Trump's Middle East AI Deal: "Just Count the Server Racks"
chinatalk.media
chinatalk.media
The key is to build a system that everyone more or less consider themselves better off than any alternative.
Also, potentially selling latest gen chips to China is an overblown problem.
And not just datacenters. The middle east are investing in bring up a lot of other industries to ensure their long term post-oil prosperity: tourism, corporate tax heavens, sports & e-sports, expos & events, maybe aerospace and military manufacturing etc.
In this scenario, the Saudis have limitless wealth and own the valley tech money bros. When you hear them speak, you’re listening to a proxy for MBS. Everything that the supposed new American nationalists say about China and trade imbalance has already happened with the Gulf States.
The lazy way to see when these arguments break down is to listen to Elon babble about Mars when he’s talking about it.
Yes, but did that stop the entire western private industries from collectively moving their manufacturing to China leaving the west exposed to the CCP? When do CEOs ever think long term about second order effects or national security interests? It's all about the shareholder returns and next quarter baby.
And if your competitors are moving to UAE and have cheaper compute than you, that automatically puts you at a disadvantage so you'll have no choice but to move to the UAE yourself or go bust. It's the China playbook all over again.
US => US elites
Autocrats hate the rule of law, they just like it as an instrument. Also, they think in spheres of influence where the strong party can "eat". That is why the ideologues behind the current US insurrection of autocracy have such difficulties with the EU and are hell bent on destroying it.
It might sound crazy, but their ideologues think in terms of power polars, with the US, Russia and China as the three world powers, with some reservoirs between them. In their view Europe is such a reservoir, as is the Middle East and Africa.
The same way as the Kremlin views Ukraine. Our problem is that we have started to believe that history was over. That fascism = Hitler, and so cannot happen anymore.
But the human struggle against autocracy will be forever.
- On an optimistic note: autocrats are extremely vulnerable. It is a small group of people that needs to parasitize on the public. It is a matter of people waking up just in time.
- On a pessimistic note: this time it is possible to lock up people in information silos and spy 24/7 on them. All ingredients what one would call a tech dystopia are ready. Also: Europe is being cut off from critical supplies needed for defense. This is how nazi Germany got suffocated. This is also why there is such a strong focus in the US on Greenland and Canada. Might makes right, they only need to normalize it to the US public.
The war to shape the fascist mind has already begun, in all kinds of ways, step-by-step. In the mean time, the press will present things like if they are neutral. Yet, even if press people are starting to get nervous at this moment and want to correct course, they are likely to find they have forfeited their own space for doing their actual job. The repercussions are real. Case in point: The Gulf of America. A loyalty test needed for the Gleichschaltung.
The focus on Trump and circus eats the bandwidth away that the public needs for introspection: how much do I normalize autocracy? That is the first war, the others will follow.
This is a great example of how incredibly stupid smart people can be. They take obvious bullshit at face value, then spend their lives arguing over insane made-up details of that bullshit. It'd be funny if they didn't end up enabling the bullshit grifters.
Trump is very simple. Give him praise, give him money and he'll give you some public concession he controls. He operates like every other despot in the history of the world. Nothing new or interesting about it.
You're an Emir and want some chips? Give him praise, give him money, and he'll change the rules so you can have your chips. If your thinking is more complicated than this, it's wrong.
A lot of people forget that the basis of the European Economic Area and European Union was to promote free trade with the sole intent purpose of making future wars unthinkable.
As in, if Britain depends on France for power, and France depends on Britain for pharmaceuticals- going to war with each other becomes intentionally difficult to the point of near impossibility without extremely good reasons.
If you want your opponent to know that you don't mind going to war, a good option is to ensure you don't "depend" on them for anything, and to cut them off from getting good things from you that might aid them.
And that was one of the reason for letting China into the WTO: the thinking is they'd prosper and the citizens would see the advantages of capitalism and economic liberalization would lead to political liberalization.
How's Chinese political liberalization coming along?
(Remember that Europeans generally had political liberalization before WW2.)
Same as it was in Ukraine, a slow groundswell and then an all at once revolution due to the "powers that be" not listening.
https://www.economist.com/china/2024/09/05/liberalism-is-far...
Also, there was significant trade before WW1 (we didn't recover that peak in terms of trade until the late 90s) and it didn't stop war. Saying that opposing free trade is the same thing as declaring war on your neighbours is nonsensical (and I assume relates to something going on US politics).
Perhaps that’s “no true Scotsman” for you with respect to free trade, but it is a version of it designed to avoid continuing the centuries of armed conflict that defined Europe.
How can you say this when it's explicitly one of the four fundamental freedoms in the EU?
I can't even read the rest of your comment when you're so completely wrong right off the bat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_single_market
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_economic_freedoms
To list them here:
* Free movement of goods
* Free movement of services
* Free movement of capital
* Free movement of labor/people
This is a peculiarly modern viewpoint with people raised on social media: saying something is a good as doing it. What you say matters, what you do doesn't.
To just go through the list: there isn't free movement of goods externally, there isn't free movement of goods WITHIN the EU (again, be clear...we aren't talking about the EU trading with other countries, this is countries within the EU trading with each other), there isn't free movement of capital WITHIN the EU, there is free movement of people...sometimes, but Schengen has been repeatedly suspended by member states because of the political instability it causes.
Btw...all of this public, the EU has been trying to harmonize services for two decades (before this, they didn't even try), the EU has been trying to harmonize capital markets furiously since the Euro crisis...it hasn't worked because of the issues with the Euro, central bank policy, and the weakness of French/German banks.
Nobody was talking about free trade outside of the EU, when the whole point of the single-market was to prevent war in a region that had not seen total peace for more than 20 years for the preceding 2,000+ years: the point becomes much more about that region.
70 years without a major war is absolutely incredible. Even "the long peace" had minor wars.
The EU does promote free trade, and signs deals when it can, and I was talking about internally anyway since that's whats relevant here; the EU is made up of countries that no longer go to war with each other. Which is the entire point.
For one, China isn't a free market. If they were perhaps it would be more fair to allow them to easily compete.
For another, countries having (access to) certain capabilities may be negative as life is more than just about commerce and money:
> Democratic countries’ economies are mainly set up as free market economies with redistribution, because this is what maximizes living standards in peacetime. In a free market economy, if a foreign country wants to sell you cheap cars, you let them do it, and you allocate your own productive resources to something more profitable instead. If China is willing to sell you brand-new electric vehicles for $10,000, why should you turn them down? Just make B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps, sell them for a high profit margin, and drive a Chinese car.
> Except then a war comes, and suddenly you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms. Oops! The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future. Manufacturing doesn’t just support war — in a very real way, it’s a war in and of itself.
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now
China (and others) may have goals other than just making money or a middle-class life sty.e
- Predatory export subsidies.
- Protective non-monetary barriers to import/export.
- Theft of intellectual property.
- Monopolization of dual-use and essential manufactured products.
- Two sides that are not posturing for war.
- One side that is not disregarding international law.
In the case of AI, the scale of CCP military command & control, and intelligence collection is vast due the size of the PLA, PLAN, MSS, etc. Denying them AI to fuse and coordinate may be a lost cause ultimately, but time has a value all its own and that's what the US is after as it - and its allies - reconfigure to defend the SCS, India & the Pacific in general.
A big difference is that the Biden administration did want you to have an EV--they just wanted it to be American made. Hence the large subsidies to promote the US EV industry.
The Trump administration does not want you to have an EV. Not only does the bill they just passed in the house remove the subsidies it adds an annual $250 penalty for each EV you own.
They say that the $250 is to make up for the gas tax you aren't paying, so as to support the roads, but that is a clear lie. If it were to make up for the gas tax it would be set so that on average an EV driver pays about the same as an ICE driver. That would be about $95.
(Also, the $250 penalty is indexed to inflation whereas the gas tax is not, and has not changed since 1993, so it will be sticking it even more to EV owners as time goes on).
It's a bad thing if you believe China is subsidising BYD and others (including with the use of slave labour) in order to destroy non-Chinese automotive makers by flooding external markets with cheap cars. Add on top the fact that modern EVs are rolling surveillance platforms...
Irrelevant since that is also true of modern non-EVs.
It can't be both.
>why is it suddenly a bad thing
There is no "suddenly". These arguments have existed as long as nation states have. A country does not like it when another country attempts to undermine its companies and manufacturing capacity with unfair competition. Just look at all the tariffs and lawsuits between the US and the EU over state subsidies of airline manufacture over the last decades. It's not a China-only issue and never has been.
> Is this a capitalist economy where anyone can compete
Capitalist economies are not magical natural occurrences. They result from rules, in this case those agreed between countries. The WTO exists for a reason. State subsidies and a counties degree of protectionism will always play a part in economic discussions.
Ford/GM wants to make expensive, unreliable and then sell "connected car" subscription as well.
This is only possible due to political and regulatory capture when they should go bankrupt.