• jaybone@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Is Chinese spyware not a thing that exists? Is it only crazy conspiracy theorists that believe in this stuff, and so we should mock them?

          Because if it was a real problem, this would be a good way to silence the criticism.

          • Specal@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Of course it exists, so does US spyware, German spyware, British spyware Turkish spyware.

            I mock people because they think China are trying to figure out what cereal they eat. It’s rational to have concerns, it’s irrational to only be concerned about China.

        • dubyakay@lemmy.ca
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          7 months ago

          Probably network connected and they all phone home to Chinese IP addresses about usage and other data.

          Am I doing it right?

        • Specal@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Strange, didn’t know that was in the renewable objective brief. I thought It was about reducing reliance on fossil fuels, not sticking it to chyna, silly me.

    • ikidd@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      If you want to beat the Chinese at solar panels, you need to go back about ten years and find a couple million workers that will take $2/hr to make them.

      I’ll look forward to updates on your progress towards this goal.

      Australia sounds like it’s about to donate $2B to some grifters that are going to pretend they can do this domestically. They’ll take the money, produce nothing and live happily ever after.

      • barsoap@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        Solar module production isn’t labour-intensive, much less intensive in low-skill labour.

        A bit more than a decade ago, Germany was the #1 producer of solar panels, drastically pushing down prices with advances in technology, manufacturing, and automation. Then the government decided to slash all subsidies (mostly about capping feed-in tariffs for solar), without warning, and without phase-out. Noone was prepared for that kind of thing so all the companies went belly-up and the Chinese swooped in, buying the tech for cheap with money borrowed from the Chinese taxpayer and began to produce panels and sell them, again subsidised by state coffers. We later slapped them with anti-dumping tariffs but by then the domestic industry was already decomposing.

        It’d stiff be cost-effective to build solar panels in Germany, the degree of automation is so high that higher wages balance out with higher transportation costs.

        Australia though don’t get me started on Australia you’re structurally a 3rd world economy reliant on export of raw goods. You’re not even smelting that ore, just shovelling it onto ships.