Are western companies able to freely compete in China? Last I checked, no, they need local partners at best, or are blocked completely at worst. And not just American but any outside company.
What their government does in regards to local industry is effectively what donald trump is attempting to do with the US economy. Except they do it well.
I consider you as a victim of the brainwashing by your main stream media.
there are tons of western cars on Chinese roads, tesla was given free land and close to interest free loan to build its factory in Shanghai. there are numerous apple shops in China. guess how many Chinese cars are driving on US roads, how many Huawei phones are being sold in the US.
if you are open to the idea of jumping out of your comfort zone of your favourite brainwashing media, some westerner actually went to China and counted every single car at an intersection for 30 minutes with all brands summarised. over 40% are western cars.
It's benefiting from the globalized market without freely competing in it. It gives them a massive edge in many industries and the world couldn't say no because of cheap manufacturing.
And certainly hostile when you add currency manipulation onto it as well.
>It's benefiting from the globalized market without freely competing in it.
Ha, very rich criticism considering the US economy and stock market has been benefiting 1000x more from said "globalized market without freely competing in it", by printing money and exporting its inflation across the world with dampened consequences domestically, then using said printed money like liquid gold to buy valuable assets around the world (like real estate and innovative companies) thanks to its status as a reserve currency (something Charles De Gaulle complained about since the 1950s), a unique US cheat code enforced thought force via its massive military.
>And certainly hostile when you add currency manipulation onto it as well.
Again, very rich criticism considering the US's abusing its status as the reserve currency for its own benefit, see above.
This is now limited to only some restricted industries: https://www.ndrc.gov.cn/xxgk/zcfb/ghxwj/202504/P020250424307... Yes, the list is long, but it's a significant improvement to the before times when all industries were off limits save for a few exceptions where foreign investment was allowed. Notably, the car industry has been mostly unrestricted for a few years now.
Internet services? Yes, you need a domestic partner, because you'll disseminate information to the public.
If you're in the automobile industry, you can import cars to China. China was Porsche's largest market until 2025, and all Porsches are imported. It used to be that a Chinese partner is needed to manufacture cars in China, but Tesla did not need one, and that policy was dropped. Anyway, it's nowhere close to the complete ban the US placed on Chinese cars.
In many other industries, you can create a foreign-owned company and operate in China.
Giga Shanghai is the exception the proves the rule. It's one of the few, if only, foreign businesses that operate without a joint venture with a local company.
Again, nobody forces you to open your business or manufacture your stuff in China. Plenty of companies do not, like Google.
Companies abided to ruthless Chinese rules because they were greedy and wanted to exploit the Chinese slave labor and also get access to Chinese market, but the CCP didn't put a gun to their head and forced them to come to China, they decided that themselves for the sake of the holy shareholder growth. And now, 2 decades after you've made your money, you're complaining over a consensual arrangement?
And trade is always gonna be asymmetric, with rules in foreign countries that don't exist in the US. That's why the EU fines US companies regularly. China isn't much different. You want to operate in China, then you gotta follow the CCP rules. You don't? Then just leave. Easy.
Lots of countries are like that though. America has an unusually free system where anyone can do anything for better or worse, but Walmart failed in Germany by ignoring all the local processes like employee protections. (But I hear Aldi is taking over the UK!)
>blocking Facebook while exporting Tiktok is a hostile trade imbalance
The US also threatened to block tiktok unless China sold it to a local US oligarch(the Oracle guy). The US is no saint here. And good luck getting people to shed a tear for China blocking Facebook. Good riddance to both of them.
The Tiktok we get that's full of slop isn't allowed in China either. China has a completely different set of content on its TikTok. Trade imbalance is a skill issue and within the country they compete fairly.
We absolutely do not need to waste as much water as we do on agriculture. Their is more efficient watering systems, crops that do not feed humans, and inefficient crops that aren't needed. Any one of those improvements would dwarf the water usage by AI.
Heck, a better solution yet would be to charge these AI/datacenter companies enough to cover the costs for watering efficiency systems to cover their usage and then some. It's a fraction of their costs, and way better than being anti-growth.
Yeah people aren't mad about datacenters because they are "anti growth"
They don't want to see their local resources depleted and, no, this isn't some fantasyland where corporations will do anything "for the greater good" that isn't in line with their pockets.
They had that opportunity, to build up the infrastructure necessary to operate, to build in places where they wouldn't reduce people's quality of life. They chose to do everything they could to squeeze out some extra profit. Requiring good behavior in one specific way wouldn't be sufficient when dealing with such obviously bad actors. They can try again to get the right to build once they've won back the trust of Mainers.
You can call it childish if you want, but a lot of people are unhappy with the economy in general and rising costs in particular. Energy costs are a big part of those rising costs and, like it or not, the AI vendors and their data center projects are an easy target.
I don't think it's necessarily a "backlash" to all the hype but the hype certainly made them a target
If you or Google have a plan to make the federal government stop shutting down renewable projects, we can re-examine the data center question after you carry it out.
Mainers hate seeing wind and solar plants- they consider them to be a massive eyesore.
The people of Maine won't consider "We'll build something you don't like but we'll offset it by building something else you don't like" as a compromise.
Utility solar is VERY different from small-scale solar panels on houses.
And, yes, there are already utility solar and wind plants around. There are also chemical plants, prisons, and garbage dumps. That doesn't mean the people of Maine want to see more of those things.
This. Utility solar in Maine in 2020-whatever is a lot like the crown's wood lots in Scotland in 1520-whatever. The locals lives aren't made any better by it and some people down south who hate them make bank.
Say what you want about resource extraction, it necessarily leeched far more wealth into local economies.
I personally think it's short sighted but I see why they're not a fan.
Data centers don't really help the material conditions of Mainers though. Here's the net effects of new data centers they'll really see, in material terms:
- A brief boost in construction jobs
- ~0 new jobs in the long term
- Increased electricity prices
- A slight chance of very slightly lower taxes, as data center taxes partially replace taxes on other stuff
It's not like the average Mainer is losing a lot from this decision. There's actually a good chance a data center ban is a net gain for the average Mainer materially, because the change in electricity demand (and thus prices) will outweigh all other effects.
Carbon offsets are a sham, but you could just require them to directly pay for the actual energy infrastructure required. If you need 1GW of electricity, develop 1GW of solar.
Sorry, I'm not picking up on the connection - could you expand? Do you think they should also pay for offsets alongside developing energy infrastructure?
I guess what I'm asking is how long it takes, soup-to-nuts, for the 1GW installation to be carbon neutral or better? I've read anywhere from 7 months to 25 years. Maybe its dependent on location?
Oh sure, I see what you mean - thanks for clarifying. On top of your point, it's true that CO2 has a prolonged impact on global temperature even after it's been 'removed' from the atmosphere, so even once solar pays back the original carbon investment its impact lingers for a while.
I guess at a certain point you're getting at a more fundamental question about the value of AI (plus technology and everything else) - what level of environmental tradeoff is acceptable? One thing I slightly lament about the discourse is that tradeoff is widely discussed in the case of AI, but not in the context of stuff we do. I suspect most people aren't aware that the water use associated with eating a burger dwarves a year of ChatGPT, that a long-haul flight wipes out the emissions savings of a couple years' veganism, or that renewables have their own impacts, like the demolition of Chile for copper.
Imagine the additional space needed to power a scaled DC with solar. I think the number of people opposing the construction would increase when they release its half the county.
It still makes more sense to directly regulate the thing that actually matters. People don't really care about the presence of a DC in their state. They care about the effect it might have on energy prices and potentially the effect it might have on public land use. You can always regulate the electricity market and public land use directly, instead of regulating the construction of data centers which is more of a second-order effect.
These approaches might very well result in the same outcome: fewer DCs, but it leaves the details up to dynamic market forces.
A Technology Connections video recently changed my opinion on this. The land required to power the entire U.S. would be less than the farmland we currently use for ethanol production.
Alec presented it well- but we don't even need to take his word for it.
The Department of Energy has all the data available, so do a dozen different other private and public institutions. It didn't click for me till I ran some napkin math.
Horrifically pessimistic numbers for PV (winter in maine with conversion efficencies half what they are now)... comes out to about a 50x50 mile square of panels to generate the entire USA's power demand from the most recent DOE numbers. Ignore that we can have wind, solar, and crops* in the same area. Turns out, btw, crops don't like high noon beating down on them. As a result we can reduce water usage and get nearly the same crop yield if part of the field is covered with panels- at least according to some studies.
That isn't the whole story. At least some of these new datacenters are gigawatt class. That's multiple sq km of solar.
Water usage is also an issue. A continuous 1 gigawatt is enough to boil off 1.3 million liters per hour which over 24 hours equates to very roughly 90k residential users. If it isn't boiled but is instead returned lukewarm it will require many times that amount due to how large the heat of vaporization is. Compare to the entire state of Florida at "only" 23.5 million people.
What? The water is not getting boiled off. Datacenters, for the most part, have closed liquid loop cooling systems. Electricity goes in, hot air and bits come out.
The old datacenters had. I don't think anyone is air cooling (radiator or otherwise) a gigawatt. Convert 1.3 million liters per hour from boiled water to air and you get an absurd number.
did you move the goal post, or erect a new one? either way- residential use is penny ante in terms of water usage. So much so that comparing data center use to residential use without including industrial, commercial, and irrigation can only be in bad faith.
Particularly since usage reports typically present all the numbers in the same chart or grid.
The concern is resource usage. Water had been left out, so including it isn't shifting the goalposts given the context.
The comparison was intended for illustrative purposes. Residential usage provides something relatable and is the general standard for these sorts of discussions.
Even comparing to industrial most operations don't use anywhere near as much electricity or water. The new gigawatt class datacenters are in the same ballpark as aluminum smelters, but rather than melting metal they sink all that energy into water.
> I think the number of people opposing the construction would increase when they release its half the county.
What's the math on that?
It's interesting to see the US mandate ethanol production the way they do, which could be argued to be a farm subsidy, and then balk at the land needed for solar installations.
For arguments made in good faith- I think it's humanity's inability to comprehend scale. We can't get the volume of a glass of water right if we change it from tall to wide. Why would we think that terrawatts worth of PV would be a square shorter on a side than most people's daily commute?
Maybe I misunderstood, but isn't that what they did? Here is the max. power you can draw from the grid, feel free to be more efficient or to produce your own electricity.
1. That renewable energy development is supposed to allow a _reduction_ in fossil fuel consumption, not an increase in wattage used.
2. That investment should already be happening, not subject to some future plans of some holding company or billionaire investor. Keeping global warming at bay is no longer some kind of future concern; and we've begun to see some initial effects of it in recent years - drouts, fires, various kinds of biosphere degradation etc.
Can we trust them to not build the data center anyways? If you think companies always get their way, then a ban is useless, as they will just do it anyways.
If on the other hand, believe in the rule of law, then creating a good airtight law that sets the stipulations that would be needed before building a data center is what lawmakers should be doing
Society is better if we sacrifice one horse and buggy driver job for two engineering jobs. The drivers suffer from that, but the net win for society is so plainly obvious that it's a better investment to retrain the driver or just pay the off rather than support a job that dying anyways.
> Society is better if we sacrifice one horse and buggy driver job for two engineering jobs.
That's a "statistic" you're pulling out of your butt, and it's doing a lot of work. No one ever knows if something like that will actually happen.
It could actually turn out that AI sacrifices 100 engineering jobs for 10 low-level service or prostitution jobs and a crap-ton of wealth to those already rich.
> The drivers suffer from that, but the net win for society is so plainly obvious that it's a better investment to retrain the driver or just pay the off rather than support a job that dying anyways.
But what actually happens is our free-market society doesn't give a shit. No meaningful retraining happens, no meaningful effort goes into cushioning the blow for the "horse and buggy driver." Our society (or more accurately, the elites in charge) go tell those harmed to fuck off and deal with it.
> It could actually turn out that AI sacrifices 100 engineering jobs for 10 low-level service or prostitution jobs and a crap-ton of wealth to those already rich.
That's where wealth redistribution (Taxation) comes in. The USA is not good at progressive taxation, but everyone could be better off if it were implemented properly.
First, you are thinking of people whose main source of wealth are assets, not income.
Also, I don't think inequality is a problem, it's better that than everyone being equal, because as history shows, even then, there are some that are more equal than others, and others are just poor.
Except those people are dead. Those who ethnically cleansed Arabs (and Jews) during the nakba are dead. Almost everyone who was ethnicity cleansed is now dead. At a certain point you need to recognize that a new generation has been born into this conflict, and with it, a change in circumstances. Attitudes like yours ignore that Israelis who were born there don't have another home to 'return' to.
That doesn't mean that Palestinians don't have a right to resist occupation, but the circumstances are significantly materially different today then 40 years ago.
Joe Biden is older than the state of Israel and Zionists have continuously committed ethnic cleansing and apartheid since their inception. This is an active and current situation.
Joe Biden was 6 was israel was created. 6 year olds are not responsible for ethnic cleansing.
And yes, there is ongoing issues (from both sides), but solving the current situation is very different than solving the ethnic cleansing that happened in 1948.
> the Israeli Army dropped a small bomb on a house
Roof knocking is using non explosive ordinance. It is, by definition, not a bomb. Attacking its use is wild, its a tactic that saves civilian lives, even if you disagree with the validity of the target.
> that means you think that Hamas sent these people on the roof to let the Israeli army execute them, not even to use them as a human shield.
Yes. That is what human shielding is. The unfortunate reality is that it is irresponsible to completely stop attacks when human shielding is used, as it encourages further use of the practice. Just like blaming Israel for all of those death is also encouraging Hamas to further use the tactic.
> What would be the military objective here?
Hamas has been very clear that deaths of their civilians further the Palestinian cause by causing the world to turn on Israel. The objective here is clear.
Now I turn it back to you: what is the military purpose of roof knocking?
No double tapping doesn't make sense here. You wouldn't use a non-explosive ordinance if the goal was "double tapping"
I was going to write a whole different comment, but then I thought
> What if, yosamino, your knowledge of the euphemism of knocking on a roof is outdated and this km3r is right? you should probably double check so that in case they are right, you are not having a stupid argument but one backed by facts.
And then I found this hilarious quote:
> As women and children lived in the house, a Hellfire missile was initially shot at the roof as a warning.
referring to American slaughter in Mosul, but still relevant.
The more relevant description is in this article
> The US has adopted a controversial air strike technique known as "roof-knocking", which is best known for its use by Israeli forces during conflicts in Gaza.
> The tactic involves detonating a small explosive above the roof a target as a way of signalling to nearby civilians to get out of range.
Which tracks a lot better with the descriptions of the practice I have heard from people who experienced it.
So while this is from 2016 and by that metric is 10 years old, you'd have to please show me some information about the army of the state of Israel downgrading their tactics from sending as small bomb to sending a ... what are you claiming they are dropping? a rock ?
“Roof knocking” is when the IAF targets a building with a loud but non-lethal bomb that warns civilians that they are in the vicinity of a weapons cache or other target.
You know, quoting from the idf website about their humane way of bombing, is a little bit like praising the IRA for calling in a bomb threat before exploding a bomb in a crowded place.
A double tap is the practice of bombing a location, waiting for people to help the humans who were injured and then kill those people as well.
Dropping a "loud but non-lethal bomb" and when humans gather on the location where you did that, responding by dropping a "loud but very lethal" bomb to kill all those humans is only on a technicality different from a "double tap" as explained above.
If your plan of (euphemism) "knocking" was to minimize human casualties, but when it turns out it increases human casulties and your only response to this is to shrug and say "at least I tried" - how sincere was your attempt at minimizing human casualties really in the first place ?
> Those are two opposing things.
I think you are stretching the definition of "oppising" furtherthan it can be stretched
Except it's not about killing the helpers. It's about ensuring an unambiguous warning that they are about to drop a real bomb. Get out NOW!! The people understand the message.
But when Hamas points guns at them and says run to the roof they do because that might work, running is sure to get them shot.
Terrorism has a simple definition: using force against civilian life to further ones goals.
Target a music festival with no military value: terrorism.
Blow up a building because hamas has a tunnel under there: not terrorism. If the military value gained is disproportionate to the civilian cost, it is a war crime. But still not terrorism.
> Terrorism has a simple definition: using force against civilian life to further ones goals.
Not disagreeing with the definition but this is what both sides have been doing.
Look, blowing up aid workers, which is in question in this article, is also terrorism. Killing unarmed civilians, kids, etc is also terrorist. Also if you you use your definition for what Israel has been doing in the last 70-80 years it makes them terrorists as well, the word is simply meaningless at this point.
What political/ideological goal does attacking the aid workers move forward? It's a war crime, no doubt, but terrorism has a meaning that doesn't include all war crimes.
> Killing unarmed civilians, kids, etc is also terrorist.
The vast majority of lethal force actions in Gaza are targeting Hamas operations. Civilians getting killed by those strikes is NOT terrorism.
Israelis brag about inflicting casualties on Gaza civilians and when confronted about it say that this will stop when Hamas releases the hostages and lays down the arms. This is textbook terrorism.
The spirit of the law is reducing the civilian cost of war. Its hard to argue that Israel's few incidents of wearing civilian clothes for special operations increased the odds of civilian costs compared to the same operation done in uniform. Meanwhile, Hamas's lack of uniforms has led to significantly increased civilian cost.
Because it's so entirely reductive and misunderstanding of where the technology has progressed. Hello world is s computer program. So it Microsoft Windows. New levels of "intelligence" unlock with greater complexity of a program.
Like look at our brains. We know decently well how a single neuron works. We can simulate a single one with "just a computer program". But clearly with enough layers some form of complexity can emerge, and at some level that complexity becomes intelligence.
You can't predict the next token in an arbitrary text unless you are highly intelligent and have a vast body of knowledge.
They're obviously intelligent in the way that we judge intelligence in humans: we pay attention to what they say. You ask them a question about an arbitrary subject, and they respond in the same way that an intelligent person would. If you don't consider that intelligence, then you have a fundamentally magical, unscientific view of what intelligence is.
To return to an analogy I used a couple of days ago ... birds can fly, planes can fly, ergo they are both flying things ... but they fly in completely different ways. So on the one hand (visible behavior) they are similar (or even the same), and on the other (physical mechanism) they are not similar at all.
Which one of these comparisons you want to use depends on context.
The same seems entirely possible for current LLMs. On the one hand they do something that visibly seems to to be the same as something humans do, but on the other it is possible that the way they do it entirely different. Just as with the bird/plane comparison, this has some implications when you start to dig deeper into capabilities (e.g. planes cannot fly anywhere near as slowly as birds, and birds cannot fly as fast as planes; birds have dramatically more maneuverability than planes, etc. etc).
So are LLMs intelligent in the same way humans are? Depends on your purpose in asking that question. Planes fly, but they are not birds.
To extend your analogy, imagine that there are airplane skeptics who insist that planes can't fly, will never fly, and are good for nothing. They only crudely simulate flight. Meanwhile, millions of people are flying around every day in planes.
But if by "flight" you meant "the sorts of things swallows and kestrels can do",then the movement of planes through the sky would be at best irrelevant.
This is simply wrong, and missing the point, simultaneously.
Flight (like "intelligence") means more than one thing. Planes fly, birds fly, but they not only use a different mechanism, they can't even do the same kind of flying that the other does.
Sometimes, the difference doesn't matter. Sometimes it does. Same for "intelligence".
We don't actually know that much about how the brain works, and nobody discussing intelligence will decide tomorrow that humans aren't intelligent if the details of how the brain functions turn out to be slightly different from what we previously thought.
LLMs obviously display what everyone prior to 2022 would have called "intelligence," before the goalposts started rapidly shifting with the release of ChatGPT. They can carry conversations about arbitrary subjects, understanding what you're asking and formulating thoughtful answers at the level of a very smart and extremely well educated human. They're not identical to humans (e.g., they don't have fixed personalities), but they display what everyone commonly believes to be intelligence.
I know you're arguing with someone else, but I think it is getting sidetracked.
Whether or not LLMs are intelligent (I think they are more intelligent than a cat, for instance, but less intelligent than a human) isn't my argument.
My argument is that complexity in and of itself doesn't yield intelligence. There's no proof of that. There are many things that are very very complex, but we would not put it on an intelligence scale.
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