mciak's comments

Selling US devices (HP computers) in contravention of US sanctions (ITAR, probably) for payment that probably touched US banks

Note that this arrest was due to the lesser sin of export control busting, rather than Huawei's biggest sin: facilitating surveillance and IP theft.

Remarkable that they (she?) went through all the effort to set up a HK front company, but then left the Huawei logo on their powerpoint decks

This doesn’t really hold true in China —- Steve Jobs is revered there but their startup scene is heavily oriented towards iterating and pivoting

I think it is easy to imagine several countries, India among them, that are both worse than China from a skills/supplychain perspective but better from a normative/geopolitical perspective.

When choosing between India/Taiwan/Malaysia/Costa Rica/etc, you then need to consider the track record of these various second choices. India's record of disregard for IP [1], political unrest [2], and playing the US and China off one another [3] don't really do it many favors.

That said, I definitely agree that we should begin making major investments of equal magnitude to what was done in 90s/00s PRC in countries aligned with Western technology norms (whatever those are).

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-ip-idUSKCN0XO1I... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-30/modi-s-po... [3] https://nationalinterest.org/feature/can-india-balance-betwe...

The Four Seasons is technically in East Palo Alto -.-

Worth remembering that you'll find similar complaints about construction projects within Chinese borders -- this isn't necessarily reflective of China being cruel to the developing world. Instead, it is a consequence of a country where things are done differently going abroad.

When Schmidt was ousted, people speculated that it was in part due to his links to the candidate who lost

Wanted to highlight coworker.org here -- worked well for the Maven issue earlier this year

Two things stand out to me here:

(1) CrowdStrike, for all intents and purposes, failed. Russia had access to dem servers for four months after they were hired

(2) Donors trying to use ActBlue (fairly major way dems raise money) were taken to a spoofed Russian site. Stealing democratic campaign donations feels like a very direct attack on the democratic process