Female spies are waging 'sex warfare' to steal Silicon Valley secrets

In fairness OP also refers to men as "males". Then later "men".

I don't have a view one way or another but maybe this time it isn't about women.

Male and female are preferred terms because they are objective and emotionally neutral while avoiding the sexism of misusing the word "man" to mean male human.

Many people speaking in English are not native speakers, even when they communicate fluently - such as yours truly.

I use "Males" or "Men", and "Females" or "Women" interchangeably. This is the first time I see anyone indicating there is a connotation for objectification there.

Isnt objectification required to make the point here? We’re talking about spies

And the popular image of jewel thieves is that they universally drop down from the ceiling, instead of entering from a cherrypicker truck through a smashed window.

Businessmen and diplomats don't know the API keys.

Good example for the extreme lengths people go to. Yet there is a huge difference in effort of fathering a child vs. pregnancy and delivering a child. Regardless of the parent in either case disappearing afterwards.

That’s horrific. The children go through life at a huge disadvantage.

> Wouldn’t surprise me, if the US and Israel have done the same.

The US doesn't have the institutions or culture in place to recruit and shepherd people into that kind of espionage. Or any espionage, really. We're notoriously horrible at HUMINT. With the possible exception of a brief period during the Cold War, we've always been hopelessly obsessed with developing and wielding technological solutions, not without some success, to be fair. Why spend $10 million on building a long-term HUMINT espionage program when we can pay Palantir $10 billion to run contractors to steal secrets remotely.

Israel... I dunno. Given the deep cultural and social ties and relatively easy mobility, and the fact most of the US and Israeli defense and information sectors are privatized and diffuse, Israel can probably just rely on poaching people, much like a corporation. By contrast, China's problem until recently has been brain drain. Chinese want to move to the US, China can just leverage that demand and flow of people.

I'm not sure Americans are any more susceptible to bribery than elsewhere. We're a tremendously wealthy country, with median incomes nearly twice those of even some wealthy Western European countries. The problem with recruiting established professionals is that access to highly valuable information is strongly correlated to career success, and career success means you have much more to lose, and thus less incentive to accept bribes, especially given how harsh our sentencing is compared to most of the rest of the world. (I wouldn't be surprised if corporate espionage results in longer prison time here than China, notwithstanding that for the really severe defense-related cases China will quickly put you to death, as shown by the recent CIA asset fiasco.) Most bribery cases seem to be low-level wage employees without much to offer except in exceptional situations, or government or military workers being paid much less than market rate compared to their counterpart in private industry. Elsewhere, the high-profile, high-level cases, most of the time it's not even clear the accusation is well founded.

While the current state of corporate espionage seems much more opaque, looking back at the history of French corporate espionage might be worthwhile. I don't know much about the specifics, but during the 1980s and 1990s France had a notoriously brazen corporate espionage program, much of which has been well documented and researched, so useful for understanding how it works generally.

> America has a bling problem; especially younger folks. It’s our Achilles heel.

And one particular 79 year old.

Maybe I should try the same, join company at junior level, rise through the ranks until finally some Russian and Chinese spies come an seduce me.

1. Yes re. first paragraph. There are many examples from the nuclear program.

2. No re. second paragraph(?). How many of the recent high profile "leaks" have been driven by money? Most seemed ideological.

That said, when you read stories of people who did perform espionage for money, the dollar amounts are usually embarrassing. "Just do leetcode, bro."

My wife hates videogames, retrogaming, electronics and history videos on YouTube.

Yet, we spend 1 hour hanging out in the morning every single day while we drink together the coffee I make in a $25 drip coffee machine.

Secret of a long marriage! 20 years going strong.

And there is data to suggest children of high earners tend to be more attractive, for just this reason.

A woman who is a 9 out of 10, but not inclined or able to make her own high-earning career, can jump to the head of the income line by marrying a wealthy man. No one is surprised by this, but there are certainly some genetic consequences.

Of course, children of high-income families have better access to dental care, pimple medicine, and so forth, in the US.

Americans get confused easily.

Singapore is an increasingly attractive place for mainland Chinese people to park their money, or attempt to make their fortunes, given the ambivalent-to-hostile attitudes to the PRC in the rest of the world.

Since COVID, Singapore's retail scene has been almost entirely overtaken by Chinese chains. Coffee chains like Luckin Coffee, Chagee, and more are sprouting up everywhere, including in the heartlands. Ma la hotpot/stir fry outlets follow, and then there are the Chinese bubble tea chains like Mixue.

The underbelly is also entirely of mainland Chinese stock. Sex workers, masseuses, and KTV hostesses in Singapore are majority mainland Chinese, who collect tens of thousands a day from men who patronise these establishments.

I suppose it isn't super easy for these women to find Westerners in rural China. Thus, they leave China in look of a future, going to places in Asia where meeting wealthy men is more likely (such as in Singapore).

Actually this stereotype is about Chinese women. Thai women aren't that materialistic, and where it is true, it only applies to poor Thai women, who are attracted to the man because he's probably 1,000X richer than her, which would be attractive to a poor woman from anywhere. If a prince from Lichenstein came to rural USA, he'd have no trouble dating.

This thread is bizarre and confusing. There's only been like 5 posts and already people are conflating rural Chinese, Singaporeans, and Thais.