Oh nothing… its just $160B in trade the United States does, nothing much.

U.S. goods and services trade with Taiwan totaled an estimated $160.0 billion in 2022. Exports were $54.5 billion; imports were $105.5 billion. The U.S. goods and services trade deficit with Taiwan was $51.0 billion in 2022.

U.S. goods exports to Taiwan in 2022 were $44.2 billion, up 20.1 percent ($7.4 billion) from 2021 and up 82 percent from 2012. U.S. goods imports from Taiwan totaled $91.7 billion in 2022, up 19.1 percent ($14.7 billion) from 2021, and up 136 percent from 2012. U.S. exports to Taiwan account for 2.1 percent of overall U.S. exports in 2022. The U.S. goods trade deficit with Taiwan was $47.5 billion in 2022, a 18.1 percent increase ($7.3 billion) over 2021.

U.S. exports of services to Taiwan were an estimated $10.3 billion in 2022, 2.4 percent ($243 million) more than 2021, and 11 percent less than 2012 levels. U.S. imports of services from Taiwan were an estimated $13.8 billion in 2022, 38.8 percent ($3.9 billion) more than 2021, and 131 percent greater than 2012 levels. Leading services exports from the U.S. to Taiwan were in the intellectual property, transportation, and travel sectors. The United States had a services trade deficit of an estimated $3.5 billion with Taiwan in 2022, down 3802.1 percent from 2021.

U.S. foreign direct investment (FDI) in Taiwan (stock) was $16.7 billion in 2022, a 2.7 percent increase from 2021. U.S. direct investment in Taiwan is led by manufacturing, finance and insurance, and wholesale trade.

Taiwan’s FDI in the United States (stock) was $16.1 billion in 2022, up 1.1 percent from 2021. Taiwan’s direct investment in the U.S. is led by manufacturing, depository institutions, and wholesale trade.

Source: https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/china/taiwan

StackOverflow initially had an interesting idea of putting metrics on things, and unfortunately humanity’s penchant for “what gets measured is gamed” was amplified and devolved into a hive of HOA Karens looking for infractions of the rules.

I’ll bet that if you “relaunched” a SO-like system and removed all human-visible “points” or “scores” you could achieve a less toxic environment. The only “ranking” is implicit based on your topical subscriptions.

Then again, you could “relaunch” the “relaunch” and “AlphaGo-ify” a bunch of AI agents to compose the dialogs and threads without any human interaction at all. I guess we’re on our way already to building Culture minds.