Hosting and providing Chinese models wouldn't be the same as doing business with the sanctioned entities though, you don't interact with them in any capacity if you only use the weights and don't sign any contracts.
Extreme control of movement and sleep including deprivation of it for arbitrary amounts, constant lighting, no outside time, nothing to do for months at a time, lack of nutritious food, all those things in combination constitue torture under most modern definitions.
Even granting that (which... no. How is it true? Any evidence?) it's still less inhumane than what Japan is doing here. The conditions amount to torture.
The fact that many people opt to falsely plead guilty and get a reduced punishment in a society that highly values honor and saving face should say a lot about it.
> "Perrin now offers a different framing. “Article 8 ter, which I had adopted, was not at all aimed at obtaining encryption keys but at introducing a ghost participant into a conversation before encryption,” he says. The “ghost participant” approach, sometimes called a ghost user proposal, was floated by GCHQ in 2018 and rejected by every major privacy organization, civil liberties group, and security researcher who looked at it. The idea is that the platform silently adds a third recipient, an invisible intelligence agent, to a supposedly two-person conversation. Users never see them. The encryption technically still works, except that one of the parties is the state."
It's not about the displacement of workers. It talks about a fundamental principles-level objection to unbounded "progress". It's not an absolute argument and Orwell himself says so, but it is worth keeping in mind.
The virtues you mention are not a consequence of the tortuous treatment described in the post though. Conditions could rise to Western humane standards and the underlying Japanese culture that allows for such peaceful living would still remain.
You can mitigate malware while still allowing for the same level of end-user control as the manufacturer. Look at Windows itself! People getting infected on up-to-date installations is a rarity nowadays, all without draconian lockdown policies.
It's not about "design", because the iPhone is perfectly capable of running arbitrary code, it just refuses to do so if you're not Apple.
The situation is such that the legal owner of the device has less power over it, post-sale, than the company that made it.
That reason alone, the imbalance of power, should be enough to support abolishing those restrictions, preferably by law.
To be clear: this is something that should be beyond market forces, and it should apply to anything that is sold to consumers and can run code. The end goal should be that no user remain less powerful, in terms of code execution and access to content, than the manufacturer.
> "The fact is that a mere training in one or more of the exact sciences, even combined with very high gifts, is no guarantee of a humane or sceptical outlook."