Hi everyone, I’m creating this megathread to help regroup information about Pelosi’s recent visit and the follow-up (currently the PLA is conducting military drills very close to Taiwan)
You’re still totally allowed to make your own threads, this is more for things that do not warrant a thread by themselves.
In discussing this the other day I came to a question about the semi-conductor topic in relation to this “Pivot to Taiwan.”
There’s very clearly a profit motive involved, with Taiwan producing a lot of computer chips and the US based companies needing to maintain control of this profit stream moving forward, particularly given the growth and technological improvement of the mainland Chinese semi-conductor industry.
What I have started to wonder about is how much this may also have to do with the hardware level backdoors implemented in nearly every western designed processor. If China takes over as the semi-conductor supplier of the world (either via mainland production or the reintegration of Taiwan), these hardware backdoors will be very quickly removed, or at the very least adapted to the needs of the Chinese people instead of American imperialists.
I think that makes sense from an imperialist point of view, especially one where the cracks are becoming blindingly apparent. Control of information is everything.
It’s not just about control for the sake of protecting profits, it’s about control for the sake of protecting information. These backdoors enable access to private/personal information on nearly any device, or to dictate what functions those devices are allowed to perform.
This is actually why the US freaked out and has pushed Huawei cell equipment out. Not because it has back doors but because it means the equipment isn’t made by their friends with THEIR NSA/GCHQ backdoors.
There is no doubt that there backdoors built into these hardware but the extent to which the US state has control over these backdoors is not very clear. At least I haven’t been able to find out some info about it.
Either way, I don’t think the backdoor aspect is as important as the monopoly angle. The entire world is dependent on Intel and AMD to perform computations. It is hard to overstate how important computation is for the economy to function especially ones like China where there is more planning and technology is deployed everyday for both convenience and governance.
There is also ARM. Nearly all my servers use ARM chips. I only have one Intel server and it’s not even a new chip (3rd gen i7).
Where do you get decent arm servers for cheap? I’m building a xeon workstation.
Well, they won’t be as powerful as a Xeon system. That is why I have my one intel server. Most of the services I run (I run 26 services), can run on low-power hardware easily (things like Invidious, Homeassistant, Cockpit, Node Red, Jellyfin, etc.). For these, I have SBCs. I currently run 9 Raspberry Pi 4s (8 as webservers, one as a recursive DNS server with Pi-Hole in front of it), 2 Pine H64s (one as my reverse proxy that provides access to the rest of my servers and one as my TV box running Kodi), and a RockPro64 handling more intensive stuff like the Matrix homeserver. My Intel machine is an old Mac Mini which I’ve upgraded the storage (500GB HDD to 1TB SSD) and RAM (4GB to 16GB) on and installed Debian. On that, I run things that require either a lot of power or a lot of storage. For example, my Mac Mini hosts Gitea, Minio (open source Amazon S3 clone), Code Server (Online IDE), Nextcloud, Onlyoffice, and a Minecraft server.
SBCs are nice because they are cheap and very low power. All my servers connect to a single <$100 UPS and that lasts over an hour. Of course, the downside is that if you have a single service that needs a lot of compute power, you’ll need to use a separate server for that, which is what my Mac Mini is for.
Edit: By the way, I’ve seen you on Matrix. My username on there is Heisenbug.
BREAKING: China has announced the end to the following cooperation with the US
- Calls with leaders
- Defense meetings
- Maritime Security Consultation
- Climate Change Talks
- Anti-Drug cooperation
- Transnational crimes
- Illegal Immigration
“Anti-Drug cooperation”
Are China’s anti-drug laws influenced by the West in any way? Will we see a “Green” China before fucking Texas or Indiana?
No, they’re influenced by their own experiences with narcotics during the century of humiliation.
Anyways the cooperation with regards to narcotics was mainly to the benefit of the US. China doesn’t have a big issue of drugs or precursors imported from the US but the inverse is true, Chinese factories have been huge helps for the narcotics trade into the west in making new substances that aren’t regulated as well as precursor chemicals shipped to the US, Mexico, etc which are more easily turned into narcotics and for cheaper than the cartels can hope to do on their own. So ultimately this will sting the US with more drugs flooding them while China will not be impacted in any way as the US was not in any real way helping with any of their drug trade issues which are minor compared to the US.
As to the narcotics in question going from China —> US, they’re all synthetics, opioids and club drugs type stuff.
Sorry if this is like the 10th time you’ve seen this, but PLA drills are in key positions if anything were to escalateInteresting how they are positioned; looking at a simple flat map you’d think it looks kinda random and leaves a lot of space open (the southwest notably), but it’s actually places the PLA don’t need to control because there’s nothing there.
I’m glad CGTN showed that chart because that was actually super informative, I would also like to see maps of where US ships are going. I hear that the USS Ronald Reagan(🤮) is in the area as well
USS Ronald Reagan
PLA has “crossed” the middle of the Taiwan straight during their exercises. Yesterday, they also launched missiles some of which flew over Taiwan (at least 1 I think).
Statement from Taiwan army:
The National Army will adhere to the principle of preparing for war without seeking war, and will take the attitude of “not escalating conflict and not causing disputes”
You escalated conflict when you let Pelosi come here lmao
Before the exercises the green frogs were all gloating about the PRC being paper tigers and that no matter what happens, the “free world” including Amerikkka and Japan will come to their rescue.
The exercises begin and after their masters have fucked off, these frogs have fallen silent as for a brief moment of clarity they’ve realised that actions sometimes have consequences.
Green frogs?
The DPP, their symbol/flag is that ugly green so mainlanders have nicknamed them as green frogs lol. (Sometimes also referring to frogs in the well)
wow, it really is a terrible flag
A fitting colour… they’re great at being corrupt as fuck as well as making empty promises during elections and overstepping the red line to the entertainment of their western masters.
It also look like cucumber.
