Taiwan gets chippy about US request it shifts manufacturing Taiwan has rejected US demands to shift semiconductor manufacturing so that half of America's chip needs are produced domestically, as tariff negotiations with the Trump administration intensify. The US has been pressing Taiwan to reduce American dependence on chips manufactured on the island — which accounts for over 60 …
Or in this case, "We won't stop the Cheyna from bombing you."
I've never heard something so ridiculous. America protects Taiwan because of the chips. If chips move to USA, there's no need for USA to protect Taiwan. It's probably easier for Taiwan to let USA impose the 100% and let Americans suffer the cost impact. I mean, there's a reasonable tightness on chip supply that others would come in to mop up.
Let's face it. Trumps promises aren't worth the social media paper they're not printed on.
Let's face it. Trumps promises aren't worth the social media paper they're not printed on.
Three more years.
Let us all hope and pray the Americans will have the intelligence (and "experience gained") to choose their next leader.
I pray and hope the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel is not from an incoming train.
> Let us all hope and pray the Americans will have the intelligence (and "experience gained") to choose their next leader.
Well, considering the shit they put up for vote last time, I wouldn't hold your breath.
We had to choose between orange cheeto and useless tw*t. Let's see.... The American economy was in the dumps and we had massive unemployment. What do the Dems say? "Vote for us! More of the same!!"
Hmmmm.... Wonder why they lost...? And I'm saying that as a Democrat.
"I pray and hope the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel is not from an incoming train."
More likely a near death experience but omitting the "near" and the light is not from heavenly splendour but rather the other bloke holding a tactical flashlight so a fork wielding minion can easily pitch the temporarily blinded into the infernal regions.
That won't hurt Taiwan - It'll certainly hurt the US.
Withdraw military support - If China takes the opportunity to do a Netanyahu/Putin and invade, that'll hurt some in Taiwan, it'll certainly hurt the US.
Hard to see the upside, unless Trump is deliberately out to further damage US interests...
"Hard to see the upside, unless Trump is deliberately out to further damage US interests..."
That would be investing him with a level of intelligence and guile he just doesn't have. I suspect many of us were all at school with a child who variously bullshitted, manipulated and ingratiated themself with the friend group. Just out of interest, is anyone still in touch with that flawed individual?
Didn't think so....
So work with me here, we want to keep the chip production out of the hands of the Chinese so as a bargaining chip we're going to withdraw our military support for Taiwan?
Also, we're going to require this immediately? We expect a fab to be ordered from Amazon and set up by November, or they should just stop selling so many chips in America? How do they avoid this tax? What's the behavior being sought here? (See also: Coffee, Brazil)
Not bad cops, I mean just cops in the US.
The Miramar UPS Shootout should be illustrative.
3-4 police departments, with officers armed to the teeth with AR15s and military grade armor, crouch behind cars stuck in traffic and demand the citizens stay in the vehicle as human shields as they take shots at the stolen UPS van.
Then they kill the innocent UPS driver and a grandfather in another car as they fire wildly in response to the carjacker shooting at them, bringing the total to 4 dead. 2 suspects and 2 innocent bystanders.
One of the suspects had enough time to turn the gun on himself so you can't even give them that.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/cops-south-florida-shootout-killed-ups-driver-administrative-leave-reports
https://www.miamitimesonline.com/news/ups-driver-s-family-questions-police-response-to-chase/article_a5007846-1969-11ea-8fce-e3b030006ee7.html
Everyone loves to talk about Trump's casino adventure, but they miss the point.
The casino went bust. But Trump didn't go bust. On the contrary, he walked away with a nice little pocketful.
That's the pattern. No matter how many businesses he ruins, he'll be fine. And that's what he's going for with the USA. Ruining the country is completely fine, so long as he is left standing as the richest, most important, most ass-kissable guy around.
The Taiwanese are hoping, and I hope with them, that Xi has seen how badly Putin's little Ukrainian adventure has backfired, and has accepted the lesson that military conquest is a bloody stupid thing to attempt in today's world. Bloody and bloody stupid. It provokes a strong reaction, it costs an absolute fortune, and it's at best a coin toss whether it'll get you what you wanted in the first place. (In the case of China invading Taiwan, it definitely wouldn't get China all that lovely wealth, that would be utterly destroyed in the fighting.)
"The casino went bust. But Trump didn't go bust. On the contrary, he walked away with a nice little pocketful."
That is what the Master Deal Maker wants us to believe.
The fact is, Master of the Deal was all but bankrupt when he got recruited for The Apprentice.
He got rich again by playing a billionaire in a reality show. Most of the "Billions" he claimed to own were more a valuation of his brands, not his actual finances.
The Mad Red Hatter is a prime example that you can get rich when people believe you are rich, and that money streams towards power when you are in power. As a president, you only have to be willing open the doors to let it in.
I'll raise a glass to Taiwan, all other countries and their leaders, who reject the terroristic threats coming from Trump and America.
It's not easy, it will have a cost, it may be a heavy one, but it's the right thing to do.
I just wish the UK had a backbone.
"I though the current highest priority was to vastly increase the wealth of the vastly wealthy"
That is true for the GOP and their backers.
However, the Mad Red Hacker has one, and only one aim: The Mad Red Hatter himself.
He needs adoration and attention like others need air and water. Being ultra rich is just a way to get at the top spot.
But getting in the lime lights will beat every other consideration. He will sacrifice every American for it if needed.
If the US doesn't have the manufacturing capability to make its own chips then the US could put 200%, 500%, or even 1000% tariff on Taiwan made ones and US companies wanting to make anything with a modern chip would have to pay it, as there is no where else to get them from.
Of course that wouldn't last very long as no one would be willing to pay the huge prices increases that would put on any American made tech and so either US companies would go bankrupt, Trump would do another TACO, or there would be a huge black market for cheaper devices made outside the US smuggled into the US to avoid any tariffs. None of these will suddenly make multi million dollar chip fabs appear in the US overnight.
In principle, nothing. In practice, it's easier for TSMC to do it because they've spent a long time learning how. Apple designs chips but doesn't manufacture them, so they would make mistakes that TSMC made in 2002 and now designs around. That means a TSMC-run effort is going to have a quicker trip from the first brick to profitability. It's not just them, as other companies have some experience and could also manage it, but look mostly at those who already manufacture because they're going to have the easiest time avoiding mistakes. As Intel demonstrated, that's not a guarantee that they will succeed and failures can be very costly.
AKA the John Harvey-Jones problem.
John Harvey-Jones was a strong supporter of "don't build it, buy it in". That means somebody who used to build things became a buyer. The knowledge they passed on became how to buy, not how to build.
I have no doubt that the USA or Europe could make this stuff. But it would take a generation to build up the long term knowledge that is essential to make it viable.
For comparison, take nuclear power stations. We can't build them in the UK any more because the people who built the old ones retired and/or died. So we have to buy in the knowledge from EDF (and, prior to the new anti-China red scare, China). China is building over 30 nuclear power plants concurrently. That is a huge amount of technical knowhow being accumulated, and an enormous supply chain with more built-up knowledge and capacity.
The philosophy isn't automatically wrong. It's perfectly logical for Apple, for instance, not to go into the semiconductor manufacturing business. Someone else can fab their designs and, since those people will be constantly innovating on improving their manufacturing techniques, Apple benefits along with any other customers from improvements there. While Apple has a lot of cash and could conceivably manage that in house, they don't need to.
On a national level, though, there's a lot more reason to consider certain industries valuable enough that they're encouraged, the way that Taiwan decided to do that with semiconductor manufacturing and most other countries didn't bother with, except the US starting two years ago, except when that got abruptly canceled by decree this year. A country can't do that with everything unless they have lots of money and are willing to spend it all and waste a good portion of it, but they can focus and specifically target some types of things to their benefit.
Always put things in human terms, as if this were a project you were going to implement for yourown financial gain, it often becomes clearer.
So: “Being a doctor is a high-salary occupation. Money (for training) aside, what prevents me from opening a doctors surgery?”
Well: you absolutely can try, but….,,in the best case it will take you ten years, during which time you will have zero or low income, even in the best case. The failure rate during training is very high. The majority who try, don’t make it, they’re not smart enough or they don’t work enough hours until midnight, or both. Today, you have no evidence of skill or talent. You might be in the top 1%, nobody knows, but the cold hard facts are that you are 99% likely to be in the 99%. You’re in a moderately well-paid job today. Not amazing, but you’re going to have to give that all up to take a spin on the wheel to be a doctor. If it doesn’t turn out for you, coming back in 10myears time you will be 10 years out of the industry, and your current job will not be open for you. You’ll be serving customers at B&Q.
All of that applies pretty much word for word, as to “should we, or should we not, spend $500bn of our taxpayers money to have a 10% chance of staying in business against TSMC”.
"You've got no hope and bob hope, and bob's no longer with us."
Faith, hope and charity.
Unfortunately the "true" but clearly delusional faith has sucked all hope and charity from the US.
† and don't be so smug. Just wait until Musk takes up his abode on your planet.
If Apple tried it, it's only a matter of time before they'd be up to their neck in antitrust suits.
It's not reasonable to build an entire fab dedicated to serving only one manufacturer, so they'd have to sell chips to other customers as well. Some of those other customers would become fixated with the idea that they weren't getting as good a deal as the parent company, and that would open a whole can o' worms.
That's why vertical (supply-chain) integration is usually not a great idea.
You need to understand the scale of China. There are entire cities of skilled people at highly specific parts of the process that just aren't present outside of that area.
It's not like you are making pizza or some relatively simple process. You are operating at extremely fine tolerance at huge volume at low production cost. Good luck.
So you've built your fab, you managed to bribe all the right people, break ground, construct everything in record time, say a quarter decade.
Where did your workforce come from - who is doing the research on the clever thing that has now shrunken down to the new gnats chuff hair scale process that everybody else has now moved to while you've built on last generation tech.
It's a fantasy - my goto example is cocaine - it's fabulously profitable, it;'s chemically simple to produce, and yet it's not produced on the US side of the border in any significant quantity short of the stepan monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Company
I contend that's due to the availability of a skilled labour force of cocaine processors which doesn't exist in the US, anymore than the far more complex ecosystem of high-end fabrication supply-chain professionals.
If you had the money, not too much:
* No local knowledge (especially in the UK)
* Time - it takes years from selecting a site to making chips.....and by then the TACO kid will be history one way or another
* Cost of running is higher (especially the UK again!)
* As mentioned elsewhere, supply chains
And finally where are the "chips" consumed? I don't see loads of computer manufacturing plants in the UK, and not that many in USA......they are mainly in guess where? ASIA !!
Much is made of the Taiwan/China/USA axis, where China and USA balance each other out so to let Taiwan get on with being a capitalist powerhouse.
But if the USA does become functionally unreliable, to whom will Taiwan turn?
It seems plausible that Taiwan will recognize that there is another force aligned against China, and strike a deal with India. It seems likely that Modi could strike a deal that _also_ features onshoring (with India not the USA), but on a realistic timescale and coincidentally cut the USA-India semiconductor supply chains, so that highest-tech remains in Taiwan and the medium tech gets a foothold in India.
China has stated they will take (back) Taiwan.
Suppose they do move on Taiwan, what can the US do?
Respond politically
or
respond economically
or
respond militarily.
Does anyone seriously think any of these will dissuade China from at least attempting its stated goal?
'Attempting' because China has no modern experience with a naval invasion of anything and even the most-rehearsed plans seldom work as intended.
80 miles may not sound like a lot, but that's still a lot of water to cross.
On the other hand, consider the obstacles the US would face in defending an island off the coast of China and suddenly 80 miles doesn't sound so far.
Does anyone really think the citizenry of the US will tolerate American servicepersons dying to defend a tiny island off the coast of China?
Rather looks like checkmate.
That is, unless you have a gung-ho nutcase in charge of your military who is just itching to demonstrate his worthiness (ethos!) to an unabashed ignoramus of a leader. Then you have the makings of one empire crashing and burning in spectacular fashion on the world stage while assuring the ascent of another.
Reminds me of the scenario in American football when one team has the game in hand, but there's too much time remaining on the clock for the other team to simply concede the match, so both teams play on despite everyone knowing the outcome.
Mine's the one with the knocked-over king in the pocket...
Given the history of geopolitics, I think that, if China thinks the US will respond militarily, it will dissuade them from attempting that, based on the fact that it has done for several decades. I also think they probably don't think the US will respond militarily and they're probably right about that. A lot of things get started because country A thinks country C will not react if they do something to country B, whether or not that ends up being the case. That is why coherent and stable foreign policy tends to be beneficial; maybe you don't mean it this time, but if you mostly meant it the last times, people might believe you and act accordingly. I don't think many countries are bothering with that anymore, the US foremost among them.
The Taiwan Strait is notorious for bad weather. Taiwan has no suitable landing beaches on the easy coast and very few on the west coast.
It would be very difficult for China to land a sufficiently large fighting force and logistical support to take on the well prepared Taiwanese.
Is anybody here in a position to slip an idea into Trump's trusted news feed[2]? Maybe if he learns about the floating islands of San Serrife instead of doing anything monumentally stupid[3] he can be subtly moved towards a policy of attaching outboard motors onto Taiwan and piloting it into US waters.
Slam it into Texas (not too hard, those fabs are delicate) and job done, chips manufactured "on US soil".
At least it'd keep him safely occupied for a few weeks, especially if we let the Taiwanese in on the joke and they broadcast reports about how the trip is going, what sights they are seeing on the journey...
[1] I almost said he wants to have new States added to the USA, but various obvious factors rule out that idea ...
[2] no, I'm not opening a Truth Social account, there are limits to the amount of strain I can manage these days, it needs a younger man with good blood pressure
[3] oops, forgot who I was talking about for a moment
