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TSMC plans to halt chip supplies to Huawei in 2 months

asia.nikkei.com

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Re: TSMC plans to halt chip supplies to Huawei in 2 months

#111

Post by sudosysgen »

zanny wrote: post #101
sudosysgen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is it really? Were the people complaining about the war in Yemen or the atrocities of Saudi Arabia or the horrors of the Iraq War able to meaningfully change anything? Or is it the case that the only time that human rights actually enact change is when there is an underlying material interest, making them little more than a veneer?

Well yeah, of course. Pretty much every US city is buried in homeless populations because human decency is off the table if there isn't a profit motive behind it. You can look at the glass is half full view of this, though - thanks to selfish interests an evil regime is being cut off from market access to spy on people around the world. Its of mutual benefit to the capitalists that saw this happen and the people whom…

The question for me is twofold.

First, will isolating China from the US and it's client states actually do anything to make the CCP act in a way that will respect human rights more? I think it is pretty clear that won't be the case.

Second of all, is the entity that stands to benefit actually going to be better for human rights? In this case it pretty much is a zero-sum game. This is a bit more debatable, but I don't think that if the US won this Cold War against China the situation for human rights in the world will become any better.

Because of that, I can't get behind it, at all.

Re: TSMC plans to halt chip supplies to Huawei in 2 months

#112

Post by AsyncAwait »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #95
AsyncAwait wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back then the politics were a lot less polarized and you had sane domestic policy under FDR, these are different times. That was when U.S. understood that you can only attain so much by brute force.

> had sane domestic policy under FDR, Is this the same FDR that tried to pack the US Supreme Court and interned over 100,000 Americans of Japanese decent in camps? > That was when U.S. understood that you can only attain so much by brute force. WWII was pretty much brute force all the way. Around the clock bombings of enemy cities and civilians. Firebombing Tokyo, nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that w…

You're confusing foreign policy and domestic policy.

FDR was horrific on foreign policy and had his problems at home, but he understood with the Great Depression at least that some serious economic steps had to be taken in favor of your average worker for the system "as is" to survive.

Right now, the U.S. is "number #1" at handling COVID 19 the absolute worst and still calling Medicare for All a crazy idea, even in the middle of a pandemic, while apparently Biden, a proven right-leaning centrist as somehow being a socialist.

Crazy watching this unfold.

Re: TSMC plans to halt chip supplies to Huawei in 2 months

#113

Post by paulmd »

jacquesm wrote: post #67
jlokier wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it will take long to surpass ASML if the state commits to it and decides the ASML patents don't matter any more. There's enough public knowledge about EUV to clone the machines if starting with unlimited financial resources and no legal constraints.

That's so funny. ASML holds the market for a reason, this is not so simple. You could probably do it on a Friday night but the Chinese may take a bit longer than that.

the question is - how much of that "reason" is protectionism (patents, etc)?

if you no longer care about pissing off the US and EU (because they're up in your business anyway) then maybe it doesn't matter so much if you violate those patents.

Same thing as with Taiwan's "special trade status", Trump thinks that revoking their status will get China to leave them alone, because he has a very simplistic bullying-oriented view of international politics, but it's widely predicted to have the exact opposite effect as intended and lock in PRC control. Or trying to bully Iran with further sanctions even though they're already in compliance with treaties.

The approach is "carrot and stick", if you only use the stick then you provide no incentive for future compliance, people realize it's more effective to just start preparing for the inevitable future beatings and set yourself up to mitigate as much of the pain as possible.

This often leads to countries building up their own domestic industry to make themselves impervious to sanctions - that's how it's worked with Iran, after 50 years of sanctions they are more independent and less susceptible to the effects of sanctions than ever. That's how it's working with China, this is far from the first thing we've tried to choke off, there was the spat with memory too and they just ended up building their own plants.

And it often leads to further "escalation" and violation of norms. If you're going to get shit on anyway, why would they respect ASML's intellectual property?

Re: TSMC plans to halt chip supplies to Huawei in 2 months

#114

Post by bserge »

reducesuffering wrote: post #78
mc32 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s shocking how far they’ve fallen. But they let corruption take hold of everything, gov, economy, etc., so no one in their right minds would want to invest. They weren’t going to be the second economic power, but no reason they couldn’t have been number four behind Japan. But they could not help it, they squandered it.

Russian GDP is frequently touted as why they're overrated. However, the Russian kleptocracy believes real power is now coming from mastery of the cyberspace: disinformation, cybersecurity, offensive hacking capabilities, AI superiority[0]. This is a likely accurate understanding, and Russia has immense experience. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/4/16251226/russia-ai-putin-r...

All they can do (bar actual war) is make other countries worse. It's pretty sad, "if we can't be better than them, then we'll make them worse off than us" is a terrible strategy for the world.

Re: TSMC plans to halt chip supplies to Huawei in 2 months

#115

Post by justicezyx »

3pt14159 wrote: post #84
AsyncAwait wrote: post #64

All these things seem like desperate moves from a failing empire. I don't believe for a second the U.S. cares about human rights here. That doesn't mean I think the CCP is 'good', but 2 things can be true at the same time. EDIT: typo

For things like this there isn't a "the U.S." there's groups of people, interest groups, political economy, political will, etc. If China were rapidly liberalizing and didn't have stains on their reputation like the HK protest lockdowns, minority subjugation, and horrible prison conditions it would be a lot harder to push any of these changes through. As it stands, democrats and republicans are both turning hawkish o…

> If China were rapidly liberalizing

By any measurements one can imagine, this was true since 1970s: China were rapidly liberalizing.

In 1970s Chinese cannot choose what they wear each day. That's how authoritarian it was.

Re: TSMC plans to halt chip supplies to Huawei in 2 months

#116

Post by euix »

The founder of SMIC on the mainland is actually Taiwanese and a former TSMC executive. Loyalties cut across the strait both ways, westerners overemphasis attachment to values and ideology over bloodlines and ancestry. It's true for some but not for others. There are quite a lot of foreign engineers working on the mainland, especially Taiwanese engineers. If you are a industry vet or got some kind of special talent you can easily 3x your salary by moving to the mainland from Taiwan.

For example, Justin Yifu Lin, the former World Bank chief economist was a Taiwanese defector who to swam to Mainland China. Before he defected in the (early 90's I believe) he was a rising star within the establishment in Taiwan.

Short term definitively bad for Huawei, but the long term it should help the development of the indigenous semiconductor industry on the mainland. Necessity is the mother of invention and nowhere else is there the capital, political will and now sheer necessity as there is on the Mainland.

A lot of "huaqiao" i.e. overseas Chinese that go back to the mainland (I include Taiwanese people here) despite the repressive political atmosphere and bad environmental quality, food safety are motivated by this. In the West you can only go so far, back there, especially if you have specialized technical knowledge, you have a chance to make an impact at scale that would never be possible in the West.

I am not sure what the U.S. can really do about this without adopting essentially the same repression as in China. I.E. control the flow of personal. On the mainland if you are a leading expert in this field or that, or belong to specific establishments (such as public security or state security) you cannot exit the country without permission from higher up the food chain.

Anyways, my point at the end, is the central point of competitive advantage or a company or nation is human talent. You can restrict technology or natural resources but it's human beings that make a company or a nation competitive. So unless the U.S. finds a way to prevent talent from flowing to the mainland, either from the U.S. and/or other parts of the world it is very hard to prevent another country, especially such a big one from doing what you don't want. And when they eventually do get to that point they will be twice as bitter at you for having tried to stop them.

Re: TSMC plans to halt chip supplies to Huawei in 2 months

#117

Post by metavrsl »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #88
starfallg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but Russia is so isolated these days that pitting anything non-Russian vs. something else non-Russian is almost guaranteed to be advantageous to Russia. That also doesn't change the fact that long term, China is the biggest threat to liberal democracies. In terms of geopolitics, Russia is actually quite complementary to China due to its large area having an abundance of resources to feed Chinese factories and b…

Why would China be a threat to liberal democracies? I get that people don't like the fact that China is not democratic, but how does that suddenly turn into a threat?

People are being drummed up into a cold war mentality left right and center. Its become increasingly obvious recently.

Re: TSMC plans to halt chip supplies to Huawei in 2 months

#118

Post by kevin_b_er »

trsohmers wrote: post #55
slim wrote: post #33

China will nationalize TSMC

Assuming when you say China you mean the UN recognized "China", then they do not have any control over TSMC.

This is a threat to Taiwan that China will just invade it and take whatever, including nationalizing TSMC.

Re: TSMC plans to halt chip supplies to Huawei in 2 months

#119

Post by president »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #64

All these things seem like desperate moves from a failing empire. I don't believe for a second the U.S. cares about human rights here. That doesn't mean I think the CCP is 'good', but 2 things can be true at the same time. EDIT: typo

There are gradients to everything. Where in the US we have a free press to document human rights violations and people can voice their opinion, China has none. The problem with statements like yours is that it completely trivializes the major violations of one country and the progress that has been made in improving human rights of the other.
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