To all those who said that Okinawa is part of Japan and that imposing the base on them wasn’t an act of continuous colonialism - fuck you. Here it is. More proof that Okinawa understands their history, understands that they are separate from their dominators, and understands the USA as the violent imperialist that it is.
It’s .6 percent of landmass, but the national government puts three quarters of American troops there. The bases take up more than 10% of the landmass within the Ryukyu islands.
It’s an intentional policy of putting the violent drunks in a territory they don’t care about protecting from the consequences of having American military personal nearby.
EUV may not even turn out to be a critical bottleneck. It reduces the number of masks you need for some parts of some chips, but using more masks appears to be a feasible approach, and there are rumblings that the advantages of EUV are already plateauing.
Why do we give a fuck about Chinese smartphone chips? I’m fully aware that they could be used in more than smartphones, I’m just not sure why this is such a big concern for the US.
They don’t want China to steal semiconductor IP because that would enable them to equal or possibly better the US; giving them an economic, military, and intelligence advantage. Big tech companies are all US based, and US military allies design and build the most advanced computing components. This gives them a lot of leverage and an enormous attack vector to spy on the global population via hardware backdoors (in addition to the software backdoors). If China beat them at semiconductors then much of the developing world would buy components from China instead, probably killing a lot of the US’s intelligence capability, as well as increasing China’s.
point that he didnt cover : the US’s EUV comes from TSMC, a taiwanese company. If china domestically achieves EUV, all they have to do to monopolize it is drop a few bombs.
An official explains the National Defense Report at the Ministry of National Defense in Taipei on Tuesday. | COURTESY OF THE MINISTRY OF NATIONAL DEFENCE OF TAIWAN / VIA KYODO
Ahh, ok! Kbin has been doing some wonky things the last day or so with threading, so it looked to me like this was a standalone comment when I first saw it, which was why I was so confused. Sorry!
The chip wasn’t even made by Chinese machines. And the chips are many generations behind in performance.
The CCP propaganda machine has gone all out trying to prove to the west that “see, we can make amazing products even with your sanctions in place, so you should just remove the sanctions. …Please remove them.”
So what better response than to tighten the sanctions?
Well since the US sanctions started, the chinese semiconductor industry went from being a multi generations late, government funded laughing stock, even for Chinese officials, to something that is now close to the best Intel and USA can make.
Both now are at 7nm non-EUV, only Taiwan is significantly ahead.
If anything the sanctions are counterproductive, instead of crippling the competition, they lit a fire under them.
The Chinese chip manufacturing industry is still a laughing stock, and many generations behind. The new Huawei phone is using components from 2018 that they obtained before the sanctions. There won’t even be a next generation after this. They’re not even close to Intel despite what claims they make.
This is all pure economics the strategic importance of small nodes is highly overrated, even more so than the importance of chip design is underrated.
Sure TSMC leads when it comes to node size, but that node size doesn’t even come close to being optimal when it comes to costs per transistor. No military is prevented from building rocket control systems, no weather service is prevented from building supercomputers, by not having access to 5nm. Certainly no government is prevented from having secure communications, home-brew PCs for civil servant desks, etc, by not having access.
The new plant in Europe that TSMC is building with Bosch, NXP, and Infinion is going to go down to 12nm – about the optimum when it comes to price per transistor. Neither of the three companies has any interest in challenging Intel or AMD on the desktop market, it’s all about automotive and industry applications: If Bosch wants to sell you a thingie with tons of their sensors in it pretty much the only thing they don’t produce themselves right now is a CPU to connect it all up (that isn’t a microcontroller), and 12nm are plenty for such applications. For a sense of scale: The BCM2711, the SOC in a Rasberry Pi 4, is made in 28nm. 12nm is roughly Zen1 or NVidia Turing class (e.g. 2080Ti). Bosch themselves are sticking with much larger nodes because they’re into MEMS and stuff, there’s e.g. basically no smartphone in the world that doesn’t use one of their accelerometers. “Price per transistor” isn’t really the right metric, there, it’s about mechanics, not transistors.
Another thing might play into things: SMIC has been spying on TSMC heavily, it’s kind of like their favourite past-time. They might already have stolen all the knowledge they need to copy TSMC’s newest nodes, the people in charge of deciding these things know, and all this sanction stuff is to keep the Chinese from benefitting economically from that. It might be that neither Taiwan nor the US would care had the Chinese actually developed their own shit – which they’re now forced to do without access to EUV. I very much doubt than small nodes without EUV will be price-competetive, though.
Hopefully one day we will see articles about Taiwan cooperating with another country that don’t just automatically include something about China’s reaction.
This bullshit about Taiwan not being a country is so ridiculous.
South Sudan (2011)
Kosovo (2008)
Montenegro (2006)
Serbia (2006)
East Timor (2002)
Palau (1994)
Eritrea (1993)
Namibia (1990)
Zimbabwe (1980)
Djibouti (1977)
Seychelles (1976)
Angola, Sao Tome and Principe, Comoros, Cabo Verde, Mozambique (1975)
Guinea-Bissau (1974)
Equatorial Guinea (1968)
Swaziland (1968) -> Eswatini (2018)
And so on
These are the countries younger than Taiwan.
Sure, in the early years they didn’t think of themselves as a country. They thought of themselves as the rightful rulers of China who were just temporarily occupying an outlying island, but they’ve been isolated on that island since 1949. That’s 74 years now. There are full generations of people who have grown up in Taiwan.
It makes perfect sense that Taiwan should formally renounce any claim to the rest of China. The business of being the “Republic of China” is ridiculous. They lost the war, they’re never going to unpause the conflict and defeat the PRC military. At the same time, China should just acknowledge that the people of Taiwan have no interest in being part of their country. Sure, 74 years ago they were on the opposite side of a civil war. But, it’s unlikely any decision-maker from that conflict is still alive today. It could be that a handful of soldiers in their teens or twenties are still alive in their 90s, but nobody that young was making any important decisions.
The US started as a breakaway colony in 1776, was at war with Great Britain until 1783, and it only took until 1785 before Great Britain and the US re-established diplomatic relations. The UK continues to have a decent amount of soft power around the world because it has maintained good relationships with all the countries that decided they didn’t want to be part of that empire.
It’s telling that Taiwan is now becoming closer to Japan than to China. Taiwan was occupied by Japan for half a century, and it was a pretty brutal occupation. That occupation only ended a little before the ROC moved there in 1949. If the PRC had just normalized relations with Taiwan decades ago, Taiwan and China would probably both be working together in opposition to Japan due to their shared history of mistreatment by Japan. Instead, China’s ridiculous insistence that a 74 year old country isn’t actually a country is just causing that country to ally with old enemies against China.
It would put to bed the idea that the PRC and ROC are still involved in a civil war that’s just on pause. If Taiwan said “The civil war’s done, you won, we only claim this island now”, China could still claim that the island is theirs and Taiwan is an occupier, but they couldn’t pretend that the civil war is still ongoing. It could also give other countries an excuse to have normal diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Instead of having to choose between the ROC or the PRC as the legitimate government of China, they could say that the PRC is the legitimate government of China, but that Taiwan is a breakaway region that gained independence back in 1949, and that they recognize Taiwan as a country too… but only as the legitimate government of that one small island.
As for whether it would make an invasion more or less likely, who knows. It probably wouldn’t change anything. China has to know that if they ever invaded it would be an extremely costly invasion, and anything of value in Taiwan would likely be destroyed. Invasion would be devastating to Taiwan’s economy, and terrible if not devastating to China’s economy. The only reason to do it is political. Theoretically it could be something a weak central government could do to make the people feel patriotic and to make the government seem strong. But, that might backfire and they might look weak and people could lose faith and/or stop fearing them.
I’m sure all of the boats used to spell that out are running on clean fuels and totally not contributing to the problem they’re trying to raise awareness of. /s
I disagree. Neo-liberals, just like conservatives, serve their own interests first, even when that means being deceptive and manipulative in the public eye. Most people are not accurately represented by neo-liberals. Most people would prefer to not have wealth disparity, polluted water and air, or global warming.
If the people in power are what they are, what does it matter what everyone else is? It implies that people in power don’t get in power without selling themselves to corporate interests.
Talking openly about it matters. Publicly identifying the enemy matters. Knowing which direction is down-range matters. It helps to focus our fire on the right targets. Conservatives are killing us all and mocking us as they do it. We need to be openly discussing exactly who our enemy is. It’s a basic step in stopping that threat.
The neoliberal democratic experiment has been a failure. It’s unclear whether the failure is on behalf of neoliberalism or democracy, but it’s failed like every other government in the past:
(1) There’s a corrupt government that has enough power to cause system collapse, OR
(2) There’s not enough power in the government, so since people with money are naturally corrupt and greedy, the system collapses on its own from exploitation
We’re barrelling towards (2) through problems mostly caused by (1). We live in the most surveilled set of countries in the world - the NSA has capabilities shown from the Snowden leaks that China can only dream of, particularly because the NSA has no qualms spying on American allies. We have seen almost complete defunding of key social services in favour of “lower tax rates” that don’t actually materialize. Labour has been entirely stripped of its power because the government decided that “national security” trumps people’s rights. Meanwhile, government expenses are going up because, turns out, a lack of social services is pretty expensive and leads to directly subsidizing big corporations. We’ve seen a complete disinterest in active democracy to such a degree that even China gets more active citizen participation in its government (which, tbh, is super depressing because China is wildly considered to be a one-party state). We’ve seen complete apathy to local and municipal governments, despite those having a much greater impact on peoples’ lives.
The Western model of democracy has had about a 250 year run. That’s pretty good.
The only way to actually make change is to be active. That’s what conservatives get and that’s why they’re able to make change. You don’t change things by sitting at your table and bitching and moaning about how sad everything is. You don’t change things by talking to people who agree with you and pointing at people who you disagree with and saying “wow they’re bad people!” You aggressively lobby, you play dirty tricks, you invade the Capitol, you protest and protest and protest, and you do everything in your power to make sure that what you want passes because it’s a matter of ideology. To some extent I admire religious conservatives for their dedication to their core issues and the commitment they have to seeing it through. It’s changing the country into what they want, and that’s respectable even if I don’t like the country they want.
japantimes.co.jp
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