TSMC plans to halt chip supplies to Huawei in 2 months • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 4:22 AM UTC

woofie11 wrote: post #320

reissbaker wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDP(PPP) is useful for observing changes within domestic markets but not global economic power. As per the page you linked: "GDP comparisons using PPP are arguably more useful than those using nominal GDP when assessing a nation's domestic market . . . It is however limited when measuring financial flows between countries." When we are discussing a Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer stopping shipments to Huawei due…

It depends on the type of economic power. US is a bigger market, by virtue of bigger real GDP. Chinese can produce more by virtue of bigger PPP GDP. I agree that for TSMC, market size is more important, but the blanket statement about global economic power is a little bit excessive. If we want to have COVID19 PPE, mass-produce medical equipment, or rapidly build military equipment, China can out-manufacture the US. I…

[deleted]

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

#332

Post by mellow2020 » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 4:36 AM UTC

abrowne wrote: post #136

systemvoltage wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t make sense. > 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. That alone will be enough to deter people from moving to China for even 10x salary. Getting locked into an insane Han-supremacy regime is walking into the dragon’s mou…

It would be less a deterrence for someone from Taiwan, with linguistic, cultural and maybe family connections to China than it would be for someone with no connection to the Sinosphere. And it's not like they're getting locked into Belgium. (I like Belgium! But it's a small place compared with China.)

ANY place one is in is exactly as small as the collar around one's neck is tight.

> [..] any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against ‘individualism’ and the ‘ivory tower’, no pious platitudes to the effect that ‘true individuality is only attained through identification with the community’, can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind. Unless spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary creation is impossible, and language itself becomes something totally different from what it is now, we may learn to separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist who denies that fact — and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a denial — is, in effect, demanding his own destruction.

-- George Orwell, "The Prevention of Literature"

This is just as true for scientists. Bought, caged, too addicted to harmony with peers -- all these and more have the same result.

If you cannot even say that the Tiananmen Square massacre happened, if there is an arbitrary set of facts you are even allowed to acknowledge, determined basically by brownshirts through violence, you may be doing something, but you're not being a fully fledged scientists anymore than an elephant could be found in a small fridge. I don't even need to look at the person, the circumstances are fully sufficient for this determination.

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

#333

Post by justicezyx » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 4:53 AM UTC

drozycki wrote: post #233

AsyncAwait wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a billionaire, yes. If you're a person of color of not so great means, education etc. in the U.S. from a somewhat infamous area like Chicago, am not so sure. Just see the ongoing protests right now.

The intersection between South side Chicago resident and semiconductor expert is vanishingly small. Those who grow up in a disaffected part of the US and go on to study EE or CS do so through a US college opportunity which will funnel them into a US semiconductor job where they will be treated better than the treatment dark skinned people get in China. It’s common for restaurants in major Chinese cities to have “No B…

The linked article has no pictures of the sign.

I have friends living in Shenzhen, I asked them, and they said they never saw such signs. It could be that they are visiting different groups of restaurants or hotels etc.

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

#334

Post by justicezyx » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 4:58 AM UTC

GiantSully wrote: post #326

euix wrote: post #116

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 yo…

“ 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.” It’s also the mother of the GFW, which greatly impede the innovation. For example, many latest IT technology cannot be speeded effectively.

Really? GFW definitely helped a lot of newer internet company take off by shifting the market from a US directed tastes to a more domestic. I.e. one would not immediately think Instagram is cooler than douyin. (As a result, Instagram like photos sharing were never main stream)

GFW by itself is no small engineering feat either. It's technology is widely relevant in many technical areas related to traffic control and network management. For example, deep packet inspection was applied in GFW, and had been quite useful in intrusion detection. Of course now with the popularity of encryption, DPI is no longer very relevant. But that's the example of it being advancing technology.

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

#335

Post by tasogare » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 5:02 AM UTC

narrator wrote: post #134

systemvoltage wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t make sense. > 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. That alone will be enough to deter people from moving to China for even 10x salary. Getting locked into an insane Han-supremacy regime is walking into the dragon’s mou…

Also, if you are a billionaire the government can take everything away from that person in the blink of an eye if decides it doesn't like what that person says. In the west there are far more protections and due process rights.

> In the west there are far more protections and due process rights.

Not necessarily. You could also lose your job and get totally screwed professionally if you speak against the last political trend. University professors could for instance lose a job over a pronoun matter. Sharing a memo have also been proven risky. The actors are different (state in one case, mob and PC in the other) but the end result can be pretty similar.

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

#336

Post by qlk1123 » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 5:09 AM UTC

lihan wrote: post #311

qlk1123 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop spreading artificial history like "1992 Consensus". It was not even mentioned in the 1992 meeting.

The real history disagrees, they are widely available on the internet as well as plenty of history references in real libraries.

George Orwell already demonstrated this long time before: Who controls the present controls the past. Most Taiwanese have been realizing that the so-called 1992 consensus is a total nonsense.

I believe you read Chinese, so please check: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B9%9D%E4%BA%8C%E5%85%B1%E8...

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

#337

Post by woah » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 5:14 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #276

tomp wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on man (woman?), this comment is completely disingenuous. You're comparing 2 completely different things. Is US / the West fair? Not by a long shot. Tons of shitty stuff happening, from George Floyd, to Harvey Weinstein, to Jeffrey Epstein, to Julian Assange. But at least we know about them. But compared to China? You won't even hear about the "small person's life". I'm sure life in China can be great, unless…

Tons of shitty stuff happening, from George Floyd, to Harvey Weinstein, to Jeffrey Epstein, to Julian Assange. But at least we know about them. I would prefer live in the West also. I also know a lot of people in the world value security over free expression. Just as much, I'm reasonably sophisticated in my reading of the news and the open expression here allows me to pick the truth reasonably easily out of a stream…

If Epstein happened in China, would anyone even be allowed to go on the internet and claim that he was killed because he had dirt on everyone in the government?

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

#338

Post by qlk1123 » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 5:18 AM UTC

_7fvc wrote: post #260

I see this news as a loss for the US. It has to resort to regulations to stop TSMC from doing business with Huawei. When you can't incentivize your ally, that means your opponent's business is still very attractive. Regulations will only cripple your ally. Taiwan may comply on the outside. But inside, they'll cut under-the-table deals with China. They'll find loop holes to skirt regulations. Taiwan seems to be headin…

That's why President Tsai Ing-Wen propose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Southbound_Policy

Hopefully such movements can reduce the business interests in Taiwan towards China in the long run, and establish multilateral-ism with many identities other than China.

> Taiwan seems to be heading to be the next Hong Kong.

Don't remember we have military forces and it happens to be Han-Kuang Military Exercise recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Kuang_Exercise

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

#339

Post by endogui » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 5:18 AM UTC

reissbaker wrote: post #197

euix wrote: post #116

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 yo…

> 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. [sic] The U.S. economy is nearly 2x larger than China's, and if you're…

It seems that GDP should only tell part of the story with respect to specialist incomes. A senior engineer in the US will have their salary and contribution diminished by regulatory requirements and business inefficiencies, and will lose a lot of their potential compensation to health insurance, investor compensation, and other rent-seeking. In China, someone with a skill the Party has designated as critical to national goals may have a lot of the bureaucracy and bullshit cleared for them, or may be offered zero-interest loans to develop their business. Or perhaps not... I have no experience here, but GDP is a terrible metric for how much opportunity is available to skilled engineers.

Furthermore, compensation for technically skilled individuals is significantly lower in the rest of the world than in the US: visa barriers are definitely holding US tech salaries up. Although China has even stronger restrictions on foreigners, for those who can get into China but not the US it may be a good deal.

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

#340

Post by chii » Fri, Jul 17, 2020, 5:27 AM UTC

woofie11 wrote: post #320

reissbaker wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDP(PPP) is useful for observing changes within domestic markets but not global economic power. As per the page you linked: "GDP comparisons using PPP are arguably more useful than those using nominal GDP when assessing a nation's domestic market . . . It is however limited when measuring financial flows between countries." When we are discussing a Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer stopping shipments to Huawei due…

It depends on the type of economic power. US is a bigger market, by virtue of bigger real GDP. Chinese can produce more by virtue of bigger PPP GDP. I agree that for TSMC, market size is more important, but the blanket statement about global economic power is a little bit excessive. If we want to have COVID19 PPE, mass-produce medical equipment, or rapidly build military equipment, China can out-manufacture the US. I…

> it would pass the US rather quickly at this point too

only if that military power is _used_. During WW2, the USA had to use that power of manufacture to win the war.

So unless you're suggesting that china is willing to go to a hot war with the US, and out manufacture military products to win it, this argument holds no water. and this isn't even taking into account nukes.