Comments by "shazmosushi" (@shazmosushi) on "Asianometry" channel.

  1. "In January 1979, Disney CEO Donn Tatum sent a paper email via post" 😂
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  2. "At the risk of being made an idiot later, I am saying that I don’t believe that any superconductor-based computer will become commercially competitive at any time in the future." We'll see if your quote ages better than Lord Kelvin's quote: "I think it cannot be done. No balloon and no aeroplane will ever be practically successful."
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  3. 6:29 Reminds me of the rocket launch industry. Funny how in that industry, Boeing has become a slow incompetent incumbent being the prime contractor for the multibillion dollar pork program: the SLS (Space Launch System) super heavy lift rocket, and the Starliner capsule. Though many argue that Boeing is also the incompetent incumbent even when it comes to passenger jets. See the failures in development of the now-grounded 737 MAX. Most see the turning point as when engineering-driven Boeing buying the finance-driven McDonnell Douglas. What ended up happening is all the finance management replaced the Boeing management. Which was great for the share price, bad for engineering and quality.
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  4. Ahh Cold War geopolitics: this is really some OG Asianometry content. Longest video the channel ever made too!?
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  5. An excellent introduction to the operation of the Great Firewall of China, a major component in China's broader internet censorship system called the "Golden Shield Project". Great work! I hope more people signup to your excellent early-access tier on Patreon. I think this channel is going places!
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  6. If viewers liked this video I recommend this channel's "TSMC - Essays" playlist.
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  7. From a human rights perspective, Xi forcibly imprisoned a mere 2 million Uyghers in his 8 years in office while the estimates are that Mao killed 40-80 million people during his leadership. To be fair, Mao's assumed power in 1949, so 8 years into his rule was still prior to the 1958 Great Leap Forward and the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution. It will take at least another 20 more years to make a fair comparison on whether Mao or Xi has the larger impact on China's population and their human rights.
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  8. I am a supporter of the free market and the general principles of comparative advantage (eg, not every country needs to build their own cars), so its interesting when the government of a country like Taiwan kickstarts a semiconductor industry (see Asianometry's video "How Taiwan Created TSMC") and ends up succeeding so much it doesn't just no longer require state subsidies but dominates the industry globally.
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  9. Are you planning on covering Gigabyte Technologies? They make great computer motherboards, just like ASUS. And do manufacturing in Taiwan too!
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  10. I'm glad that even as your channel grows you're continuing to make random history videos that interest you, even though they tend to get fewer views compared to the other topics you cover
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  11. If anybody wants a 15 minute firehose of information about China's older Long March (Chang Zheng) series of rockets, I highly recommend checking out Scott Manley's video titled "Every Chinese Rocket Design Explained!"
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  12. 8:24 The bamboo ceiling concept is an interesting concept that I should probably read more about (starting with the Wikipedia article). By the way, it might be a good video idea too. It seems like most of the worlds best technology companies have leaders who are classified by the US government as "Asian": CEO of AMD Lisa Su (Taiwanese American), Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (Indian American), Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai of Google (Indian American) and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (Taiwanese American, though he was a co-founder so didn't get promoted into his position). Side note: there's actually a really long list of notable leaders on the (hilariously named) Wikipedia pages "List of Taiwanese Americans" and "List of Asian Americans". Lol, it does not appear to be an exhaustive list, but it's a start. Of course the fact that so many companies have leadership (and middle management) being Asian American does not preclude racism and discrimination of course. The Asian American immigrant leaders I've listed spent their childhood in the United States and "speak" American both culturally and linguistically. Perhaps some individuals may be brought up in a way that looks down upon eg, being a "mover and a shaker" and "rocking the boat", which perhaps may not be well suited for being promoted to leadership roles in technology (at least in the typical American business context). All that said, when it comes to measuring racism you need to look at proportions of populations and do statistical analysis: Asian Americans are underrepresented in leadership roles by education, but over represented by percentage of population.
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  13. Keep the comments civil and constructive rather than flippant -- you don't want OP to start disabling comments like the old days
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  14. For viewers with less background knowledge around semiconductor fabs, Global Foundries was spun out of chip designer AMD -- the underdog that has been the second source supplier for Intel chips since the 1980s. AMD briefly beat Intel chips in performance during the early-2000s with the AMD Athlon, and again in the late-2010s with Ryzen-chips based on the Zen architecture (a performance crown AMD holds to this day). Switching to the advanced TSMC manufacturing process obviously improved chip performance, but the Zen architecture helped greatly. AMD was bleeding money in the early 2010s, so spinning off Global Foundries provided a key cash injection. As did the short-sighted technology transfer to China as part of the THATIC and Hygon joint ventures (which fortunately for AMD appears to have been wasted on China's end). Meanwhile Intel is floundering with its semiconductor manufacturing, and unlike its competitors is not a pure-play foundry that manufactures billions of smartphones. In hindsight, Intel should have accepted Steve Jobs offer to build a custom low power chip for the original iPhone, and starved their competitors of revenue.
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  15. 10:19 I would be very skeptical of the 20x return in 4 years. Some private equity firms have a reputation of buying distressed companies then doing some financial engineering (but not actually increasing sales) then flipping the company at a much higher price (through an IPO) because it looks a lot better on paper.
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  16. Great insightful look at a random piece of Taiwanese internet culture that I had never heard of. I found it funny at 4:20 when you said "it uses a more modern network protocol called Telnet". LOL telnet is by no means a modern network protocol haha. The quality of the PTT's authentication and encryption will be extremely lacking compared to running a modern web service over HTTPS
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  17. Here are the links to other Asianometry videos that mentioned in the video, with timestamps: 1:48 The Waishengren, Briefly Explained https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRq9B_-svvU 4:47 Hongxin: China’s Billion Dollar Semiconductor Failure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZSvDYDfd78
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  18. Another great company profile from one of YouTube's best channels. ASUS produces some really great products. For advanced home users, ASUS Wi-Fi routers in particular are some of the best around, especially because the community supported "Merlin" firmware is just so good, and helps unlock some very useful features for advanced users. It's hard to find routers that has such great community support but with a firmware project like Asuswrt-Merlin it makes recommending ASUS routers really easy. The fact ASUS is based in Taiwan and does a lot of manufacturing in Taiwan makes the choice really easy. Other router manufacturers like TP-Link are based in China, which is obviously problematic for network infrastructure.
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  19. Checkout this channel's "TSMC - Essays" for more great videos.
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  20. You got to admire Evergrande's ambition though. If the tide didn't turn it could be a Hengchi, not a Volkswagon. I'm still in complete awe that a debt-fueled apartment builder can enter the electric car industry. China really is something else.
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  21. 11:25 The NVidia acquisition of ARM Holdings is not looking likely at this stage, with regulators from multiple countries raising objections. But I'm not sure if any final decisions have been made.
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  22. lol even just playing the song "Thunderstruck" over drone footage flying over that gigantic NT solar farm would be a great promo video! The proposed solar farm allotment shown at timestamp 2:03 is 12 MILES long and 6 MILES wide (or 20 kilometres by 10 kilometres). Bigger than Manhattan Island! I want to see the drone footage!
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  23. If you want to read the paper, search the internet for its title "Busting the 'Princelings': The Campaign Against Corruption in China's Primary Land Market". Knowing what the websites for research journals are like, any direct link I post will inevitably become invalid in a few months (possibly a few minutes), so Googling the title is the easiest approach.
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  24. Through and accessible mini-documentary on the water management policies of Singapore. Great job. Makes me want to play Sim City (or City Skylines).
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  25. Sounds like you're back to your proper microphone setup. The recording quality is much improved over your recent videos!
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  26. Such a great mini-documentary! Camphor, celluloid and bakelite are rarely spoken about these days, except maybe a sentence in a high school chemistry textbook's chapter on plastics. It really was the "rare earth" mineral of its era: the steampunk wonder material that powered Hollywood motion pictures.
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  27. 2:52 "Atari put in an order for 2600 pieces of a plastic connector for their joystick cable". I think you may have got the order quantity and the product name mixed up: the name of Atari's 1977 console was the "Atari 2600", and it sold millions of units, so I doubt Atari's order quantity for Foxconn's big break happened to be a mere 2600 pieces. Unless it was an initial batch or something.
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  28. 11:37 The Wii U wasn't helped by its awful branding. The name is way too similar to the name "Wii". Consumers thought it was a tablet/gamepad addon for the Wii but in reality all the games weren't compatible with the original console
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  29. Comic-Con is serious business
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  30.  @Halflifex  Fair point -- it's hard to tell sometimes (Poe's law)
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  31. Flash memory prices have remained stubbornly high for a long time. The incumbent manufacturers have not been innovating. It's crazy to me that mechanical hard drives remain better on a dollar per terabyte basis. Consider that a tiny MicroSD card is available in 1 terabyte capacity. And of that MicroSD card only a small amount of its area is dedicated to the flash memory itself, the rest is dedicated to the physical connector pins, the controller and the casing. There's no reason why a 2.5" laptop hard drive couldn't contain hundreds (even thousands) of terabytes of flash memory. It's just a matter of being able to cheaply manufacture enough silicon. Heat dissipation is not a problem if the memory access patterns are slow enough (at the extreme, Amazon Glacier type workloads). I feel like there's a big market opportunity for a company to figure out a way to manufacture MUCH higher capacity hard drives. The entrance of Yangtze Memory may spur this on.
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  32. 8:15 You say every country in the world except the US needs to worry about low wages and brain drain. The US isn't a monolith: rust belt states have very different economic outlooks to some of the wealthy coastal cities. This economic divide helps power Trump success
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  33. When financial education is low (and regulations lax), the predatory lenders move in. It's a story as old as time.
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  34. +1 that sounds interesting. Also related: why isn't Japan super successful in semi-conductors? They invented blue LEDs... Perhaps as you video alluded to they fell into the trap on spending too much on 'basic research' and not enough on 'applied research'? Or is it that they simply missed TSMC's contract business model and never had the scale to build businesses like Intel fab or Samsung fab?
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  35. This is one of the best channels on YT for in-depth historical explanations of relatively arcane but interesting topics. There's a lot of social mobility provided by cities having good public transport networks. Helps people without cars get to jobs across the city with a reasonable commute duration. In lower density cities, buses routes seem to make sense. In higher density cities, a partially underground metropolitan rail network is great. Supposedly Japan's rail networks own the real-estate of the stations themselves, which are bustling shopping complexes. This provides another revenue source for operating the expensive rail system.
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  36. 10:26 Australia is the 51st state
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  37. If you enjoyed this story, its worth reading up on how Huawei grew into a powerhouse through corporate espionage of product lines and R&D from Canada's Nortel Networks and Cisco. In Nortel's case the Chinese government reportedly had complete access to its internal networks for more than 10 years, and was constantly siphoning information (including designs, pricing and product roadmaps). I also highly recommend the book "The Hundred-Year Marathon Book" by Michael Pillsbury. I found it very insightful and well-written. The growth of SMIC and Huawei are such an important lessons for management in the securing of trade secrets. It's safe to say that all large companies are unknowingly having their corporate secrets siphoned away through ongoing corporate espionage (see the recent SolarWinds hack).
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  38. It's kind of interesting how over the decades "Silicon Valley" has lost all its high-end silicon fabrication capacity to South Korea (Samsung) and Taiwan (TSMC), with some non-bleeding edge fabrication capacity still in the US (from Intel, GloFlo and others, mostly outside of California). Now the companies that dominate "Silicon Valley" are software companies (mostly advertising technology companies like Google and Facebook), with some fabless semiconductor firms (like Qualcomm) remaining in California. Some say it's America naturally moving up the value chain (software has much better economics than hardware), but it's clear there are worthwhile profit margins to being the leader in high-volume advanced manufacturing industries like semiconductor fabrication.
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  39. Very interesting 18 minute video looking at Malaysia's attempts to move up the value chain into semiconductor fabrication. Speaking of Malaysia, I was very surprised to learn how many large and relatively complex appliances (like fridges and air conditioners) are manufactured in South East Asia: Samsung fridges are made in Malaysia, and Mitsubishi Air Conditioners are made in Thailand. Thailand also manufactures mechanical hard drives (eg, Western Digital HDDs). I'm still not sure why the bigger South Korean and Japanese firms chose to outsource to South East Asia over China, but it's great that consumers have a cost competitive alternative from different regions when they decide what to purchase!
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  40. 1:11 What is the heck is going on with that photo??? Was the miner photoshopped in!!? 😂
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  41. I have never eaten dog. The issue is the Yunlin dog festival is that dogs are skinned alive then boiled alive, because the physiological effect of the stressed, tortured animal changes the taste of the meat. It's definitely horrible, inhumane stuff and we should call it out. But if even the cutest dog is raised then slaughtered in humane conditions, then it's not at all different to eating the less cute, similarly intelligent animals like pigs/pork.
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  42. His research process was covered on episode 24 of the Compounding Curiosity podcast, by the way
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  43. 5:57 Here are the most important Variable Interest Entities (VIE): 1. Zhejiang Taobao Network Co., Ltd. 2. Zhejiang Tmall Network Co., Ltd 3. Alibaba Cloud Computing Ltd. 4. Youku Information Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd I thought I'd write this out because most English speakers would struggle to transcribe the word "Zhejiang"! It might also help with search engine optimization.
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  44. It's very sad that Malaysia's inequality issues have caused race to be a major factor in politics. One problem with race-based policies is there's so much difference within each racial group. In America, the black or Asian children of wealthy doctors might go to the best school districts are clearly in a very good position. While there are poor rural whites living around drug addicts in a trailer park in West Virginia, poor blacks in a violent inner-city school district, or the multi-generationally poor descendants of refugees who fled Cambodia in the 1970s. Using the limited tax payer money to improve the lives/education/opportunities of those with the most dire socioeconomic circumstances (regardless of race) is the best approach. In Malaysia of the 1970s (and probably 2020s), even policies blind to race would be helping the ethnic Malays more as a ratio of the population, but it would mean the poorest ethnic Chinese and ethnic Indians would also have more opportunities to escape poverty. It takes political leadership to convince a country to adopt policies blind to race. But I think even the ethnic Malays voting blocs could be convinced: much of their privileged positions would be preserved (because as far as I understand Malays continue to be poorer than other races in Malaysia), and it would definitely improve the country's international image and long-term racial harmony.
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  45. New video from YouTube's most underrated channel? Time to stop what I'm doing and watch it :)
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  46. You mentioned Taiwanese contract manufacturing firms Foxconn, Pegatron and Wistron, which are used by literally all the companies in the world, from Apple, to Nintendo, to HP etc. There's probably an interesting story as to why most of the world's best electronics assembly firms are based in Taiwan. (Well except for Samsung, which owns and operates all their overseas factories, whilst being competitive with TSMC in semiconductors fabrication and being highly competitive consumer electronics company that happens to be the world-leader in OLED displays and flash memory. Samsung really impresses me by the way)
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  47. After so many years, I'm so glad we finally got to meet each other! I'm very happy with how this channel has grown since the early days, and so much further to go! Also -- I hope I'll never lose my child-like wonder when seeing or riding in a Waymo. Reminds me of the quote, "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed". Also crazy how in just the last couple years the world now contains AI systems that pass the Turing Test and fully autonomous self driving taxis. What a time to be alive!
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  48. Of course we should do everything we can to stop money laundering -- especially around drug trafficking and human trafficking -- but whatever fraction of China's mass capital flight that's legitimate should definitely considered foreign direct investment and carefully handled, because anybody with a large amount of money within China understandably wants to get their money out of China as soon as possible. Australia's relatively recent regulations are pretty smart: We have no restrictions on foreigners purchasing new buildings. If you buy a vacant plot of land you must build a dwelling within 4 years (you can't just buy it and hold it). You can only buy and demolish an existing dwelling if you build more buildings than were previously there. Finally, real-estate investment no longer contributes to gaining citizenship. All these things are good because they encourage increasing the housing supply which means housing is more affordable. I know that some places (I believe Vancouver and maybe London) tax empty houses and apartments which should encourage them to be placed on the rental market instead of the cultural preference of leaving the home unoccupied. (Side note: China itself has a massive problem with unproductive ghost cities, so other countries need to be smarter than the CCP in combating this with smart policy). Finally, I should note that after decades of giving permanent residency and citizenship to people with strong Chinese Communist Party viewpoints and associations, Australia has developed massive issues around Chinese Communist Party-linked political corruption, infiltration and bribery (eg, Huang Xiangmo and his family), but that's a separate issue.
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  49. I recall an article on iceberg towing was part of the standardized reading comprehension testing system in the Australian elementary school system. It's such a great science fiction concept!
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  50. LOL excellent choice of the "High Expectations Asian Father" meme thumbnail.
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