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

  1. Another very well-researched and informative video. I think Taiwan and TSMC should be very happy that the United States has added China's SMIC to the Entity List (banning commercial transactions containing US technology unless an export license/exemption is first obtained). I think it's now very unlikely that China will be able to develop a world-class semiconductor fabrication facilities. Having Huawei on the Entity List directly hurts TSMC financially, but on balance I think it's well worth it. Side note: The strategy that economic engagement leads to democratization worked very well for South Korea and Taiwan (both were both brutal dictatorships until only 30 years ago). That strategy has of course failed spectacularly for China: as it got richer it's becoming more brutal. I really like the idea of democracies using their economic might to preventing brutal dictatorships from becoming proficient in high technology -- like the United States is doing with its Entity List.
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  2. Japan's off-book compensation is way different though. Like for many companies even organize which apartment their employees live in. And for CEO's this can mean company private jets for personal travel etc.
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  3. For more on Vietnamese history, watch Asianometry's video titled "Looking Back at the Sino-Vietnamese War".
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  4. Interesting that Taiwan moved up the value chain through technology transfer (legitimately purchased in a mutually agreed contract), hitting the jackpot by investing in the right technology at the right time (CMOS chips), and the return Western educated immigrants. It seems that China is trying to follow a similar strategy with The Thousand Talents Plan, China's returning "sea turtles", and controversial forced technology transfer. China has definitely hit the right technology at the right time in certain areas (eg, drones) but nothing recognized internationally as an innovative world leader like TSMC is. Though to be fair TSMC is a not really a household name.
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  5. Another well researched and informative video. Here's a comment for the YouTube algorithm.
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  6. In a way, he got his wish for immortality. Reminds me of that quote that's often misattributed to Banksy: "They say you die twice. Once when you stop breathing and again when your name is mentioned for the last time" Also it's interesting to see how experimenting with dubious/dangerous potions in traditional Chinese medicine goes back thousands of years.
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  7. I have confirmed with Asianometry that this was a typo. It's 14km (8.7 miles), not 140km (87 miles). The description and transcript has been updated. The number comes from a book: "Over 1973-4, the new disk brake was tested in wind tunnels and in drops from helicopters and aircraft from altitudes as high as 14,000 m. The spacecraft model was also dropped onto simulated Venusian soil made from foam concrete." (from the book "Russian Planetary Exploration History, Development, Legacy and Prospects: by Brian Harvey).
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  8. It's worth re-iterating (as in previous Asionometry videos) that US sanctions against China's semi-conductor companies will make it an uphill battle to achieve Made In China 2025 goals for China to import substitute the semiconductors used in its exports. Brief overview of the sanctions I'm aware of: SMIC (China's TSMC competitor) are not able to buy ASML lithography machines from the Netherlands. According to South China Morning Post they are currently buying used machines from other companies in China (I guess that's a workaround). Huawei's HiSilicon (fabless design company) can't license ARM Holdings chip reference designs. Huawei can't use the Android operating system due to sanctions. China is even being banned from accessing EDA (chip design software) from America. China could succeed in building indigenous replacements of these technologies one at a time, but when the United States is sanctioning everything at once it's VERY difficult. Especially when eg, Huawei's revenue streams starts drying up and those companies face big budget crunch.
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  9. It's worth noting the China-based semiconductor foundries like SMIC and HSMC were trying to build cutting edge 7 nanometer semiconductor node leveraging extreme ultraviolet techniques. For those who don't follow the chip making industry at all, it's worth noting the former world leading chip maker from Silicon Valley called Intel has been struggling for the better part of a decade and is no longer on the cutting edge. Now, Intel has $25 billion US dollars in cash on hand. If getting to a cutting edge process node was as simple as poaching a few hundred TSMC engineers for 2.5 times the salary for 5 years then surely Intel could do it? They could pay 750 TSMC engineers each $250,000/year to move to the US for 5 years to try and leapfrog TSMC, and that would still be $1 billion in salary (4% of their cash on hand). Admittedly building a new fab would cost another $10 billion by itself, but it would still be a bargain if it got Intel back into the lead (which they held for most of their existence).
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  10. You've mentioned American fabless semiconductor firm Ambarella in recent videos. Given you're starting to profile fabless semiconductor firms like MediaTek (and maybe in the future HiSilicon, THATIC etc), it might be worth covering Ambarella. Unlike even MediaTek and Qualcomm, it's definitely not a household name that a consumer of Android devices would come across when they research the specifications of their next smartphone. Feel free to ignore this suggestion especially because the company not even based in Asia.
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  11. the collapse of the 3 Gorges Dam will cause millions of direct deaths, and millions more through disease. It would likely be the biggest single disaster in human history. Have some respect for those downstream people who may lose their lives. They don't get to choose their government like much of the rest of the world. They don't even have free access to information so in many cases can't know any better.
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  12. I find it fascinating that Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) was granted democracy by their British colonizers in 1931. Sri Lanka is Asia's oldest democracy. It's 2020 and Hong Kong is still fighting for democracy. Britain wanted to give Hong Kong democracy in the 1950s and 1960s, but the China's Communist government threatened to invade Hong Kong to prevent this.
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  13. I've recently been reading the very interesting book "Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm" which talks about how to extract the basic chemical that power our world (like nitric acid and potassium) from boiling trees in a pot and distilling the steam. I love the topic so much. It's so "steampunk" and takes high school chemistry to the next level!
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  14.  @fwefhwe4232  South Asia is a geographic term. There's other major religions in the area too. Such as Buddhism and Islam
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  15. 4:55 It's probably worth doing a video on KT Li. He seems like a key politician in Taiwan's economic success. I'll go have a read of his Wikipedia page.
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  16. Fortunately for TSMC and Samsung, the government of China's strategic investments are extremely wasteful. Unlimited money does not necessary lead to good outcomes (see SpaceX vs Blue Origin). The government of China has spent tens of billions over decades to build jet engines for passenger aeroplanes with little to show for it. They might eventually succeed, but due to US sanctions this is now unlikely. Consider that SMIC (China's TSMC competitor) can't even buy ASML machines due to being added to the Entity List. Huawei's HiSilicon can't license ARM Holdings chip reference designs. Huawei can't use Android due to sanctions. China is even being banned from accessing EDA (chip design software) from America. China could succeed in building indigenous replacements of these technologies one at a time, but when the United States is sanctioning everything at once it's VERY difficult. Especially when eg, Huawei's revenue streams starts drying up and those companies face big budget crunch. Xi Jinping overplayed his hand (around the usual issues: annexing the South China Sea, 1 million Uigher internment, crushing Hong Kong democracy, etc) and caused the US to react. Now if the US sanctions continue I think China will struggle to ever becoming competitive in the semi-conductor industry.
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  17. Another high quality video. Keep making more like these. In depth and fascinating stuff!
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  18. I have come across similar ethno-supremacist views on Reddit (r/Sino, r/AznIdentity and the related subreddits). I've seen comments on these subreddits strongly lean towards Han and Asian ethno-supremacy ideas, and funnel users to exclusive/private Discord chatroom if proof of racial identity is provided. Reddit bans subreddits which promote hate speech, but discussions on private Discord servers are of course much harder to police. It's hard to know if such corners of the internet are run by state-funded internet troll farms or just private citizens who hold extreme views. I should mention this is especially worry because disaffected or mentally ill people can radicalize themselves -- such as Elliot Rodger who committed the 2014 Isla Vista killings.
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  19. If you're interested in this video, checkout the video from this channel titled "Hongxin: China’s Billion Dollar Semiconductor Failure" and "Taiwan's Fabless Semiconductor Giant: MediaTek Explained"
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  20. It pretty remarkable how powerful China's protectionism strategy is: For businesses that heavily depend on "network effects" (like PayPal, and social media companies like Facebook, Reddit etc), the playbook is to completely block the foreign firm using regulation and the Great Firewall of China, then locally develop a product that fits the niche. For businesses with difficult-to-master technology, the playbook is to promise great riches but block foreign companies from setting up wholly-owned subsidiaries, instead offering market access only through a joint venture with a domestic Chinese firm. Then all valuable technology, expertise, trademarks and intellectual property are transferred to the local firm before the foreign firm is blocked from the market. We'll see if a Biden administration will push for World Trade Organization reform to ensure equal market access. Also it's still an open question whether domestic Chinese firms can compete in the global economy if faced with international competitive pressure. In Japan, Amazon's local subsidiary is pretty dominant alongside Japan's domestic e-commerce website Rakuten.
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  21. 2:53 7 great temples? Sounds likes The Legend of Zelda. I can't find any reference that Tofukuji is part of 7 temples other than the "Five Mountain" temple concept: 5 in Kyoto (Kyoto Gozan) and 5 in Kamakura, Kanagawa.
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  22. Just throwing this topic idea out: Taiwan and population demographics (which is related to fertility rate and immigration). Taiwan didn't have the One Child Policy, but they have birth rates similar to Japan/South Korea/Singapore. Will the country grow old like Japan? Taiwan is the most socially progressive nation is Asia (eg, legalized same-sex marriage). If there's any nation that might throw open their doors to Australia-level of educated migrants (other than maybe Singapore) I feel like it would be Taiwan. Is Taiwan going to sleep walk its way off demographic cliff like the rest of Asia?
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  23.  @Asianometry  No, in the geopolitical climate from 2015 through December 2020, they would absolutely 100% block it. Consider that in November 2019, the Australian government blocked Lion Dairy (then owned by Japanese beverage company Kirin) from being bought by the Chinese company Mengniu Dairy. The most interesting thing about this decision was that it was given the greenlight from Australia's Foreign Investment Review Board (the equivalent to CFIUS), our competition regulator (the ACCC: Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) and recommended by Treasury. But the deal was reportedly (and somewhat controversially) vetoed by the Treasurer for reasons that were never made public. The direct economic cost of this strategy is actually very low: only 5% of Australia's foreign investment is from China. Also politically, it's increasingly popular to block Chinese firms from buying Australia's assets. I highly recommend Pew Research's article "Unfavorable Views of China Reach Historic Highs in Many Countries". More recently, since Australia called for an independent inquiry into the origins of the pandemic, China has stopped meeting with Australian diplomats, issued a list of "14 demands" through its embassy, and started arbitrarily blocking Australia's lucrative exports of coal/wine/barley/lobster/etc under various pretenses such as illegal subsidies and supposed quality issues. This has culminated in Australia taking China to the World Trade Organization for arbitration. There's some speculation that Australia's new trade minister might change strategy to placate the Chinese Communist Party. But I highly doubt such a change would ever involve approving an Atlassian sale: the software is used for project management in major companies around the world. Confluence Wiki, JIRA task tracker and (especially) BitBucket naturally contain trade secrets, business strategy, source code / blueprints, and more. It's very important to issue patches for security vulnerabilities in software used at major companies WITHOUT representatives of the Chinese Communist Party being involved in the process. Also, Atlassian has major offices in the US and is traded on a US stock exchange, so CFIUS rules apply and will definitely block any sale for the previously mentioned reasons.
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  24. 4:49 For those interested video is titled "TSMC is more than just Taiwan", direct link below
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  25. If you are interested, ABC (American-Born Chinese) is a political term that has been amplified by China's state media. It indicates somebody is always Chinese first-and-foremost that happens to be American born -- even if they have lived their whole life in America. The more generic term uses heritage-nationality (eg, Chinese-American). This distinction is important given the CCP's United Front Work Department activities attempting to switch the allegiances of all ethnically Chinese people regardless of their nationality and how little connection they have to China. Though of course, you are free to use whatever term you like.
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  26. I have confirmed with Asianometry that this was a typo. It's 14km (8.7 miles), not 140km (87 miles). The description and transcript has been updated. The number comes from a book: "Over 1973-4, the new disk brake was tested in wind tunnels and in drops from helicopters and aircraft from altitudes as high as 14,000 m. The spacecraft model was also dropped onto simulated Venusian soil made from foam concrete." (from the book "Russian Planetary Exploration History, Development, Legacy and Prospects: by Brian Harvey).
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  27.  @gallasebiyo4427  But TSMC is not even a household name, because it's business-to-business. Much more well known are the Taiwanese consumer brands like ASUS, Acer and Giant Bicycles. I'd also argue that Foxconn (the manufacturer for Apple and many other companies), MediaTek (computer chips), Gigabyte and MSI (the computer motherboard maker) are also pretty well known. At least for anybody who follows technology.
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  28. I don't knock any Taiwanese engineer for moving to China to make 2 or 3 times higher salary: as long as they're not any stealing trade secrets from their prior employer I see it as completely fair game. As this video suggests, most of these semiconductors fabs in China aren't actually making any money (and have no prospect of making money) but are instead propped up by billions of dollars of investment capital. This is by itself not a bad thing: Silicon Valley is fueled by ample investment capital for high risk projects and moonshots. But in China's case the money is coming from Local Government Financing Vehicles rather than private VC money. The Chinese Communist Party is encouraging provincial governments to take out massive loans and put the money into these high risk ventures run by princelings (children of Chinese Communist Party elites, like Jiang Mianheng). Taiwanese engineers can and should go to China, do their jobs to the best of their ability, and earn billions of dollars of this "dumb money" (as they have already been doing for decades). The companies they work for in China will eventually go out of business (due to princeling management and American sanctions), at which point the Taiwanese engineers can move back to Taiwan and go work for better managed companies like TSMC. It's unfortunate the regular people of China will be left with the bill, but that's the responsibility of China's government and the management of the companies that are hiring. Not the random Taiwanese engineer who is hired and goes to China to do their job to the best of their abilities.
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  29. 2:38 Video is titled "The Coypus (Nutria) of Prague". Here's a direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz3RlC4RxUc
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  30. It's very interesting that more than 50% of bitcoin mining happens in China (I've seen some estimates that are closer to 75%), by enterprising private individuals but ultimately under the jurisdiction of the government like everything else in China. While mining obviously generates bitcoin, any transaction on bitcoin forfeits a transaction fee that is transferred to whichever miner verifies the transaction first. Effectively all bitcoin transactions transfers a small amount of wealth to China: buying bitcoin means you're buying into an ecosystem controlled by China, the same as if you bought a Huawei phone. Additionally, in blockchain based systems you just need to control more than 50% of the mining to be able to reverse transactions so it's conceivable that China could one day do a "51% attack".
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  31. 10:35 Okami is actually a Playstation 2 port by the way
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  32.  @MarkWTK  2:39 "Shao Kahn" is a character from the video game series "Mortal Kombat", and is the the emperor of "Outworld". And "ripped" is slang for abdominal muscles. In his spare time, he also co-founded Amperex Technology Limited, the battery manufacturer.
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  33. In case you're not aware, this is the EIGHTEENTH video in this channel's TSMC coverage. Here's the entire playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKtxx9TnH76SRC7ZbOu2Nsg5mC72fy-GZ
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  34. Even without separating the internet using the Great Firewall of China, the language barrier continues to be a big barrier. Most English speakers who visit Facebook, YouTube or Reddit will only speak to other English speakers and rarely consume any content in eg, Korean, Spanish, or Hindi (other than cultural exports like Gangnam Style, Despacito and possibly, the Macarena).
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  35. I'm very comfortable that the United States and Taiwanese governments will tend to block the sale of advanced semiconductor companies to China. I'm a bit less confident about the South Korean and Japanese governments.
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  36. ​ @WasatchWind  The video was available on Patreon Early Access for a month and when "unlisted" YouTube videos are made public the release date gets reset but all the comments remain.
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  37. This video is about the social costs of the mismatch between supply/demand. A 4 year degree in Taiwan is presumably pretty affordable compared to the US, so it's less of a big deal if the degree isn't utilized. On this topic, Peter Thiel has a lot of interesting things to say on this topic (search keywords "Peter Thiel" and "higher education bubble"). He sees as a world that no longer innovates outside of computer technology, and believes that US society requires (in my words) constant radical innovation otherwise it falls into chaos. I should mention a degree shouldn't be about the credential giving you an advantage other people, but about how those skills and knowledge can be leveraged to produce economic value. There are so many problems in the world that only radical innovation can solve. It's great for higher education to be widely accessible. Imagine how much further we would be if every person living in poverty in eg, Africa/India/Myannmar/etc had an advanced STEM (Science/Technology/Engineering/Mathematics) degrees and had the right incentives to eg, cure aging for all humanity and hopefully not eg, developing chemical/biological/nuclear weapons.
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  38. If anybody is interested, Singapore is supposedly not well-suited to wind power, with low-to-intermittent wind speeds (2 meters per second) where commercial turbines supposedly operate at 4.5 meters per second. Also the waters around Singapore are busy shipping lanes, so there supposedly aren't actually that many places to put the wind turbines.
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  39. Thanks for the very thorough mini-documentary. I have never heard of controversy around this Ractopamine animal feed additive. Also I have never heard of this United Nations food safety standards body, the "Codex Alimentarius Commission" (if anybody from the United Nations is reading, here's a better name: "UN Food Standards Authority"). Sounds like I need to start watching those industrial agriculture documentaries on Netflix/CuriosityStream or wherever. Now, from your mini-documentary it sounds like there is concern about the quality of the science coming out of the UN commission, due to economic pressure/influence from "big agriculture" firms via the United States government. My advice to Taiwanese politicians and Taiwanese voters is to create a commission of local pre-eminent scientists to independently analyse the science of such questions, release public reports and advise the government. The goal of such a commission would NOT be to covertly implement non-tariff barriers to protect Taiwan's domestic pork industry, but to be above the political partisanship and be the trusted and respected independent arbiter tasked with protecting public health. If American trade negotiators don't like that, then let them complain and ignore them. Taiwan is a sovereign, independent country. The country should only ever make food safety decisions based in science of public health, not because foreign free-trade negotiators were twisting your arm.
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  40. This is such a great and underrated channel. If you are fascinated by Hanzi/Kanji etymology, you may be interested in A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters by Kenneth Henshall. It provides a huge degree of etymological depth for the average Japanese language learner. I have long since given up my Japanese studies, but it was/is fascinating!
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  41. 8:16 By the way, I always pronounced this "Zie Links" (and so do colleagues of mine). The CEO and Bloomberg both say "Zie links": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNDgZVm5aDg
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  42. 21:06 I am still in awe that a company that builds apartments also makes *electric cars*
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  43. The question is whether the short-term cash injection outweighs the long-term threat of transferring the expertise to China. If SMIC reaches parity with TSMC in the next few years based on transferred expertise, the decision will look very bad in hindsight. But if China is unable to master the technology and continues to spend tens of billions with little to show for it (like HSMC -- Hongxin Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) then it was a good decision. Side note: SMIC was just added to the Entity List. This may prevent the company from importing ASML equipment, killing their ambitions.
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  44. 6:25 Randomly dropping that pronunciation of Shanxi 山西 😂💯 💯
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  45. Repealing the California gold rush-era Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 was a good start, but by many accounts the US immigration system today continues to be very broken in other ways and it's important we try to understand how to try and make the next hundred years better. Many people in United States (including elected representatives) often suggest the US should move to a "points-based" immigration system like Canada and Australia, where clearly defined criteria (including English language skills, educational attainment, age and strategic national priority skillsets) which supposedly provides a very fair and transparent way for the government to specify exactly the kinds of immigrants who should be given a pathway citizenship (without any consideration of national origin). I'm not necessarily advocating for (or against) the United States to adopt points-based immigration system, just pointing out there's a lot of support for the idea.
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  46. 4:33 I am skeptical of the claims that 1975's Typhoon Nina caused a "one-in-10,000-year flood" along the Ru River and Hong River region. That's a very long time for accurate historical records to survive in oral and written history. It far easier for the population to accept that the Banqiao Dam failed after just 24 years when people say it was "built to withstand a one-in-1,000-year flood but it failed during a one-in-10,000-year flood". This was China during the Cultural Revolution. I'm sure the dam faced poor maintenance and mismanaged water release over a much longer period of time which contributed greatly to its collapse.
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  47. For those interested, that project is called "Asian Renewable Energy Hub" and was originally another submarine power cable project (from Pilbara, Western Australia not central Northern Territory)
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  48. My first smartphone back in the early 2010s had a MediaTek chip in it (MT6575). It had pretty good performance for its era. There were hundreds of different white-label versions of the same reference design, each competing with each other on price and by selecting slightly different components for better battery capacity/RAM/storage/camera etc. The worst part of using a Chinese smartphone was being forced to use the white-label brand's custom modified Android version, complete with all the non-removable Chinese spyware like AdUps: you were stuck with the untrusted vendor's spyware riddled operating system. Advanced users who re-install their operating systems enjoyed very little support from the broader custom ROM community, and no support from the more trusted custom ROMs such as LineageOS (formerly named CyanogenMod). Also the tablet/smartphone manufacturing quality was pretty bad, at least in those days: the microphone and headphone jack broke on that phone, and a similar era tablet had bad overheating and stability issues. That's why I swore off the cheap Chinese white-label brands that MediaTek chips tend find their way into. This was way before the current human-rights situation came to light and modern "boycott China" movement starting gathering momentum. After the subsequent death of the Google's excellent Nexus line, these days I recommend certain Samsung Galaxy M smartphone models. They are very reasonably priced, assembled in Vietnam rather than China (which is better for human-rights), have excellent screen quality if you choose the right model according to the specifications, have exceptionally great battery life (again, if you choose the right model according to the specifications), they get regular security updates from Samsung, and don't have Chinese spyware (but unfortunately have other kinds of bloatware from Samsung). The M series is basically filling the niche that Xiaomi/Oppo/Vivo and the other internationally successful Chinese smartphone brands have been doing quite successfully: great bang-for-buck mid-range phones.
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  49. The biggest macro-economic level that Japan can pull any time is the immigration tap. It would solve all their shrinking labor force problems very quickly, and potentially fix their demographic problems if they do a good job encouraging births and assimilating all new arrivals and their children. But unlike the West, Japan didn't have mass migration in the last few hundred years so is not an immigrant nation: they have strong cultural and racial aversions to this. But the immigration doesn't even have to be from the Middle East and Africa. It could be from East and South East Asia (from Laos to the Philippines). But Japan would rather see its population fall to 60 million people than become an immigrant nation. Which is fine -- that's their decision to make. It's just that it means the country will become increasingly economically irrelevant as time goes on (while the demographic of many western countries continues to be much healthier)
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  50. During the first Cold War, India was a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement -- a grouping of countries that were not aligned to the Soviet Union or the Free World. It was of great advantage to China to have India continue to be strategically neutral, to have limited ability to project military power and buy what military equipment they do from regional partner Russia (rather than improving the unit economics of the US military-industrial complex). Even before the most recent border clashes India is moving sharply closer to the United States security sphere. They've rebooted the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) between Australia, India, Japan and the US. Surely pushing India to further align itself to the West (including South Korea, Japan and Taiwan) in not the best interests of China? The current leadership in China seem very short sighted. The strategic value of an neutral/non-aligned India seems extremely valuable.
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