, I should clarify: every public is motivated by profits.
I don't actually think it's survivorship bias, my local coffee shop is good to me for little other reason than the owner and I get on well, and they're not likely to go out of business any time soon. I just didn't specify my point well enough.
Your little coffee shop goes out of business if they don't attract enough business, if they have competitors that provide a better product for example. But even then, you are rewarding their good behavior directly, if you want to scale that up, you and and a bunch of your friends will need to stop buying Apple products to let them know you find their behavior to not be of your liking (and become patrons of the companies that do conform to your moral values). But scaling morality is hard without some sort of restricted market intervention.
I'm going to disagree with you there. I agree that their bottom line benefits from their being nice to me, but that's not the same as being motivated by profit. Similarly, I'm not looking to obsessively optimise for the best product.
I find your description distastefully cynical, but more importantly not particularly in line with my experience of how people behave.
I guess we have to agree to disagree. In order to get Apple to stop their behavior, you either have to regulate morality and go beyond not just buying their products, but forcing others to not buy them either.
Corporations are made up of people and people can make decisions despite incentives to behave otherwise.
I’d argue Zuckerberg did this in his Georgetown speech [0]. Recently the head of the woman’s tennis association did too when pulling out of China. Palantir is also principled about this (read their S1) - though incentives are more aligned there.
Add in the South Park writers too.
It is possible to do the right thing in difficult contexts - and that should be the goal.
Easy to do when A - You have the "right" opinions (they aren't politically incorrect or unpopular among your target customer demographic), and/or B - You are insanely rich.
Right, it's clear that Apple does not have any financial resources or pull in the industry. Not like they have enough money to personally just build up an entire city of factories somewhere.
I assumed it was firstly access to Chinese manufacturing. They can probably still make humongous profits without the Chinese market, but presumably their global sales rely on first manufacturing in China?
Yep, and it's likely that China is the only place they could actually manufacture their products. China isn't the cheapest place to make things anymore, and it hasn't been in a long time - that's been supplanted by Bangladesh, Vietnam, etc. It's even within spitting distance to manufacture in the US.
Companies manufacture complex electronics products in China because everyone manufactures there. The skills are there, factories are there - but most importantly, the supply chains are there. You can drive a truck from factory to factory to pick up all the pieces you need. Then drop the truck off at Foxconn. They'll make the products and you can put them back into the truck and drop them off at the port or rail yard.
That's not something you can just replace overnight.
Samsung is the largest smartphone-maker in the world (and has been for much of past 10+ years). They ceased all their phone-making operation in China and left for Vietnam a couple of years ago (also most recently closed their last display, shipbuilding operation) -- along with 200+ suppliers, plus 20+ new domestic suppliers created there along the way. Now, most of Samsung phones are made in Vietnam and their output there accounts for some 30% of Vietnam's export and 20% of their GDP (2019).
I'm very skeptical that China is the only place Apple can make their products. Sure, Apple doesn't actually "manufacture" anything -- the company outsourced it to Taiwnese CM's like Foxconn, Wistron, and others who have cleary demonstrated that they have no competence, experience, or even desire to build things outside China (see Foxconn's misadventures in Brazil, Wisconsin US). But that shouldnt' be surprising considering that their business model entirely depends on ginormous state subsidies and seemingly unlimited supply of young, unskilled laborers from rural China. Also consider the fact that most critical, high-value components come from not China, but South Korea, Japan, the US (some via TSMC in Taiwan) -- China still makes less than 5% of all chips produced globally (as of 2019 according to US SIA). Of course, they are all assembled/packaged there, but China's contribution to this whole process still accounts for less than 4% of overall value.
I just don't buy the argument that China as the world's electronic supply-chain can't be replaced.
And Samsung is able to produce a large share of their smartphones in Vietnam (180 million annual unit capacity). There's clearly no reason Apple can't further distribute production across India, Vietnam, Indonesia and a few other nations, while reducing dependency on China. The bigger issue is they want to continue to have privileged access to the Chinese consumer market.
> I just don't buy the argument that China as the world's electronic supply-chain can't be replaced.
No one is really interested in taking the hit in creating in country supply chains for all of the low value stuff. Vietnam is too small to support that, SE Asia as a whole might work (or maybe India), but both are still politically and economically unstable to do much in this area yet. China has scale and stability.
I see final assembly moving to different countries, but the supply chains will remain plumbed through China for a while.
??? Vietnam has nearly twice South Korea's population (and less than Japan's) and of course, it also has scale, as South Korean businesses in Vietnam have shown repeatedly.
To boot, Vietnam has no immediate internal political threats (eg, compared against China's separatist movements by ethnic minorities in Tibet, Uigher, Inner Mongolia) or no potential regional geopolitical/territorial conflicts with neighbors (eg, Phillippines, Japan, India, etc), other than China. And, most importantly, despite having fought a war half-century ago, America's diplomatic and trade relationship with Vietnam is far less hostile -- it's in fact quite amicable -- than with China.
>> ... but the supply chains will remain plumbed through China for a while.
That's inevitable only b/c of Apple's political clout and relentless lobbying here in the US. I was hoping, while I was no fan of Trump, Trump's trade policy would at least partly address this, but oh boy, how quickly he caved in before Apple and dished out tariff exemptions.
Vietnam has 90 million people. South Korea doesn’t have much scale, Japan has a bit, the numbers only start making sense if we could develop a supply chain throughout Indonesia, Malaysia, maybe using talent and capital from Singapore. Or India and South Asia, of course, if things were more stable. But alas, stability is important. And none of those regions are very stable.
> That's only inevitable b/c of Apple's political clout and relentless lobbying in here.
Apple is like .1% of the political clout and lobbying being brought to bear. Their only notability in this is that they are the only FAANG that has significant business in China.
>> Apple is like .1% of the political clout and lobbying being brought to bear
Sure, as Tim Apple testified before Congress, Apple pays the most tax in the US and is also the most valuable company in the world. I'm pretty sure there is nothing going on between Apple and American/Chinese gov't. /s
>I just don't buy the argument that China as the world's electronic supply-chain can't be replaced. //
Of course it can. Manufacturing moved there over the last 30 years for the low regulation and particularly the low wages that keep manufacturing cheap and allow the bosses/owners to make more money. So, all you need is to accept less profit, which the controlling powers won't do without keeping wages/costs down to soften the blow - Western regulations on safety and workers rights means that's hard so prices will have to rise.
You might do it in a decade, but it'll hurt profits. Hence, USA politicians wading in with 'China can't be trusted all our allies must now buy electronics from us' ... which also helps y'all to spy on us too. Double win for USA.
Sure, nobody is expecting an overnight miracle, but it's certainly not going to take anywhere close to a decade either, as Tim Apple and others American executives have deliberately misled all these years.
And no, the US isn't interested in bringing the whole supply-chain back home, it just doesn't want a politically or economically unreliable partner.
Vietnam's plus are its cheap labour and proximity/good relations with China. As labour is growing costly in China, assembling of things is moving to Vietnam. Many components are still manufactured in China and exported to Vietnam.
Samsung likely has fewer suppliers compared to Apple. And it's much easier to coordinate its supply chain with other Samsung subsidiaries, even across borders.
China can as the electronics supply-chain can absolutely be replaced - at a cost.
I intentionally emphasized the fact that Samsung is the largest smartphone maker and that more than 200 suppliers moved along with the company to make that transition (and 20+ new domestic suppliers). While Apple surpassed Samsung's revenue in recent years, the depth and scale of Samsung's manufacturing are much greater -- not only b/c they make so many different and high volume products, but they also compete with many suppliers in their supply-chain.
I always cringed at Tim Apple's deceptive rambling on the industry's dependence and necessity of supply-chain in China and feared that he was cooking up something more sinister behind the curtain. I recall as far back as 2012 when Tim defended their oversea outsourcing practices on CBS by claiming that "Apple iPhone engines were made in America," even as they were working to offshore that to TSMC in Taiwan shortly afterward.
China is the only place they could actually manufacture their products
And yet, the Apple products I bought for my wife this Christmas state "Made in Vietnam" on the box. And other electronics I've purchased for her recently were similarly not made in China.
China hasn't been the "only" place to manufacture tech for several years now. It's an outdated cliché.
Don't know about Vietnamese laws, nor your local laws, but "made in Britain" can be put together in Britain. There's a good chance it's still relying on chips and circuits made in China?
China has never been the only place to manufacture tech ever South Korea, Japan, even Germany/France/USA for us in the UK (LG has grown phenomenally well the last couple of years, Japan in the 80s-90s was the place for UK electronics).
But China seems to have been the principal place for affordable consumer electronics [chips/circuits] for at least the last decade.
This is true and sadly my favourite motorcycle cycle company Honda started building some of their bikes in Vietnam. Whether this will effect build quality I am not sure but not as impressed as made in Japan as I used to be.
Apple is big enough and rich enough that they don't need Chinese manufacturing. It is a nicety, and probably cheaper, but they could have probably picked about any country to do it and set up shop. As pointed out, Samsung does all their mfg in Korea and Vietnam. Oneplus setup shop in India for some devices...and Apple is much more powerful than BBK.
I'm sure China knows that if they do ever actually invade Taiwan, then there will be hundreds of agents, if not outright military actions, to destroy or sabotage the critical parts of Taiwanese industry rather than let them fall into the hands of the CCP. (For instance, I can't imagine any of the key ASML machines would survive without being quite thoroughly destroyed by thermite to keep their secrets from falling into Chinese hands.)
This would nearly completely cripple the world's tech economy for a decade, but that is far better then becoming vassals to CCP tyranny.
>their global sales rely on first manufacturing in China?
for the past years but China's wages is increasing and Chinese crack down on tech company like Alibaba, Tencent, DiDi...etc. would it extend to foreign company? Not to mention the rise of Chinese domestic tech company like Xiaomi.
it look like Apple is not making their money back in China with this deal.
"To placate Beijing, though, some capital may have served more like donations to state enterprises and local governments. The company generated $249 billion of sales in Greater China over the last five years, less than the pledged amount."
China is their number 1 market to expand. If market cap is to go up, China is instrumental there.
If anything, continuing to manufacture in China is likely required for that market expansion. Otherwise I feel they would have started to diversify to other, less politically tenuous markets.
A Reddit comment [1] on this same article really hit home,
> Mr. Cook has watched China's middle class grow to four hundred million while watching the domestic middle class shrink. Like GM, which sells more cars in China than the USA, Apple knows where the market opportunities reside.
America needs growth again, whether that's immigration, childbirth and childcare subsidies, or seeking to merge with other democratic nations (Australia, Korea, Japan, Taiwan).
America needs to onshore manufacturing of critical chemicals and components. Steel. Electronics.
America needs education that is equitable, but it also needs to let academically or extracurricularly gifted students advance to special placement.
I want America to be #1. Free speech, being critical of government, and even having the ability to run for president are rights that every person should have.
> ... seeking to merge with other democratic nations (Australia, Korea, Japan, Taiwan).
That presumes that other countries want to be part of America. I suspect strongly you'll find that's not the case. Merger then has a more "1812" feeling to it.
The only folks tripping over their shoelaces to be US states are Puerto Rico and DC.
> America needs to onshore manufacturing of critical chemicals and components. Steel. Electronics.
While these are strategically sensible decisions, that won't bring back Apple any time soon. Everyone manufactures in China because there's a critical mass of manufacturing in China. All your components are made there, by everyone, and the best-in-class assembly folks are all there. Supply chain and logistics are all there.
China's investments in ports, roads, railways are paying dividends. Including their one belt one road initiative offering overland rail links to the UK.
It's not sufficient to just say "let's make stuff at home" - it requires real, long-term, strategic thinking, huge investments and optimizing for the group. These are not America's strengths right now.
> All your components are made there, by everyone, and the best-in-class assembly folks are all there. Supply chain and logistics are all there.
The first part of this statement is inaccurate and the second part is accurate. No, all of the components in your iPhone are not made in China. Yes, they have the logistics and capability to assemble efficiently. No, they do not make everything in an iPhone or Mac—not even close. Examples of major components often not made in China:
- Microprocessor (Taiwan)
- Memory (South Korea)
- Screen glass (USA)
- Audio, Wifi Chips (USA)
- Gyroscope (Switzerland)
- Accelerometer (Germany)
- Display (Japan)
- Camera (Japan)
The batteries tend to be made in China, but many of the raw materials that go into the batteries are not. Also, Apple has successfully had iPhones assembled in India, so there's no reason to believe if they chose to, they couldn't (at very significant cost and ramping up and effort) move assembly. iPhone prices might go up then though.
No representation without taxation. PR residents don't have to pay US federal income tax, and most of them aren't willing to pay that price to get the political benefits of statehood.
> I suspect strongly you'll find that's not the case. Merger then has a more "1812" feeling to it.
Ironically, the hardest challenge for the British during the war was to keep their soldiers from deserting to the US. Since there was no way a young British male could legally come to America from the UK, joining the army then crossing into America was their only hope.
Ironically today, the countries named by the GP (Australia, Korea, Japan, Taiwan) all have a net inflow of people to trying to get into the US, mirroring what happened in 1812. The political elites might laugh at the idea of a merger (considering they have a vested interest in keeping power) but it seems to make sense for a lot of their highly educated citizens who decided to make it happen here in America!
> ... but it seems to make sense for a lot of their highly educated citizens who decided to make it happen here in America!
That's not the same thing as wanting to abandon independence. Folks go to work in other countries not because they want their home country to be America. Those smart highly-educated workers aren't moving to America so much as the Bay Area to work at tech companies and make money - based on my personal experience and that of every other immigrant I know. Even those that went on to become US citizens wouldn't begin to entertain the idea of folding in their home countries.
I've lived in America for years but I certainly have zero interest in "merging" in Canada. I couldn't want anything less, tbh.
They're both unique and interesting countries in their own rights, with quite different peoples and values.
It's interesting that the narrative is that when people move to Canada, it's because they have a deep desire of becoming Canadian, and according to the current administration deserve it even more than the folks who built the country [0], but when it's people coming to the US it's simply for higher pay and not because they want to make America their home.
Meanwhile, there are now universities where 85% of the graduating class immediately moves to the US upon graduation [1]. And the numbers have actually increased during the Trump administration, despite the narrative that the US would stop attracting international talent.
> It's interesting that the narrative is that when people move to Canada, it's because they have a deep desire of becoming Canadian.
That’s fine on an individual level but that doesn’t mean they want to merge their home countries into Canada!
Someone from Italy may move to the US but that is totally disjoint from them wanting to make Italy the 51st state. If they retain a strong positive association with the attributes of their home country, they want to retain independence to preserve them. If they have a negative association with their home country they have no interest in merging them either as they've actively distanced themselves from the negative attributes of their home state.
Someone moving from California to New York doesn't want to see CA and NY merge into one bi-coastal superstate any more than someone moving from India to Canada wants to see a bi-continental megastate.
> Meanwhile, there are now universities where 85% of the graduating class immediately moves to the US upon graduation [1]. And the numbers have actually increased during the Trump administration, despite the narrative that the US would stop attracting international talent.
The number of people who desired to stay after college went up, but visa issuance was suspended so they were precluded. They can want to stay all day long, they're not being allowed to. And that will have an effect in time. Meanwhile... [1]
> The number of people who desired to stay after college went up, but visa issuance was suspended so they were precluded
What I posted is people who moved to the US, not people that had a desire to move.
> Meanwhile... [1]
It's interesting, because in these stories Canada is never the first choice. Seems like every story starts with someone being unable to qualify for US immigration using Canada as a back up plan.
> It's interesting, because in these stories Canada is never the first choice. Seems like every story starts with someone being unable to qualify for US immigration using Canada as a back up plan.
Yes, because these are economic migrants and economic migrants are going to try for the most active and lucrative market first. If they can't get a visa, they'll certainly take their second pick. They'll then build up that market over time. This is why we have Shopify in Canada. The ecosystem builds on itself and it one day won't be quite so distant a second choice.
> That presumes that other countries want to be part of America.
I feel like if there was a referendum, the UK's population would happily dump their monarchy in exchange for US statehood. There's a lot of commonality with their democracy, language, skepticism of foreign immigration, embrace of capitalism, etc.
It would also be a pretty solid strategic move to bring the US closer to Europe as a hedge against the Russian ambitions laid out in their Foundations of Geopolitics playbook.
I think you misjudge how much the Anglophone world looks down on America, and Americans in general. We take great pride in Australia of our differences from that place. We're much more similar to the British (and them to us) than to the Americans.
The problem is, it's not a numbers game: quality matters a lot.
Importing massive amounts of unskilled labor only depresses wages and, combined with NIMBY, creates a massive housing bubble thanks to artificial shortages.
In Australia's case, it also suffers from a disproportionate brain drain of highly educated professionals since local firms simply won't compete for talent.
I hope you're not suggesting that Australia is getting low-quality immigrants. Unlike the US, Australia has a points-based immigration system where you have to meet specific, standardized criteria, which IMO is more objective than the US process. I don't know what guidance State Department staffers follow when determining who gets a visa, but the process is more opaque, and I suspect more subjective.
edit: I think the "quality" argument is overrated. Not all immigrants do ground-breaking research or start billion-dollar companies. When it comes to economic activity, quantity has a quality of its own (apologies to J. Stalin). A city/state/country with the economic activity of an extra 20% population of mediocre, healthy, tax-paying, car-buying, mortgage-paying, burger-eating blue and white-collar immigrants is better off than one without.
> I don't know what guidance State Department staffers follow when determining who gets a visa, but the process is more opaque, and I suspect more subjective.
Except for categories where there's an extremely high burden of proof for extraordinary abilities, it's simply someone's ability to get a job no American is qualified to take (and be so in demand that it commands a salary in the top percentiles for the profession).
> ... it's simply someone's ability to get a job no American is qualified to take.
Not exactly, its someone's ability to get a job that their employer cannot find a more qualified candidate after advertising the job in the local newspaper for 6 months including at least two separate Sundays.
Maybe in high tech service jobs, but not the average punter on the street. Migration from Australia is usually for greater economic opportunities, which all things considered only includes a small number of countries and a limited set of occupations.
UK voters (imho) were still stinging from the economic decline and austerity measures post-2008, and were led to believe that a divorce from the EU would restore their greatness. Now that that's been demonstrated to be a delusion, and with covid-related economic collapse piling on top of Brexit consequences, UK voters might be open to a dice roll.
This is obviously my idle speculation, and I think the UK voters would never be allowed to vote on such an opportunity anyway. Still, I think if it happened it'd be great for everyone.
> America needs to onshore manufacturing of critical chemicals and components. Steel. Electronics.
I'm all for countries having local manufacturing capabilities. Not just the US. I was also pretty vocal about Argentina having them when I lived there and I'd love the US to have more accessible local manufacturing now that I'm here.
Thing is, as much as I can want that as an engineer with a somewhat cozy desk job it's true that on-plant jobs require skill and determination that I don't have so I feel a bit of like a hypocrite for suggesting that. Are there people in the US that want factory jobs? Because when looking for talent in California for stuff like manufacturing engineering, supplier development... or when trying to find small shops that will prototype I kinda feel that no one wants to do that. Salaries are kinda okish for those positions, but to actually rebuild the talent and the collective energy and willpower to work those jobs is going to take a while.
Honestly can't blame the Bay Area for not wanting to work in plant considering public transport sucks and everything closes early. You need someone at the house or with flexible schedule to be able to take a job on plant.
> Are there people in the US that want factory jobs?
The only way to make manufacturing at home competitive with overseas is full-scale automation. It won't create jobs to bring it back onshore - nor should it for exactly the reasons you specify. Instead, it would be a strategic investment.
Except automation can’t change on a dime. It also is bad at all kinds of things… just see Musk’s commentary on why they backed away from so much automation with Model 3 for humans.
The biggest impediments are political. China will subsidize anything they're not already leading in. To counteract that, you either need tariffs or your own subsidies. But corporations will fight against tariffs (they've already invested in manufacturing in China) and labor unions will fight against subsidies for automation, so here we are.
The rural South wants a lot of things it probably isn't going to get. Most of those jobs will be automated away or low wage and low security Amazon warehouse kinds of employment.
If they're expecting lifetime security on the assembly line with enough money for two cars in the garage and a pension with a gold watch at the end, it's not going to happen. That's not how the world works anymore.
iPhones are not a middle class item anymore, or, I've seen plenty of "low income" people with iPhones.
Apple dominates the US market, and will continue to do so. So why bother to invest more in a market you already own? The US domestic market hasn't shrunk for iPhones. I think this is reading way too much into this. China is a new growing market largely untapped by Apple, and one that is significantly larger just due to population sizes. It's as simple as that.
If you're relying on growth to save you then you'll die like a locked-in morbidly obese person in a bed of shame and your own filth. It's unsustainable.
> I want America to be #1. Free speech, being critical of government, and even having the ability to run for president are rights that every person should have
In principle I agree with you, but in practicality something maybe isn't working as expected? If those things mattered so much, why would the Chinese middle class have grown so much while the American middle class shrank? (assuming this is true, which I'm not sure)
At the end of the day, there's still a hierarchy of needs. If one country cannot offer its citizen those needs, reaching for higher level ones doesn't matter. Most people would rather be able to afford food, clothes, a home, electronic, entertainment, etc, than they would the ability to be critical.
On some other dimension, the best argument free democracies had used to be that the people of those countries were richer and had better lives, while totalitarian regimes, religious regimes, communist regimes delivered a worse outcome to its people. And while this is still mostly true, it seems that it's no longer as obvious which one delivers better value to its people.
> why would the Chinese middle class have grown so much while the American middle class shrank? (assuming this is true, which I'm not sure)
It's not meaningful: Middle class in China would be poor in the US, and developing countries can expand their economies much more quickly.
I am happy for the middle class people in China.
> the best argument free democracies had used to be that the people of those countries were richer and had better lives
You skip the main reason they have better lives, which is freedom. All those Americans (and others) worked and sacrificed for freedom. Wealth is barely mentioned in the founding documents; the Gettysburg Address, FDR, MLK, etc., didn't mention it much (though the latter two did address poverty).
>Most people would rather be able to afford food, clothes, a home, electronic, entertainment, etc, than they would the ability to be critical.
The Chinese 'middle class' standard of medical care ( on average, a lot cheaper but it's also a very basic level of care), financial security, air / water / consumer good safety, access to meaningful education, and freedom of worship / speech / congregation of all types is well under what is typical for a middle class citizen in a western democracy, even including the united states. At around $20,000 USD per year (approx boundary of China's upper middle class) you're in the same general territory as Russia.
The difference is that Russia has been stuck in that quagmire for 30 years[1], whereas in China, most of those people would have been impoverished rural poor, 30 years ago.
When you have observed a colossal material improvement in your life, and you have hope for the future, you can overlook a lot of problems with governance.
[1] Yes, yes, Moscow is not an active disaster zone. Russia does not begin and end in Moscow, though.
> When you have observed a colossal material improvement in your life, and you have hope for the future, you can overlook a lot of problems with governance.
It has been long believed to work the other way: Poor people don't have the education or resources to deal with governmance; they are trying to survive, working three jobs (if they can get them), etc. When the middle class expands is typically when democracy blooms.
Democracy doesn't bloom when the middle class expands. Democracy is just one possible outcome of political upheaval - and political upheaval happens when the middle class feels that their situation is hopeless.
Russia's 'middle class' expanded massively since the economic disaster of the 90s, but I would not describe it as being more democratic today than it was in 1995.
A rising middle class isn't why communism fell apart in the 80s, either. It fell apart because the country lost any faith that the system will bring future prosperity.
It still remains to be seen if these short- and medium-term gains for China's middle class will result in prosperity in the long term. "Selling" your social/political/religious freedom can often be a boon in the short term but come back to bite you later.
China simply invested more in their people than USA it seems. You now see American business people like Elon Musk promote divestment from the USA in his attack on government deficits.
Technically, especially Muslims. The per capita amount spent on securitization, reeducation, labour transfer (jobs programs) for the purpose of sinicizating restive muslims population is massive.
that this is an extreme oversimplification of the Xinjiang issue should be obvious given the fact that other Muslim Chinese minorities like the Hui in China enjoy relative religious freedom. (in fact the issue is assimilation into China's ruling class, not religion per se). In fact inter-Muslim wars in China itself have a long history between different Islamic groups. Also of course the (lack of) response from the Muslim world in general to the Uyghur situation should make clear that the situation is somewhat more complicated.
And there are 56 minorities groups in China, they were all have specific aid program, like preferential treatment in national college exams.
What's the basis of such a wishwash statement on China and the people? Are you suggesting Chinese people are practicing racial segregation? Or what exactly are you suggesting?
that's culture differences. it doesn't support or shown China invest more in its people.
I'll argue, you don't need a lot of techies. you need people with vision like Steve Jobs, Jack Ma...etc. they don't have tech background and yet created giant tech company.
You need both, and you need a lot more "techies" than visionaries. Otherwise those visionaries just sit around at home with no one competent enough to execute on their vision.
Context: The bill they're talking about is unusually porcine, to the point of overwhelming even cynics. Relevant example: Subsidies of $12,500 for electric vehicles, but only if they're made by a union. Because auto unions are major campaign donors.
Everybody always talks about "oh the government spends so much money on pork all the time, deficits are so big etc." but this is another level:
Federal spending as percent of GDP last year: More than triple the level present during the New Deal. >50% increase year over year.
It's unprecedented in peacetime. The only time it has ever been more as a percent of GDP is WWII, and in dollars (even per capita and adjusted for inflation) it's already more than WWII.
This year's proposals are a significant increase from that level.
The claim that to oppose the bill is to "promote divestment from the USA" is pretty bold.
All that money goes into the private sector. Government deficits are an investment. Recent investment is huge and helped millions of people. Without the investment we would be in a depression (not just a recession). Elon Musk is not happy about this kind of investment for some reason. He doesn't want the government to invest so much in it's own people, which is so strange to me.
There are of course criticism in the details. For example, a majority of the funds went to the top 10% which isn't great. How the funds were deployed was far, far from ideal. It lead to asset price inflation because of this. So there are problems with it, but the alternative, not investing, would have been much worse.
> There are of course criticism in the details. For example, a majority of the funds went to the top 10% which isn't great. How the funds were deployed was far, far from ideal. It lead to asset price inflation because of this. So there are problems with it, but the alternative, not investing, would have been much worse.
The criticism of the details is the point. Spending half as much money by cutting out the portion that went to the top 10% is only the most obvious of the better alternatives.
This doesn't mean anything without the details:
> Government deficits are an investment.
The government can borrow a trillion dollars and give it to Mark Zuckerberg or whoever else donates the most to their campaigns. That's not an investment, it's corruption. It represents a net loss to the American people, because they lose the money, have to pay interest on the debt forever, and get nothing in return.
To be an investment you actually have to invest in something. But during an economic crisis, the best thing to invest in is people. If you're going to borrow money, just send out the checks. Everybody gets the same amount. It helps the people who are in trouble, it stimulates demand, and it isn't susceptible to corruption or regulatory capture.
And if you did that, you wouldn't have to borrow as much, because the same money would be more effective and the same benefit could be achieved with less of it.
Ones who have finished their sentence? Absolutely. The world is better served if we allow folk who have made mistakes are allowed the opportunity to grow and re-enter society as full members rather than permanently made a second-class.
Having the financial means to develop and maintain his voice seems like a reasonable part of that aspiration. The author is fully supported by his work with Stratechery. [1]
Just like Google that bent over backwards to please the Chinese censorship and their persecution. Then when Google failed in China (domestic competitors was better) they tried to exit "gracefully" by claiming it's due the Chinese hacking them and pretending it's about ethics...
The agreement included a pledge from Apple to help Chinese manufacturers develop "the most advanced manufacturing technologies," "support the training of high-quality Chinese talents," use more components from Chinese suppliers, sign deals with Chinese software firms, collaborate with research in Chinese universities, and directly invest in Chinese tech companies, as well as assistance with around a dozen Chinese government causes.
The secrecy around it doesn't bode well, but to be frank the list above seems pretty innocuous. If it were the other way around or any other county I doubt many would care.
The recent trend of countries toward isolationism scares me.
The type of economic integration described above is healthy for world peace and how you avoid wars.
I think the US had a much stronger effect toward global stability when it did a better job exemplifying the best of democracy and worked to spread its culture through economic and other ties.
While I want apple to keep its dignity as much as you do, I cannot change our government (we don’t get to vote, so we literally cannot). Given this situation, if apple don’t do these kind of things, worse case scenario, it get banned in china just like google and many others. As a user, apple products are still the most privacy protecting products I can buy and use in china. (For example, do you know that Chinese government forbids end to end encryption? But iMessage is an exception). Business aside, I think apple protected the human rights in china the best way it could.
A cynic would wonder if China allows iMessage to be encrypted because they can break it. A real cynic would wonder if China allows iMessage because Apple deliberately made it so that China could break it.
If iMessage isn't revealed in the future to be accessible by the CCP, I'll eat my hat. It's not even protected for users in the USA [0]. Do people really think the CCP would allow encrypted messaging it can't access? If so, I've got a bridge to sell you.
> As a user, apple products are still the most privacy protecting products I can buy and use in china
I find it exceptionally hard to believe that, with iCloud datacenters located in homeland China. An easier explanation is that Apple's marketing, long revered as one of the best in the world, was able to convince people that they were secure while giving data to the CCP hand-over-fist behind the curtain. Until their system is transparent enough to say for sure, I'd err on the side of caution.
That simply not true. Millions sacrificed their lives so they countries could be free. You just don't want to fight and you are happy with expansion of communism.
The West is not going to fight for you, you have to do it yourself. Don't be cowards.
yeah, tell me more. I was one of the students in Kiev, Ukraine during “Orange revolution” in 2004. Yeah, it is scary but not fighting for your future is scarier.
My friends did fight in Cuba for freedom during July's protests, now they are gone. Ukraine is wonderland compared to China, Venezuela, Cuba, etc... Gimme a break.
If you like being dead or enslaved, go ahead and challenge the Chinese government. They have an internment camp bed with your name on it. They have express lanes setup in airports to sell your organs to the highest bidder.
I am assuming blahgeek is middle class and as far as I know now sucessful revolution (in the traditional sense)has been led by the middle class ever. It's the impoverished people who have led such things.
At what point does something like this become a national security issue?
I know these modern titans of industry answer to no one, but perhaps they should?
I find it interesting you see Apple a national asset needing special scrutiny.
It might as well be true, but then you should also expect other countries to start dealing with Apple as a part of the US gov. and not a purely private party.
Lockheed Martin is a private company with all sorts of laws on what they can and cannot do with foreign countries. It is not weird to create special categories for niche protected industries.
Would Lockheed Martin also be negociating tax breaks with Ireland and forefront line development costs of factories in Taiwan ? Or provide separated enclaves for EU countries ?
Right now Apple is an international consumer company at its core, which makes its positioning a lot different than defense contractors or power producers for instance.
We used to regulate a lot more of consumer electronics ability to operate overseas, those restrictions have eased, but it doesn't mean they shouldn't come back if companies start to act irresponsibly.
Also, yes, Lockheed Martin does operate in different countries (Ireland included) and most likely does negotiate quite heavily with factories around the world.
Of course it needs special scrutiny. What if in the midst of a break down in talks between the US and China, Chinese regulators come calling and say that either Apple provides the iCloud backup data of a staffer of an America senator or else they will be immediately banned from the Chinese market.
Maybe at that point Apple can stop spying on its users, that way as an EU citizen I get the US government to stop spying on me too (Apple was part of PRISM).
Or a threat. An entity with a trillion dollars in reserves and devices in billions of people's hands, including hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of government employees. That's a lot of leverage.
I think it became a security issue when Apple bent to China's desire to keep iCloud servers in a domestic datacenter. If Apple gives up control so willingly for a foreign nation, one can only imagine how deeply in bed they are with American intelligence agencies.
National security issue, though? The US government has no desire to call Apple on security or privacy. Doing so would be a pure disadvantage for them.
Interestingly, Apple could also cause problems to TSMC. Because of Apple-first policy, at least two major chip manufacturers* are moving away from TSMC. One is even completely obsoleting a line of products that was previously being manufactured at TSMC. At the same time, while Apple can get processors from TSMC, their iPhone production is lagging behind due to shortage of power supply ICs.
* - not sure if this info is already public, I am NDA bound to disclose more.
We've seen articles about Qualcomm and AMD shifting to Samsung and away from TSMC. Some of Qualcomm's new processors are already moved over to Samsung. The 780G and 888 are already on Samsung's 5nm process. I don't think AMD has moved things, but we've seen articles about it noting how Apple is getting first-access to TSMC's latest processes.
> One is even completely obsoleting a line of products that was previously being manufactured at TSMC
That sounds a bit odd. AMD/Qualcomm products basically obsolete themselves very quickly. People generally aren't looking to buy a Snapdragon 855 from 2019. They'll either be buying the 888 or one of Qualcomm's cheaper lines (like the 700 or 600 series). It seems weird to prematurely obsolete something given that it's likely on a process that you already have enough TSMC capacity for. I mean, clearly I could be wrong. Maybe Samsung offered them something to do that and move things over faster.
It's very fair from my point of view. Think about it, you're company want to do business making a lot of money in my territory. Why would I let you? unless you give me some benefit as well. And the request from the government is to improve the country's technological capabilities and economy. Which government doesn't want this? If you see the country as a group of person, then it seems very normal. You want some benefit from me, you also need to help me, right? What's wrong with that?
But the Apple book store and movie store were never restored, and Apple was forced to move their iCloud servers onshore to Guizhou. What did Apple gain from this apparent extortion?
Microsoft just hopes it can keep selling operating systems and Google has no market in China because the Chinese hate information. So they back off on anything controversial hoping for a better day to step in and sell something if possible.
the top comments talking about maps, it's absolutely insane
'The agreement included a pledge from Apple to help Chinese manufacturers develop "the most advanced manufacturing technologies," "support the training of high-quality Chinese talents," use more components from Chinese suppliers, sign deals with Chinese software firms, collaborate with research in Chinese universities, and directly invest in Chinese tech companies, as well as assistance with around a dozen Chinese government causes. If there were no objections from either side, the deal would be automatically be extended for an additional year until May 2022, according to the agreement.'
'Apple vowed to invest "many billions of dollars more" than its current expenditure in China, including on new retail stores, research and development facilities, and renewable energy projects. Other internal documents reportedly showed that Apple's pledge amounted to more than $275 billion in spending over a period of five years.'
what do American citizens have to do to get this sort of treatment? Seems like a broken record at this point, but we truly have been sold at the absolute highest level. It's one thing to make these deals with a foreign hostile country - it's another to ask yourself: When's the last CEO I heard making these same promises to America? Or to any friendly country for that matter? As if the streets are paved with gold everywhere else?
It aches my heart to be a young man in this country and see this be our so-called 'leaders'. I'm confident the tides have already turned against all this nonsense, though, and I look forward to rebuilding industries of the world with good-hearted men & women
> It aches my heart to be a young man in this country and see this be our so-called 'leaders'. I'm confident the tides have already turned against all this nonsense, though, and I look forward to rebuilding industries of the world with good-hearted men & women
I just got finished reading a book about the pre-war climate of 1930s Europe and man this comment sounds scary and nationalist.
I’m worried that so many people like you buy into the media positioning of China vs. America. It ratchets up tensions for the purpose of selling clicks.
Do you not see how American companies making deals with other countries is beneficial for everyone, including you? The economy is not a zero-sum game. You can create value without destroying it elsewhere. Nobody has to suffer in order for you to thrive.
When deals like this are made, it makes it less likely China will do things to piss off the US, and vice-versa. The last thing we need are more tensions.
Do you really want to hold people in other countries back from ever achieving the standards of living that you enjoy?
> When deals like this are made, it makes it less likely China will do things to piss off the US, and vice-versa. The last thing we need are more tensions.
Eh, no. That's sounds like a version of the "Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexus_and_the_Olive_Tree#G...), and it's bunk. China's leaders are nationalists, and it's likely they're looking to strengthen themselves to the point where they can do what they want without caring if the US is pissed off or not, and their actual behavior supports this view. They've actually shown themselves to be quite adept at exploiting sentiments like yours while they play a different game.
> Do you really want to hold people in other countries back from ever achieving the standards of living that you enjoy?
It's not that simple, obviously. Do you want knock people in your own country down (and have them stay down) so that can happen? We're not just talking about standards of living, either. How do you feel about assisting the ascent of an ideologically-incompatible competitor regime (https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-lea...)?
Golden Arches Theory was intended as a joke. Trying to "debunk" a joke, does nothing to negate the trend of increased economic cooperation leading to decreased conflict.
I think the author's own response is fitting to the sentiment in your comment:
I was both amazed and amused by how much the Golden Arches Theory had gotten around and how intensely certain people wanted to prove it wrong. They...insisted that politics, and the never-ending struggle between nation-states, were the immutable defining feature of international affairs, and they were professionally and psychologically threatened by the idea that globalization and economic integration might actually influence geopolitics in some very new and fundamental ways.
The link you posted at the end is a great example of what I'm talking about. The NYT has an incentive to scare you into thinking China is going to take over the US and destroy your way of life and imprison you in some dystopian hellscape. And so we must oppose them at all costs to protect our way of life, and subscribe to the NYT to read more about this growing conflict!
Sounds exactly like the scary bedtime stories Hollywood told us about the USSR during the Cold War. Or the stories Newsweek told us of how Japan was going to dominate and overtake American business in the 1980s. Oh no!
Not saying history will necessarily repeat and China will implode in a USSR-like manor, but, could it be that maybe those fears are just a little overblown?
China is an aging, shrinking population with still a long way to go towards industrializing. And a dictatorship isn't usually a great way to organize a government if your goal is stability.
Are you even willing to consider the possibility that maybe this deal was a mutually beneficial fair trade, with upside for both parties?
> Golden Arches Theory was intended as a joke. Trying to "debunk" a joke, does nothing to negate the trend of increased economic cooperation leading to decreased conflict.
I think you misunderstand. I wasn't specifically referring to the Golden Arches Theory as bunk, but the more general one you describe. It's bunk because it makes assumptions about motivations and strategies that aren't necessarily true, not because of some specific counterexample to a jokey formulation.
In China's case, I don't think it's playing the same "economic cooperation" game you assume it is. If the "decreased conflict" result has any truth behind it, it's because if increased interdependency, but it's pretty clear (for them) that's not a desired end-state, but rather a transitory state on the way to more independence and greater strength.
Those I suppose you could still have "decreased conflict" even in that case, as long as other nations remain too dependent on them to be able to object or resist if they want to do something objectionable.
This is what people don't understand, the CCP is not playing a co-operation game. They will play a co-operation game until they get what they want from you. After that its the domination game.
It's like patriotism, nationalism have become bad words in the USA. The USA and its values are really worth fighting for (am not even from the US), but this thing about "lets not be nationalistic", and if you criticize the CCP you hear "oh let's not be sinophobic" needs to stop.
All the 3rd world countries who got into the Belt and Road "co-operation" are really getting belted now.
Haha, I have seen many speeches of the US presidents and they all come off as nationalist. I imagine it would be very hard to win an election in the US without mentioning that Americans are the coolest people on Earth or something like that.
> Haha, I have seen many speeches of the US presidents and they all come off as nationalist.
Who cares about speeches? It's policy that matters. Chinese leaders actually pursue nationalist economic policy, while the US leaders dress up globalization with nationalist rhetoric.
All of them since the 80s at least (except for Trump, but he's not representative of the class "US leaders").
> And china seems to be focused on free global trade as well. Trade embargos are more known for the US.
What do embargos have to do with anything? Chinese leaders might be OK with free global trade, given the kinds of controls they have on domestic market access, they aren't really committed to "free trade" like the US has been.
"except for Trump, but he's not representative of the class "US leaders""
He was the last elected US president and was almost elected a 2. time.
So like it or not, but to the world, he is a very strong current representative of a US leader.
And yes, a very nationalistic one at that. Who can be back to power very soon, or someone like him.
>> except for Trump, but he's not representative of the class "US leaders"
> He was the last elected US president and was almost elected a 2. time.
1) "US leaders" encompasses more than the presidency, and 2) at this point Trump is an n=1 aberration and no one can say if any patterns have changed.
The overall US leadership class has internalized the dogma of free trade, to the point of openly and uncritically accepting the national-level negatives (de-industrialization, etc.). I'm extremely skeptical that any other Republican besides Trump would deploy protectionist policies like tariffs or bully business leaders into doing something that puts the nation in front of their shareholders.
"The overall US leadership class has internalized the dogma of free trade, to the point of openly and uncritically accepting the national-level negatives "
I see, and this is why the US is enforcing so many global trade embargos?
And as for the collateral of them, here in eastern germany the economy suffered a lot by the embargos against russia - as did many other branches in europe. I doubt the US economy was hit by it in any significant way by comparison.
Or that the US was (and is) using massive pressure, so that germany abandones north stream (a pipeline to get russian gas directly) and rather buys cheap US fracking gas?
So sorry, but I can't really take the "free global trade" rhetoric much serious.
The US is pro free trade for sure, but only as long as US interests are not hurt too much.
> I see, and this is why the US is enforcing so many global trade embargos?
You're not getting it. Embargos are neither here nor there, what matters is how they treat the domestic economy. They've let important bits whither, get outsourced, or slip out of their control through foreign acquisitions (which are default-allow), all often with great negative effects for the actual citizens they represent. That shows you where their commitments are.
lol. Watched any of the previous president’s speeches, for example?
Most (all?) countries look after themselves, their borders, their people etc and don’t honestly care about others. Whether this is right or wrong - that is a different question. But let’s not pretend some political leaders are saints and others aren’t.
commitments to free trade and globalization.
Sure, because it helps their country and their economy. They aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.
Global politics is not about right and wrong or love and friendship - it is about profit and loss, strength and weakness, convenience and opportunity…
About 24 million people are at stake, just watch the Taiwanese Foreign minister's palpitations and the horror on his face with regards to Chinese aggression. If this doesn't convince you of the tacit reality, not sure what will: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3D0_Bhzbyo
Some level of pushback - manufacturing in this case - is the most reasonable, peaceful and rational recourse to the threat China poses to the world and its neighbors, while also creating a supply chain resiliency. I think narrative that you've spelled out is a grave danger to democracies around the world. If anything is ratcheting up that is taking an innocuous comment about globalist corporation's greed to an extreme and alarmist parallel to pre-world world nationalism which I find rather irresponsible.
American companies make manufacturing deals with China to export manufacturing environmental pollution over there, and to get compliant labor which is somewhat cheaper.
I would support pollution tariffs on imported products to make the pollution export game less profitable to companies like Apple.
Corporations extract concessions from US taxpayers. China extracts concessions from corporations. This is unfair. Why aren't US taxpayers getting the same deal as Chinese taxpayers?
Paraphrasing u/pembrook:
Something something nationalism. Whoa. Be careful. Corporations extracting wealth from US taxpayers is good for world prosperity. For reasons.
lol. it's so insane. Anything that is not praising globalism is smeared as some sort of nationalist nonsense. I mean this in a sincere way, people really need to stop putting things into 'boxes'. It does nobody any good, especially when media & government take advantage of these boxes to push division, etc.
How can being disappointed in American leaders be considered 'scary' and 'nationalist'? It makes no sense. America is not in good shape. We can argue the statistics all day, but it's undeniable how far we've fallen in education & health most importantly, but of course other critical parts like infrastructure, manufacturing & technology. the kids are not alright
People in America don't feel supported right now, and they haven't for awhile. Between the endless wars, and the endless focus of moving all our capital and labor overseas, not a lot has come back to the people, and they feel it.
You can say whatever about nation-building, promoting living standards, etc., but I just don't think it's fair that the American citizens who worked, fought, and often funded (through subsidies) these companies, do not get anywhere NEAR the level of attention we give elsewhere. Obviously ton of people agreed with me on here, lol, and every single person I've talked to on this topic agrees.
$275 billion in spending over a period of five years sounds like a lot, but I think you might be underestimating how much Apple would spend in China “naturally”.
When's the last CEO I heard making these same promises to America?
Thank you! I swear some people just have blinders to things just so they can be anti-Apple. Apple makes these promises everywhere and especially to America.
> It's one thing to make these deals with a foreign hostile country - it's another to ask yourself: When's the last CEO I heard making these same promises to America? Or to any friendly country for that matter?
Thank you for saying this. I don't live in the US, but yes it's shocking.
My (unpopular) view is that we humans have the ability to focus only on a limited set of issues simultaneously, and we should pick the important ones first. It is appalling that news about secretive 200+ billion deals with Xi's CCP (the greatest threat to freedom since the Brezhnev era) has to compete for attention.
Honestly, I'm not trying to sound like I'm speaking in bad faith or provokingly, but why did you ever expect the top executives of a multi-million (or in this case, trillion) dollar corporation to care about anything but profits and their own well-being? It's just like Zuckerberg said, "Company over country".
I like to imagine those corporations as a machine with irs unique objective being profit. Every single thing that comes out of their mouths and every single action they perform is done with the expectation that it will sooner or later result in more profit. In this case, the equation came out as "the profit that Apple will earn as a result of this deal will compensate any loss of revenue that could be ever generated because of the public's reaction to it". And that's how it always works, period.
> Honestly, I'm not trying to sound like I'm speaking in bad faith or provokingly, but why did you ever expect the top executives of a multi-million (or in this case, trillion) dollar corporation to care about anything but profits and their own well-being? It's just like Zuckerberg said, "Company over country".
That's a common ideological outlook now, but IIRC it wasn't always so and it doesn't have to be so in the future.
Simplistic free market greed-sacks like you describe should be pariahs, and treated as such by society and the government to the point that they find it very hard to make profits.
> why did you ever expect the top executives of a multi-million (or in this case, trillion) dollar corporation to care about anything but profits and their own well-being?
Perhaps he expected his government to incentivize/compel them to look at more than just profits? You know, like China is successfully doing. While shady when it comes to foreign influence, it is an absolutely legitimate approach for domestic companies, instead of allowing them to sell out their home country for short-term gain in the name of free markets, that the West was duped into believing is the only moral policy.
The empathetic perspective is that these CEOs and boards don’t have national allegiance. They are trying to optimize globally, and China is more exploitable in the sense of getting a steeper growth curve out of it.
The realpolitik perspective is that some countries demand allegiance from companies that operate on their soil (China), while others don't (USA). So Apple has a national allegiance to China in that country, and an allegiance purely to profit in the USA. It's easy to guess which country's citizens will receive more corporate philanthropy. See GP comment for the answer.
What's despicable is that none of the mainstream media (WSJ, NYTimes, WaPo, Boston Globe, CNN, Fox, etc.) are covering this story. The American people atleast deserve to be informed.
How is this not the biggest blow to Apple in terms of its relationship with China?
> What's despicable is that none of the mainstream media (WSJ, NYTimes, WaPo, Boston Globe, CNN, Fox, etc.) are covering this story. The American people atleast deserve to be informed.
NYT is extremely predictable - both in its choice of what to inform its viewers as well as what will fit their political stance (globalists). If you need this to be spelled out, either you’re being rhetorical or you’re uninformed - I suspect the former.
> If you need this to be spelled out, either you’re being rhetorical or you’re uninformed - I suspect the former.
No, I suspect you have things wrong in this case, but you're being so vague it's difficult to figure out where the error is.
> NYT is extremely predictable - both in its choice of what to inform its viewers as well as what will fit their political stance (globalists).
Even if that's true, it's no reason to assume they wouldn't publish this story for some ideological reason, especially given they've published very similar things in the past.
> As if the streets are paved with gold everywhere else?
They kind of are, though. Find somebody that is broadly world traveled over a multiple decade period and they will invariably have noticed the stark contrast in the way societies are inside and outside what could be broadly termed the modern western countries.
People that have been stuck in those countries their entire lives simply don't understand how badly they have been robbed.
I personally do not trust China, should we not assume computer hardware made there has invisible backdoors? The security state for example believe 5G shouldn't be controlled by Chinese companies, I'm certainly not sure I really trust what I say on this MacBook Pro, is there a way to prove it's not compromised as everyone says it's definitely not but I can imagine the Chinese suddenly just switching off half the computers in the West in the case of a war one day (say the US defending Taiwan).
If I was them looking to become top of the hill I'd be instructing people at Foxconn and wherever else to provide me with backdoors into most computers sold in the West.
Disregarding the human rights/politics background, this sounds like standard operating procedure for Apple: Do whatever it takes to have unimpeded access to the best tools/tech needed for their mission
Except no, you shouldn’t just disregard the human rights / politics in search of “the best tools” which happens to be low waged workers who were famously killings themselves at work in such large numbers that their solution was to install nets so that they wouldn’t die when jumping out the windows anymore,
I didn't mean to imply that you should disregard human rights, only that when you look at it from a strictly strategic point of view, it aligns with the strategy that Apple follows in many other areas. See for example buying full chip lines, entire display supply, even for the gigantic windows they use at the Apple stores.
Since this is finally out, I am hopping they have all the other juicy details in supply chain, where Apple lifted suppliers to their standard and help them build out / counter balance competitors. ( Also interesting this is coming out from The Information, which tends to be an Apple shill for many years from Apple PR. But I am looking at BOE, YMTC and Luxshare. Should be the easiest find and leaks. If they do intend to go deep into it. )
> Maybe one day he should think about resettling to China… just saying.
I mean yeah? Maybe? It's really not that hard to understand how to maintain high standing in multiple conflicting societies. Doing so in China is also not that difficult or bothersome, not any harder than maintaining good standing in a private platform like Youtube the analogy being that the arbitrary decisions follow unspoken rules but you can predict what those rules are and still have a great and endearing time. I get that we are raised not to respect that a government assumes that kind of role while tolerating private institutions that run our day to day lives operating the same way, but the assumption that day-to-day life is sooooo aggravating in China is just completely wrong.
Day to day life in China is easy if you're in a Tier 1 city, able to speak/read Chinese, don't require stable access to non-China based internet services, don't mind the pollutuon and are not black or Indian.
Even with some of these it's still OK, but it can be aggravating quickly. I feel like there is always someone in every apartment block constantly renovating and the drills on the walls never cease. Also, try transferring money put of the country. Spent more time in banks in China than all other places I've lived combined. And I speak Chinese, so most things are easier.
What about the lifestyle of an average white collar job though? Don't they generally have a similar 50-60 hour week like other East Asian countries, South Korea and Japan, that would be considered quite excessive by western standards?
Yeah, China is taking advantage of US companies, state governments, to compete with USA. There are lots of company leaders and governors can benefit from secrete negotiations with China government. There is only one China, but there are tons of American businesses.
In some regards (foot-pounds), Apple is way more of a Chinese company than an American one. Nearly all of the people who actually make Apple products are Chinese citizens subject to Chinese law, in China.
A billion dollar company (and Apple is a trillion dollar company) is a political entity. It's decisions have political effects. You cannot run a company that size and NOT expect governments of all sizes and types to come knocking with "requests".
Apple was growing massively in PRC in mid 2010s, should not be surprising they got roped into more prosocial and pro-establishment (read CCP) obligations. If memory serve this was right after Apple started clean energy programs in 2015 and PRC regulators shutting down itunes books & movies.
>Cook's negotiations led to the successful signing of the multibillion-dollar agreement, quashing a number of regulatory actions against the company with exemptions and enabling access to the Chinese market, in return for significant investments, business deals, and worker training in the country.
Keyword is exemptions and access, aka what you expect from trillion dollar company lobbying governments.
It's not surprising but it's a surprise. All the lobbying for the US Tariff exemptions were out in the open, if it was revealed as a surprise it would look like bribery.
Imagine doing business with a government willing to disappear anyone who talks even slightly against them - and trusting them to be honest in their dealings. Jack Ma has not been particularly vocal of late has he…
"Secretly" is well-put between quotation marks, because i kind of recall when those "conspiracy-nuts"(as called by the media, of course) were specifically saying this during that period.
I love how ignorant people can be about this biggest corporation US has.The labour it profits off is not ethical, and a simple search for "safety nets" should be enough to convince one of that.Then again most people don't give a sh1t when they want their new "3D face-unlocked emoji" feature.
The title implies $275B in revenue (well, to me it does) but the article says "$275 billion in spending"
That may be different than revenue for Apple. Does the pay wall article clarify this?
Note: I'm not defending Apple here. Assisting a regime like the PRC with technology that could be used to further violate human rights is something the US should be monitoring and cracked down on with significant force, whether it's $275B or $10k
"The Information suggests that Apple is heavily reliant on Cook for international negotiations and speculates that it could face difficulties dealing with government affairs when Cook stands down as the company's CEO."
I wonder- is this true, or is this article trying to do some indirect PR/reputation building for Cook?
I read a lot about manufacturing, but I dont think the real growth market is in manufacturing. I dont read anything about it here in the thread but what about the growth market for data? Especially referring to apples icloud services in PRC and physical datacenter, in guiyang (just like microsoft, ibm btw)
An absolute zero on the patriotic scale. And when I say patriotic, I don't mean the "we're the best in the world" type of patriotic meaning, but more like "tiktok is a sign of things to come, let's try to slow down the inevitable ass-kicking of our economy that's upon us."
Having said all that, he never had a choice to begin with. When Google decided to stand up to China, they didn't bet the farm but "only" a lower double digit percentage of their revenue (my hat's off to Google for that). Apple cannot produce their hardware anywhere else in the world at the scale and quality level that they are currently getting from China. I am saying this as someone who has a good amount of insight into how the Chinese production capability compares to other parts of the world.
His fiduciary responsibility was to do what's best for the company. If he stepped down, it would have taken no time to find the next guy who would have happily done what's best for the company (except less well). So really, it's entirely inevitable.
If you buy into the last sentence, you might want to ask yourself what the long-term future of a capitalist society looks like when it's economically attacked by a very capable totalitarian regime that can think strategically rather than being beholden to the capital markets.
If they gave in so easily to a government and agreed to give something about which they care a lot such a huge amount of money, imagine what they do if they are asked to hand over something they don't care as much such as user data.
you can't trust them to protect our freedom of speech, our privacy, to save the environment, to care about how social media impacts kids, you can't trust them for anything, ever.
Apple works with the US government too. Apple operates in China so it'd be prudent to work with the government for mutual benefit. I'm not sure I see why this is being framed as a bad thing.
As a German you of all people should understand the havok unchecked authoritarian regimes can have on people and the world. The USA may not be a perfect democracy/republic and it has certainly been through tough times as of late but it is foolish to resort to such false equivalence.
Honestly the US Govt should be helping solve this with a trade deal. Instead they put the corporation in a position to have to pay this protection money.
This is the purpose of a national trade deal, so an American company has the weight of the US government for contract enforcement with foreign entities, regardless of size or influence, and so all American companies operate on a level playing field with regard to US law.
With this Apple is a big step closer to handling the rope that the CCP will tell it to use to hang itself. After stealing enough technology, of course.
So...local politicians, in a market where Apple was making money hand-over-fist, were feeling kinda used. By a huge foreign corporation. And the they started getting sticky on all sorts of regulatory things that Apple needed. Until Apple's CEO promised to do a bunch of "local investing" in their country.
How different is this from the 1980's in the U.S., when Japanese auto makers decided that they needed to start building cars in America, and otherwise placating American politicians and voters with big piles of money?
That I am aware of, "protection money" clearly implies that the payments are to a criminal organization - which is separate from, and unauthorized by, the established state. The MacRumors story seems very clear that Apple and Mr. Cook's deal was with the Chinese government, and the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
Do you have information to the contrary? Or is your point merely to voice anger at China, the CCP, Apple, and/or Mr. Cook?
> That I am aware of, "protection money" clearly implies that the payments are to a criminal organization - which is separate from, and unauthorized by, the established state.
The phrase is also very commonly used to refer to money paid to government officials who are corrupt. One could still quibble over whether this is technically “corruption” since it might very well be totally legal and encouraged under Chinese law, but I think the usage of the phrase here is quite suitable.
> criminal organization - which is separate from, and unauthorized by, the established state
When the government of an established state violates human rights and international law (like the Geneva Convention), I don't think it's incorrect to call that government a criminal organization.
There is absolutely no way at all to verify that claim - considering 'better/worse' entirely depends on the happiness of those individuals. Something we have no way of measuring.
Something like 30% remains from pre-agricultural sites show signs of violent death... sure not a measure of happiness but i'll take safety for starters.
It's unclear how reliable statistics like these are, and the picture of how violent and/or war-like pre-agricultural humans were is very far from clear:
Which agricultural revolution? If the earliest, sure more food is good, but having to fear being wiped off the earth from random raiders or armies kind of sucks.
Don't take it too literally, his comment is a modified quote from the unabomber's manifesto, which opens with, "The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." It's something of a meme to swap out "industrial" with something else, usually with a tongue-in-cheek intent.
States require administrators by definition and administrators require food surplus or they would starve. I know there were some hunter gatherers who had small food surpluses but I dont think there was anything that could remotely be called a state
This guy edited his comment. He originally asked if there were states before agriculture
Was it? Reading the article, the only 'secret' component was the lobbying, which is obviously done behind closed doors. Everything else is public commitments and public statements - which makes sense, since they were trying to pour oil on troubled chinese waters.
FWIW, western media often suggests stuff is 'secret' in china, because they can't read chinese, and all those orientals are awfully mysterious.
It's effectively illegal* in china to write unapproved stories about any government official or department or policy. I think that's what people mean when they say government dealings are 'secret'.
* i.e. to be a journalist you have to go through intense ideological screening; extreme prohibitions on foreign journalists operating in china; complete prior restraint on ALL media (and all education, all printing presses, communication technology, etc.)
I guess I'd see it more as a continuation of the whole 'kremlinology' trope. Granted, access is difficult in China atm. On the other hand, most of the press doesn't like to do deep investigative journalism in any case, so when you put a few barriers in their way, they tend to get real lazy real fast.
If you just check google news 'china secret' you can see an enormous number of articles, many from credible sources, talking about various 'secret' doings of the CCP.
Not arguing with your point, but it’s not uncommon that western media take a paragraph from Chinese gov docs out of context and call it clandestine despite it being merely formality
I didn't see any evidence of bribery. Please point that out.
Companies make investments in countries all the time for concessions on reduced taxes, streamlined approvals, etc... When Apple wanted to enter India's markets in a bigger way, they agreed to build a factory there. What is the difference? This is just how big business is done all over the world. I'm not making a judgement about whether this is good or bad, I just don't get all of the outrage and surprise over a process that is far from unusual.
I've been trying to understand this comment for like half an hour, I think maybe the idea is to imagine 1980s America with a CCP-style government? So, Martina Navratilova was a prominent critic of the dominant political party in the 80s, and if she was in China that could have gotten her arrested, but she was in the US so she wasn't.
That's as far as I got, I can't figure out what point the comment is trying to make.
The question I was responding to was "how different is this from the 1980s in the US?"
A possible difference I was suggesting is that Apple is being required to do things such as storing data locally not only for business reasons related to local industry, as the parent post had suggested, but also to enable surveillance of political dissidents, suppression of criticism of the government, etc..
Perhaps I should have picked John McEnroe as he might be more recognizable, but as I understand it Navratilova was a women's tennis #1 in the 1980s who actually did criticize the Republican party (and the US government) so I thought it might be an interesting comparison.
No, but perhaps I can explain the analogy more directly:
The most likely driving reason for requiring Apple to maintain iCloud data in local datacenters in mainland China rather than offshore (as it had done previously) is to facilitate data access by local investigative authorities.
Will the unofficial tribunal judgment issued on the 9th November 2021 have any effect on Apple? The account of the Tribunal findings as given by BBC World today are almost too much to stomach. I suppose I should add these are 'alleged' but people should judge for themselves.
Correct. Ding ding. Folks are trying to sound alarms.
Steve built his company to dissent when Apple started to drift too far from those values it proudly puts on its front page, still. It’s fraud to have those up now, imo
Let’s put down the kool-aid for a sec and agree that enough is enough.
A coward dies a thousand deaths but a valiant man dies once.
Justifying any entity participating in blatant genocide is cowardice.
I think that what many of the comments here miss is that "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era" was not officially mentioned until a year later, and the Chinese Constitution was not amended until 2018. China in 2016 likely didn't appear like the threat to Western geopolitics that it does today.
Well, I happen to know that Apple management signed many deals with the US, which is just as problematic of a world state as China, if not more so.
That is to say - unless you have a planet-wide blind spot, this title evokes the same emotional response as, say, "JD.com signed RMB 275B deal with US corporations in 2016".
Look, I am well enough aware of the depth of the crimes and misdeeds of US imperialism. I'm not blind. But the current Chinese regime has many repressive aspects, different and often more grave than those we find in the US. Also, if one examines its history, the number of internal deaths arguably caused by government malfeasance is much greater in China than in the US. So while I may agree with your bottom line, a person weighing the failings of the US and China may argue that "China is worse", and that would not be a preposterous claim even if we disagree with it.
>I have stated multiple times that muslim or uygur genocide in Xinjiang is a laughable propaganda lie.
That you have stated so does not mean if it is true or not. Your Chinese source doesn't change the fact that Uyghur birthrates dropped by a 60% between 2015 to 2018 according to Chinese government statistics. From 2016 there was a seven-fold increase in sterilization [1]. There are no natural reasons why that would happen, only to Uyghurs, entirely limited within Xinjiang in such a short amount of time. It is the textbook definition of genocide [2].
> Uyghur birthrates dropped by a 60% between 2015 to 2018 according to Chinese government statistics.
First thing first. Dropped birth rate itself is from from genocide. China does not have genocide on Han people, even if the birth rate dropped significantly https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/44133954.pdf
Note Uyghur (维吾尔族) birth rate is 1.991 in 2000 and 1.842 in 2010. The same time the other groups vary a lot, but mostly the difference lies in the area economy development degrees. Ie, more advanced areas have lower birth rate.
Planned birth can cause drop in birth rate. As in the case of the one child policy.
Planned birth is violating human rights. But it's not genocide.
All in all, check the facts and see who are producing them. I am not a professional reporter, and I only believe extraordinary claim require extraordinary proof.
All evidence so far can only lead to the speculation that Uyghur population might be growing much slower (for that I still not see evidence that it's outlier compared to the whole population trends in China as a whole, I.e., Chiese population is undergoing huge aging and low birth rate across the nation).
If you want to link one data points to genocide, then I assue you I can come up with genocide claims in any nations on earth.
> Birth rates always drop when the quality of life improves.
Sure. They do not drop 60% in only a few years, only amongst a single ethnic group in a single region. The numerous testimonies, plus recently leaked documents confirming this is an explicit CCP policy removes any doubt.
That's true. However, it seems in China some things just happen much more quickly than anywhere else. This happens with building new nuclear power plants (or building anything, really), and I wouldn't be hugely surprised if it also happened to things like sex education, especially given Chinese lack of tolerance towards religious extremism and the reproduction rights hurdles it brings, even in nominally civilised countries like the US. Another thing about those official Chinese statistics is... well, personally I'd take them with a grain of salt. China is still far behind the West when it comes to transparency.
The testimonies are a strong argument, however we're in the middle of information war against China. There is also the argument of the amount of those testimonies: there are surprisingly few of them, given millions of people armed with smartphones who live there.
But the premises of 60% drop in birth rate from 2016 to 2918 is not verified in the first place...
I am still asking the source of 60% drop in birth rate of Uyghur groups. You probably need similar data for other ethnic groups to prove that this drop in Uyghur is unusual.
The point remains that no one is applying the same standard when discussing China related issues. Why birth rate drop is linked to genocide? Because it's China!
No I totally think US is overall superior to China right now, when comparing 2 nations snapshot vs snapshot.
But, US perception on China is so bad compared the Chain perception on US, that this imbalance is creating a huge strategic risk between 2 nuclear super power, and causes both sides troubles when they need to collaborate.
That's why it's important to unshackle the US mass from the perception bias on China.
And that's what I want to convey. I.e., stop using grandiose sweeping argument like moral superiority, which is itself so large in scope that the comparison quickly lost any relevance.
> Lets meet as friends in Tiananmen square - you wear a t-shirt saying ‘what happened here in 1989?’
I think the Tankman incident is a silver light in the whole event, i.e., the individual stand against the tank, and the tank decide to go different route; and eventually the confrontation was dissolved by bystanders.
If you emphasize the confrontation, you'll use the t-shirt you mentioned.
For me, I'll wear a t-shirt stating: remember the tragedy.
And what's the point of this to do with altering the perception on China? If you just narrow your viewpoint onto Tankman, that's going to miss so much of other things happening in China.
It's like focusing on Gorge Floyd, and ignoring all the other things happening in US.
What's the point of such narrow view?
> I’ll come dressed as Winnie the Pooh.
If you cut all the implication to Xi, I see no danger whatsoever of wearing that on Tiananmen, or anywhere in China.
Politics in China is different. That's just a cultural thing.
Parents are also more authoritative, that's part of the cultural as well.
Mocking people public is considered an insult. Not just to Xi, to any normal Chinese citizen, that's considered inappropriate.
If you feel that your own culture is so superior that others should automatically accept; and if they don't like it, then you'll call them a lot of bad words, and try to force the narrative, then you are practicing fascism?
> I guess as long as the tank tread on your neck is Chinese - it’s not a problem.
Are you implying mg Chinese identity will be a problem in US then? Are you threatening or are you joking?
> Better to be called a facist in democracy than to live in the authoritarian dictatorship you provide unceasing support to.
I provide uneasy support to China and CCP? No! I uneasily support the mutual understanding between China and US. And for now, the part that lacks understanding is US, and American people continue to allow themselves to be fooled by the mainstream media. While at the same time most of them do not even trust them anyway. It was just that the mental conditioning has been started since early 1900s since the rise of Communism that the distrust on MSM does not translate to critical thinking in the people's mind.
Yes for sure. My support for anything is uneasy. And only on a case by case and rational way.
I see the danger of blindfolded mindset to trigger the hot war between 2 nuclear super power. Then I act accordingly. Is that a support to China? Sure! It's a support to China just like Bill Clinton OKed China's joining to WTO. It's a support like Donald Trump squandered US supremacy and disunited the US allies. That does not make me or bill Clinton or Trump less American.
> I pity the people of China
Me too.
I support Chinese people's development. I am planning a nonprofit for my home province's education. We'll be helping youth coming to US and learn the history and culture in the American, so they have a more independent attitude towards government and power.
Like I said, changes take time, I want to contribute to the cultivation of western values in Chinese youth.
> who don’t have a say in their government
No no no...
This current iteration of Chinese government was created after the people overthrow the US backed KMT. They are going to overthrow CCP if CCP starts to behaving poorly. Look at the growing civil dissident during the haydays of rampant capitalism when people's lives are put on danger for the profits of the few.
> and have no choice but to tow the party line
They don't have choices in some basic politicians rules. Like CCP has to be the leader, and China had to be on socialism.
So what. American have to be on a 2 party system, and US has to be on a capitalist system. Is that so different?
> What’s your excuse?
I have no excuse. All I said is rational based on my own observation.
I have no issues embracing US dictatorship when Julian Assange was ruled to extract to US.
I also have no issue of embracing Chinese dictatorship when what?
The point is that nations are complicated. From individual to a national government. If you want to use dictatorship to describe 1.4b people's collective, then you are simply too lazy to think.
When Apple and HP collaborated, HP was forced to cram iTunes on its devices for years. China isn't known for respecting IP, not sure who is the "good guy" in this collaboration, almost like the Borg and Cylons joined forces.
I thought the HackerNews crowd could do better than "Google/Apple/X is offering something censored / is complying with local laws / local government requests in China/Russia/X so it must be bad and they must stop".
Don't be so naive.
1. In order for US/international companies to survive in China/Russia/heavily censored countries or regions, they have to comply to local laws. Otherwise they are blocked or shutdown completely.
2. Despite having to comply, most of the times these large global companies have some power to fight back, negotiate and find middle grounds.
3. Having a presence is critical for the sake of the local people to seek information. Having Google censoring the search results would be 100x better than having Baidu willingly fake it. Having Apple fighting for all the information requests is 100x better than having local giants like Tencent and Huawei willingly building monitoring and censoring capabilities for all users.
Without the presence, the people in these regions and countries have no choice. They don't have ways to access even censored information or knowing about the censorship at all. They will be fed with much more twisted information. Companies like Apple are doing their best negotiating and fighting back. Maybe they have to comply with 10% of demands, but the local alternative will do 100% in a blink of eye. And ironically they are the target of blame in both China and the US. It is not fair to them.
Would you rather have someone fighting for the people, or would you want them to be like North Korea where nobody outside can get in?
1) This article is about Tim Cook negotiating deals to help the Chinese economy to avoid bad press that they aren't a team player over there, and so this has nothing to do with "complying with laws".
2) FWIW, to reply to that anyway: while this article is not about this, Apple does go far out of their way to make themselves a bottleneck that would be subject to these laws in the first place.
As a trivial example of this, Apple blocks VPNs from being installed on end user phones by not hosting them in their store and additionally requiring a special entitlement that requires a paid developer account (so you can't code your own VPN and install it yourself).
Now, you can claim this is them "complying with local laws" (though I bet if you actually looked they are going well above and beyond the call of duty here), but that is frankly a "shit take" as it fails to explain how every Android phone sold in China DOES allow you to install VPN apps: sure, Google doesn't host them for you, but they let you sideload anything you want (including a VPN).
The reality is that Apple has uniquely decided to build a completely-centrally-controlled ecosystem where they CAN block you from installing a VPN on "your" phone, while Google did the morally-reasonable decision that happens to avoid them becoming a tool of authoritarian regimes.
1) Yes, this article is about Apple's secret deal with China. But this is exactly the way deals are done in China. They are not going to be public about it and they are not going to admit that this investment has anything to do with keeping Apple's business going in China, but in reality, they absolutely are related if not causal.
2) This is not true. Apple used to allow VPN apps on the Chinese App Store up until one day several years ago that they couldn't fight it any more and were forced to take all of them down. It is not Apple going far beyond what was requested/needed to stay in business, they have zero incentive to do so unlike the local Chinese competitors who go all out on "precautious" censorship.
It is the same with Android - No VPN apps can be found from ANY app stores in China (Google Playstore is not even available in China). The only reason you can install an VPN app is via an .apk file and this is due to the technical design by Android vs. a closed ecosystem like Apple App Store. I don't think you can say a closed-source system is less morally reasonable at all. There are 10x or more malicious apps that steal user data on Android than Apple App Store due to lack of control and verification. It is just a consequence of two different technical design approaches.
Technically speaking, Chinese Android phone companies could just block 3rd-party apk installation anytime they want in the name of security (They already do that by default) and 99% users won't know how to circumvent it.
3) My entire post is actually trying to make a point that you, like most of the commenters in this thread, are idealists who vastly underestimate the value of being able to operate in these markets controlled by authoritarian regimes and reaching the end users.
Strategically, the most morally-reasonable way is to help the people in these countries by actually trying to be present even under severe pressures from the regimes to comply with their demands.
For example, Google's exit from China is actually a huge mistake. It is the best case scenario for the Chinese government and local Chinese competitors and worst case scenario for the Chinese people, Google and the rest of the free world. After the exit, Google handed their leading search engine market share to Baidu, which provides a much more proactively censored and twisted version of the search results, and the Chinese government gained complete control over the search engines. What used to take a lot of back and forth with Google to censor certain small things, is now a simple phone call to Baidu's Government Relations department to get the whole category wiped out.
Same thing happened with Android in China. You think the open-sourced model would bring any less censorship? Not at all. All of the Android App Stores in China are owned and controlled by local companies who comply 100% to government requests. And god knows how many malicious apps are in those app stores to eavesdrop users' private information. It is actually much harder to achieve the same effect with Apple's closed App Store and privacy features. You can buy 3rd party services to track the ID and location history of almost every Android phone sold in China, but this is not available for iPhone users.
So before you blame Apple for being a tool, in reality, they actually contribute much more to the freedom and privacy of the end users in these authoritarian markets. Without Apple, 100% phones would be tapped and there is little hurdle for these local governments to do whatever they want with the local companies.
> The only reason you can install an VPN app is via an .apk file and this is due to the technical design by Android vs. a closed ecosystem like Apple App Store.
Obviously, I understood this, right? This was the entire reason I can make a point I about how Apple decided to go down an immoral technical design with the goal of making more money than can be morally justified, because we know there were common alternative designs.
> Technically speaking, Chinese Android phone companies could just block 3rd-party apk installation anytime they want in the name of security (They already do that by default) and 99% users won't know how to circumvent it.
And yet, they don't.
I guess the big problem I have with your comment (the original one also) is that there is a certain scenario where you think you have a great point, and the idea that the other people arguing here or the article we are reading might not fit your enemy template is I guess so confusing or maybe frustrating that you are willing to just start smashing reality until it fits.
That you are pulling out theoretical futures here to fix your narrative is then telling: that Chinese companies could change something... well, a big part of my point is that they have not already changed something, and we can thereby use that to understand the boundary of what the law in China--not just the written ones but anything unwritten as well--are actually saying.
The reality is that, as far it seems both of us know, the only company with much marketshare--INCLUDING OF THE ONES IN CHINA--that outright block your ability to install VPNs on their phones is Apple. This is because Apple has gone to great lengths to design a system where all data and control over hardware is centrally managed by Apple, which causes problems the world over.
> Strategically, the most morally-reasonable way is to help the people in these countries by actually trying to be present even under severe pressures from the regimes to comply with their demands.
Google didn't even leave China over moral reasons: they did it because China was directly messing with their data centers. It is a move that comes off to me as purely defensive. It thereby isn't at all clear to either myself or many of the other people posting here that Google actually cares to take a stance against China due only to some ethical stance.
But like, you do realize I wasn't applauding such an action, anyway, right? While I am not sure I would be against such, I don't actively think Apple should leave China over their inability to host VPNs... I think they should allow people to install VPNs that they don't host, because apparently that's currently allowed in China and the only reason I see that changing is if Apple sets such a strong precedent that it is even possible or reasonable to control an ecosystem from top to bottom that we lose the practical ability--likely throughout the entire world--to even own general purpose computers anymore.
> And god knows how many malicious apps are in those app stores to eavesdrop users' private information.
As for this whole argument path, you seem to be arguing that people don't deserve freedoms because they are... I guess, dumb? If we don't believe people should have freedoms anyway, maybe we should just accept that authoritarian regimes are a force of good? I mean, the Chinese government is going to make tons of similar arguments about the good they are doing. Could it just be that you are pro-authoritarianism? :(
Regardless, you here claim that the possibility of malware people might accidentally install on these devices is somehow a 100% (a number you use later) guarantee of surveillance but ignore that Apple is just handing their centralized collection of user data to China anyway via stuff like iCloud (which is absolutely "in scope" if "users are dumb and will install malware is"... we can't make decisions based on the idea that elites running tech companies have the job of being smarter than the unwashed masses: down that road likes authoritarianism).
At this point I felt I should maybe dig into your comment history to try to better understand whatever your position here result is, and in the process of digging through a hunger of pro-censorship positions and defenses of Apple ( I came across something fascinating from a mere three months ago: you are against Apple's CSAM work (which I would expect you to be for, given your arguments here, as it is essentially the exact same scenario).
> This part is legit though: governments around the world could pressure Apple to add other forms of surveillance. Be it hashes of non-CSAM, or simply pressure NEMEC or other hash providers, or extending its capabilities to all messages or photos on device.
> In my opinion, this is the biggest concern, not the technology. Before, Apple could simply refuse by saying we don't have the capabilities. But now, that excuse is gone. Apple's promise to human review content and only report CSAM is the weakest link.
^ This. This is you making my EXACT ARGUMENT for why having centrally managed software distribution is bad: that once you build such a mechanism, "governments around the world could pressure Apple to add other forms of surveillance" by using that mechanism you didn't have to build, and which all but a totalitarian regime (North Korea) would never force you to have built. "Before, Apple could simply refuse by saying we don't have the capabilities. But now, that excuse is gone. Apple's promise to human review content and only [block scams] is the weakest link."
Here is a talk I have at Mozilla Privacy Labs about centralization and the evils thereof, which attempts to link together a ton of these kinds of thoughts. Maybe it would be helpful to sit back and really consider your positions and whether they are at all consistent :(.
Please read my comment above for the reasons why "we don't do business at all in your totalitarian country" actually doesn't achieve your ideal "human rights above profits" goal.
"Sometime in 2014 or early 2015, China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping told members of the Apple Maps team to make the Diaoyu Islands, the objects of a long-running territorial dispute between China and Japan, appear large even when users zoomed out from them. Chinese regulators also threatened to withhold approval of the first Apple Watch, scheduled for release in 2015, if Apple didn’t comply with the unusual request, according to internal documents.
Some members of the team back at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., initially balked at the demand. But the Maps app had become a priority for Apple, so eventually the company complied. The Diaoyu Islands, when viewed in Apple Maps in mainland China, continue to appear on a larger scale than surrounding territories."
Apple has, and will, fold to government pressure faster than a lawn chair.
1. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/12/08/the-information...