Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "Taiwan’s Chips Could Be Preventing War With China" video.

  1. Great piece... I'll just add some stuff of what I know about the subjects in this video. Ok, first and foremost, chip production both in US, China plus a few other nations already exist, like in Europe. The problem with those are in quantity and quality. You can see it as Taiwan having the full stack - large quantities for the lowest to highest end technological products. The high end is needed for stuff like smartphones, desktops, laptops, video games, industrial machines, robots, AI, and a bunch of other stuff - all sorts of electronics and components that are pushing the boundaries of technologies. Low end you can think about pretty mundane stuff, like chips for basic functions, chips inside very basic electronics that don't seem to have any advanced functions. Basic clocks, a simple battery or power brick, domestic utilities, kitchen gadgets, stuff that you don't automatically think "computer" when you see it. China is also already in production of the high end side of things, but in a smaller scale, and a few steps back on the technological chain. So, if you go buy a low end smartphone these days, you may end up with a product with a Chinese chip, like say Mediatek, HiSilicon or UNISOC. On the low end China already dominates large quantity and steady production - chips for the basic electronics that it has become an industry of. China also has a lot of production on component chips of these same high end electronics - then you have to think about chips for stuff like wireless communications, power regulation, audio functions, sensors, etc etc. There are tens to hundreds of chips inside any computer-like device, it's not only processor, memory and whatnot. You have a myriad of sources for each one of those, but Chinese companies already has lots of them in the stack. The fabs that are coming to US side industries, if they ever happen (which I still have pretty big doubts about), they will necessarily need to start at a further step down even current China production. Reason is pretty basic - you cannot jumpstart high end production without all the necessary environment needed for it. If we're talking about tens of billions of dollars - that's far from being enough to support this type of industry. You could focus on a single thing, which would allow for faster development, but even with several years of development, sinking trillions in this, and a total cultural shift and infrastructural shift towards this, you'd still be nowhere near "independent". It's exactly because this isn't only about building factories somewhere in the nation - this type of industry involves everything - culture, logistics, knowledge base, education, infrastructure, with entire cities with several different types of industries to optimize production. Because we're talking about the very high end of industrial production here. To make it simple to understand, just think on the individual level. Have you ever seen a disassembled smartphone, for instance? How many components and parts are inside it? Now, think about a single country producing all of those enough to attend current demand, even just US demand. Now, if we think about past attempts to 'bring jerbs back" to the US, all of those are pretty modest and more realistic attempts that also didn't go through. You can read all about a particularly symbolic case here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconn_Valley_Science_and_Technology_Park A Foxconn led panel assembly plant is a million times simpler than chip production. It doesn't even compare the level required for worker education, specialization and training, the amount of parallel infrastructure and industries also don't compare, how much you need to process base materials don't compare, the amount of rare earth minerals and components don't compare, how many workers involved don't compare, the level of advanced machinery, logistics and infrastructure don't compare... plus a whole ton of other stuff. And that's for actual production, what was being attempted on Wisconsin was a simple assembly factory. Get all components from China and put things together there. Now, the Foxconn Wisconsin plant plan failed, and failed hard. This chip initiative is on a higher scale and budget, but it is still prone to failure, because the level of complexity is exponentially harder. The budget is higher, but there are things you simply cannot solve by just throwing money at it. What I think the problem is in all of this is that US politicians, plus lots of people, extremely underestimate the complexities involved in these industries. They don't even have the start of a hint of knowledge to really understand what it takes to pull off a TSMC, or a Foxconn, or any sort of modern advanced technological mass production. It's because offshoring in the mid 80s or so completely took away that side of how things are made out of the view of most rich nations, they only get to see the final product, and with late stage capitalism, anti consumer and anti repair corporate culture, and all of that - the absolute vast majority of people simply does not know what it takes to make the stuff they use. You know those docs showing the entire chain of production from farm to table about the food we consume? Electronics are some two to three steps exponentially more complex than that, and most people don't know. From base materials that are needed for the entire process, all the way up to the extremely advanced machinery required in these industries, it's all a world unto itself. But anyways, back to the topic, I agree with the general gist of the piece - even if China has a totalitarian regime with a propaganda stating that Taiwan is a rebel state that needs to be reunified with China, if the CCP ever decides to invade it, if chip production halts in Taiwan, not only China but also the entire modern world will get f*cked to oblivion. The chip shortage that happened during the pandemic can't even be considered a hint of what's to come, because remember, as bad as it was, we still managed through it with stocks and a few options. If the chip factories in Taiwan ever gets shut down, damaged in a war scenario, or production largely interrupted for a prolonged period of time, you need to think about how the war in Ukraine caused famine in countries dependent on it's wheat production, only it'll be about technology, globally. We'd have a complete freeze in technological advancements throughout the world, and then you'd start having shortages until it becomes complete paralysis of production of anything that requires a chip. This not only takes us back before the computer era... it takes us back before even that, because a whole ton of stuff we used to do without chips in the past, we can only do with chips today. I'm being a bit dramatic here because like I said, the US, Europe, countries like South Korea, do have some level of chip production - but again, even all of those combine don't come even close to the quantity that Taiwan currently has. So even if we can fall back to an earlier level of tech, it still would be tech for the extremely few who'd be able to afford it, because it would become extremely expensive given shortages and high demand. People, not even the most optimistic ones, should expect for these chip localization efforts to render real results in several decades. It's far more likely that those efforts will break down and result in nothing. It is realistically a far better bet to just bet on diplomacy, restore talks between opposing nations, and vouch for global peace so we can work on the global problems that are currently encroaching on us as a species. But since we can't have that, I actually think that the time that it takes for these extreme localization efforts just cannot be met. In a few decades or so the effects of climate change and of the ongoing political division, plus effects like mass migrations, wars on resources, among others, will be in such a level that we'll need to dedicate far more resources and far more attention into, in such a way that this trend of trying to hyper localize things will take a step back and eventually get abandoned. But we'll see.
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