Remember that “top U.S. general” who unequivocally and with 100% certainty told the U.S. that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction - which led to the longest “war”, for nothing, in U.S. history?
Well that was a whole conspiracy that was never prosecuted and was a special event. I take your point but do think that it was a very unique period in history.
I think the best course of action for China is lower the tone and try to have some business with Taiwan (I don’t know if they have it now) and from there go up until both side become partners.
Well they basically tried that already. They tried to strike up a trade agreement with the then ruling conservative power that would give China significant economic and thus political influence. But the Taiwanese people were smart enough to see through that. There was a popular uprising, the legislative building got occupied by student protestors, the agreement was retracted and the then president lost the next election in a landslide.
The DPP received significant funding from the US National Endowment for Democracy during that time. Coincidence? Probably not…
Same meddling shit that happened in Ukraine with Euromaidan and in China with Tiananmen Square. Even the US PsyOps teams themselves admit that they were responsible for those events.
I’d love to say that the Taiwanese people themselves came to the conclusion, but time and time again the US has showed that the people’s choice isn’t something they really respect abroad.
In these statements, it is clear that the NED has given significant support to Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP. Meanwhile, NED funding in East Asia is a fact. It’s blatant intervention into foreign democracies through American state-backed actors.
The following is a statement by the PRC’s Foreign Ministry, so feel free to ignore the colour commentary, but the details of who and where the NED funds are accurate. www.fmprc.gov.cn/…/t20220507_10683090.html
Meanwhile, the US 4th Psyop’s Division literally has released a public video claiming responsibility for orchestrating events in Euromaidan 2014 and Tiananmen Square 1989: youtu.be/VA4e0NqyYMw?si=t8ZSix96y2cTmUVJ
That video correlates strongly with the statements made by the Foreign Ministry of the PRC.
The DPP wasn’t even a very instrumental actor in the sunflower movement. It was largely student led and of those people that participated in it that went into politics, most went to different smaller parties. I lived in the country during the time that happened and to claim that foreign interference played any meaningful role is just absurd on its face. Maybe don’t try patronizing entire populaces from afar as if they somehow weren’t able to make their own decisions and come to their own conclusions.
The NED has been funding some NGOs for decades, so these groups, which prior to the sunflower movement mostly didn’t even exist and didn’t have an organizational structure to direct funds to in the first place surely were funded by them as well. Some absolutely impeccable and waterproof logic there.
So… Your argument is that if I “donate” a billion dollars to the Republican party in the US, that would have zero relation with the rise of conservative views in the US and that those views must have arisen organically?
China’s way of partnering is through domination, and under Xi it is no longer even a matter of opinion or interpretation. The Taiwanese know that well, while the rest of the world is readjusting after a half century of concessions and “trying to be good friends”.
China doesn’t believe in/wants/cares about a world order with all countries equal under the same international laws, and that’s what I personally find to be the scariest for the world’s stability in the long term (rather than the naive “democracies are good vs authoritarianisms are bad and hence we should align against CN/RU”).
China’s way of partnering is domination? Why are you projecting the European project onto your political enemies? Domination is how the North Atlantic has “partnered” with the rest of the world for the last 600 years. China is providing an alternative.
You think China doesn’t believe in international law when that’s essentially the only position it has been expressing and espousing for decades? Again, you’re projecting. The USA has no interest in all countries being equal under international law. The USA is the scariest and most dangerous for world stability in the long run. Of the most bombed countries in the world, the US bombed the top 4 and all of them around China (Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam).
The USA has politicians like Condoleeza Rice saying that invading sovereign nations is a war crime when she was a major architect of the US invading Iraq. Many of the countries you’re talking about are literally British construction. You think The Phillipines is named after someone who lives in that region? You think the borders of African nations are naturally straight?
It’s fucking ridiculous how blind you are to the projection.
You have no idea what you’re talking about. Rice was the US Secretary of State. You think the only politicians are elected officials? She was an active member of the Republican party and she held political power through the executive branch of the US government. Just because the manner of filling the office of Secretary of State is appointment and not election doesn’t mean she’s not a politician.
And if you think I’m a shill for China, when I have never been there, don’t speak or read the language, and don’t work in politics, international relations, international business, or journalism, then maybe you’re a little too sensitive to anyone holding a position that opposes yours because your position is completely unexamined and is constructed entirely by Western propaganda.
Actually yes, they do become aggressive. In fact they become overly aggressive, beyond what the situation calls for. Sort of like you, who goes immediately into ad hominem.
I went to ad hominem? I presented a position that opposed the commenter and the commenter accused me of being a shill for China. That is the literal definition of ad hominem.
You still haven’t responded to my comment except to say I’m a shill using scripted talking points. That is a personal attack, it is literally ad hominem - against the man.
And I see you’re still there too, waving your own takes under a pretence of knowledge and experience that inevitably more and more people can see as absent. Keep it up!
You think you can opine on the best course of action for China but don’t even know if they have business with the Island of Taiwan? Talk about arrogantly ignorant!
Read some history. No right to speak without investigation.
China and Taiwan are already some of each others’ largest trading partners. China is Taiwan’s, and Taiwan-China trade is so significant it’s almost half the US-China trade volume.
Peace is more profitable than war for basics everyone except the US. Only the US’ military industrial complex is so geared towards extracting maximum profit.
Sounds reasonable, even under very generous assumptions regarding the expansion of the Chinese army, there’s no way they can take Taiwan within the next few decades (unless big, but unlikely, changes in alliances in the region), according to military strategists. And by that time, those generous assumptions might no longer be tolerable for the Chinese economy.
I should spend the time to assemble my sources to oppose yours once I get on a computer, but one thing I found telling was that China’s current landing capability for infantry is in the low thousands whereas they would need in the high hundred thousands for minimal strategic goals, and this is the easy part in terms of shipbuilding. If they expect to invade opposed, they would need a whole fleet with anti naval and air capabilities which they don’t have and does take decades to build.
Well, there have been a lot of war games that currently show China losing but by a small margin. It’s likely that in less than a decade China would win by a small margin. According to many US generals.
So while your wrong, China almost certainly could take Taiwan in less than a decade, I would argue that there’s no chance in hell they would do it. Winning by a small margin here means millions if deaths if not nuclear war. This would be massacre that would make both Israel and Russia’s violence look down right peaceful.
And it’s not like China hasn’t shown it’s hand in what it would do. War is not China’s goal, a blockade is.
Are those games weighing Taiwan’s defense capabilities versus China alone? In practice China would be up against the USA, and Korea, and Japan, and the Philippines and a plausible economic and logistics alliance of most countries in the region. I am not a military strategist but the sheer numbers alone are not in favor of China, and that is ignoring the tactical challenges at play.
So if we believe the US military, then China can already win. Though many argue US military says this just to get more funding.
I would err on the side of US just barely winning with all allies.
That said, I do not believe China would invade. It makes no sense. Anyone who claims this is could happen should have their credibility questioned. As China as I said already has shown its hand, it will blockade if it comes to it.
With the way the economy is going there, I can’t imagine that we can expect that China will remain as it is now in a few decades. The entire thing is ready to come tumbling down at any moment.
Taking Taiwan would lose so many lives it’s absolutely absurd. It’s complete unviable, especially when the US has already clearly demonstrated an alternative solution (just “not blockade” them like Cuba).
What are you talking about? The US sends billions to Israel every year. We support Israel because of a mix of wanting a permanent outpost in the middle east and Christian Zionism.
One would hope for an actual humanitarian ceasefire. But a humanitarian pause seems to be a pause to bandage up people and get them some food for a small period before allowing Israel to bomb those same people again.
A proper ceasefire is really needed right now, but the US and Europe seems very opposed, and is rather arguing about the terms ‘ceasefire’ and ‘pause’, as if that’s the most important thing right now.
This is a battle the voice actors won’t win, unfortunately. Maybe today, their voices are iconic. You can’t make a new Frozen movie or any other Disney Pixar without the original voice actor (you can, but it’s bad).
But in the future, the next “voice actor” for the next big Disney Pixar hit, is a pure AI from the start. Then they can control the voice forever. And that’s what they want.
I can’t see how the voice actors could possibly get around this, because they are suddenly expendable.
This is a battle the voice actors won’t win, unfortunately. Maybe today, their voices are iconic. You can’t make a new Frozen movie or any other Disney Pixar without the original voice actor (you can, but it’s bad).
But in the future, the next “voice actor” for the next big Disney Pixar hit, is a pure AI from the start. Then they can control the voice forever. And that’s what they want.
I can’t see how the voice actors could possibly get around this, because they are suddenly expendable.
Which was already a blow to voice actors. It used to really be primarily about talent first and then they started realizing they could create hype by hiring famous people for the jobs. Some were great at it (Robin Williams comes to mind) but the Chris Pratts of the world have no business voicing Mario, etc.
Yup and it’s going to happen for music, illustrations, photography, 3D models, scripts, lyrics, books and probably patents and full digital personalities. Some things will be harder to fully replace but big components will get replaced.
Some things will mostly just move on the spot for a while, like coding, as it won’t get much easier for the professional level, but basic elements will be possible to get fully replaced.
Hopefully wars in future can be decided by an AI battle instead of human life, like in episode 23 of Star Trek. Without the real deaths though. Well of course that part is fiction, but I wanted to add that little trivia.
Edit: I want to point out that most people have yet to understand how general AI works and I understand the downvotes. It’s scary and new, but you can prepare properly and get through this with very little friction if you act now. Cheers!
Wars are already simulated like crazy. AI battles will be going on right now working out if various ukraine battles are winnable, what will happen if Iran gets too riled up, etc.
It’ll happen in games first… nobody cares if ‘background NPC #15’ is generated by AI, and mostly they voice a few sentences at a time.
Suddenly, voices aren’t special… Voice actors have to have something else, like movie or book fame (Audible books seem to be mostly voiced by the authors, and I can’t see that going away). But only a few % really have that… I bet there are thousands of voice actors we wouldn’t even recognise the names of.
I have a lot of respect for voice actors and their work. Many of my favorite games are what they are because of them, because their work managed to bring those characters to life. However, I'm also a little bit torn on that matter, because many of them also decided to go after people using their voice models for modding projects to improve their favorite games. I don't mind if they go against those who try to monetize on that but the majority of that type of work is completely free, from the community, for the community, without any intentions to capitalize on it.
With that in mind I feel I at least lose sympathy for at least some of them, because they kinda act in a similar way as those big companies.
I'm still not a fan of said companies potentially gaining some sort of copyright on those actors voices either though, as they'd do the same thing, not caring about potential fair use.
A union doesn’t change the fact that voice actors are expendable. You can make a movie without hiring any voice actors. That’s a fact.
And hard bargaining by the union is likely accelerating the adoption of AI. The technology is immature right now and not really good enough… but it’s getting better and in part because of all the strikes it’s getting better really fast.
Taking away all of the actors is a really powerful motivator for Hollywood to start making movies without actors.
At the end of the day, it’s the producers who are the moneybags of the industry. All the money comes from them. If actors don’t have a good relationship with producers, then actors will not get paid. That’s got nothing to do with AI - producers can (and often do) choose to invest their money in something other than the arts.
It feels to me like a missing piece in this conversation is any consideration at all for balancing private profits against public costs when weighing whether or not a particular chemical or technology ought to be sold or used.
Yes, they’re better for solving the narrow use case of being a fire retardant now and that’ll save someone a little bit of money while it’s in use vs. using more water or soaps, but what of the costs thereby put on everyone whose drinking water now has that stuff in it and their increased cancer risks over time? Or what if instead of non-stick aluminum cookware, we used seasoned steel and iron cookware and nobody has to die of cancer because DuPont dumps its manufacturing waste in nearby waterways?
I remember having this conversation about fracking fluids and how “economically important” fracking was to the economy at the time, but those wells are tapped in a matter of a year or two and if the neighbor’s water is rendered undrinkable, that’s a spoiled resource that will remain spoiled for a long, long time- long after the profit is all gone and the well operators have abandoned those wells. If the mess costs more in externalities to others than it creates in profit and value for the people doing it, the thing has net negative value and probably ought not to be done.
The situation is much more nuanced than that. PFAS chemicals are in (almost literally) everything. Your nonslip shoes, your water proof jacket, your stain resistant table cloth, and your fire retardant mattress. On top of that the list of PFAS chemicals that the EPA is looking at is around 70 compounds long and only scratches the surface of all the compounds. The test to detect PFAS is in its 4th draft and can’t reliably detect low enough to reach the levels of concern, except in nearly pristine waters, so you can’t even detect if you have it in most water. The levels of concern that are being discussed are in the single digit PPT for individual compounds or 70 PPT total PFAS for some health advisory levels. Detection levels on normal waste water are generally somewhere between 50 and 4000 because the test is so sensitive other compounds fry the machine and it has to be diluted.
Another problem is that the thresholds are so low that it’s hard to draw any conclusions definitively. It’s associated with so many things you could write a novel: altered immune and thyroid function, liver disease, lipid and insulin dysregulation, kidney disease, adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes, cancer, decreased birth weight for infants, infertility, and more. The thing is that the only way to make a more conclusive connection is observing high exposure areas where people were drinking it at thousand times higher than the risk levels, so interpolating down smaller values has a lot of theoretical connections, but few smoking guns.
In general industries are trying to move away from PFAS, but the areas where they can’t include things like AFFF foam used for fighting jet fires. Some areas, particularly the military, are unlikely to make concessions as they want the best option available even if a close substitute is available. Your average PFAS using company; however, is moving away from PFAS in general.
EDIT: also the quantity of PFAS in most items is so small that it actually is below the threshold on an SDS for requiring it be reported, so trying to find out if a product you use has PFAS means you have to call the manufacturer. Maybe they can tell you, maybe they don’t want to tell you, or maybe they don’t know because it’s not listed on the SDS for the raw ingredients they use. In the industry it’s gotten into a near legal situation where companies are telling their suppliers and vendors to look for PFAS and certify that their products don’t have it, only for the vendor to turn around and do the same for their vendors and suppliers. The portion at the end of the article captures this well, an example would be, “Well we don’t use PFAS, but our machine has gaskets which probably have PFAS. This doesn’t touch the final product so are we able to use it?”
PFAS chemicals are in (almost literally) everything.
Yes, this is more or less the circumstance we arrive at when the burden of proof for consumer safety is on injured parties to prove the particular thing unsafe, or its use negligent after the fact, in courts against often powerful corporations with lots of money to spend defending themselves, as opposed to the burden being on would-be sellers to prove its use safe and environmentally responsible before bringing it to market.
I appreciate your post, it really is informative, and it explains how problematic it will be to connect injured parties with the people that harmed them, how now that some people depend on those things and will accept no substitute and will continue emitting more of it into the environment, that the rules as they are don’t provide real remedy or solutions for problems that were perfectly legal to create and everyone involved did nothing wrong.
That right there, really, prompts the question- would we really be that much worse off if we had consumer safety rules that put the burden of proving a product or technology’s safety and sustainability on the seller, or on some sort of product safety testing system?
If that were to mean industrial chemicals had to undergo trials or studies in the way that pharmaceuticals do, sure there probably would be fewer new things. OTOH if there had to be even the most-rudimentary plan for the lifecycle of a product up front, maybe we wouldn’t have millions of tons of discarded plastics or forever chemicals in the environment that everyone knows there’s no money to clean up (because our system protects those that profit by externalizing costs).
Great post, but just throwing this out there. Teflon was invented in 1938 and brought to the commercial market in 1948. PFOA is one of the top 2 legacy PFAS chemicals under scrutiny and is a chief ingredient in the manufacture of PTFE (Teflon). PFOA wasn’t noticed at all until 1968 and links to health impacts weren’t noticed until 1999.
This specific chemical existed before many of the consumer protection laws we have today, but even if those laws had been in place it would have likely been decades before we had made the connection. 20 - 60 years to test a new chemical is a long long time.
This is an excuse by the entire world to not spend money on solving the problem because they can just keep spending money the same way and not worry about it changing. This sounds like capitalism 101. They need to spend money is the problem their is no excuse for “there is nothing that can substitute it” aside from “I don’t want to spend money on trying to figure this out”. Their is always a solution to a problem you just need to you know… solve it.
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