this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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Almost all of those "gains" came from stolen western IPs and labor exploitation.
Yeah, but that's capitalism in general, which is what people mean when they say "free market".
USA's brand of capitalism has IP protections, such as patent, copyrights, and trademarks. None of which China actually follows.
China is well known to conduct significant corporate espionage. (IE: hackers targeting corporations like Microsoft or Sony, not really people with "critical national secrets" but instead software they'd rather keep secret). China also hacks for national-security purposes too I'm sure.
I mean, still better than the Russian hackers or North Korean ones that focus on randomware. China at least is trying to get economic benefits out of it, but... its clearly built up on a lot of stolen tech.
Which are frequently abused by those in power.
They protect the companies who have money, not the people who generally create those ideas and technologies.
Abuse or not, Chinese corporate espionage is well crossing the line.
Say what you will about "Copyright", but we all know that when China hacks Google and steals source code, that's "unfair" and well crossing the line of the minor copyright violations we normally discuss here on Lemmy (or other internet). I'm not talking about simple piracy, I'm talking about fucking hacking and stealing years of hard work / programming source code from major US Companies here.
This isn't some performance artist or protester trying to "download a car", so to speak through piracy. This is literally China's MO of corporate espionage. Steal everything to launch their country into the future. Steal the hard work of honest programmers trying to give their systems an advantage over the competition.
I'm not saying that what lots of Chinese companies (often with their governments backing or even insistence) isn't terrible... what I'm saying is they're not stealing from angels.
They're basically just doing what American (and other western companies) are doing, just without the "gentlemen's agreement" that the west uses to keep the poors from getting uppity.
You think those companies are giving the people who actually create the things they make billions (or trillions) off of a fair portion? No, they're taking all that hard work and paying a pittance for it.
There is no moral high ground here, just lower and lower levels as each tries to out scum each other.
No US company steals from each other at the level that China steals from us. Its not even close. Stolen source code and other such copyright issues would be resolved in our court system. You'd get your ass sued.
Ummmm... dude. No reasonable person can argue that source code kept private to a company (ex: Google) deserves to be stolen by China. Or are you seriously trying to make this out to be "not a big crime" or something?
I'm not talking about the low-levels of copyright issues here in the USA (I'm not talking Bittorrent). I'm talking about well accepted parts that, I've literally never heard someone argue about against me in my many decades of online discussion. I'm talking about pretty basic levels of "Don't fucking steal code from other programmers, especially when they're trying to keep it private to themselves".
Programmers are the best paid profession in the USA right now dude. No programmer is complaining about their $300k salaries right now.
It's a good thing I never implied that then.
You seem to be arguing against a strawman, not me. Let me know when you want to have a discussion instead of arguing against a bogeyman.
You first.
I'm talking about Chinese hackers, and you're trying to talk about... what exactly? Is your subject even on topic for this meme image?
Are you seriously saying the focus of your argument is closer to this topic than my focus on Chinese Hackers is? I dare you to try to tie your posts back to the root meme that started this topic.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding about how discussions work. They change and evolve, a root meme is just that... a root. It is not the whole tree. There are no leaves on a root, yet there are many on the rest of a tree.
I'm talking about the basic nature what what these specific "Chinese hackers" are doing (which were never mentioned in the meme, so I'm not sure where you even got them, if you're so invested in it), which is capitalism. They are motivated by capitalism, just like the people exploiting the labor of the people they employ.
US style capitalism has strong IP protections that make Chinese-style Hacking / corporate espionage literally illegal. Literally illegal in our system.
Your argument flies in the face of obvious facts here.
Except that it doesn't make the unequal extraction of resources from the workers illegal, which is what this fella was arguing. That at the end of the day you're arguing it's unfair that one scum fuck organization is stealing from another scum fuck organization, so who really cares? It's not about the corporate espionage but the actual root problem of extraction of resources for inadequate recompense due to the stranglehold that those with power/capital have on the amount of wages that are paid.
He's arguing that the people that Google, apple, Microsoft and whatever other companies have built their fortunes on the backs of their workers who will never see even a 1/1000 of the capital that their work brought into the company which makes all the companies unjust in the first place.
Why do we, the proletariat, care if they steal from each other? We don't own the ideas we generate when we work for them, they do, so I at least don't see any reason to give a shit.
And currency manipulation