Huawei Turns To Pig Farming as Smartphone Sales Fall (bbc.com) 77
Huawei is turning to technology for pig farmers as it deals with tough sanctions on its smartphones. From a report: The Chinese telecoms giant was stopped from accessing vital components after the Trump administration labelled it a threat to US national security. In response to struggling smartphone sales, Huawei is looking at other sources of revenue for its technology. Along with Artificial Intelligence (AI) tech for pig farmers, Huawei is also working with the coal mining industry. Former US President Donald Trump claimed Huawei can share customer data with the Chinese government, allegations it has repeatedly denied. As a result, the world's largest telecoms equipment maker has been limited to making 4G models as it lacks US government permission to import components for 5G models. Huawei's smartphone sales plunged 42% in the last quarter of 2020 as it struggled with a limited supply of microchips due to the sanctions. Huawei has also been locked out of the development of 5G in a number of countries, including the UK, amid fears over national security.
[...] China has the world's biggest pig farming industry and is home to half the world's live hogs. Technology is helping to modernise pig farms with AI being introduced to detect diseases and track pigs. Facial recognition technology can identify individual pigs, while other technology monitors their weight, diet and exercise. Huawei has already been developing facial recognition tech and faced criticism last month for a system that identifies people who appear to be of Uighur origin among images of pedestrians. Other Chinese tech giants, including JD.com and Alibaba, are already working with pig farmers in China to bring new technologies.
[...] China has the world's biggest pig farming industry and is home to half the world's live hogs. Technology is helping to modernise pig farms with AI being introduced to detect diseases and track pigs. Facial recognition technology can identify individual pigs, while other technology monitors their weight, diet and exercise. Huawei has already been developing facial recognition tech and faced criticism last month for a system that identifies people who appear to be of Uighur origin among images of pedestrians. Other Chinese tech giants, including JD.com and Alibaba, are already working with pig farmers in China to bring new technologies.
So disappointed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nobody would eat that!
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That is the problem here. Trying to create some kind of doubt with regard to Huawei and the CCP by bringing up Donald Trump over and over again.
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It's not either/or: All 3 are F'd up.
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Fair enough. I'm just saying one needs to separate their opinion of Trump from their opinion on... anything really... but in this thread Huawei and the CCP don't become more or less F'd up simply because Trump was calling them out. As you said, all three can be F'd up.
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What are you trying to say? Or why are you disappointed?
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I think he's trying to say that the most obvious interpretation of the title was that they were now farming pigs to make ends meat**, not developing tech for people farming pigs.
**that was intentional
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Could pig farmers be turning to Slashdot editing? Food for thought.
Pig Shit (Score:3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Replace the Underworld with Ughurs and Aunty Entity (Tina Turner) & her staff with Huawei, and this is a pretty good approximation of this story!
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Don't mock, it's big money. (Score:5, Insightful)
In much of the world, pork is the de-facto meat, well above poultry. And it's not small organic farms doing the pig farming here - it's major upscaled industry, with plenty of automation.
And automation will kind of be THE meta-industry as time goes on, for tech companies.
Maybe not as glorious as cell phones - but doing contracts and shifting to general industry automation is key to becoming a bigger company, redefining the tech sector, rather than just playing catch-up or support to American industry.
That and automated plant/bacteria/insect farming for food and biofuels are the big obvious low-hanging fruit towards helping the most human beings with the least effort over time. Water purification after that - but there's still a lot of roadblocks in the materials science side for that, so it's probably not a good target for a tech company yet.
Ryan Fenton
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John Deere is way ahead of you.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech... [ieee.org]
Deere then worked with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NavCom Technology (now a Deere subsidiary) on a better GPS system. The result was Deere’s first GPS receiver, which also worked with other regional constellations of positioning satellites. The 1996 version, shown above, was affectionately nicknamed Green Eggs and Ham. Designed to be mounted on top of a tractor’s cab, it carried a GPS antenna as well as a C-band anten
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pork is the de-facto meat
I sure do hope that pork factually is meat, and not some kind of fake.
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I sure do hope that pork factually is meat, and not some kind of fake.
Fake meat is more expensive than real meat, so I doubt if it is fake.
It is more likely that someone would try to slip some real meat into the vegan packaging.
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They're not as fond of beef as the western world is. At least not yet.
Because I've also seen that marked for dairy products has exploded in China in the last three decades. And while dairy cattle produces inferior meat compared to cattle raised for meat, they probably still can make a greater profit if they find a way to sell it for consumption by people than with using it for something else.
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Chinese also eat lots of sheep, especially in the north and west.
China raises more than twice as many sheep as Australia.
China also imports millions of sheep from Mongolia.
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Re:Don't mock, it's big money. (Score:4, Informative)
China's huge population alone is going to inflate numbers, hence I think we need to divide by the population to get some per capita numbers, we could get a better idea of proportionality.
So if we go by numbers like from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
We have:
China with 54,070 tons of pork consumed in 2016 at a population of 1.379 billion in 2016. Using a very crude 54,070/1.379 (for simplicity) we get a pseudo per capita ratio of 39209.
EU with 20,062 tons at a population of 510.1 million all in 2016 -> 39329
US 9,452 at a population of 323.1 million all in 2016 -> 29254
The EU was slightly ahead in pork consumption in 2016.
If we combine the EU and US into the Western world (I lack data for Canada and Australia in 2016) we get a total ratio of 35422.
PS I also like sheep, as in mutton and lamb. But I don't know many here in Germany that feel the same. Perhaps lamb is somewhat ok, but not mutton. In my home country Romania it's a different story though. Mutton is more popular there.
Re: Don't mock, it's big money. (Score:3)
Depends a lot on climate. I am in Qinghai. Less pork because of Muslims. The lamb here is quite excellent and very popular. Yak more popular with Tibetan.
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Sure. Culture affects a lot of what we deem is acceptable to eat. Halal and Kosher are big examples of this being so ingrained it's religion. It's interesting though I think you left out whale which is probably one of the most controversial and includes both commercial operations and traditional practices. Also, South China in Guangdong they eat basically everything (e.g. dog, insect, bat) -- even in China people are pretty freaked out by everything they eat there. Monkey is also an interesting one, I have
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They're not as fond of beef as the western world is. At least not yet.
Because I've also seen that marked for dairy products has exploded in China in the last three decades. And while dairy cattle produces inferior meat compared to cattle raised for meat, they probably still can make a greater profit if they find a way to sell it for consumption by people than with using it for something else.
All cow meat is dairy meat.
Mammals don't waste calories on production of protein and fat used only for feeding their babies who can't yet digest solid food.
Ergo, if you want to have fresh milk every morning and plenty of cheese for your pizza - gotta impregnate them cows. To make them lactate. A lot.
But then you end up with an excess number of baby cows... and half of them, being boy cows, will never produce milk.
So, being useless compared to tractors some become veal, others are grown into beef.
Cow meat in
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Just one example. https://www.bbc.com/future/art... [bbc.com]
Feel free to do your own research for dairy consumption in China.
From my perspective their economy as wholly embraced capitalism and despite some predisposition to lactose intolerance among those ethnicities they're not leaving that branch of agriculture untapped.
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You could have stopped at "cattle produce inferior meat". Aside from cooking beef heart in anticuchos I can't really think of a chunk of cow that I would prefer over pork, mutton, chicken, buffalo (yum!), rabbit, guinea pig (YUMMM!!), snake, alpaca, pigeon, or pretty much any other critter.
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Most Europeans eat pork just fine. The strange obsession with beef is kind of an anglosaxon thing. It is a bit similar to the situation with horse meat.
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To cite a goat herder I knew in Romania: Pigs eat food that I could eat. My goats eat things that are inedible for me.
Now sure, not everyone is a fan of goat meat, but similar things apply to chicken or rabbits, to all animals of the family Bovidae (buffalo, domestic cattle, goats, sheep). You can raise them on a diet of grass.
Of course when it comes to
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Can that goat herder really eat acorns?
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My mother tells a stories about her grandfather, who after Romania was overtaken by the Red Army and Germany surrendered was sent to Russia for reparations with many other ethnic German Romanians. As one of the story goes, he had to eat acorns to stay alive, while many others just starved to death.
The tannoids in contained in the acorns are poisonous. Pigs just happen to be a lot more resistant to them than humans. So if you get the tannins out a healthy human digestive tract c
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Hmm... Big money, but that's mostly on the large scale of factory farming, and it seems to be a losing strategy.
Today's counterexample is the massive culling of chickens in Japan. Eggs now in short supply because the lack of genetic diversity guarantees that any suitable strain of avian flu will run rampant. Or is Huawei going to focus on ways to increase the genetic diversity with more kinds of hogs and more "individualized" optimization?
(But I still can't see any path to the massive profits that the stock
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Forget nanotechnology, which remains in the unforeseeable future. We're not even to Snow Crash yet.
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I think I need to make another effort to find Snow Crash around here somewhere... (In English, that is.Translations are readily available.)
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Sadly good point. My version is that stock price has become a matter of opinion in a kind of gambling game.
Still, the notion that every form of earning money is supposed to be somehow equal is fundamentally ridiculous. Reminds me of a book called Zombie Economics that said a lot about the lack of "perfect" knowledge on Wall Street.
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Facial recognition technology can identify individual pigs, while other technology monitors their weight, diet and exercise.
Well, there's even a bigger market than pigs waiting out there. Pig physiology is very similar to human physiology so maybe everyone in China could get this gadget strapped to them:
"Comrade X! You must eat your spinach!
"Comrade Y!. Get your fat, hairy ass off the sofa and get out and exercise!"
Denmark is the biggest pork producer in Europe, so maybe they might be interested in this technology.
But then again . . . maybe they don't want to put the health of their pigs in the hands of a competitor.
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In much of the world, pork is the de-facto meat, well above poultry. And it's not small organic farms doing the pig farming here - it's major upscaled industry, with plenty of automation.
True. Reminds me of the time I saw one "free range" live pig while visiting Austria's countrysides. Yes, that quantity is accurate. We laughed about it, assuming the rest were on almost every plate in every restaurant.
And automation will kind of be THE meta-industry as time goes on, for tech companies.
Good for tech companies. Now I wonder what we're going to do with the endless herds of unemployed humans displaced by THE meta-industry as they quickly reach unemployable status. Let's not assume Greed cares. At all.
Maybe not as glorious as cell phones - but doing contracts and shifting to general industry automation is key to becoming a bigger company, redefining the tech sector, rather than just playing catch-up or support to American industry. That and automated plant/bacteria/insect farming for food and biofuels are the big obvious low-hanging fruit towards helping the most human beings with the least effort over time.
Yup. Sounds like a whole lot of human jobs alright. Also sounds like
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Population size alone would have any unemployment trends magnified sooner, for the simple reason most countries don't have jobs for everyone.
Re: Don't mock, it's big money. (Score:2)
China finds all kinds of little jobs for people. Generally a lower living wage, longer periods of living with extended family or three generation homes, and cashless societies. Shit, you find beggars with QR codes but generally these are people with extreme disabilities, like no legs. Uber may not be profitable but Didi seems to be fine. The gig economy seems perfectly alive and well here. Shit I got a lady who cleans my house for 35 yuan an hour and that won't even buy me a cheeseburger and a coke.
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Old and busted: Corporations aren't people.
New hotness: Corporations have rights to not have to compete with Amazon or be bought by Apple.
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In a future that dark, it's probably equally plausible that the humans will be turned into literal cattle. I mean, what ARE they going to do with all of us excess people they don't want?
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In a future that dark, it's probably equally plausible that the humans will be turned into literal cattle. I mean, what ARE they going to do with all of us excess people they don't want?
Soylent Green, takes place in the year 2022. Perhaps we'll find out soon enough what the Green New Deal, really means.
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On a related note, after hurricanes in the US southeast have blasted apart several large industrial hog farms there is now a feral pig problem in that part of the country. There were (may still be) guided hunts you could go on, no license needed.
I cannot even imagine how many companies have been undercut and driven out of business by Amazon Basics tactics.
Probably far fewer than you think, and definitely far fewer than have been saved by sales on Amazon. Over half of the sales on Amazon.com are made by third party businesses, and the majority of those are small and medium sized companies. There are a *lot* of busi
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On a related note, after hurricanes in the US southeast have blasted apart several large industrial hog farms there is now a feral pig problem in that part of the country. There were (may still be) guided hunts you could go on, no license needed.
I cannot even imagine how many companies have been undercut and driven out of business by Amazon Basics tactics.
Probably far fewer than you think, and definitely far fewer than have been saved by sales on Amazon. Over half of the sales on Amazon.com are made by third party businesses, and the majority of those are small and medium sized companies. There are a *lot* of businesses out there which are only surviving the lockdown because they still can sell product online.
Tell that to every human who previously was employed in a G&A position that was destroyed by a single org putting them out of business. From the duplicate CxOs all the way down to the janitor, thousands of jobs were displaced or lost altogether through nothing more than consolidation.
Be honest, did you know prior to the recent announcement that Apple had purchased 100 companies in the last 6 years? When we're talking about trillion dollar companies, let's not assume the impact. I agree that a *lot* h
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will kind of be THE
Your confusion is palpable.
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some help (Score:2)
Chinese Government Divestiture (Score:5, Informative)
The underlying problem isn't in the Chinese legal system and their ability to demand data from private companies. After all, the US has laws that permit it to serve warrants to demand information, including secret ones that cannot be challenged (FISA). The differences between the US and China in this area are not as large as many have been led to believe!
The underlying problem is that the Chinese government has a board-level ownership stake in many companies, not just the ones that are 100% state-owned. And board-level corporate owners in China get access, much as board-level corporate owners do in the US.
But there is a HUGE difference here between China and the US: In the US, the government is not allowed to own corporations, except within very narrow and limited legislated boundaries.
Were the Chinese government to divest itself of corporate ownership (including state-owned businesses) and vacate all board seats it holds/controls, that should greatly reduce the tensions and concerns. Unfortunately this is unlikely, since the state-owned companies help fund the Chinese government which in turn helps keeps taxes artificially low.
In the specific case of Huawei, a company that is not publicly traded and claims to be employee-owned (it's murky), there is literally no way to know the level of Chinese government involvement: There is no Chinese legislation that limits it! This is despite Huawei's frequent claims of independence from the Chinese government, something it has been unable to prove (perhaps due to Chinese state security or intelligence gathering laws).
Though I personally like Huawei products, I cannot say the US government is in any way wrong to limit Huawei access to US markets and products.
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Every nation with the capability to produce its own telecoms gear should do so specifically for this reason.
We gave up the capability to make our own electronic devices with all home-grown parts, but we could and should get there again.
As long as people are capable of evil, it makes sense to institute defense in depth.
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Your BS: China might spy, but that is IMPOSSIBLE in America.
Reality: There is no evidence that Huawei spies, while America's government has been caught red-handed inserting backdoors into commercial products and spying on enemies, friends, and allies.
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You've entirely missed the point: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
We have no way to determine the level of Chinese government direct involvement in Huawei. However, it is an absolute fact that the Chinese government has massive direct influence in the majority of large Chinese corporations, most often through various branches of the PLA (which is nearly a government unto itself). What we call "spying" from our perspective they may call "business as usual" from their perspective. That's an
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Even if there were laws in China against government ownership of corporations, the government could break its own laws with impunity. There are no checks or balances against abuse of power, other than higher-ranking party officials becoming upset with someone's behavior.
Re: Chinese Government Divestiture (Score:2)
Saying the party self-regulates and the US has checks and balances, is effectively a comparison of nil value. The only difference is the US has a polarized landscape and the Chinese system has to effectively agree on a unified policy. In practice both have supreme examples of cronyism. Since this is the general measurement of corruption, we cannot really arrive at any meaningful conclusion and to do so, often only illuminates our bias to our belief that countries are really that different when they all pl
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A comparison of nil value?
Some random bureaucrat in D.C. can't plant monitors in corporate board rooms at a whim with the blessing of higher-ups. In China, this can (and does) happen all the time.
China can rewrite and reinterpret its own laws on a whim, at any time, with no meaningful due process.
The CCP can confiscate property. The CCP can forcibly relocate you or make you disappear. It can do anything it wants so long as it doesn't step on the wrong toes or upset too many people. You can't (yet) do th
Re: Chinese Government Divestiture (Score:2)
You are so write. Truly an expert on China and US history. This is why the trail of tears never happened because in America you can not force people to relocate and there is no such thing as imminent domain because lawyer armiestgat work for the good of society. This is why guantanamo bay is actually a beautiful vacation spot because in America the electorate could never circumvent inalienable rights and if they did those shining lawyers would March to the rescue of anyone in need. America is number one
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The underlying problem isn't in the Chinese legal system and their ability to demand data from private companies. After all, the US has laws that permit it to serve warrants to demand information, including secret ones that cannot be challenged (FISA). The differences between the US and China in this area are not as large as many have been led to believe!
In the specific case of Huawei, a company that is not publicly traded and claims to be employee-owned (it's murky), there is literally no way to know the level of Chinese government involvement: There is no Chinese legislation that limits it! This is despite Huawei's frequent claims of independence from the Chinese government, something it has been unable to prove (perhaps due to Chinese state security or intelligence gathering laws).
For a bit of (recommended) light reading, in 2017 China's State Council produced a paper (full translation here) [newamerica.org] on its plans for the development of AI. One indirect analysis of it surmised that: "Underpinning it were a set of beliefs: that AI can “harmonise” Chinese society; that for it to do so, the government should store data on every citizen; that companies, not the state, were best positioned to innovate; that no company should refuse access to the government to its data." It is this last,
Slogan (Score:2)
Re: ILLEGITIMATE president Beijing Biden to the Re (Score:2)
Missed a pill again this morning? It's in the top drawer..
Who runs Bartertown? (Score:2)
Remember Reggie Perrin? (Score:2)
The Fall and Rise of Huawei
It's a match (Score:2)
The more pigs China raises, the less pigs the US can export there.
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African Swine Fever is a wildcard (Score:2)