this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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[–] madeinthebackseat@lemmy.world 167 points 9 months ago (5 children)

Let's see, in the 80s we rapidly moved much of our technology manufacturing to China, and now we're shocked that China has this knowledge?

[–] Diplomjodler@feddit.de 90 points 9 months ago (1 children)

But a lot of shareholder value was created! Won't anybody think of the poor shareholders?

[–] philodendron@lemdro.id 48 points 9 months ago

"The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them"

[–] Fedizen@lemmy.world 47 points 9 months ago

but hey we crushed labor unions and nobody can afford anything anymore except rich people. Win-win-win

[–] bruhduh@lemmy.world 32 points 9 months ago (2 children)
[–] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Look out! That Pikachu manufactures semiconductors!

[–] bruhduh@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)
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[–] VampyreOfNazareth@lemm.ee 3 points 9 months ago

Summoning demons can be risky eh Nanashi

[–] novibe@lemmy.ml 17 points 9 months ago (4 children)

That’s because the Chinese experience was very peculiar. When American and European investors and industry giants went abroad to outsource manufacturing, they brought in the capital and left with the profits. But the capital, and technology or knowledge, never spread in the colonies or neo-colonies. When China “opened up”, they were real clever about it. They said: “sure, you can open your factories here where there is an abundance of cheap labor. But in exchange, we want the knowledge and technology”. And since opening up China to foreign capital has been the wet dream of capitalists and proto-capitalists for the past several hundreds of years, they accepted the deal. So China was left with the know-how to be able to set-up their own national industries. And the profits of exporting manufactured goods was used for strategic industries and infrastructure, unlike most colonial and neo-colonial experiences where the profits are just pocketed by a national bourgeoisie.

[–] demonsword@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

And the profits of exporting manufactured goods was used for strategic industries and infrastructure, unlike most colonial and neo-colonial experiences

that's because most colonial/neo-colonial experiences are about raw resources extrativism

where the profits are just pocketed by a national bourgeoisie.

there quite a few billionaires in China

[–] novibe@lemmy.ml 2 points 9 months ago

There sure are billionaires in China. But they don’t control the political structure like the billionaires do in the US. They are controlled by the political structure. When has it been the last time the US or EU executed a billionaire for harming the environment?

[–] trolololol@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

Yeah na

Every time a factory opens in 3rd world the knowledge partially stays.

[–] Wanderer@lemm.ee 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

They just outright broke laws and stole shit.

Chinese are just a lot less honourable and trustworth. If they scam you that's your fault for being stupid, nothing wrong with scamming someone.

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[–] Mango@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

Holup. So they did it for the experience and that's working for them?

[–] Damage@feddit.it 7 points 9 months ago

But but they're supposed to be inferior humans! They shouldn't be able to compete with superior Americans!

[–] Andrenikous@lemm.ee 97 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Capitalists blame capitalist for capitalism. More news at 11

[–] coffeebiscuit@lemmy.world 32 points 9 months ago

Dammit! He’s greedier than me!

[–] markr@lemmy.world 65 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Capitalism and neoliberal globalization is great as long as your capitalist organizations are dominating the system. But that inevitably results in the emergence of other competitive capitalist organizations. Then it’s back to trade barriers, and when that fails, military conflict.

[–] bruhduh@lemmy.world 21 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It also leads to enshittification, Google Twitter and previous intel stagnation before rizen cpus were invented, subscription services everywhere and they always try to cut content and rise the prices, even subscription based cars like bmw and Mercedes, GPU prices overpricing, and Apple price gouging with additional 8gb of ram costing 500$ and apple vision pro USB 2.0 strap costing 300$, any market competition is beneficial for us commoners, it keeps corporations and their lobbyists at bay

[–] filister@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Don't forget here the Apple pro stand, that's literally a fancy monitor stand for the low price of 1099.

Or the printers that have toners with DRM and all the hardware parts having a DRM chip which invalidates perfectly capable third party components.

[–] owen@lemmy.ca 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)
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[–] themurphy@lemmy.world 54 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Free market and competition. We don't like that now, huh?

[–] agitatedpotato@lemmy.world 23 points 9 months ago

Correct. The free market is only good when it's enriching them, if it's helping anyone else be it citizens or another country, then something is wrong and we can pay an economist to tell you so too!

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 36 points 9 months ago

VCs? Regular Cs are enough.

[–] CosmoNova@lemmy.world 31 points 9 months ago (1 children)

A whole bunch of assumptions with not a lot to back it up there. Who exactly says Chinese semiconductors and AI are world class all of the sudden? The source they linked doesn‘t imply any of that. It states a couple of traitors to the free world support the Chinese genocide with a couple billion. That‘s pretty vile but hardly makes China a powerhouse in those fields. It‘s a band-aid fix to a broken leg.

[–] General_Effort@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

2 days ago there was a post here, presenting a LLM derived from Qwen. Qwen is basically Alibaba's counterpart to Meta's Llama.

ETA: Qwen on github

What that means for Chinese AI is not something I could say.

[–] CosmoNova@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Qwen has been around for a while, but from what I can tell it didn't really stick out after it's initial hype. Alibaba claims it's open source when it isn't and people are naturally suspicious about it. User experiences also seem to be really mixed about it. And maybe the latest update caught up on the likes of Mixtra, but that's not breaking new grounds or makes China an AI powerhouse by any means.

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[–] Caligvla@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 points 9 months ago (4 children)

It always amuses me just how much of a hate boner America has for China. The absolute fury and indignation that those guys on the other side of the pond are catching up to them is funny to me.

[–] KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 11 points 9 months ago

The US has had so much soft and hard power the idea of a new hyper power is baffling to those with authority

[–] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

My big question is: if they've got this much of a hate boner, why not just build the chips in Taiwan? I hear they're even better than China at this shit. Or is this one of those "we're pretending there's only one China for the overlords" articles?

[–] stembolts@programming.dev 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

From a planning perspective, the West must assume Taiwan is already "lost" and merged into China. Therefore the rational action to take is to begin spinning up as much chip production as possible in the interim, while continuing to rely on Taiwan's manufacturing.

Fun fact, the guy who founded TSMC was an immigrant working in tech firms in the mid-late 1900s but was unable to get promotions due to American racism against asians. So he said, "Aight guess I'll go back and make my own company."

The US had the TSMC founder and drove him away with hate.

Please do yourself a favor and check out podcasts covering this topic, there are some good ones.

[–] Oiconomia@feddit.de 3 points 9 months ago

European Technology firms also fucked this up really hard. Philipps created ASML, NXP and had a founding 25% share in TSMC, but managed to win nothing from it. Due to Philipps short-sighted management none of these great wins in the semiconductor industry benefited the company at all and all three firms are now completly spum out and worth way more than Philipps. The TSMC share alone is now worth much more than Philipps Market Cap.

[–] DAMunzy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Got to have our ~~3~~ 2 minutes of hate and someone to direct it at!

Edit: I somehow extended the hatefest 50%. Corrected.

[–] Malek061@lemmy.world 0 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Stealing. The word is stealing not catching up. It really doesn't matter matter because China lacks the creativity and forethought to make the tech work. That's a cultural problem.

[–] hark@lemmy.world 25 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Stealing is how you catch up. Imaginary property laws were also lax in the US as it was growing. By the way, the "they just steal, they have no creativity" line was the same old bullshit trotted out against Japan while Japan was outcompeting us. Unfortunately for Japan, they're a US ally and were bullied into adopting a financially-engineered ticking time bomb that exploded and left them with multiple lost decades.

[–] filister@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago

Sorry but the patent system you have in the US is absolute bullshit that benefits very little and is prone to abuse by patent trolls.

[–] Malek061@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

Japan literally took American ideas and make them work. Japan brought over American innovators who were stifled at GM and Ford. They put in the production that killed Detroit.

[–] Hacksaw@lemmy.ca 19 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Absolute garbage comment. Our entire LIVES and upbringing is assimilation of thoughts and ideas. We literally have sayings like "imitation is the most sincere form of flattery".

Capitalism comes in and decides that ideas, in and of themselves, need to be monetized and commodified. We create parents and trademarks and copyrights, all flying in the face of millennia of human cultural evolution. Using this, we decide that copying is stealing. Absolute insanity. Stealing is wrong because it DEPRIVES someone of the use of their property. Copying doesn't deprive anyone from shit!

We have a system where if someone finds a good way of doing something, but doesn't play nice with others, we DEMAND other people to use INFERIOR ways of doing that thing so we don't make the original inventor mad. This might, maybe, make sense with people, but corporations own just about every useful patent we've ever made, corporations aren't people, we don't owe them shit. ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS! IDEAS ARE NOT PROPERTY! IMITATION ISN'T STEALING! How did we even get here?

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[–] HerbalGamer@sh.itjust.works 7 points 9 months ago

Oh yeah the famously uncreative and uninventive chinese culture. They've never done anything, I'm sure.

[–] filister@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Have you seen the last couple of years who your most brilliant minds are? Hint most of them are either Asians or descendants of Asian parents.

Like it or not, but there are a lot of really smart people in maths, science and IT people in China and Asia who are much smarter than Europeans and/or white Americans.

Coming from a European.

[–] friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 20 points 9 months ago

No fucking shit.

[–] cyd@lemmy.world 15 points 9 months ago

blames American venture capitalists

Me personally, I think the Chinese had something to do with it.

[–] moitoi@feddit.de 8 points 9 months ago

But regulations are bad and the free market is good! /s

[–] Malek061@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago

Not with top down, hierarchical societal conformation. No room to foster innovation.

[–] buzz86us@lemmy.world 0 points 9 months ago

China is better at capitalism than we are. They have actual competition in markets.

[–] eskimofry@lemmy.world 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Of course... non-americans can't build chips and AI because they are inferior

[–] ilmagico@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago

Right? I don't known why some Americans think they're the only one capable of building AIs, and if someone else did it, they must be stealing it... (or more likely it's an excuse)

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