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US Government May Not Approve Sale of IBM PC Unit
andy1307 writes "Xinhua, among others, quotes a Bloomberg report saying the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States, or CFIUS, might block the sale of IBM's PC unit to Lenovo over national security concerns. CFIUS is made up of 11 U.S. agencies, including the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and is chaired by the Treasury Department. They are concerned Lenovo employees might be used to conduct industrial espionage. The Bloomberg story said members of CFIUS were focusing their attention on an IBM facility in North Carolina of the United States. The same article says IBM hasn't produced its own PCs for several years and that the bulk of its production is done by manufacturing partners, largely in China. In the past, CFIUS has blocked the sale of Global crossing to Hutchison Whampoa because it would have meant Chinese control of the undersea cable communication network."
Computers are all made in China anyway! We don't build cars in America, we don't grow food in America, we don't even do tech support in America, we don't make steel in America, we don't make clothes in America and we're busy moving all our jobs that pay well overseas! When exactly did this kind of behavior become a "national security problem?" instead of good business? I mean I know all those people who used to make textiles in the South all just went right out and got themselves a degree after the mills closed - what, you say they weren't smart enough to do that?
Then WHAT THE HELL is left for them to do when all those jobs are gone except cook meth in their trailers? Or become religious terrorists?
Vote Quimby!
sticking your finger in the leaking dike or singling out a grain of sand from the beach. It's already too late. We have exported a majority of our technology to China already, which of course is being copied, therefore, saving China billions in R and D. America's greed has sold itself out.
Before you flame me, yes, I am a patriotic American, however, I am not blind to what is happening. America is going down the path of Rome. Just give us more bread and circuses. Football is more important than academics. Money is more important than ethics.
Hardly #2, but the USA is nevertheless waking up to the fact that China is catching up technologically at a much faster rate than anybody had expected. Soon enough the Chinese will have reached a point where they can threaten the USA militarily using Chinese developed technology based on technological transfer from Russia, W-Europe and the USA it self. Greedy corporations outourced work to China and with they exported the technology China needed to develop better and better military hardware. This sort of a panic reaction is simply a belated reckonition of this development. Expect the Chinese to field Submarines, Tanks and a Stealth aircraft capable of competing with the F-35 within the next 20 years or so and its surface fleet will become a serious challenge to the USN in the Pacific.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
The point is that you have at least two known psychopaths with shotguns in a room full of other people of dubious morality. The room is getting rapidly hotter and you are running out of food. There was an escape stairwell, but it's dangerous, broken and expensive to fix.
You are one of those two shotgun toting psychopaths. You've already shot at least one person to prove a point (but nobody liked that guy anyway) and your colleague has done likewise a few times as well. People in the room are very worried about you.
Do you:
a) Become repentant of your sins and mend your ways and then tell the other psycho to do likewise?
b) Blow the guy's head off, before he shoots you or somebody you like?
c) Talk to him quietly while waving your gun around to stop other people in the room getting ideas? I mean, if the two of you team up you could eat all the other people in the room and not go hungry, right? Yeah, let's eat them.
I know that this view of the world is really screwed up, but if you look at world events, I think that this is the world that our leaders see.