The thing is, if it ever comes out that there was any coordination on that based on police actions that's a crime for everyone involved. Potentially a very serious crime.

You are literally risking prison to prevent some fine on microsoft that has unlimited money, and prosecutors and judges are no idiots and it may very well end up working against your company.

This is not like the mafia either where microsoft will take care of you for life for taking the fall. Microsoft will just throw you under the bus and that is that.

Isn't that what got Travis Kalanick kicked out of uber? They had this global data kill switch that made french authorities angry and they put up two french Uber execs facing charges of up to 5 years in prison (not for obstruction but for a laundry list of things), after which suddenly Uber lawyers came up with the requested documents and Uber suddenly found itself able to comply. And they were saying it was just a temporary glitch and no files were ever deleted.

It would be a hilariously dumb strategy because microsoft japan is a japanese company. Imagine trying to argue in a US court as a multi-billion dollar US corporation that you have no access to your own email that you were happily using until a day earlier but suddenly since there is a subpoena you magically lost access. You'd be going to prison dude. Doesn't matter if you are 'following orders' if it's a criminal matter. These execs owe nothing to microsoft and are going to throw anyone at microsoft under the bus to prevent going to prison.

Probably not really bribes. In general the abuse of a monopoly is illegal in many countries - even without bribes and such. In their communications they can find things like evidence of deliberately using one monopoly to strengthen another or even straight up confessions that they know it is illegal.

Very unwise to turn a civil matter into criminal obstruction.

Consumer surveys show people perceive conventional meat as tastier and healthier than lab-grown alternatives.

The perception is just nonsense, given that practically nobody has tried this stuff yet, and there are potentially many thousands of variants with different taste and structure coming.

The article really glosses over that key fact: It is effectively impossible to buy right now.
Even in this thread you see people thinking that soy burgers (like impossible burger) are the same thing, but they are quite different.

Lab-grown meat is real meat. It might be a type and consistency of meat that is different from any other meat on the market now, but it is very much meat.
Lets see what happens when it actually reaches store shelves in any kind of volume.

You pay your cashier at Walmart a lot of money too. Just she never actually gets that money. Unless you hire sole proprietors, which most people don't, you don't pay your electrician directly generally. Usually you pay the company that hands them a much lower amount.

Attorneys of any quality typically cost 300+ though. And they often stretch hours, hand off hours to interns and double book clients.

For both electricians and attorneys there is still the issue that they often don't fill up 40 hours per week though.

By the way, Nexperia was hardly a very profitable company, it was just a spin-off of the 'uninteresting' parts of NXP. Sold.to make some cash. This basic component manufacturing was going to china eventually anyway and nobody really cares about this. However they need to operate within dutch law and what mister zhang did was not. That's all. Not sure why you are so stuck up about defending some corrupt chinese businessman that even china put in prison for that.

As for chinese consequences, china did nothing against netherlands in response. US and Germany are much harder affected because their car industry doesn't have components to easily switch to.

You said "Dutch already admitted publicly that they didn't think this grab through." and that your source is the minister himself. Show us the quote.

They already did. Turns out that when you're not a shit tier eurocrat who thinks that people can't just do things without his bureaucratic approval... you can just do things.

If you read your article, it just states they sourced 'wafers' for one type of product and even that one is far from production state. They are nowhere near being ready to just switch to a different supply chain. As I said, you can manufacture these products (and get them certified for global care manufacturing), just it isn't just 'lets order some new wafers'.

Yes, Reuters and the relevant minister in Netherlands are Chinese.

I listened to his talk (Karremans) in Dutch in front of parliament. Show me the exact quote what you are referring to.

Most of product development was in PRC as well.

Oh Hamburg and Manchester are in China now? You are flat out wrong mate.

Just a little correction: NXP is the original company where Nexperia was split out of. Zhang Xhuezheng was CEO of Nexperia, not NXP.

reportedly after the United States raised security concerns.

It should be noted that these reports were purely speculative.

The minister involved has explicitly stated in an official statement to parliament that the US did not ask for this move and that there were no talks with the US about this in the leadup to the ban. While it is possible that he is lying, getting caught in a lie about that would be career suicide and he could have easily said that he cannot provide information about that because of national security reasons.

This is total nonsense . The whole point of splitting out NXP was to combine all kinds of basic semiconductor stuff like diodes and mosfets. None of this was ever incredibly hard to replace and that wasn't the point. The thing was just to create decent quality large volume basic semiconductors.

Let set the context here a little bit. What happened was that the then-CEO of NXP Zhang Xhuezheng, was suspended from his company through the dutch legal system. He illegally and without proper structure tried to move company assets into his own company, which was temporarily prevented by this move. This is a form of corruption.

Zhang Xhuezheng previously spent more than a year in prison in china for... corrupt business practices including illegally gaining power over a company.

What actually happened is that Dutch grabbed the HQ. I.e. the company bureaucracy. Actual production, specifically everything but wafer supply is in PRC. Wafers are easily sourced elsewhere, which is what Nexperia China did.

Haha, nope. That's a little funny because you got one part right but you missed the importance of it. The wafers yeah... with the components already on them. All that happened in china with those wafers was cutting parts from them. No they cannot just order some wafers elsewhere lol. Again, these are not complicated things like CPU's. They can manufacture them elsewhere. But no they cannot just order some different wafers.

Dutch already admitted publicly that they didn't think this grab through.

Nope, where do you get your news? Chinese state media? Check your sources dude.

Which is understandable. US invents, China builds, Europe regulates.

Right, says the guy on his ASML printed chips, possibly you would have been helped by a deepmind (UK) invented LLM as it would surely have told you about the errors you were posting.

What Dutch are finding out is that bureaucracy is actually an easily replaced, borderline irrelevant boondongle. What actually matters is productive capacity and engineering. None of which was in Europe except wafers. And wafers are the easy part, which Chinese Nexperia just got from China.

Now that you have learned that the actual components were developed in Europe, how would you rate this line yourself?

Great to see Steve Jobs' spirit of being a shitty deadbeat parent still lives on in apple products.

These family sharing features really show how companies think. Microsoft for instance - after enabling family mode - disallows installation of Google Chrome (they allow every other browser), and disables LAN play for games, forcing you to play over their xbox cloud.

I think a big part of this is that a lot of companies (especially big tech) massively overhired during corona, making critically needed personnel be unavailable, nearly crashing the economy, and fully crashing the labor market.
Them saying 'AI made them redundant' sounds a lot better to the people in charge than basically admitting that they were total idiots for hiring so many people they had no work for in the first place.

They pushed hard to get a lot of people into tech and then rugpulled them, insanity.

Look at Google's genie 3 page. Especially the credits. Half of those people are marketeers, people from agencies, and video editors. When you critically look at the video you basically see some poststamp size video generations that are OK looking, but no better than like open source models like hunyuan. They show two videos with impressive consistency but like 95% of the vids are just a couple seconds long. It is suggested that the generation is realtime, but there is no indication of what kind of hardware is used for it.

Also we get no indication of the amount of cherry-picking used. Knowing google that if they'd ever release it to the world, it would be nerfed to the point of having zero fun.

As far as I know the 'world model' name comes from openai that called sora a 'world simulator'. It very much turned out to be cool but have very little knowledge on what real world physics looks like.

I believe it when I can use it.

Firm Fixed-Price contracts definitely do exist and are fairly common too