You get more phone per phone

Good for them.

The adherence to open source in the form of free labor for corporations is not about freedom or availability whatsoever.

Race science is back, baby!

I didn’t mention chattel slavery or indentured servitude. There have been slave economies outside the American colonies / the United States.

There is no evidence of slavery in Xinjiang, though there is a network of propagandists tied to Adrian Zenz, the US State Department, and the Australian equivalent who make dubious claims.

Neither of those are exactly quality organizations whose claims should be taken at face value, though Amnesty International has made no claims about slave labor and HRW doesn’t itself have any statements about that so far as I can tell.

Though this is beside the point as, again, we are talking about EV manufacturing. Please do your best to not support the orientalist implications throughout this thread. If you would like to make a specific claim, go ahead and do so, but be ready to explain it with more than NGO or State Department name dropping.

Already responded to this one comment over.

A US State Department “fact sheet” from 2021 that cites no sources. Amazing.

Anyways, Chinese companies make electric cars in modern factories with normal workers paid for their labor. Y’all are peddling in orientalist assumptions that only work on people that know nothing at all about the country aside from, say, US State Department single page propaganda pieces.

Depends on which part of the EU you are in. There is a reason the poor of Poland move to places like the UK.

Though this is neither here nor there as the original allegation was slave labor, which is simply a lie.

That’s true but the logic applies. The EU is part of the imperial core that eats from that trough and in turn supports its maintainer. It is simply following the US’ lead.

Slave labor is a system in which a person is bought sold and indentured to a master for a substantial duration, often life. Their labor is coerced as property of that master.

That is not how China produces cars. They use highly automated systems and paid workers like everywhere else. While Chinese workers are paid less due to the forces of unequal exchange (a system imposed by the US) and an export economy (a system usually imposed by the US but more of a 4D chess move by China to develop productive forces, with the US gladly taking the deal for exploitation), that is not really why the cars are so much cheaper. It is because China has highly concentrated industry and a much less financialized system.

Speaking about “fair” is amazing in this context. The US is simply trying to protect domestic monopsony industry and to damage Chinese industry. This is a jingoistic and corporate policy.

That is a funny way to say, “our AI models suck so we have people provide manual answers”.

I… agree but isn’t then contradicting your previous point that innovation will come from large companies if they only try to secure monopolies rather than genuinely innovate?

Nope.

I don’t understand from that perspective who is left to innovate if it’s neither research

Who said there’s no more research?

not the large companies… and startups don’t get the funding either.

Both are, on average, just doing boring work minorly translating research in the hope to become more monopolistic, just at different levels of the good chain. The former eats the latter.

It is of course up to data providers to say when it’s being used incorrectly. They can do that whenever they want to. Why couldn’t they? It is in no way unprofessional to call out bullshit.

Having seen and done this transition I can tell you that companies do very little for innovation compared to university researchers. Companies are exclusively focused on profit, they don’t do the five to ten year moonshot project unless they are already a massive corporation, not a startup, and even then the massive companies want the easiest thing to translate to a product and begin making money. At best they have engineers that make scaling up more practical, and while that is a fun and interesting thing, it is also very straightforward and is something a company has to avoid screwing up, not investing in massively to make it right.

I’ve seen several companies that did literally nothing except swap a couple things on their production line and call it a day. The only transition from research to industry was an IP agreement and a few meetings.

Large companies are not looking for innovation by buying startups, they are usually looking to secure monopolies. Sometimes they want the product and to work it into their own product offerings. This is often a way to vertically integrate more, not innovate. They bring in-house because they see a competitor emerging and want to hedge their bets or because they see a way to take over a market by just doing the same thing. Sometimes it is just a way to hire some employees that seem pretty competent and thereby deprive your competitors. Large companies operate with a monopoly mindset. This is also why Google kills every project that they declare won’t scale into a huge money-maker (they really mean take over a market).

Small companies are often started with the plan of actually making and selling their product long-term but run headfirst into the fact that their industry is dominated by just 3 companies that will gladly do the one-two punch of threatening to bleed you legally with nonsense lawsuits while offering to buy you up. Or, on the flipside, just copying your work and changing it just enough that they know they could bleed you legally even though they have broken IP law. Usually, they would rather just buy you out at less than you are worth but enough to make the VCs happy.

The source of their data says they were using it incorrectly, that it simply does not mean what they reported. I have not gone into exactly what their data is, just that it was reported as total new funded startups and the data provider says, “that’s not what this is”.

It also looks like these numbers might not even be accurate: https://nitter.privacydev.net/NuryVittachi/status/1834747250666508679

I would expect a decrease in VC startups based on the way China is tackling finsnce, though.

I think innovation will happen more through universities and existing large companies. Most research and innovation happens through universities anyways and China is currently having an academia boom.

Companies like Huawei are way up, and domestic consumption is slowly rising.

The metrics here are those most relevant to finance, which is not synonymous with innovation. Startups are notorious money sinks that are only invested in due to a promise of monopoly profits later, basically a gamble. They usually fail, and dramatically. Finance is necessary for private capital investment and liquidity but when it grows too large it becomes parasitic and also tries to dictate policy. The real estate bubble that China is now dealing with is a direct result of financialization and an expectation that it would be “too big to fail” and that real estare finance would get bailed out by government.

China is tackling this issue by limiting the impact of finance on its economy, changing its lending terms and what it guarantees, including not bailing out real estate finance. This has the direct effect of making startups and venture capital less common as they simply can’t make as much money from pure speculation. They don’t have a state-funded safety net for their worst gambles and interest rates are higher.

Overall, this is a good development. China’s finance sector absolutely needed to be limited and it is good for the state to take on a greater role in running companies.

Being “ready” means nothing, it is just a thought in your head. Praxis requires that you act. You aren’t ready for an uprising if you aren’t actually organizing towards one yourself. And I have yet to meet a successful revolutionary organizer that tries to sheepdog for literally genocidal Democrats.

I haven’t advocated for “doing nothing”, I have advocated against supporting genocide from both a moralizing and electorally strategic angle. I choose these angles because it is the language most people will understand and because the propaganda that I oppose in the process teaches people to give up leverage and cheerlead, which is literally disempowering.

If people want recommendations on something positive to do, I would recommend joining the Uncommitted Movement if you prefer electoralism. If you are interested in politics that also extends beyond electoralism, I would be happy to provide advice on any local groups and reading materials.

They will not exist so long as you vote for “lesser evil” genociders. Why would there be? You still vote for them! They don’t need to listen to you at all and will gladly continue the project that is in their overall material interest in supporting Israel. You show up in their databases as, “Likely Democratic voter” and so they send some volunteers to try to get you to vote and they ask you for money. That is how you are thought of, and I mean this literally. That is how they curate and use their information. The rest is PR for how to ensure you don’t take these looney anti-genociders too seriously.

There is no “push from there” without leverage. If they don’t do what you want, what are you going to do? With what power? If you mske a threat, why is it credible? We are kept docile and ineffective through electoral illogic that serves the interests of the existing political class and cannot imagine gaining or wielding power in any practical way.