Japan's gamble to turn island of Hokkaido into global chip hub

> Then why did I never took an Indian or Chinese made paracetamol, but all generics in my EU country I ever took from the pharmacy ware locally made

Because it was synthesized using Chinese and Indian sourced "Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients" (APIs) [0], both of whom synthesize around 80% of all APIs required by European pharma manufacturers.

The EU is trying to rectify this, especially after COVID when India decided to stop all exports of APIs and pharmaceuticals to Europe in order to prioritize domestic production [1], but it still takes time (they started in 2021, and it'll probably take another 5-7 years to build the critical mass needed to rebuild a domestic ecosystem).

> Meanwhile I can't buy a locally made laptop, smartphone, GPU, it's all Asian made goods

Becuase, as I have kept elucidating on multiple occasions on this thread, the entire ecosystem for these goods simply does not exist in Europe, and no European member state is interested in opening their pocketbooks to subsidize manufacturers to move to Europe in order to begin manufacturing the intermediate parts needed.

Countries like those across ASEAN, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China, the US, and India offer millions to billions of dollars in hard cash, land, tax subsidizes, or a mix of all 3 in order to attract or retain manufacturers. EU member states simply does not do the same for electronics. Some of them absolutely do so for biopharma (such as Denmark), but by and large they tend to be exceptions of the rule.

> Pharma gets special privilege over industries like cars, phones or semiconductors, since it deals with people's lives

Ime, Pharma PLIs and incentives are fairly comparable to those that would be provided to electronic industries as well. The same tax sops India gave to attract Apple to TN were similar to those that India gave Novartis and Bayer decades ago, and China has been using the same subsidy program it used to attract electronics manufacturing to attract and become a major player in the biopharma space.

[0] - https://pharmacia.pensoft.net/article/172383/

[1] - https://www.statnews.com/2021/05/05/india-vaccine-heist-shod...

It sounds like we have some common ground, but I think you may have a misunderstanding of the present American worldview and politics.

We're 79 years removed from Philippine independence, and you would have to try very hard to find a single American who wants them back. The US military would have been fully capable of annexing Iraq and Afghanistan with violent repression of dissent and zero concern for civilian casualties, had that been the will of the people. After 75 years of peaceful coexistence with a hypothetical independent California, I would be very surprised to see any political will for annexation.

The "same international norms as the rest of the world" you refer to are anachronistic. The post-WWII norms, to a large extent defined and upheld by the US, aren't based around maximal balkanization or unconditional support for separatism, but rather opposition to transfer of territory by force. If that sounds like ladder-pulling, maybe it is, but China has no standing to complain; Western conquests have been largely disbanded, while China remains as the third-largest nation in the world (ahead of the US).

I'm not claiming that the US has never done anything wrong. I asserted the opposite of that. I'm arguing that pointing out someone else's crime isn't a justification for someone to go commit a crime of their own. If you shoot someone from a rival gang, your lawyer isn't going to argue in court that it's okay because someone else from that gang shot someone else a decade ago. There's actually a word for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism.

But if we both agree that wars of aggression are bad regardless of whether they're started by the US, China, Russia, or anyone else, then we're basically on the same page.

I think that the American worldview is heavily propagandised and doesn't particularly reflect reality. The post WWII-norms are not at all a story of peaceful self-determination. The decolonisation of the Phillipines was an anomaly and an outlier. At the same time that the US was letting go of the Phillipines, it was gearing up for war in Korea on behalf of its puppet military dictatorship that was, at the time, even more repressive than the North Korean one. The Dutch fought a war in an attempt to keep control of Indonesia. France fought a war for its colonial possessions, which the US joined in on. Portugal fought wars for its colonial possessions. The UK let India go only because it was utterly ravaged by WWII, and they recognised they would not likely be able to keep it by force.

Moreover, the US specifically simply adopted a different model: puppet governance. As did the USSR. You would hardly find an American who would say that the USSR was benevolent, despite the fact that they believe themselves to be benevolent while doing the same things. Invading a country to install a regime loyal to yours is not meaningfully different from annexing the country outright. But it allows the populace at home to believe that they are doing the right thing. Why, their form of governance is the best governance in the world, so they're doing other nations a favor by invading them and replacing their governments!

Americans will make all kinds of fuss over China doing meaningless posturing in territorial waters, meanwhile their government is currently launching missiles in Venezulean waters, actually killing people. They violated the sovereignity of Iranian airspace, dropping bunker busters on government buildings. They assassinated another nation's top general. These are all acts of war. Nothing has changed. America continues to operate as it always has, under the principle of "might makes right", while dressing its operations up in pretty rhetoric.

Pointing out hypocrisy in ongoing international norms is not whataboutism. In a world where nobody is ever punished for shooting a rival gang member, then you either shoot or get shot; that is simply the natural way of things. And moreover, the prosecutor bringing charges against the Red Gang is a member of the Blue Gang that shot theirs first. Why would the Red Gang entertain, for a moment, the charges of aggression from the Blue Gang which did already intervene in its civil war and effectively seized territory from it? For the Blue Gang to possibly be convincing to the Red Gang, it would first need to make amends and to stop actively committing 10x worse crimes than the crime it accuses the Red Gang of. If we want a peaceful world, I'd argue the onus is on the US to live up to its self-proclaimed "rules based international order" first, because it is the one violating those rules the most, and other nations will not simply lie down and agree to be bound by rules that are openly being violated to their detriment.

I'm in agreement that wars of aggression are bad, but I strongly dislike the tendency for that to be selectively leveraged to paint only certain actors in a bad light. I think from a non-American perspective, it's pretty clear that the US is a much more egregious international actor than China. But if you agree with that, you're in a true minority of Americans. Even if there are a substantial portion of Americans who disagree with their own invasions, most of them will still see China as much worse than themselves, despite the fact that the PRC's last and only real invasion was the reclamation of Tibet 70 years ago, and otherwise it has only started a couple of minor border skirmishes for the entirety of its existence. Meanwhile Americans engage in Yellow Scare-esque fearmongering about China invading Japan which, as a neutral third party, seems so far outside the realm of possibility as to be utterly delusional.

I found this a really funny thread of answers to read. Maybe Japan should start making historical claims like China does. Japan could claim much of Asia, create a new historical narrative that the atrocities were manufactured fake news and that the oppressed peoples of Taiwan, Korea, Nanjing, South East Asia, and Oceania were illegally forced to leave the Japanese Empire due to propaganda and illegal militantism where the victors then created a fake narrative of Japanese war crimes. Maybe Japan should tear up the peacenik constitution that was forced on it by Nuclear USA and written by a woman from Kansas and turn the SDF back into the Japanese War Machine - revive industries, begin to reclaim territories for essential resources, and once again move towards the creation of a glorious co-prosperity sphere. The US seems to be reviving the NAZI war machine and is only steps away from adopting swastika as a positive symbol, so why not Japan bring back the old flag and mentality too? - I know this is ridiculous. So are most of these comments.

Do you think I'm misunderstanding something other than that I'm not drawing the same distinction between proto-Germanic and "paleo-Germanic" that that paper appeals to?

You've quoted something that says after proto-Germanic had diversified, daughter lineages left southern Scandinavia to establish themselves elsewhere in the world.

But I pointed out a completely different idea in the paper, that before proto-Germanic diversified, about 2000 years before the time you mention, its speakers arrived in Scandinavia from "the northeast coast of the Baltic".