Is there a 'fruit of the poisoned tree' rule in international trade and tariffs? If the US puts tariffs on Chinese chips because they think they are derived from knowledge that was stolen from a US company, will they get chastised by the big international trade organizations?
Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power
71–80 of 211 posts
Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, if you EE guys would finally got off your high horses and dropped Verilog in favor of JavaScript, we wouldn’t have this kind of problem!!!
I left EE and became a full-stack developer! No complaints about JavaScript here. Verilog should just switch to lambdas and get it over with.
Same here. Switched to CS from EE and never looked back, although my respect for EE majors increased a lot.
(I had trouble with the continuous math once we reached steady-state analysis. Besides, I wanted to just get through all that to the fun stuff: discrete math, logic design, and programming.)
Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power
#73Considering the two sticks of Micron RAM I purchased in mid 2016 have appreciated 2-3x value, I don't have much sympathy for the big three DRAM producers. There's a reason the Chinese are looking so longingly at their lunch.
Memory is always a feast and famine cycle, it's one of the reasons Intel pivoted away from it.
Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power
#74DOD would have way more cost effective spending ditching the F-35 flying turkey and buying the IP for TSMC, and moving US fab to Virginia/Austin.
yeah, but ... does the IP for TSMC reside in some easily transferred tangibles? wouldn't the DOD really need to transfer the whole community of engineers and ecosystem of suppliers?
Engineers in Taiwan don't make that much money. Just saying you'll pay them standard US engineer salaries and add instant green cards for their families as part of the acquisition and you'd probably get most of them to move.
TSMC although is a pretty foundational company of Taiwan. It would be like the US buying samsung and then moving everyone to the USA. Taiwan might stop you.
Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want to pick at your “moon rovers” comment because I think it’s somewhat misguided (although, yes, it does apply specifically to Chinese government officials). One of the reasons that the United States won the race to the moon (while definitively losing the race to space and manned space flight) was because we were the first to dump exorbitant sums of money into the hot (and extremely expensive) new kid on the comp…
This ^^ 100x. If it wasn't for integrated circuits, the u.s. likely would not have won the race. And it's not just because I'm a chip guy.
Wow “chip guy” is understatement of the year. I just looked up vathys.ai from your profile. Very excited to see what comes from that! My personal focus is in embedded computing (Arduino/Pi), and seeing all of these amazing AI-focused chip startups makes me really excited for the days once SBCs can handle heavy-duty machine learning - THEN we’ll get to see the future we were promised in the 90’s!
Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power
#76Notes from the ground here. My undergrad was in EE at an "elite" school - I can say definitively that ~50% of the MS/Ph.d. students in EE were from China (with the other 50% largely from India). They TA'd many of the graduate level courses and were the majority of the students taking high level semiconductor design courses that centered on fabrication and nanotechnology. China's short term goal is clearly to reach pa…
Throughout the 20th century, the United States benefited greatly from this sort of knowledge drain, from war-torn Europe, and from the Soviet sphere of influence. The trend is just reverting to the mean.
Many scientists and academics immigrated to the US because of its values: it was a free country and a multicultural country where immigrants are welcomed. The knowledge drain moved smart people to a free country to build a knowledge economy. (Economists too: the Bretton Woods system was built in part by smart people who fled the autocratic or fascist countries). That system of free exchange between stable democracies with social safety nets kept peace in the world for 50 years.
Not sure this brain drain has equal intentions for rule of law and democratic societies.
Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't need to be 'good' at anything, they just will move slower than an equivalent market based system but eventually they will get there. As long as the rest of the world out-innovates them they may not catch up but do not underestimate the power of over 1 billion people, especially not when a large number of them are very smart. Have a look at China 30 years ago and China today and tell me that that authoritar…
Actually I'm not so sure if much would change (w.r.t. performance) if they switched to a more democratic regime. In the end I were always a bit scared/reluctant about the US often touted ultimate justification for democratic capitalism that it is simply more efficient -- "Cultivate freedom -- after all, in the end it's just more efficient!". What if... it isn't? China is turning the tables on this argument quite a bi…
The US has slid away from a free and fair market too. By moving to completely unregulated markets, they have given control to the biggest companies. In a totally unregulated market, inequality grows.
That’s bad for a society. Most free market economists (before “free market” was taken over by billionaires and plutocrats trying to increase their wealth) understood that regulations (anti-trust, anti-price fixing, anti-dumping etc) were needed to give small players and workers a fair shake.
When the US emerges from this national emergency, will it restore balance to markets as it did in the 1930s and 40s in reaction to the 1920s plutocrats? To me that is totally unclear. Let’s hope so. Let’s hope Europe joins it.
Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power
#78History rhymes. American industrialists famously begged, borrowed and stole machine designs from Europe -- Slater the traitor kickstarted the American cotton industry. Of course, the lack of foresight of Wall St is legendary! Many companies have traded long term loss for short term gain.
IP and knowledge was much less valuable in the 19th C industrial economy than it is today. Back then execution and raw materials and access to semiskilled labor was most important.
The Chinese (NK, Iranian, Russian) corporate hacks we have seen recently could have a MUCH larger economic effect.
Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power
#79Notes from the ground here. My undergrad was in EE at an "elite" school - I can say definitively that ~50% of the MS/Ph.d. students in EE were from China (with the other 50% largely from India). They TA'd many of the graduate level courses and were the majority of the students taking high level semiconductor design courses that centered on fabrication and nanotechnology. China's short term goal is clearly to reach pa…
Well, if you EE guys would finally got off your high horses and dropped Verilog in favor of JavaScript, we wouldn’t have this kind of problem!!!
I know you’re joking, but look at Chisel or Clash.
Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power
#80History rhymes. American industrialists famously begged, borrowed and stole machine designs from Europe -- Slater the traitor kickstarted the American cotton industry. Of course, the lack of foresight of Wall St is legendary! Many companies have traded long term loss for short term gain.
IP and knowledge was much less valuable in the 19th C industrial economy than it is today. Back then execution and raw materials and access to semiskilled labor was most important. The Chinese (NK, Iranian, Russian) corporate hacks we have seen recently could have a MUCH larger economic effect.
Not really. Britain banned textile technicians from leaving the country because textile machinery knowledge was overwhelmingly valuable. Semiconductor IP is not nearly that important.