Tag: News

• Target plans to stock Pride merch in about half its stores this year, sources told Bloomberg.
• The full range will be available online, it reported.
• Last year, Target's Pride range faced a massive backlash from conservatives, contributing to a fall in sales.

Target plans to stock Pride merch in just half its stores after it faced an intense backlash and even calls for a boycott last year, Bloomberg reported.

The retailer is looking at data for each store to decide where to stock the products, and is likely to sell them in about half of its locations for Pride Month in June, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. It plans to sell its full Pride range online, the people said.

A Target spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company was committed to supporting the LGBTQ+ community "during Pride Month and year-round." The company would have internal programs and a presence at Pride events across the county, the spokesperson said.

Last year Target faced a massive backlash from vocal conservatives over its Pride range, which included slogan tote bags and sweaters as well as transgender-friendly swimsuits. The retailer said some people had made "threats" impacting workers' safety and CEO Brian Cornell said its call centers had received "high volumes of angry, abusive and threatening calls."

In some stores, Pride displays were moved to quieter areas. Some workers in Florida and Texas told Business Insider that products related to transgender Pride had been removed from their stores.

Some LGBTQ+ Target workers said that the company's response to the backlash left them feeling alienated.

Target CFO Michael Fiddleke told investors last summer that the reaction to its Pride range had contributed to the retailer's first quarterly sales decline in six years.

Bud Light was also targeted by conservatives last year after partnering with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, and some Starbucks workers said the coffee chain had banned them from displaying Pride decor, including flags. A Starbucks spokesperson told Business Insider at the time that there had been no changes to its LGBTQ+ policies.

• Warren Buffett slashed his Apple stake then found himself forced to work from his iPhone.
• The investor turned to the device after phone lines went down this week at Berkshire Hathaway HQ.
• "I'm glad we didn't sell all of our Apple," Buffett joked to The Omaha World-Herald.

Warren Buffett may be cursing the universe for its wicked sense of humor.

The famed investor revealed during Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meeting on Saturday that he'd slashed his Apple stake. Two days later, he walked into his company's headquarters to find the phone lines were down, forcing him to work from his iPhone.

"I don't know how to do much with it, but I do know how to answer calls," Buffett, 93, told The Omaha World-Herald on Wednesday when the local outage had not yet been resolved.

"I'm glad we didn't sell all of our Apple," he quipped.

Buffett famously spends his days analyzing companies and conversing on the phone, so the outage was a major headache for him — especially as he left his cellphone at home on Monday.

"We had this meeting that went over very well all weekend, and now to anybody who has phoned us in the last three days, they think we have gone out of business," Buffett joked to his hometown newspaper.

He was nodding to Berkshire cashing in 13% of its Apple stake for roughly $20 billion last quarter. At the end of December, the position was worth $174 billion and made up nearly half of Berkshire's $353 billion portfolio.

Berkshire's disposals, and an 11% drop in Apple's stock price, cut the holding's value to $135 billion, or 40% of the portfolio at the end of March.

Buffett is unabashedly old school and proudly frugal. Berkshire follows suit despite commanding a near-$900 billion valuation and ranking among the nation's 10 largest public companies.

For example, Berkshire's corporate homepage is a list of hyperlinks straight out of the 1990s:

Buffett's tech skepticism made his massive bet on Apple a surprise to many people. But the investor has pointed to the iPhone's immense appeal and how indispensable it is to users. He got a taste of just how much people rely on it this week.

• A think tank hid a free bottle of wine in its website's terms and conditions.
• They aimed to see if anyone actually reads privacy policies. It took three months to be claimed.
• Tax Policy Associates founder Dan Neidle said it was a "childish protest" at the need for privacy policies.

It might just be worth reading those T&Cs after all.

In February, UK think tank Tax Policy Associates snuck a tempting offer into one of the clauses on its website's terms and conditions, to see if anybody would actually notice.

"This website uses cookies so it remembers your name if you leave a comment. You can reject them if you like," the privacy policy read. "We will send a bottle of good wine to the first person to read this."

The think tank's founder, Dan Neidle, said on X on Thursday that someone had finally claimed the bottle.

"Our ongoing experiment into whether anyone reads website T&Cs continues," he wrote, adding that the wine "just got claimed."

Neidle told the BBC that the T&Cs stunt was "my childish protest that all businesses have to have a privacy policy and no-one reads it."

The website's privacy policy has since been updated to say: "We know nobody reads this."

Amusingly, the person who claimed the bottle was only reading it because they were writing their own T&Cs and needed examples to follow, Neidle told the BBC.

The wine he sent out, per the BBC, was a 2013-2014 bottle of Château de Sales, which retails for about $44.

So-called "gotcha clauses" have been around for a while, highlighting a seemingly intractable problem in digital life.

In 2014, a security firm added what it called a "Herod clause" into a public wi-fi network's terms and conditions.

Six people signed up to "assign their first born child to us for the duration of eternity," in order to access the wi-fi, as The Guardian reported at the time.

The authors of one 2017 study found that 98% of participants signed up to similarly onerous terms.

Neidle said he was inspired by the legendary clause that Van Halen buried in their tour rider, according to the BBC.

At each stop, the group demanded a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones taken out — not because they were pampered, but because it would prove that the host venue was paying attention to more crucial safety and technical aspects of their show.

"It was a brilliant strategy to see if people were paying attention," Neidle told the BBC.

There are many reasons why few people read T&Cs, marketing experts Jeff Rotman and Paul Harrison wrote in The Conversation last year.

People tend to trust that large companies won't screw them over and that any problems would have already been spotted and dealt with before, they said.

They also said that evidence suggests that people are slightly more likely to read them if they're perceived as short, if they're spending a lot of money, or if they think they'll have a chance to influence the terms of the contract.

• Emirates CEO Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum criticized Boeing in a CNBC interview.
• He told the planemaker: "Get your act together."
• Boeing is balancing plane safety with keeping its customers happy over delivery times.

Boeing is facing criticism from one of its biggest customers, as the CEO of Emirates told the planemaker to "get your act together," in an interview with CNBC.

During Tuesday's interview, Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum expressed disappointment with delays to deliveries of new Boeing planes Emirates has ordered.

"We're not happy really with what's going on, we always really wanted to see this aircraft entering the fleet when it had been promised — and there is a delay, it's not only to us," he told CNBC.

"I think they have to put a lot of pressure in order to make sure that they deliver to the customer whatever they promised."

Al Maktoum told CNBC that his message for Boeing is: "Get your act together and just do it. And I think they can do it."

Boeing did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by Business Insider.

The planemaker's reputation has faltered since a 737 Max operated by Alaska Airlines lost a door plug in midair in January. In its preliminary report, the National Transportation Safety Board said the plane — delivered just 66 days earlier — left Boeing's factory missing key bolts.

As a result, aircraft production has slowed as Boeing tries to regain customers' trust.

After announcing his resignation, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun said the company needed to slow down production in order to focus on safety and avoid another incident like the blowout.

Al Maktoum's comments highlight the difficult balancing act Boeing must achieve in the coming months — ensuring that it prioritizes safety over pretty much everything else, while also keeping delays to a minimum.

With 250 planes on order, Emirates is Boeing's biggest customer for widebody jets. The Dubai-based carrier also does a lot of business with rival Airbus: on Monday, it announced the first destinations to be served by the A350 which enters service in September. It's also by far the biggest operator of the superjumbo A380.

While Al Maktoum expressed his disappointment with Boeing, he didn't go as far as to say that this would lead to canceling orders or switching to more Airbus jets. "I won't be able to say exactly what we are planning," he told CNBC.

That contrasts with United Airlines. In January, CEO Scott Kirby said delays to the 737 Max 10 mean the carrier is building an alternative plan without it. The chief financial officer then said the Airbus A321neo is being considered as an alternative.

• Norway is often in the 10 happiest countries in the world, but is also in the top 3 most productive.
• A Norwegian CEO based in Oslo whose worked in the US shares the major differences.
• He said Norwegians have stricter boundaries between work and home life and are never late. 

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Sondre Kvam, co-founder and CEO of Naer, a VR platform that helps teams improve their productivity with fully immersive workshops, who lives in Oslo, Norway. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I live and work in Norway and am a co-founder of Naer, a VR productivity platform. I work with employees based all around the world and travel to the US frequently. I often think about productivity and how to embed it in working practices.

Sweden is often lauded for its working practices, and of course, it has a larger economy, but it's Norway that's often ranked as one of the most productive countries in the world. Looking at GDP per hour, Norway often falls in the top three countries globally.

These aspects of Norway's working culture contribute to high productivity while maintaining a good work-life balance. Norway also falls in the top 10 happiest countries in the world.

People spend less time navigating workplace conflict

Much of our work life is based around the Norwegian model of cooperation and mutual respect between employers and employees, unions, employee associations, and the government.

There are laws to ensure good information flows between businesses and employees. For instance, if you have more than 30 employees, you're obligated to have an "employee representative" as part of the board.

There are unions for knowledge workers and most normal jobs like restaurant work. Discussions between unions and companies usually happen via the "Næringslivets Hovedorganisasjon" or NHO, a sort of union businesses can join. Companies don't have to join the NHO, but most do.

Norway has something called "lønnsoppgjøret" or "the salary settlement" every year, where general guidelines around pay are established for each industry in negotiations with unions and employer associations. Once a wage baseline has been set in each sector, every business has some leeway to give more to high performers.

Civil conversations between all these players are the norm, and people don't spend much time in conflicts regarding workplace issues because they're handled by these trusted bodies.

Because of that, Norwegian employees tend to be focused and spend their time well during work hours. Most people work traditional hours like 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. or 9 p.m. to 5 p.m. There's a mentality that you should strive to have a life outside work by working set hours and having boundaries.

Deep work is the default

At work, Norwegians are working, and deep work is expected of everyone. So there's no doing life admin, answering LinkedIn messages, chatting to colleagues about unrelated topics, or online shopping, like in UK or US offices. Most of the time, Norwegians are head down working or collaborating. Pretty much every Norwegian has some sort of noise-canceling headset. If you're wearing one, you want absolute peace.

Going to the US, I often hear of people putting in 80-hour working weeks. However, Americans have a different relationship to the workplace — they stay later because they have longer commutes and maybe can get dinner, use the gym, or other life admin services at their offices. 'Busywork,' life admin, and rest time all happen at work.

In Norway, anyone working at any large company logs off and continues with their home lives when the day's allocated working hours are up, which are tightly regulated during collective bargaining. That's across sectors — banking, consulting firms, and service jobs.

A lot of people turn off notifications outside work. I've set up my notification systems so that only important things come through outside work hours. I like getting up early, reading books, and trying to spend time with things relevant to my work. There's this misconception that being constantly available for your workplace makes you more productive or faster. Being constantly "on" just interrupts time to think things through or get inspiration from other places.

There's an understanding between employers and employees in Norway that you will do better work if you're not thinking about work all the time. Talking of work outside work is not taboo, but you don't want to be the guy who can't shut up about work. Norwegians are encouraged to take holidays and spend time with their families. Stress and exhaustion narrow your perspective, which in turn degrades your work.

Ahead of time, or you're late

For Norwegians, being late to anything is incredibly rude. Either you're ahead of time, or you're late. Sitting around waiting for someone to join a meeting is one of the things Norwegians hate the most. It's throwing both money and time out of the window.

As a society, we do not praise "grinding for the sake of grinding," and there's an awareness of the cost-benefit of doing so. I don't feel a pressure not to work, but there's a clear expectation that I keep an eye on my own well-being.

As the cofounder of a startup, I work a fair amount, with particular crunch points like launching products, sorting recruitment, and preparing for a fundraise. Having customers in other time zones also means I must be flexible with my work schedule and sometimes work in the evening or early morning.

As everywhere else, there is a problem of people being burned out as founders in Norway.

My girlfriend is much more strict on the boundaries of her work. She is a data scientist and backend engineer for a Norwegian startup. When she's done for the day, she completely switches messages off. She probably gets even more annoyed than I about waiting for someone on a call.

It links to the fact we have limited time at work. You get used to this dynamic where time is precious and hate it when someone's late outside work. If I were to be more than 10 minutes late for a date in Norway, that would be unacceptable. That relationship would be finished before it started — it's a total dealbreaker.

• Cold Stone Creamery is facing legal action over 'pistachio' ice cream that contains no pistachios.
• The plaintiff argued that the name misled her into believing the ice cream contained real nuts.
• Last week, a judge ruled that the case can move forward. It's unclear when it will go to trial.

The parent company of Cold Stone Creamery is facing legal action after a New York woman ordered "pistachio" ice cream only to discover that it didn't contain pistachios.

In a ruling last week, Gary R. Brown, a federal judge at the Eastern District Court of New York in Brooklyn, allowed the case against Kahala Brands to move forward.

It all started when the plaintiff visited a Cold Stone Creamery in Levittown, Long Island, in July 2022, ordering what she believed was a pistachio ice cream.

In court filings, her legal team argued that she "reasonably believed" it contained the nut due to its name, but Brown wrote that "heartbreak followed."

The ruling says that upon examining the website's ingredient list, the plaintiff learned that the ice cream was made using a "mixture of highly processed ingredients" but no actual pistachios.

According to the ruling, it was instead made with pistachio flavoring, consisting of "Water, Ethanol, Propylene Glycol, Natural & Artificial Flavor, Yellow 5, [and] Blue 1."

The plaintiff's lawyers argued that had she been aware of this, she wouldn't have bought the ice cream.

In the ruling, the plaintiff compared Cold Stone Creamy's pistachio ice cream to offerings from Häagen-Dazs and Ben and Jerry's, both of which contained real pistachios.

She also compiled a survey of more than 400 US consumers, in which about 85% of participants believed a product labeled as pistachio ice cream would indeed contain pistachios, according to the ruling.

Despite Kahala Brands' efforts to have the case dismissed, including arguing that an online ingredient list was sufficient, the judge remained unconvinced.

However, he agreed that the case should focus solely on pistachio ice cream, and not other products with potentially deceptive names, and he dismissed implied warranty and unjust enrichment claims.

Kahala Brands did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It is unclear when the case will go to trial.

The lawsuit represents a broader trend of customers holding fast-food chains accountable for misleading product names or failing to meet expectations set by advertisements.

Business Insider previously reported on the rise in false-advertising class-action lawsuits against big food chains, including McDonald's and Taco Bell.

But Oren Bitan, an expert in these types of lawsuits, told BI that these types of claims face a high bar for success.

• The nation's biggest tech companies have spent more than $25 million lobbying Congress in Q1.
• Many of the tech giants have pivoted to developing AI tools in the past year.
• They're trying to make their voices heard ahead of time as Congress debates regulating the field.

The nation's largest tech companies spent more than $28 million on lobbying services in the first quarter of 2024.

Federal lobbying firms — advocates paid to try to influence legislators on Capitol Hill — were required to disclose their first-quarter earnings from companies on April 22, showing the groups they partnered with and some of the services they were lobbying for.

Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and other industry leaders have spent billions in the past year alone developing AI tools and large language models, with each company trying to one-up the other. That is abundantly clear in federal lobbying disclosures, which reveal the companies have spent nearly $5 million more this quarter compared to Q1 in 2023, when they spent just under $23.6 million.

These companies also spend big bucks trying to persuade legislators to join their causes as they struggle to regulate the ever-changing technology industry.

• Five people who landed jobs at Meta, Apple, Amazon, and Google share how they did it.
• A software engineer at Google said he networked with other engineers to learn about their day job.
• A former Amazon assistant prepared interview examples based on its leadership principles.

Getting a foot in the door at one of the four Big Tech companies — Meta, Google, Apple, and Amazon — can require years of training, an expensive education, and many interviews. Some spend years applying over and over and getting rejected.

Business Insider spoke to five people who landed jobs at Big Tech companies about how they learned the skills and experience that landed them the role — and how they showcased those skills during the interview.

Corey Griffin talked about side hustles that showcase relevant skills in an interview at Apple

Corey Griffin dreamed of working in Big Tech but felt he lacked the educational background he needed.

He learned software engineering while working in marketing and carved out a niche in marketing engineering. Griffin started a media company, C3G Media, as a side hustle and launched several marketing products, including a teleprompter product called Speakflow.

Griffin worked as a software engineer for Rotten Tomatoes, Vox, and Shopify before applying for jobs at Apple four times. Eventually, in 2021, he landed an interview.

However, he told Business Insider that he wasn't able to give details about some of his work during his interview because it was under NDA. Instead, he spoke about his side hustles, including Speakflow.

"I could show my wide skillset through my side projects, including graphic design, animation, marketing, and coding. I also had clients in a range of industries, such as the music industry and small technical clients," he said.

Griffin landed a role as a software engineer at Apple and worked at the company for two years.

tara Larsen knew Amazon's leadership policies inside out when she applied there

Tara Larsen landed a job as an executive assistant at Amazon after eight interviews.

She told BI that interviewers asked her behavioral-based questions which were based on Amazon's"leadership principles," also known as LPs.

Her advice to those interviewing at Amazon was, "Familiarize yourself with the LPs, have them in mind when you answer questions, and be ready to tell an interviewer which Leadership Principle you identify best with."

She said that interviewees should avoid trying to guess which LP the interviewer wanted to hear about for each question and instead show them how they would approach a situation using the LPs as a guide. Larsen would only say which specific LP she was referring to at certain points in the interview.

For example, she would say: "… where I did a little inventing and simplifying," or "…which reminds me of the LP, earn trust, because…" and "where I learned a thing or two about diving deep."

Sahil Gaba had learned cutting-edge software before becoming an Amazon software engineer

Sahil Gaba was working as a software engineer at a small fintech firm but knew he wanted to work in Big Tech.

Gaba told BI he felt he wasn't learning the cutting-edge technology he needed. He learned new technologies and honed his interview skills in his spare time. After two years, he landed a job as a software engineer at Amazon.

Within 18 months of working for Amazon, he landed offers from Meta, Uber, and Google, where he accepted a job with a starting salary of $300,000.

Sandeep Rao worked at Apple and Meta after working a job he thought would make him credible to Big Tech

Sandeep Rao, a software engineer who has worked at Apple and Meta, started out working in a lower-paying role at Oracle in India in 2012, where he was making 850,000 rupees a year, or $15,000.

"I took it to get my foot in the door of a Big Tech company and build credibility," he told BI.

At Oracle, he applied to graduate schools and eventually landed a place in the computer science graduate program at Carnegie Mellon University.

"Grad school was hard, but the doors it opened for me made the struggle worth it," Rao said. When he finished, he landed a job at Apple with a salary of $115,000.

Zubin Pratap networked with tech workers at conferences before getting a job at Google

Zubin Pratap had been working as a lawyer for over a decade when he decided, at 38, to pivot to tech. He told BI he didn't have a background in computer science and found it difficult to transition to a completely new industry.

Pratap focused on networking at conferences for engineers and developers and inviting people who could help out for coffee.

From asking questions about what they did he learned to "speak to engineers in their language," which he told BI was his "biggest advantage."

He started working at a small software development company and, after a year and a half, landed a job as a software engineer at Google. Before landing the role, he'd been rejected by Google four times. He said he had networked with people working in the company for insight into how things there worked and that this

He said, to land the role, he'd spent time speaking to people in the company for insight.

• Some US hospitals are demanding payment for non-emergency surgeries up front.
• It comes as hospital systems and corporate entities buy up medical practices nationwide.
• But for some patients, paying up front is not an option.

Getting surgery is getting harder in some American hospital systems.

In the past, medical centers have broadly provided procedures first and settled the bill with patients later — something they are legally required to do in emergency cases.

Now, in non-emergency cases, some hospitals want to be paid up front before they operate, and customers — ahem, patients — are not thrilled, The Wall Street Journal reported.

A surgical center in Flordia now owned by UnitedHealth, a healthcare insurance giant, told the Journal that billing patients in advance informs them of the expected cost. However, forcing patients to pay in advance also relieves companies from the cost of having to track and bill patients later on.

This shift comes as insurers, hospital systems, and private equity firms are quietly but efficiently buying up medical practices across the country, Business Insider previously reported.

Over three-quarters of doctors in America are now employed by a hospital or corporation and, as of January, more medical practices were owned by corporations than hospital systems, according to research from the Physicians Advocacy Institute.

Some medical providers fear the corporatization of healthcare could have a detrimental impact on patients. The new "pay-first, cut-later" policies at some medical practices may be an example of that negative impact, forcing people suffering from a medical condition that's severe enough to require surgery to scramble for funds to obtain the procedure.

In Tennessee, a hospital system overcharged 59-year-old Blake Young by over $2,500 for a heart scan, Young told the Journal. He had paid up front at the hospital's request and later found out he was charged too much for the service. He wrestled with the hospital for months to secure a refund check.

"It's not unlimited funds," Young told the Journal, noting he would use the refund for future unexpected medical bills. "They do run out."

• China is trying to make its economy less reliant on the West.
• These efforts could boost the Chinese economy but also prepare it for an invasion of Taiwan. 
• Self-reliance has helped the Russian economy stay afloat amid the invasion of Ukraine. 

China is taking steps to make its economy less reliant on the West. It likely has both economic and military motivations for doing so, experts say.

In recent years, China has invested billions to boost its production of semiconductor chips, electric vehicles, batteries, and solar panels. Over the past year, Southeast Asia overtook the US and Europe as China's largest export market. The Chinese government has also decreased its holdings of US treasuries, taken steps to reduce its reliance on Western food imports, and has worked to improve its energy security.

From an economic perspective, these efforts could both provide a short-term boost to China's slumping economy and help it prepare for long-term geopolitical tensions with the West, experts told BI. But these strategies also help it accomplish another objective: preparing the country for war.

"Reunifying Taiwan with the mainland is one of Xi Jinping's clearest aspirations, and it only makes sense that, if he's trying to game it out, he would want to do so in a way that minimizes the exposure to the Chinese economy," Vivek Chilukuri, national security expert at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank, told Business Insider.

However, if an attempt to reunify by force was around the corner, some experts say there are a few other signals one might expect to see.

"China's operating under the assumption now that tensions with the United States and the West are quite severe and unlikely to recede anytime soon," Scott Kennedy, an expert on China's economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research organization, told BI. "At the same time, doing that is still quite different from preparing for an actual war and what would come after."

It's not just about war: China has several other reasons to invest in its economy

Growth in China's economy has slowed as the country grapples with a real-estate debt crisis, high youth unemployment, an aging population, and reduced demand for its exports. And while China reported GDP growth in April that beat expectations, these challenges are expected to persist. The country's big investment in clean energy technology, in particular, is intended to boost its economy. However, it's worth noting that some experts are skeptical of the accuracy of Chinese economic data.

At the same time, China is building up its military at a rapid rate and is expected to have the forces needed to seize Taiwan in a few years — China has long claimed the island as its own. In the event China does invade or blockade, it would likely have to deal with the sanctions and trade restrictions of the US and other countries, which gives the country all the more reason to shore up its domestic industries.

It's possible that China could be taking some lessons from Russia, which took steps to shore up its resources prior to its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. While Russia's economy has taken a toll since then, Russian efforts to boost its domestic food supply and diversify its trade partners have helped it stay afloat and minimize the impact of Western sanctions — and Chinese imports of Russian oil have played a key role in this. Self-sufficient production of critical commodities like oil, natural gas, and wheat has also aided Russia, in addition to a large defense sector that's helped supply its military.

While China may have been accelerating efforts in recent years to "de-risk" its economy, this process started as long as a decade ago, Chilukuri said. He pointed to the country's "Made in China 2025" policy, launched in 2015, which was intended to make China the global leader in the manufacturing of key technologies like chips and EVs.

De-risking efforts like these would ultimately leave China better-positioned in the event of an invasion or blockade of Taiwan, or an unforeseen development like a pandemic. But Chilukuri said he thinks much of China's recent manufacturing push is about getting its economy back on track after the country's zero-COVID-19 policy brought it to a halt — and caused some in China to lose trust in Xi Jinping and his government.

"The fundamental trade that China's made with its people is you give up your aspirations for human freedom in exchange for sustained historically unprecedented economic growth," he said. "And Covid, I think, shook the confidence of a lot of people in China that that deal was going to be fulfilled."

That's why, even if an invasion or blockade doesn't happen anytime soon, growing tensions and loosening trade ties with the West could give China plenty of motivation to invest in its economy.

Despite its precautions, a seizure of Taiwan could still have a 'disastrous' impact on China's economy

China already has some experience in asserting its dominance over a territory and navigating blowback from the West.

In 2020, China passed a national security law for Hong Kong that eroded the city's freedoms, autonomy, and democracy and led to the arrest of pro-democracy activists. In response, the US issued sanctions against 11 Chinese and Hong Kong officials, and some US companies left the city.

Some experts believe China's intervention in Hong Kong served as a "test case" for how it would approach a takeover of Taiwan. If China follows the Hong Kong model, it might threaten Taiwan into capitulation without having to invade.

The other ways China might try to take control include a naval blockade that circles Taiwan and cuts it off from the rest of the world. An invasion is a third possibility — experts disagree on the likelihood and timing of this option.

In recent years, China has staged provocative military exercises around the island. What's more, Xi Jinping has told the Chinese military to prepare for war and said that reunification with Taiwan is inevitable. Some experts think a war could be on the horizon.

But not everyone thinks a Chinese military move is necessarily imminent. If China was actively preparing for a near-term invasion of Taiwan, Kennedy said there are a few things he might expect to see first.

First, China would begin preparing its citizens for war.

"You would see a steady drumbeat of propaganda preparing people for conflict and for potentially substantial economic sacrifices," he said.

Second, Kennedy said he'd expect to see China invest more heavily in materials like carbon fiber, which has a variety of military applications.

Third, he'd also expect to see many Chinese diplomats, business people, and students start returning to China, as well as significant movements in Chinese financial assets in an effort to avoid future sanctions.

As long as the US and Taiwan don't cross any of China's "red lines," the chance of a war involving Taiwan is "quite low," Kennedy said. He said those red lines include a Taiwan referendum on its statehood and the placement of significant US and Western military assets in Taiwan.

If China does invade, the global economic impact would be huge, and despite its efforts to secure its economy, China would likely be far from unscathed.

"Any action against Taiwan would be disastrous for China's economy," Chilukuri said. "But China's shown that it's willing to bear a considerable cost for ideology."