Miscellaneous News

NoetherSpudCharge said:

I hate to comment on second-rate political analyses coming from seemingly respectable figures (Kevin Rudd) b/c these guys have already embarrassed themselves enough by putting their "thoughts" out there. But I'll make an exception here coz I wasted an hour of my life a few days ago listening to this circle-jerk from the Western NatSec ThinkTank crowd. The problem with the entire epsidoe (basically a book promotion by Rudd, head of the Asia Society) is not that he made no good points about XJP and the CPC, it's that Rudd's exposition at its most basic is just a rehashed Cold-War-1.0 style propaganda piece that stresses the spectre of Chinese Leninism. It's almost as if it's a focus-group-refined, by way of an Oxford D.Phil, warning to Western intellectuals who may be interested in "democractic socialism" (personally, when Rudd mentions Leninism, it actually makes me feel better about the CPC's future prospects against degeneration and corruption as a disciplined party that's focused on its historical tasks is far better for China than one that sits around in a sewing circile discussing the finer points of political morality, to paraphrase Lenin).

Rudd's references to his attempt years-ago to draw-out XJP over glasses of Australian Reds during a cold-night in the PM's residence in Canberra and to his fortuitous presence in Beijing in late May 1989 suggest to me that he likely has been a valued intelligence asset for the Five Eyes agencies thoughout his entire adult career, starting from his first Australian Foreign Services posing to Sweden.

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Yeah, exactly, could not agree more, agree 1000%

There was a transcript of that video, read some of it then I stopped because,

1. All Rudd did was repeat old stereotypes, which showed he was as unimaginative as he can be. Suppose China was unimaginative sticking to the Leninism. Where would China be today?

2. It is clear that Rudd is CIA man. What else is he going to say.

Chevalier said:

I feel like we are all correct when it comes to the motivations of the anti China Chinese crowd.
it’s more that Chinese ppl who are anti China tend to be on the fringes of society, ie cult leaders, conmen, pimps and gangsters, but they are still genetically Chinese so they use the endogenous Chinese intelligence cultivated from Millenia of scholarship and war and direct it against the Chinese state. Some of them are simply selfish and self interested and willing to bring ruin to their Chinese compatriots if only they get rich. A lot of Chinese compradors of the opium war era got rich this way as well.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2078263234508022220

I imagine China would have been much more amenable to this proposition if the French had not partaken in the century of humiliation. Now? Let them suffer.

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Remember recently France opened a commission to look into returning treasures stolen by them? Well now you know what part of the price will be for that to happen.

Europe wants a Plaza Accords for China. No, it's China that gets to do one on them. Yes they think it's possible to make China surrender like Japan did. China ain't Japan that knew its limits needing the West in order for them to survive. The list of things China needs from them is shrinking day by day. China is in the driver's seat. China is the one that gets to dictate terms if they want to be able to survive in China's world. What are they going to do? They're already used that leverage when they attempted to decouple and thought China needed them more.

The truth is the West that believes in capitalism and the rule of law was always a lie. That was to protect their interests and violate them when the situation didn't favor them. They didn't think about what's fair to all when everything was to their advantage. The fact is trying to punish China for not doing what they want is going to have the same consequences for them as if China just ignored them.

FriedButter said:

The northern communist smoke is blowing down. It’s blowing right into our great American cities. And you know who’s responsible? Canadian China. They are not our friend, folks. They are taking advantage of us like everybody else. But we’re going to tariff the crap out of that illegal alien smoke crossing the border.

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horse said:

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Interesting how this Chinese-made box of matches discloses the number of matches as being +/- 5%. Nowadays, I'm noticing in western food products, it is more and more common for the manufacturer to just label whatever weight measurement they want and hope the customer doesn't check. I've personally weighed a bag of lay's potato chips just this month because it felt light and it came out to around 20% less than the advertised weight. If you go on reddit, for example the mildlyinfuriating subreddit, you'll see this kind of complaint more and more with all kinds of food products from powdered sugar to flour to meat. This is in addition to the sneaky accelerating shrinkflation that has been taking place the last 5 years. More evidence of decaying material conditions in a late state hyper capitalist society in which the trust compact made with the customer is too expensive to fulfill going forward. Also the suggestion to complain to whatever government weights and measurements agencies usually result in no action because all the "unprofitable" government agencies have been gutted to nothing. It's a free for all out there.

horse said:

Yeah, exactly, could not agree more, agree 1000%

There was a transcript of that video, read some of it then I stopped because,

1. All Rudd did was repeat old stereotypes, which showed he was as unimaginative as he can be. Suppose China was unimaginative sticking to the Leninism. Where would China be today?

2. It is clear that Rudd is CIA man. What else is he going to say.

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These days no one seems to care if he exists. He is simply a relic that no longer has a purpose once he is no longer in leadership. Whatever happens to Australia will be dictated by what nation leads the world. That is how Australia is really, it's leadership's tends to drift towards who ever has control over its economy. Because China controls the EV car markets, Australia is drifting towards Chinese cars because of this. In the end, as I believe Australia will eventually become a vasal of China once the USA is economically and militarily spent. Once that happens, the leadership will ultimately follows China's tune, especially when the USA simply doesn't provide anything worth a damn. When one thinks about, this is more or less why the liberal party has collapsed so badly because like Kevin Rudd, they have no vision except follow the USA like a loose bitch, all these pundits will in the end cease to exist one way or the other

supercat said:

Moronic take of the day: EVs save gas - but at what cost?

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2077932592876183814

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This reflects the true reason why the West wants to shut out Chinese products. It's not really due to Chinese "subsidies" and "excess capacity"; after all who complains about getting wealthfare that must be paid by an opponent? No, it's because at 1/10th of the cost, Chinese products drastically reduce Western governments' tax revenues.

As usual, every accusation is a confession.

I fail to understand why the reckless Indian policy of mandating E20 fuel is the fault of the car manufacturer Suzuki. Most cars are not designed for high ethanol content fuel. Indian court orders Suzuki to replace an Indian doctor's car because of faulty fuel.

China also played a role, with import prices rising 0.9%, the biggest monthly move since January 2008, a possible reflection of tariff impacts. The 12-month increase was 1.3%, the largest yearly gain since the period from November 2021 to November 2022.

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US Imported Chinese product price are now rising at the fastest pace since 2008. 15% of US imports are sourced from China expect inflation to rise.

Whats with more and more countries having basically worthless currencies these days? Is it like Hunger games where slowly one by one countries get eaten up?

Phead128 said:

The problem of trying to ban Chinese models is it's trivially easy to post train fine-tune an open weight model to become a new (American) model. Just example, Cursor's Composer 2.5 is a post-trained fine-tune version of Kimi 2.5. Cursor never touts this but this is well known. It takes a Chinese model and re-makes it into another model. In what universe can you regulated/ban it? It's no longer Chinese anymore as it's post trained.

So think about this, they literally cannot ban it, so what can they do?

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They are going to do exactly what they have always done, gate keeping through certifications and standards, and the review panel will be chaired by the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI.

Certifications have always have secondary purposes in protecting the incumbents and shutting out new competitors. At the very beginning of the COVID pandemic, China's equivalent to N95 masks, the KN95, weren't allowed to be used in the US by healthcare workers because they aren't certified as N95 even though functionally they are the same. That is, until the US got so fucked, and healthcare workers stopped giving a shit, that they had no choice but to recognize KN95 as an N95 equivalent standard. See .

Standards are always set low enough for incumbents to pass, but high enough for foreign competitors not to pass. Sometimes, not even the incumbents can pass, but all the incumbents have to do is pay fines and send a few people under the bus, then they could continue to sell. It is essentially pay-to-play, but foreign companies can't emulate. See automobile emission standards.

In cases where you meet or even exceed standards, the authorities could just make up new standards just for you. See EV, specifically EU's attempt at forced tech-transfer. They could also outright ask for the impossible. See what US does with items made with cotton.

With LLMs, the US could only allow "certified" LLMs to be used commercially. The question is, what would China do in retaliation? Obviously, China could tank the US stocks, but the US administration would not need to worry about that after November.