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Preventing incremental material losses suffered by a U.S. mega-corporation isn't very high on my priority list and shouldn't be very high on yours, either, if y

Preventing incremental material losses suffered by a U.S. mega-corporation isn't very high on my priority list and shouldn't be very high on yours, either, if you are a citizen of this planet. Many parts of the U.S. have third world conditions and the UN recently sent inspectors to parts of West Virginia because things have become so bad there. Millions are without healthcare, children are hungry, etc. Why waste even a breath on protecting proprietary semiconductor technology? The major semiconductor companies have significantly more motivation to protect their proprietary technology than the modicum of care we derive from our saber rattling and trying to maintain geopolitical dominance, and at the end of the day it is up to them to protect their own tech (their real enemy is AMD and ARM anyway). Imbuing certain technologies with vague and in practice largely imaginary export control laws does very little to prevent this kind of behavior, and it is in my mind a misappropriation of resources and mental energy to go out of our way to try to enforce them on a national scale. Shouldn't we, as a society, instead reserve this level of moral and legal outrage for CEOs who price-fix, bribe, and make 100x more than their average employee while people are starving in rural backwaters and dying in the streets and in hospital hallways thanks to COVID?

mc32 5y ago
Oh I agree companies should have greater interest in the well being of their communities and we should effect change that makes them beholden to the communities that allowed them to prosper and not sell the communities out to the lowest bidder overseas. But… tell China this same argument. That they should not protect their self interest and see how well it goes over.
- sam0x17 5y ago
  > But… tell China this same argument. That they should not protect their self interest and see how well it goes over. Note that my argument is one of prioritization -- to protect our self-interest, we have a lot more pressing problems at home than Intel et al losing a few bucks because they let the wrong people see the secret formula, and wasting precious human and financial resources on the wrong problems can be worse than doing nothing. As you mention, China on the other hand can afford to worry about problems like this, given their 0.7% poverty rate as of 2015 (despite some glaring issues like ethnic genocide, free speech, etc). In the U.S. we have an 11% poverty rate and nearly a million dead from COVID. We don't have time or resources to play the secret formula game with walkie-talkies in tree forts. Gotta do our homework pretty soon or it will be bed with no supper.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    The irony of all of this, of course, is that we already have a system in place for protecting secret formulae: you patent them. But here we get on the issue of the question of international espionage and whether it matters if you patent something in the US if China will just refuse to enforce an international patent. Perhaps there's a case to be made that in a world where superpowers don't obey each others' laws, this was never going to be Samsung's $1 billion to make... It seems like when you sum it all up, this is a really good time to be a Chinese tech firm.
    - sam0x17 5y ago
      It just goes to show that patents are stupid at the end of the day. From a harm-reduction standpoint, they do way, way more harm in the form of astronomically high drug prices, core pieces of technology being off limits even though almost anyone could have invented them, etc., etc., than they help. Patents, like intellectual property, are an imaginary legal construct, and if you want to compete in a global economy, you have to assume others aren't going to buy into your imaginary concept, particularly when it comes to opposing global powers. A lot of knock-off technology is actually _created_ by people reverse-engineering things _from_ the patent as well, which they then mass-produce in a jurisdiction that doesn't respect U.S. intellectual property (AKA China where most things are mass-produced). The real system of protection in place for protecting secret formulae is simple and more effective -- don't show it to the wrong people, and don't outsource your factories.

mc32 5y ago

Oh I agree companies should have greater interest in the well being of their communities and we should effect change that makes them beholden to the communities that allowed them to prosper and not sell the communities out to the lowest bidder overseas. But… tell China this same argument. That they should not protect their self interest and see how well it goes over.

sam0x17 5y ago
> But… tell China this same argument. That they should not protect their self interest and see how well it goes over. Note that my argument is one of prioritization -- to protect our self-interest, we have a lot more pressing problems at home than Intel et al losing a few bucks because they let the wrong people see the secret formula, and wasting precious human and financial resources on the wrong problems can be worse than doing nothing. As you mention, China on the other hand can afford to worry about problems like this, given their 0.7% poverty rate as of 2015 (despite some glaring issues like ethnic genocide, free speech, etc). In the U.S. we have an 11% poverty rate and nearly a million dead from COVID. We don't have time or resources to play the secret formula game with walkie-talkies in tree forts. Gotta do our homework pretty soon or it will be bed with no supper.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  The irony of all of this, of course, is that we already have a system in place for protecting secret formulae: you patent them. But here we get on the issue of the question of international espionage and whether it matters if you patent something in the US if China will just refuse to enforce an international patent. Perhaps there's a case to be made that in a world where superpowers don't obey each others' laws, this was never going to be Samsung's $1 billion to make... It seems like when you sum it all up, this is a really good time to be a Chinese tech firm.
  - sam0x17 5y ago
    It just goes to show that patents are stupid at the end of the day. From a harm-reduction standpoint, they do way, way more harm in the form of astronomically high drug prices, core pieces of technology being off limits even though almost anyone could have invented them, etc., etc., than they help. Patents, like intellectual property, are an imaginary legal construct, and if you want to compete in a global economy, you have to assume others aren't going to buy into your imaginary concept, particularly when it comes to opposing global powers. A lot of knock-off technology is actually _created_ by people reverse-engineering things _from_ the patent as well, which they then mass-produce in a jurisdiction that doesn't respect U.S. intellectual property (AKA China where most things are mass-produced). The real system of protection in place for protecting secret formulae is simple and more effective -- don't show it to the wrong people, and don't outsource your factories.