[goalieca]

Because China has stated they will take Taiwan, they have been threatening Philippines sovereignty too. Japan and others are on edge too. China currently has been behaving very adversarial and has a huge fraction of the minerals under their control that this article is posting about. I think sovereignty is a good thing. Plan for the worst, hope for the best.

[amykhar]

And yet all sorts of people are advocating for using Chinese LLMs because they are less expensive. It seems like a very risky move to save a few dollars.

[lenerdenator]

It'd be interesting to know how much of that is truly organic support versus what the CCP pushes out across the internet as agitation/propaganda.

Are they cheaper? They are open-weight, so in theory, they are cheaper to run and do with them as you wish.

The problem is that they come from a place with a long and storied history of attacking digital assets in the US and the West in general.

[lardosaurusrex]

The USA keeps threatening my country; Canada.

I can say with a reasonable amount of confidence that going "but china" isn't going to help the US much going forward.

[goalieca]

I'm in canada. I don't think the two are even comparable.

[Teever]

You're sort of right. What the US is doing in Canada right now is more comparable to what Russia was doing in Ukraine in the early 2010s[0]

The upcoming Alberta separatist referendum that is funded and boosted by foreign agitators isn't intended to succeed. It's intended to cause a festering wound in Canada to prevent it from growing in strength and independence from America.

As far as I'm concerned America has already lost the next impending major war. They've spent the past 25 years blowing trillions on purposefully unwinnable wars that serve to enrich American oligarchs. This has left the American military structurally weakened and mis-optimized to fight small groups of terrorists instead of fighting an enemy with comparable and perhaps superior ability.

We've also seen the decimation of the manufacturing base in America and with it the economic security that it provided the middle class and with it the power and skill set that comes from being able to design and build thing. Finally, the United States' recent choice to blow half their stockpile of numerous kinds of missiles all all at once while at the same time lacking the supply chain or even the manufacturing base to adequately restock their munitions as the nail in the coffin for the American empire.[2]

So what's going to happen in a world where America can't win a global conflict but is still protected from invasion by thousands of nuclear weapons? America is going to decline into a regional power that attacks its neighbours with impunity. You're already starting to see it and it won't be long until you see articles like this[1] about Alberta.

I don't want it to be this way, but it is.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43487443

[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-hit-with-demand-for-answ...

[2] https://www.csis.org/analysis/last-rounds-status-key-munitio...

[wojciii]

The usa is also threatening my country. The orange dude wants to buy a part of Denmark that is not even ours to sell.

[RazorBucksICO]

Well, to be fair, by “USA“ you mean one person who is frankly more ceremonial than an actual leader. Whereas I think China is doing much more to actually irreversibly change who has the real authority in Canada. Canada is also a uniquely bad case in governance. I don’t know if any western country has had so much decline in living standard so fast. That you could put Fidel Castro‘s bastard son in charge says a lot about who holds the cards there.

[maxglute]

That's misattribution of the the why. The real why is US can't do the sensible thing and cede regional hegemony to growing PRC. There's always the normal solution of watching PRC bomb PH schoolgirls while buying their rare earth and selling them semi, like the rest of the world when US bombs school girls. The why is US leadership pathologically can't not fight, including the fights most of their pop don't want to fight.