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The US government should spend at least $1.25 billion "to invest in Western-based alternatives to Chinese equipment providers Huawei and ZTE," a bipartisan group of six US senators said yesterday.
[...]
"Every month that the US does nothing, Huawei stands poised to become the cheapest, fastest, most ubiquitous global provider of 5G, while US and Western companies and workers lose out on market share and jobs," Warner said.
[...]
The senators said these funds will help the US win "the race for 5G." The Federal Communications Commission's Republican majority has repeatedly cited the "race to 5G" as justification for eliminating federal rules and preempting municipal regulations that cover deployment of wireless equipment in US cities and towns.
[...]
The FCC in November voted unanimously to ban Huawei and ZTE equipment in projects paid for by the FCC's Universal Service Fund (USF), saying the equipment could have backdoors installed at the behest of the Chinese government. This ban affects only future projects and the use of federal funding to maintain existing equipment, but the FCC may also eventually require removal of Huawei and ZTE gear from networks that have already been built.
[...]
If the bill passes, recipients of FCC grants for replacing Chinese equipment with new 5G technology would have to submit plans outlining how they will switch to standards-based equipment.
Previously:
Huawei Denies Receiving Billions in Financial Aid From Chinese Government
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @08:07AM (9 children)
If you read between the lines this is bought and paid for congressmen effectively trying to pass a bill to give hundreds of millions of dollars to what are no doubt the exact same companies that "donate" to fill the election chests for these very politicians.
I am 100% for going full America on our development of pretty much everything since I think we never actually 'evolved beyond' a manufacturing economy. We simply drove all of those jobs offshores through our rules and regulations. We intended to create better, safer, and more rewarding jobs for workers. But this was one of countless examples of good intentions gone astray. Instead of achieving this, we simply left them with no jobs. And before somebody cites American manufacturing numbers (which are abysmal compared to what they once were, but at least still existent) consider that a company that buys all the products for China and then engages in some simple 'last-mile' assembly of the parts is considered 'manufacturing'. It's not necessarily a loophole in classification, but it does misleading people when they read that we have e.g. a $3.6 trillion 'manufacturing' industry.
However, this shift to American labor should be done not by giving away billions of dollars of taxpayer monies to companies of politicians choosing. It should be done by either loosening our rules and regulations which would probably provide politically challenging, or alternatively by simply putting limitations on exactly how much can be imported such that domestic developers working at American labor prices with American regulations need not fear about competing against companies shoveling all their work over to Chinese companies operating on Chinese labor prices with Chinese regulatory standards.
But this whole idea of just give billions to companies is nothing but corruption - it's exactly how you get Boeings.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @08:36AM
LOL [imgflip.com]
That's sad, though. Another delusional.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @11:44AM (3 children)
Right.... so all the people in America working right now are working in the tiny mining and manufacturing sectors?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
Services is where most people work these days. Maybe that was not so 100 years ago, but it is today. And your standard of living is so because we don't need so many people working in manufacturing. Furthermore, the actual manufacturing is done through trade, not through protectionism. It is mostly US manufacturers that got fucked over when Trump bumped duties on steel and aluminum. Suddenly their input costs went up while input costs for their competition around the world, not so much. So who loses??
https://slate.com/business/2019/10/trump-tariffs-bayou-steel-group.html [slate.com]
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/trending/bAoEj_SX9u5F0EOHvomVvw2 [spglobal.com]
And don't forget. A lot of small manufacturers do almost exclusively custom orders. They are more service than old-school manufacturing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @12:24PM
Why is reading comprehension becoming such a lost art among certain groups in America today?
No, obviously I am not saying everybody is working in manufacturing. What I am saying is that we destroyed these jobs before our nation or economy was actually ready for this to happen. And in fact, I suspect it may be the case that there's never actually a point when you can 'move beyond' manufacturing is essentially the 'skeleton' of any system. And so we simply moved our skeleton over to China. Rolling with the metaphor, the brain industry is healthier than ever, yet the rest of the body has predictably just collapsed.
If you want to create a new rent seeking software service, or a data harvesting company, or some company related to spamming users with ads, then America is, by far, the best place in the world to be. But if you want to create something physical or material then we're no longer an especially desirable destination. There are some exceptions of course - SpaceX is quite a wonderful one. But they are indeed the exceptions. And I think this is not good for our economy. Instead of people engaging in skilled trades, they're left to man a cash register or even worse ask if you'd like fries with that.
This is what I mean in that we did not 'evolve beyond' manufacturing. We simply killed it with rules, and tried to pretend that everything could still work out somehow. Well, it's not working out. And something that's perhaps even worse is that China has not only already taken over the manufacturing industry, but it's now likely to also gradually start taking over the 'brain' industries. Ultimately we 'evolved beyond' manufacturing in the same way that somebody observing Hollywood in recent years might observe that we've 'evolved beyond' good movies. We fucked over a pretty good chunk of our entire nation's labor base, and then called it progress.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 20 2020, @09:32PM (1 child)
In short, our economy today amounts to one big circle jerk. Everyone wants to "service" someone, but precious few are actually producing anything. I won't pull any punches here - it sucks ass. It's the reason millenials have to work two, three, maybe six jobs to make ends meet. It just sucks ass. The "gig economy" needs to be stuffed up the politician's asses, where it came from.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 22 2020, @06:48AM
When most of the rest of the world are "holding" trillions of US dollars what that means is you can transfer wealth from them by creating more US dollars (aka "quantitative easing" or whatever fancy names you decide to call it).
You can then
a) Use that wealth to benefit the US citizens (build infrastructure, better education etc).
or
b) Use that wealth to benefit a few favored ones.
The US Gov seems to be doing b) too much nowadays.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @02:30PM (2 children)
Wait, I didn't even read between the lines and saw this as nothing but corruption.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday January 20 2020, @06:05PM (1 child)
Well, Huawei doesn't have a monopoly on 5G shit. Nokia and Ericsson just to name a couple also make 5G shit. It would be nice to have our own domestic 5G stuff but that's on our telecom companies to invest in their own R&D rather than be bribed by the government. If America had any faith that the shit would actually be profitable, then we'd have subsidiaries of Lockheed-Martin et. al. building 5G shit.
But as an industry insider, I know that 5G is going to be gimmick-tier for quite a while, if it even functions better than 4G or at all. Automotive radars are the same way. If I did the stock market thingy I'd hedge against any dedicated 5G companies and a few non-dedicated 5G companies, but I might not actually make any money that way -- look at Tesla.
Tesla stock keeps going up even though every other day there's a story about Teslas killing people in fiery wrecks. Tesla has probably been chosen by Palantir/CIA to become the dominant EV manufacturer because of the easy of hackability to kill dissidents either by crashing their Teslas or by crashing a Tesla into them, when Tesla inorganically becomes an EV monopoly in a few years or so. Just like Facebook's and other surveillance state apps' inorganically huge valuations of their IPOs. Obviously these would have to be companies based in America.
We are Calhoun's mouse universe, going to hell in a handbasket.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @08:35PM
Wow, is there any place you haven't worked? Any industry you aren't "an industry insider"?
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday January 21 2020, @03:44AM
Yeah, when I read:
I immediately mentally translated it to: