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Notes -
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang caught having affair with Chinese spy.
There was some discussion of this in the Sunday thread, but I think this is a big deal worth a top-level post.
The woman, Alice Huang (no relation), is an executive at Singapore-based cloud computing company Megaspeed. The official story from Nvidia, up until last week, was that this was a totally normal nothing-to-see-here business relationship with a client. Jensen himself now seems to admit this is not the case.
Jensen has been strongly opposed to chip export controls for some time. No doubt prosaic conserns about margins and market expansion were a major factor, but now we have to wonder how much corruption, blackmail, and CCP blackops might have played a role. There have been rumors of... irregularities regarding some Nvidia chip shipments to Asia. There is new reporting today that Nvidia itself intervened to squash a Commerce Department investigation into Megaspeed.
I feel like the board has to fire him after this, but on the other hand it seems almost unthinkable. Imagine Apple firing Steve Jobs. There might be pressure from investors to keep him on. It will be interesting to see how the National Security apparatus responds to such a massive persistant vulnerability if it comes to that.
So, I'm mostly just seeing a lot of jokes and memes about this. Which, understandable, it's a juicy scandal.
But one semi serious response that I saw on Twitter got me thinking. Is this just an inherent weakness in all men? An unpatchable security flaw? We're already vulnerable to just normal human temptation. What are we supposed to do when foreign governments target us with professional seductresses? Should all men in critical positions get castrated for national security?
One disadvantage we have in the west is that Chinese guys are just not interested in our thots.
Can you really see Jack Ma going for this?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=anna+nicole+smith&ia=images&iax=images
Maybe, just maybe, we can draft a corps of Ryan Reynolds type guys with soft eyes to empathetically listen to the concerns of lonely Chinese housewives.
Maybe not Jack Ma, but I'll bet the CIA could crack this guy: https://fortune.com/article/chinese-billionaire-xu-bo-fathered-100-children-dozens-us-born-take-over-business/
I feel like that guy would be very hard to crack if only since he's so public with what he's up to.
Depends on the route. The easy way is a blackmail op with a professional sex worker doing the seducing and the spy holding the camera. That wouldn't work on Xu Bo because there is nothing to blackmail. But the Huang op looks like a hard mode honeypot where the spy does the seducing and the information you are after leaks via pillow-talk. That works even better on a man like Xu Bo.
I agree with @CertainlyWorse that the reason why the US (or another western country) can't do a hard-mode honeypot is that western culture doesn't allow us to ask a professional-class young lady to do that for her country.
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