Comments by "Peter Lund" (@peterfireflylund) on "China Observer" channel.

  1. ASML is not a chipmaker. They make essential chip making equipment and they have a monopoly on the most advanced equipment. You can’t make a state of the art fab without their equipment.
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  2. A stable foundation is actually all about resources and capabilities. There is almost zero social safety net in China so the families have to be dead sure the couple can make money, don’t drink, don’t gamble, aren’t spendthrifts, etc.
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  3. 120 for 8 billion €? That would be a steal! They must have got a lot fewer or paid a lot more.
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  4. Ukraine is richer than rural China -- and old age pensions for ordinary people are also higher in Ukraine than in China. China isn't really all that rich...
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  5. They all have access to more wealth and welfare than middle class Chinese... if they want to access it. Some are drug addicts, some have schizophrenia. Not much that can be done about that, is there?
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  6. They have a good excuse for the yellow river. It is yellow because of very, very fine grains of stone suspended in the water (called “loess”). They get blown into the river by the wind while the river is flowing on a high plain at the beginning of its course. Then it flows fast downhill for quite a while. The speed and the turbulence whisks the water so the loess stays suspended in the water. Then the river comes to a long stretch that is almost flat. The river flows slowly, it becomes wide, and the loess slowly falls out of suspension and gets deposited at the bottom. And that means there are many places along the river where the riverbed becomes lower and lower (and wider and wider) until suddenly the river decides to change course. There is not a lot that can be done about it. The rest of the floods are due to human folly, just like everywhere else, plus a few places where the river is bordered by steep mountain sides (also typical for flood-prone rivers elsewhere). Rainwater flows down the mountain sides, there is nowhere for the river to go except “up” and “fast”, ... By human folly, I mean: building villages and cities right next to the river, often with a mountain side behind the city... or hemming the river in with walls along its course so it can’t overflow to meadows/fields... or straightening the river out so it flows quicker.... or building dams to take up the rainwater but then not emptying them before the rain comes... Rivers need flood plains to overflow to so they don’t overflow cities/villages!
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  7. Europe as well. Mainly TGV.
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  8. The auto translations would be piss poor so they are not missing much.
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  9. However bad China seems, it is still much, much better than North Korea.
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  10.  @johnwong5317  interesting! Google told me about a granary fire in Heilongjian in 2013, just 4 days before an inspection. Were there others?
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  11. Medicine is usually quite cheap. Surgery or complicated treatments are not.
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  12.  @resultspaid7250  China’s history is full of civil wars, huge uprisings, and brutal fighting to quell those uprisings. The Chinese are actually not very docile.
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  13.  @michaelrenper796  doesn’t GloFo still have a fab in Dresden?
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  14.  @handsomesg6390 sure. And the EU is stronger and better than the (West) Roman Empire. The (West) Roman Empire still fell…
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  15. They don’t actually need cobalt. You should expect cobalt to be phased out of most lithium-ion batteries within the next 5 years or so.
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  16. More like 3500 years. Less, if you consider how much their culture has changed over the years. Remember that the oldest Greek texts are older than the oldest Chinese texts…
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  17.  @volkergiesbrecht5829 some languages don’t even have words for yes and no. Chinese is one of them. Latin was another. You express “yes” by saying something like “correct”, “it is” or by repeating the verb. You express no with a negation, sometimes with a negated verb. There might be more than one negation and you need to use the correct one for the situation. You’d think learning “yes” and “no” would be a lot easier. And they are taught English in school over there!
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  18.  @billycarr7446 The times of mass dying are pretty much over (outside of North Korea). A lot of people in China are losing their jobs and their savings but almost nobody will starve to death. It’s not Mao’s China anymore: it’s a lot less poor and Xi is — despite everything — not nearly as bad as Mao.
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  19.  @erinmcdonald7781  Do your research. Social factors are almost non-existent when it comes to intelligence and crime — genetic factors are what matters.
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  20. Concurrency = simultaneity. I think you meant “competition”.
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  21. Old superstition related to the “mandate of heaven”.
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  22. Xi, not She.
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  23. Nope. We are talking about lithium batteries, not lead acid batteries or cadmium batteries.
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  24.  @patrickt49 who does?
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  25. People on the west coast make much more money than the Chinese.
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  26.  @michaelrenper796  I thought AMD’s fabs there were built from scratch?
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  27.  @michaelrenper796  good morning! I tried googling for a bit before I asked yesterday but I didn’t get any wiser. Maybe if I had bothered googling in German...
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  28. You don’t have to be stupid. It’s a choice. (And you probably meant “cooperation” instead of “competition”.)
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  29. Quan ;)
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  30. But it should be done fairly. A good comparison would be to passports and rules for free movement inside the EU (and the Schengen area). There are also restrictions on what you can do and what kind of services you can get in a foreign country there.
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  31. No, there are plenty of bad universities in the West and some Chinese ones are pretty damn good (Tsinghua!).
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  32. Islam is illegal.
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  33. Their manned space program (and their chang’e missions) actually seem to be really well done. (They licensed lots of tech from Russia...)
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  34. How? In Europe!?
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  35.  @rochcarothers-ts3jx  that’s a low IQ answer.
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  36. She was a disaster for China but she was really good at staying in power :(
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  37.  @kcw0809 she spent most of her reign preventing progress from coming to China from foreign countries. She had zero case.
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  38. That’s not the only explanation. It doesn’t excuse the high costs and schedule overruns in California and New York, for example.
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  39. At a first glance? Nothing. But Starlink could easily be used for global positioning… it just requires a software update.
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  40. Ilyushin.
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  41. It doesn’t work like in the US. You can’t just give the bank the keys and walk away.
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  42. Another one?
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  43. No.
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  44. No, much worse.
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  45. And a lot of those are literally just copies of western patents.
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  46.  @garygallant5390 she’s not an AI voice.
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  47.  @ne0teric yes, but that was per month.
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  48.  @domingosmascarenhas4923 is competence a monopoly?
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  49. It’s a gravity dam so even if part of it breaks, the rest is likely to hold up.
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  50. Amiga (+ they made PC clones, too).
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  51. Maybe spend a bit more time on high school physics?
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  52. Your dad was wrong. It is much older and probably entirely unrelated to Germans. It goes back to 1832 or even earlier.
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  53.  @Simon-1965  and yet, one of the most prized possessions in that war was jerrycans.
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  54.  @Simon-1965  jerries/gerries... same thing. It was sometimes spelled with a j, sometimes with a g. And jerrycans were definitely German.
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  55. It has less to do with the one child policy than people in the West believe. Fertility rates were already low before the one child policy and they actually didn’t fall much afterwards. The one child policy also has exceptions for rural areas and minorities.
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  56.  @bieneulm1982 maglev trains are (very) expensive gimmicks. They are not actually useful. “Allowing” transfer of that tech to China was a net positive for Germany and a net negative for China.
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  57.  @bieneulm1982  China wastes a lot of money and resources on dumb things. Most of high speed railway lines are money pits, for example.
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  58.  @SERGIO-cr6uy the problem is that Mexico is in North America.
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  59. Yes. 家 (jia) = family, household, home, house. They use another word for buildings.
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