Tag: China

  • keep domestic wages low + sell to rich countries = profit!

    If you do not buy your domestic products and instead export them to richer countries, you can underpay your workers and generate a surplus. This means you don’t need to optimize employee pay and production. Your employees stay poorer, and are thus more desperate and less feisty, and have little buying power, but they are…

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  • The US needs, even wants China. From the revealed preferences files: Aside from rhetorical commitments to restoring domestic industrial capacity and a variety of China Select Committee investigations that tend to go ignored, there’s near-weekly evidence that Congress and the current administration are not entirely serious about leading a whole of nation effort to eliminate…

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  • Outrage about TikTok, so heated a few years ago, now seems like a time capsule from another era. That the negligent, self-dealing new arrangement seems to be going ahead with so little opposition shows not that TikTok has become safer, but that so much else in America has become more dangerous. From The Economist, gift-link:…

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  • 🤖 A stark analysis of how a withdrawing U.S., a resurgent Russia, and a coordinated China have placed Europe in existential danger, urging radical unification and rearmament. 🔗 Europe is under siege

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  • Checking in neocon globalization dreams, ~40 years later

    Comparing China now to the US in the past isn’t just a convenient rhetorical trick, it’s arguably causal. While the full, more nuanced story deserves its own piece, the decline of the US’s Rust Belt is definitely directly linked to the rise of China. A fate sealed by political decisions, primarily in the US, to…

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  • China Has a Different Vision for AI. It Might Be Smarter. – AI applications outside of the consumer sector: “In February, the city announced the release of an agricultural AI model, using technology from the Chinese startup DeepSeek, which gives local farmers guidance on crop selection, planting and pest control, according to a local government…

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  • What happens when one storytelling style dominates the world? – ‘I realised this, at first, when I was reading Strange Tales of the Chinese Studio, a novel written at the end of the Ming dynasty. I was amused that each story ended in a way that would make most Western readers (and probably modern Chinese…

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  • Mexico and China didn’t take manufacturing jobs from the Rust Belt – ”A big missing part of the story: Interstate competition. The Rust Belt’s manufacturing decline isn’t primarily about jobs going to Mexico. It’s about jobs going to Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee.”

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  • [Deepseek: The Quiet Giant Leading China’s AI Race](https://www.chinatalk.media/p/deepseek-ceo-interview-with-chinas) – ”Open source, publishing papers, in fact, do not cost us anything. For technical talent, having others follow your innovation gives a great sense of accomplishment. In fact, open source is more of a cultural behavior than a commercial one, and contributing to it earns us respect.…

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  • Swings and roundabouts – or slides? – “German policymakers made some strategic bets some decades ago that have backfired significantly over time: dependence on Russian energy, underinvestment, over-reliance on parts of the manufacturing sector as China has gained ground – in electric vehicle production for example – and a failure to keep up with digital…

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  • Deepseek: The Quiet Giant Leading China’s AI Race – ”Open source, publishing papers, in fact, do not cost us anything. For technical talent, having others follow your innovation gives a great sense of accomplishment. In fact, open source is more of a cultural behavior than a commercial one, and contributing to it earns us respect.…

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  • A free, powerful Chinese AI model just dropped — but don’t ask it about Tiananmen Square – Great, now the AIs are getting political.

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  • China tech tariffs: Which countries will be affected – Round up of how current tariffs are going, and what they are.

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  • The Chilling of TikTok – Yeah, never good for a tech company to be get its feelings hurt: “the bigger concern will simply be the distraction of it all. Product decisions will take longer. Timelines will slip. Executives will be absent. Employees will leave.”

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  • The Super App Window Has Closed – “58% of online adults in metro China said that they trust the content that brands post on social media, compared with just 20% in the US” // As someone quipped on The Dithering Podcast, no one is going to trust their money to the Bank of Twitter, let…

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  • 🗂 Link: No country for old men

    Lots of Chinese people ask to have their picture taken with my daughter. No one asks for a picture with me. Source: No country for old men

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  • Link: Naspers plans to spin off its Tencent stake and other holdings

    Naspers, which started out as an Afrikaans newspaper group a century ago, has since gone on to invest in a host of startups, mostly in emerging markets. The runaway success of Tencent has created an enviable headache: Naspers has become too big for the Johannesburg stock exchange, where it now makes up a quarter of…

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  • Link: Are security concerns over Huawei a boon for its European rivals?

      Between 2015 and 2018 Huawei’s share rose from 24% to 28%; Nokia’s dipped from 20% to 17% and Ericsson’s from 15% to 13%. An escalation in the war on Huawei might prompt Beijing to retaliate by kicking Western firms out of China. That would be a blow to the Nordic duo. China accounted for…

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  • 🗂 What’s wrong with Huawei, and why are countries banning the Chinese telecommunications firm?

    > The focus of many security agencies and countries on Huawei’s involvement in 5G systems raises the stakes, too: The next generation of wireless technology is expected to fuel even more connectivity in the “internet of things,” linking smart cars, smart homes and smart cities together. Billions of devices will be involved, all communicating with…

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  • Link: The sky’s the limit

    ‘But China could add 13% to its GDP by 2025, relative to a baseline, if it increased women’s employment, hours and productivity as quickly as the leading countries in its region or peer group, McKinsey says. That would translate into an extra $2.6trn by 2025 (an economy the size of France). In India the relative…

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