Saying the Democrats are uniquely focused on racial and LGBT issues is completely detached from reality.
In what way? This is a huge part of their message.
It's more a huge part of messaging from conservatives about liberals. And that you think otherwise indicates your media bias. Democrats respond to Republican cultural issues. As they should. When Republicans state that immigrants are eating your cats and dogs you'd better well fucking address the nonsense otherwise people like you start thinking Haitians are actually out there eating people's pets.
Political reunification, i.e. land > people, see PRC saying "keep the island not the people". At this point no amphibious assault needed, just blockading TW and turning into gaza via mainland munitions now that starving masses is normalized is an option too.
How do you turn an island into Gaza when the US is providing weapons to it, and not to the other side? Ukraine seems like it would be a better example.
US+co essentially incapable of resupplying TW if PRC motivated to stranglehold blockade. TW is 15 times smaller than UKR, the quality of ISR and amount of munitions PRC can pour onto anywhere in the island and adjacent waters is also orders of magnitude more than RU and resupply via water and air is basically transparent vs myriad of obfuscated land routes UKR has, PRC can trivially locked down TW airstrips and ports from purely mainland platforms. Short distances involved = extremely rapid responses, as in not enough time to unload supplies - low single digit minutes from higher end PRC missiles... doesn't even need navy to enforce a kinetic blockade. TW also 98% dependant on energy imports, 70% on calories. Better example is Cuba, if US wanted to blockade Cuba or depopulate the island, there isn't anything anyone can do about it, i.e. PRC take out some power infra (refrigeration) and water treatment plants and island basically becomes Gaza in days. Ironically, if that happens the only actor with the logistics capability to sustain island with population of TW is PRC - US airlift capacity smaller than Berlin airlift and that was... for 2m vs 24m mouths. Which is why IMO all those new fancy landing barges likely going to be used for "humanitarian" relief - realistically no one in/out of region has the surplus to arbitrarily ramp up supplies for island of 24m... except PRC since that's ~1% of PRC population, almost rounding error vs covid0 mobilization.
30 years ago in the US, there were a handful of major TV news outlets, and most people got their news from one of those and/or a newspaper, of which there were also a limited number. The thing about those sources is that for the most part, it wasn't really economically viable to alienate half the population by leaning hard right or left. Any reduction in audience would likely translate to a commensurate reduction in…
The cracks in the media were already visible 30 years ago. Conservative talk radio was taking off, people were beginning to call CNN "Clinton News Network", and Fox News was right around the corner. There was clearly an appetite—and a market—for partisan news. This was further fueled by the growth of national radio and TV networks that were less beholden to capturing local audiences. I think the internet just superch…
Agreed. And Democrats were fucking stupid and decided to just ignore all of the systems Republicans were putting into place over decades. There are multiple conservative think tanks who approve supreme court nominations and spearhead Republican policy. They have been working on it for decades. It's unfortunate that the only political party in this country which can look to the future an make long term plans is the one most likely to follow the Nazi party into the history books.
I'm not into hardware but I remember when AMD was sneered at, and all real CPUs were Intel. Then Ryzen happened. My meta conclusion is that its super hard to tell when someone is done, and it can change quickly. Or not. Sometimes it if looks like terminal decline, it simply is terminal decline.
Everyone thought AMD was done. Intel is going through a difficult transition, but if they can make 18a /14a work and keep improving their GPU line we could be having the same conversation about AMD in 10 years.
AMD lost their foundry business on the way. To keep the foundry competitive you need a lot cash rolling in or you're out. Either they become competitive soon, somebody keeps pumping billions in for many years, or they're out and lose their foundry.
Intel as a brand may survive in some shape or form but it's not looking good for the foundry.
What I really want to know, from someone who does know: Is Intel cooked? Like, will they be able to manufacture chips that compete with TSMC? They used to be a crown-jewel of US tech. But it seems like every time I read the news, they are announcing a delay or shutting down some product.
I'm not into hardware but I remember when AMD was sneered at, and all real CPUs were Intel. Then Ryzen happened. My meta conclusion is that its super hard to tell when someone is done, and it can change quickly. Or not. Sometimes it if looks like terminal decline, it simply is terminal decline.
I don't think you can necessarily draw conclusions about Intel vs TSMC from Intel vs AMD.
Yes, building top-of-the-line CPUs is hard and it's impressive that we saw the dominance flip in the course of just a few years.
But I think frontier chip fabrication is a bigger juggernaut than "mere" CPU design.
(Your conclusion could still be correct, but I don't know if I buy the high-level reasoning).
Or more accurately, the Taiwanese government also believes that mainland China and Taiwan should be unified (ie. a One-China Interpretation). But that this One-China should be under the rule of the Taiwanese government and not the CCP, which they considered an illegitimate government, up until the 1992 Consensus. After the 1992 Consensus [1], the Taiwanese government still considered the Mainland its territory (again…
The unification isn't the issue.
It's whose government will get to run the whole thing.
I'm not into hardware but I remember when AMD was sneered at, and all real CPUs were Intel. Then Ryzen happened. My meta conclusion is that its super hard to tell when someone is done, and it can change quickly. Or not. Sometimes it if looks like terminal decline, it simply is terminal decline.
These things go in cycles and predate Ryzen by a lot. The late-model Pentium 4 chips were overheating power-guzzling garbage compared to the Athlon XP, and the Athlon 64 was a serious competitor to the Core 2 series. Ryzen is the current incarnation of AMD coming into vogue in desktop, but it's not like it took them 40 years to get there.
In the past we had only x86 and they were produced by AMD and Intel, no other serious competitor left. Of course in that market it will swing back and forth between these two. The stronger competitor will not go for the kill due to government intervention.
Now we are in a different situation. There are several big competitors using ARM instead of x86. The software world is actually transitioning away from x86 in masses. Apple does their own CPUs better than Intel. AMD outsourced production already. Everybody is pumping money into TSMC who are are already ahead of Intel and they are moving faster.
Either Intel gets a really really lucky run with their new technology or they need to split off the foundry business. The government may put it on life support until TSMC themselves may run into serious problems.
The better way into the future may be to split up TSMC in multiple redundant and competing companies.
If that is the cost of keeping the value within the western economies, we should pay. Plain and simple. I'd even argue it's cheap.
This is not an easy inference. For this inference to be true , you have to know how much of the expense goes to salaries . Also, you have to give credit to tsmc to be world class which enables them to control prices, it may not translate across industries
Its a pretty easy inference for anyone who has mfg experience. The amount you pay per worker versus the quality of work you get back is STARKLY different between US and Taiwanese companies.
If something happens to Taiwan, we won't regret being able to produce these chips domestically. If AI keeps growing like it does, it might even trigger a conflict.
Ironically my only opposition to US chips is that we’re less liable to protect Taiwan if China invades
Fwiw, I think theres so much demand that we could be building 10x as much and still depend on Taiwan. Chip fabs take a long time to build. Probably don't need to worry about that for at least a decade, if not two. Especially now with intel dying