The invasion continues.
That’s the post… React below
That’s the post… React below
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Spy Balloons
- Thread starter SycamoreStateofMind
- Start date
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As long as it's gone by July 4th.
I've seen that movie and not interested in a real life version.
I've seen that movie and not interested in a real life version.
Weather balloon, spy balloon, I don't care. It's from China. Shoot the damned thing down. What morons we have running our government.
It doesn’t make sense to me why it’s not gone by February 4th… we know it’s from China but we’re going to tolerate this? Even if it was a mistake (highly doubt it was) it’s a mistake you don’t allow. But hey open borders open air space. Whatever.
Almost makes you think someone in our government is owned by the CCP. Or many someones...
This is the first time I'd heard about it, so shout out to SSOM for bringing it up. The fact that we haven't shot it down just shows how many gutless cowards we have in our current government today.
China is, and has been our #1 threat as a country for many years now. Between them building up militarily with fake islands in the South China Sea, gobbling up Hong Kong, and constantly threatening Taiwan they are a huge problem. Now they're getting aggressive in our own hemisphere down at the Panama Canal. Giving that up to the Panamanians was one of the dumbest decisions ever made. I may be labeled as a nut for saying this, but as a very strong believer in the Monroe Doctrine, I truly believe that we need to go take the Canal back one way or another.
They've put well over million Uyghurs into camps, and have been accused of committing genocide. Just a very evil country, and it's amazing how our government and our citizenry just don't seem to give a rat's ass about it. To be fair a lot of people don't even know about it because our lousy and arguably corrupt media organizations cover it up.
Another thing we need to do is severely punish corporations that manufacture goods in China, or any other enemy country for that matter. The corporate income tax rate in America is 21%, so make it 42% for those that want to do business over there. Not sure why TikTok hasn't been completely banned yet either.
China is, and has been our #1 threat as a country for many years now. Between them building up militarily with fake islands in the South China Sea, gobbling up Hong Kong, and constantly threatening Taiwan they are a huge problem. Now they're getting aggressive in our own hemisphere down at the Panama Canal. Giving that up to the Panamanians was one of the dumbest decisions ever made. I may be labeled as a nut for saying this, but as a very strong believer in the Monroe Doctrine, I truly believe that we need to go take the Canal back one way or another.
They've put well over million Uyghurs into camps, and have been accused of committing genocide. Just a very evil country, and it's amazing how our government and our citizenry just don't seem to give a rat's ass about it. To be fair a lot of people don't even know about it because our lousy and arguably corrupt media organizations cover it up.
Another thing we need to do is severely punish corporations that manufacture goods in China, or any other enemy country for that matter. The corporate income tax rate in America is 21%, so make it 42% for those that want to do business over there. Not sure why TikTok hasn't been completely banned yet either.
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And how much money are our universities getting from China?
I guess all of you mainstream media followers know too that China has police stations in our country.
I guess all of you mainstream media followers know too that China has police stations in our country.
Simply not possible to do. Any piece of electronics you use including your semi has electronics components that are manufactured in China. So the entire US shuts down if you tried to do anything that stupid.
This is where it’s easiest to see the sell out job that our politicians have done to our country over the last 30 years. We’ve signed trade agreement after trade agreement that are great for everyone else and terrible for us, and the politicians and the media are too corrupt to expose it. Ross Perot was spot on when he spoke of the “…giant sucking sound…” being all our manufacturing jobs going to other countries with these one sided trade agreements.
So yeah, we’d shoot ourselves in the foot to cut it all off at once, but if we don’t start laying the groundwork to get all these manufacturing capabilities back into the USA, we’re going to be a slave state in short order. More so than we already are.
I'm curious as to what your proposal would be. Surely you're not happy with the status quo when it comes to China?
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bent20
The Odum Level
Politics. That's the only reason to get worked about this. Because when you know that China already has hundreds of spy satellites you realize this is meaningless and not worth the drama.
time.com
Why Would China Use a Spy Balloon When It Has Satellites?
On Wednesday, a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon was spotted floating above Montana. Here’s what to know
I don't have a proposal. It would literally take decades to ramp up onshore manufacturing to match the capabilities that China has built since most of the world embraced globalization back in the 90s and handed it to them on a silver platter. Then even if you somehow managed to pull that off, you still have to deal with the raw materials trade and fighting their ability to basically keep their workforce in concentration camps and work for peanuts.
You can have two comparable products, one made here in the States and one made in China and it is cheaper for a company like Walmart to buy from China and then pay exorbitant logistics costs because of the significantly higher labor costs we have. You could use robotics/automation to remove the human labor cost but the problem if that is done at scale, nobody can afford to buy your products because companies never lower prices. Once they raise the floor, it almost always stays. Or they use illusions (think potato chips) where they keep bag sizes the same but start skimming ounces -- like Doritos used to be $2.99 for 16 oz. They moved it to like $3.49/$3.99 and then started dropping the amount of chips and I think their standard back is like 12/14oz.
I also think a lot of this is futile anyway. I fully believe in the Fourth Industrial Revolution that has been process for almost the last decade. Once those technologies are powerful enough, we're going to have so many unemployed people because it will be INFINITELY cheaper to have it done by AI/robotics/machine leaning algos/etc. There are some Chinese/Japanese factories that are 100% automated and even have robots to fix when their robots break down. If you can get labor costs near $0, it's damn near impossible to defeat that.
Also, China has been massively investing in their 4IR stategy with their new global Belt and Road Initiative where they are building out the next gen of manufacturing/logistics/etc on top of these technologies.
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bent20
The Odum Level
There is also the belief that within the next century half the population will be "paid" not to work because we'll continue to see the population going up and the number of jobs going down due to technological advances. I think too many people just can't bring themselves to put two-and-two together and realize that the American Dream of yesterday isn't sustainable.
Yep, it is a widely held belief within the futurology community. There is a portion of people that are ignorant and think their industry will be immune but I find it that to just be arrogance. For example, the default response in IT for those displaced by technology is just to "go learn programming and you'll always have a job" and ChatGPT has dropped that on its head in the last couple months alone.
Rumor has it that Amazon is now getting rid of many senior developers and will only be hiring young/cheaper talent. One of the reasons for that is they can easily be augmented by these tools. Microsoft put $14 billion into ChatGPT and has already integrated it into Teams where it can essentially function as a secretary -- transcribing meeting notes, sending out invites, etc. My current job is managing a IT Service Desk for the Government and most of my time is currently spent on working on an AI initiative to replace people with virtual agents -- it's one of the cornerstones of almost a billion dollar contract to modernize IT support.
Blue collar jobs are harder to do because the robots need to be humoid/non-fixed and have dexterity/agility but they're coming, too.
Politics. That's the only reason to get worked about this. Because when you know that China already has hundreds of spy satellites you realize this is meaningless and not worth the drama.
Why Would China Use a Spy Balloon When It Has Satellites?
On Wednesday, a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon was spotted floating above Montana. Here’s what to know
To spy and actually be undetected by the general pop is one thing. To spy blatantly and to allow it to happen is bad optics. Perhaps collectively we should just “know” that’s the world we live in today and reality.
But when they’re doing it and your Government the said most powerful in the world stands by and watches it happen - it sends a message to the rest of the world and maybe more importantly your citizens.
So it’s not political for me. I don’t care who the President is or what party he or she is affiliated with - I’d want the intel and I’d either capture it or shoot it down. It would have been done way before now. So don’t simplify this to politics and it always happens we shouldn’t care. Stop.
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Minor edit - it’s finally been shot down.
It is amazing to me the number of people (not necessarily on this board, just in general) that show great concern about being spied on by china with this balloon (as if they can’t do it from space with just as much, or more accuracy) but will then immediately get on TikTok and several other apps and put all their personal info out there for everyone to see.
Makes perfect sense.
Makes perfect sense.
We pretty much do that already don't we? Between welfare, unemployment, and disability; that's got to be dang near half the adult work age eligible population.
I appreciate the response. I can't help but feel like you're okay with continuing the status quo though, because you believe that nothing can be done, and that you think big changes are going to happen in production anyways. To me that's a very risky chance to take, because in the mean time, the USA as a country, is still going to be propping up the CCP economically in a huge way for decades to come.
If (and likely when) China invades our ally Taiwan, then what? Do we do nothing because we depend on them too much? It's pretty easy to arm up the Ukraine (which I happen to very strongly agree with) and sanction Russia, when we don't actually depend on Russia for anything. I sort of doubt we would be quite as harsh on China. In my view, there has to be a shorter term plan for seriously reducing our dependency on China. It's not only a national security threat, but it's also a threat to our allies like Japan, S Korea, Taiwan, and some of the other smaller SE Asian nations. As a nation we're in a very weak position to deal with China, and I fear that our weakness is only going to provoke them more.