> In terms of design, China has world class companies.
And not just companies. This is currently the world's top open-source RISC-V development https://github.com/OpenXiangShan coming from the Chinese Academy of Science.
(Whether China will remain investing in RISC-V, given that the US government has started to pressure US RISC-V development to limit their involvement with China is another question.)
1. Stopping technology transfer worked exceedingly well for the west weakening the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
2. A distinct lack of (non-violent) alternatives for the West preventing China becoming the world's leading technological superpower (and hence also strongest military).
I doubt this will be successful in the long run, because China is not burdened by the Soviet Union's extremely inefficient way of organising its economy. Not to mention that China is the worlds biggest market.
I think the same, this is disadvantageous long run, but I'm not in power and the people in power appear to be complete morons with little understanding of history or nuance.
I'm pretty sure we're rapidly heading into a West vs China military conflict. I think part of the reason we've held rates higher for longer is that it hurts China more than the West as a way to undermine the Chinese economy. Coupled with the sanctions the West is getting ready for a 'timing attack'. But if the West is wrong and loses that war then we're effed. I would prefer a graceful stepping down from world hegemon and taking our seat at a multipolar world where we can focus on getting our own house in order. But obviously those in charge have other incentives.
It will work in the long run due to China’s terrible demographics, which are worse than Japan’s; and Xi’s extreme mishandling of China’s economy and foreign relations which are both intertwined.
All that’s needed is a military containment of China.
Are China's demographics appreciatively different from other industrialised countries? Questionable. Not to mention that it's unclear why an aging society is a problem at least for the next 100 years or so (e.g. most violent crime is perpetrated by the under-30s). It's also easy, at least for a dictatorship, to increase the birth rate (e.g. restrict access to all birth control, give massive preferences to families with children, like housing, salary, "bachelor tax" etc).
> military containment of China.
That is expensive. One frequently cited explanation for the collapse of the Soviet Union was that its poor economy could not support its oversized army, which it needed to keep the Soviet Bloc at heel (not to mention all the revolutions and secession movements it fostered elsewhere).
Also, does anyone actually believe that China is expansionist? Compare:
"Are China's demographics appreciatively different from other industrialised countries?"
Yes. Also, it is very likely that China has been covering up the true extent of the demographic problems. And not necessarily to hide it from its geopolitical rivals, but to hide it from its own leadership fearing purges and punishment. Like ... there's a 100 million people "missing".
"it's also easy, at least for a dictatorship, to increase the birth rate"
No it's not, because those changes take a while to implement, and even if the birth rate skyrockets, you don't get usable workers for 20 years.
Plus, China's economy is urbanized, and its economy is built around cheap labor that is worked to the bone (996). To make urban areas viable for raising kids, you need to decrease hours worked and increase wages.
And, people need to feel optimistic about the world and the future.
So lets say a massive sweeping change was implemented to make having children quite a bit more appealing. It would probably take about 5-10 years for the policy changes to trickle through the various layers of state control (China is kind of feudal in nature), monetary incentives will likely be greatly reduced by corruption.
Then 20 years later, you start to get a blip upward. Because the issue is, the people that will have the kids are ALREADY THE SMALLEST GENERATION EVER from one child policy. So to move the needle, they need to have ... like ... 8 kids each.
One child policy forced families to pick a gender as well. You won't believe this, but culturally people preferred boys. So the smallest generation ever, which would be 50-50ish, is more like 40-60 or 45-55 (maybe not that stark, but ... kinda is) then ... well, your expansion is limited by the wombs.
So, keep in mind Zeihan is a bit of a clickbait artist. He sells himself and makes bold claims. But if he is right about those new vs old/fake numbers, that is some bad stuff.
The solution to falling birth rates is immigration. And while China does see a lot of immigration, it does have a large rural/urban divide, so it might be able to "immigrate" people from the rural classes (who as I understand it are currently treated as a lower class of people).
Nice propaganda. Meanwhile China is building islands in the South China sea and provoking violent encounters with fishermen and coast guards, causing nearly everybody in SEA to build stronger military ties with the USA.
The only ones to switch allegiance to China will be the ones who have been bought off.
Meanwhile, Vietnam upgrades ties with China, Singapore performed joint military training with China, the Malaysian minister blasts the west for having a too one-sided and hysterical view of China, and both Indonesia and Philippines report that Vietnam is actually the worst offender in the South China Sea issues (indeed, Vietnam already built islands 30 years before China). And when AUKUS was founded, were Malaysia and Indonesia happy that the west came to their aid to fight the evil CCP? No, they were alarmed. Just whose side is being propagandized?
Despite all of the ceremony, Vietnam still hates China with good reason too. China keeps invading it including taking the islands in the South China Sea that Vietnam laid claim to. I believe the PLA actually attacked and killed Vietnamese troops stationed on those islands.
I’m also confident that the Philippines will now claim that China is the worst offender in the South China Sea.
As for any country involved in the 9 point line including Malaysia, anyone would have to be delusional to think that they support China stealing their territory
The point isn't that there are no animosities between SCS countries. It's that representing the situation as "evil China invades other countries" is one-sided, misleading, and ultimately harmful for peace. Having border disputes doesn't mean that countries must have bad relations, nor that they cannot be solved through peaceful means. Insisting on the notion that the existance of border conflicts must point to irredeemably evil intentions stands in the way of peacemaking because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course, the powers that be want such a self-fulfilling prophecy, even if it's at the expense of south-east Asia, which is why they keep perpetuating this view.
China IS asserting control of territory claimed by other countries. Do you deny this? Whether or not China can justify their actions, other countries will be provoked.
Just face it, Xi is steering China towards another big leap backwards. All the foreign provocation is distracting from serious domestic issues.
Again, that is completely missing the point. The Malaysian minister just blasted this attitude last week. Every country around there is asserting control over every other's country's claims, and they all have overlapping claims. This isn't "China vs the rest", it's "everybody quarrels with everybody else" and thus it cannot be peacefully solved by one-sidedly focusing on just one party.
Malaysia and Indonesia responded to AUKUS with alarm, do you deny this?
Breaking and continually flouting international law and the de facto naval boundaries accepted by literally every other country in the world is not a small thing. Until that unreasonable position changes, it is completely irredeemable. For the record, China is making the rest of South East Asia suffer here, and not the US. This is one of many reasons why Vietnamese and US relations are stronger than ever. China is the aggressor here. it’s delusional to say otherwise.
> This is one of many reasons why Vietnamese and US relations are stronger than ever.
Let's say that even this reading is heavily disputed. I don't think the Director of the Global South Program at the Quincy Institute, and member of the adjunct faculty at George Washington University, is as "delusional" as you think. https://responsiblestatecraft.org/biden-vietnam/
The 4 no’s doesn’t counter my point. Just because Vietnam won’t openly side with one nation doesn’t mean that Vietnam doesn’t hate China. It also doesn’t mean that they will not take steps to counter China. It will just be a more subtle response.
Whether Vietnam hates China or takes steps against China isn't even my point. Two things can be true at the same time: they can hate China, and it still isn't a simple "only China is at fault here and everyone wants to fight this evil" story. Whether Vietnam do or do not hate China, in no way invalidates my actual point that insisting on a one-sided manner is harmful rather than helpful for peace.
Countries like the US have not seen as large of a drop in birth rates like China. Many countries in the West have also successfully used immigration to blunt the impact of falling birth rates.
Countries like China are unable to take advantage of immigration. If increasing birth rates were easy for authoritarian countries like China, they wouldn’t be in this mess in the 1st place. This is a terrible argument. This situation is made worse with many mainlanders are trying to leave China.
The US and its allies like Japan and Australia have already implemented containment of China in the island chains. Pretty sure that thr Philippines and Vietnam are on board as well. This wouldn’t have happened if Wolf Warrior diplomacy weren’t a thing. All anyone has to do is cut off imports from the Middle East to cripple China. (No, Russian imports aren't enough. Most of their pipelines were destined for the EU. )Even India can cut off Middle East energy exports on its own because China doesn’t have a long range navy.
The BRICS coalition has also largely been a failure because no one can agree on what currency to use.
If either the Hu or Jiang faction were still in power, none of this would have happened because unlike Xi neither faction was delusional.
In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not formally at war yet. The US historically doesn’t make the first move since we’re a democratic republic and most constituents do not like war; it would also alienate most of our nominal allies. The best the US can do right now is containment and being ready to cut the supply lines from the Middle East.
1. Russia should have overwhelmed Ukraine years ago. Yet It’s still stuck. The EU is also finally mobilizing militarily. Also, this really isn’t our problem anymore. The EU can’t even give us good trade deals. They’re too busy passing one protectionist law after another. What’s the point when until now they were unwilling to pay their fair share into defense?
2. Iran isn’t doing anything but proxy wars here and there. Mostly in places where we will eventually retreat from.
3. Washington doesn’t need to contain any of them. Globalism is no longer a US interest. We are tired of subsidizing world trade and world security for little to no gain. All we get plenty of is criticism. Only countries that need energy imports from the Middle East are worried about the Houthis. Unlike many other countries, the US does not need energy imports or food imports. This is everyone else’s problem now.
1. This is factually incorrect and ahistorical. Russia obviously had no intention of "overwhelming" a massive country with half a million NATO-trained soldiers in 2022 with only 200K Russian soldiers. Even if the AFU wasn't a massive military, 200K soldiers is not enough to occupy that entire country.
2. I guess this is a way to dodge the Houthis question, who are actively striking US-aligned ships. What happened to "Operation Prosperity Guardian"?
3. And yet Washington does want to contain China? This sounds like "I can't lose because I'm not even trying".
> All that’s needed is a military containment of China.
I know the 'demographics is destiny' is the Washington Consensus but it should be understood that these are the same people wrecking our economy over and over again and starting forever wars we end up losing.
I recommend [1] as an introduction to the semiconductor physics behind the Rowhammer problem. Rowhammer is an instance of the "weird machine" problem behind many security problems, i.e. a mismatch between two abstractions: the abstraction we pretend describes the system, vs the reality of the system. In the case of Rowhammer, that is the abstraction of memory as a digital device, against the reality of storing bits with capacitors and wires, ie. analog devices. Clearly a leaky abstraction. The denser you pack those capacitors and wires, the more leaky.
I think it's important to differentiate "a mismatch between two abstractions" and "hardware bug". Because you can frame any sort of hardware (or even software!) problem like this:
"Capacitor plague of 2000 was a mismatch between two abstractions: the abstraction that capacitor actually provides datasheet-described amount of capacitance vs the reality of the system"
"Toyota unintended acceleration was a mismatch between two abstractions: the abstraction that ECU properly responds to accelerator pedal release vs the reality of the system"
Yes, digital systems are made of analog parts, but that's not a reason to accept systems behaving out of spec. For the last 50 years, the specifications for RAM have been pretty clear: as long as all datasheet requirements are obeyed, the only way to change stored data in one location should be to do a write to that location. If a memory chip does not act according to its own datasheet, it's not a "leaky abstraction", it's a hardware bug.
(Now, can this be fixed economically? I don't know, I could believe the answer is "no". However, the solution in this case is not software workarounds, but rather to make a new spec: "RH-RAM is like regular RAM but cannot tolerate certain access pattern")
Read the original Rowhammer paper where they tested various manufacturers and years --- this only started showing up around 2009, and DRAM from before that time was entirely immune to it.
The possibility of flipping bits in DRAM in a Rowhammer like fashion, was known in the DRAM industry since at least the 1990s (sorry, no reference handy), and Rowhammer-like access was used in DRAM quality testing.
As silicon density increased, the issue became more urgent.
That matches my recollection- I started in broad STEM at university in the 1980s and as chip sizes were pushed smaller and denser there was always thought given to signal bleed | harmonics from too many lines too close together.
I suspect "observed in fabrication lab | not disclosed" dates back some years before the paper .. once observed there's always a path to exploitation - but why would anyone broadcast that?
By the time it was chit chat on IRC the general feeling was that some TLA has a working exploit. (obviously unpublished).
So on RAM that needed 18,000 distance-1 accesses, they were able to mount an effective attack with 300,000 distance-2 accesses and 5000 distance-1 accesses.
That's not a particularly big assist, and doesn't sound hard to mitigate.
If TRR pushed the rows it refreshes 10% closer to triggering their own TRR, then those 300,000 accesses would have triggered multiple refreshes in the target row.
Have you ever seen any even moderately detailed specification of what the DRAM manufacturers do in this regard? I have not, and I looked. I am deeply sceptical ....
I don't believe that Rowhammer mitigations happen inside the DRAM chips themselves, I think that they are being put into the memory controller that talks to DRAM. Since DRAMs with built-in Rowhammer defences would have to spend transistors on this defence, those transistors would be 'wasted' in situations where Rowhammer is not part of the attacker model.
It makes sense to put it in the DRAM controller for many reasons. One is that the DRAM silicon process is optimized for memory but terrible for logic. Also, a DRAM bank is several chips in parallel to get the data bus width, and they would all have to duplicate the logic.
The disadvantage is that the controller and memory are made by different companies, so standards are required to agree on what access patterns are acceptable.
Agree. The extreme secrecy of DRAM manufacturers about the innards of their chips puts an additional obstacles in the way of memory controllers (MCs) implementing efficient Rowhammer defences. In particular, if the MC doesn't know which addresses are corresponding to neighbouring rows, how can an MC know with certainty that any concrete row is being attacked? (And, to the best of my knowledge, DRAM manufacturers don't give away this information.)
It might be good enough to detect a large number of accesses to any single row and then initiate a complete refresh. This wouldn't be triggered often by normal software. Most exploits have to use cache flush instructions, and with modern several-way-associative caches it would be rare for normal code to trigger it accidentally. In that case, the DRAM maker just has to specify the maximum number of accesses to any row.
Only one of those sides has children in substantial numbers, so this polarity will sort itself out over longer time scales. As somebody living next to a primary school in a very progressive city I already see this in a big way!
Agreed. If you look at what's the majority of compute loads (e.g. Instagram, Snap, Netflix, HPC) then that's (a) not particularly security critical, and (b) so big that the vendors can split their workload in security critical / not security critical, and rent fast machines for the former, and secure machines for the latter.
I wonder which cloud provider is the first to offer this in a coherent way.
Other networking protocols coming from a telco background, in particular ATM and ISDN, were all circuit switched, and had suitable resource reservation for QoS. Acceptance of telephony degradation was probably driven by cost: VoIP was free and that made a difference, especially for international calls. In my experience, in 2020 the VoIP calls I make are really high quality, even better than 1980s-style ISDN calls, and the main cause of audio quality degradation are people using "hands-free" setups with their laptops.
We should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
The problem is that we do not currently know how to carry out studies on the efficacy of programming language paradigms under "controlled laboratory conditions". It's known to be hard. Feel free to change this and become famous! The studies discussed in the article are but first steps towards:
- a better empirical grounding of programming language & software engineering research;
- more emphasis on reproducibility in science.
I'm glad that Vitek, Berger et al are starting serious empirical PL/SE research, and care about reproducibility! Bravo!
And not just companies. This is currently the world's top open-source RISC-V development https://github.com/OpenXiangShan coming from the Chinese Academy of Science.
(Whether China will remain investing in RISC-V, given that the US government has started to pressure US RISC-V development to limit their involvement with China is another question.)