And, here is the important part, those rich people need that money so their high score wealth is bigger than that other rich person's high score like wealth, not for mundane reasons like improving their quality of life or anything.
Are you somehow under the impression that just because it is "global" there are no transmitters and receivers and distance does not matter?
Counterpoint, if you don't create a new device at least once every 2 years there will be people who disregard your latest device in their purchase decision because it is so old.
"Never forget" is great and all but from a German perspective it seems to not be enough. It is much more important to make sure the same or very similar things do not happen again, not by China and not by any other nation. Otherwise you end up like we did here in Germany where decades of "never forget" lead to very similar sentiments being expressed by a new major party but since things are slightly different (e.g. the "never forget" was always phrased to be about Jews, this is more about foreigners in general) people seem to allow themselves to ignore them.
This means that Israel presently relies on an external backer for its security (the US).
Makes you wonder if Israel is trying to grab as much land as possible and eliminate as many people who might have competing claims on that land as possible before the US collapses economically (and with that their giant military budget) now that Donald Trump is doing his best to make that a reality.
Sometimes what you are led to believe is also more closely related to some sales or marketing person's life goals than your own.
I disagree...with your decision to limit your statement to their smartphones instead of applying it to all of their devices.
I can't speak for others but I simply hate that people keep telling us how amazing AI is yet not a single one of them can ever point to a single task completed by AI on its own that is actually of decent quality, never mind enough tasks that I would trust AI to do anything without supervision. I mean actual tasks, e.g. PRs on an open source repository or a video showing some realistic every-day task done from start to finish by AI alone, not hand-wavy "I use it every day" abstract claims.
People like OP seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that reading code takes a lot of time and effort, even when there was an actual human thought process behind it, never mind when it might be totally random garbage. Writing code is also not nearly as much of a bottleneck as AI proponents seem to think it is. Reading code to verify it is not total garbage is actually much more effort than writing the same code yourself. It might not appear like that if you are writing in a low expressiveness language like Go or Java because you are reading or writing a lot of lines for every actual high level action the code takes that you need to think about but it becomes more obvious in more expressive languages where the same action can be expressed closer to 1:1 in terms of lines per high level action.
Asian Intelligence?
Presumably in terms of numbers most of those are single use so think of them more as ammo than as aircraft.
Tor exit nodes could also identify you if they cooperate with some of the websites you visit (the way e.g. a government could force them to).
Don't forget that they are literally being lead by a political movement named after the history denying idea that they were "great" at some point and want to get back to that (never mind the other lie that the leaders of the movement don't actually want to get back to any particular point in history despite the name)