611–620 of 734 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with many of these points. The future is unpredictable, whoever is on top today will not be on top forever, and the idea of being governed by the PRC is very unpopular in Taiwan. And nothing you have said supports our more ignorant interlocutor's point that Xi's policies have "killed China's economy". Still, other points I disagree with. PRC's exports to the US are not falling; they fell in 02019 due to sanct…
> Expensive private tutoring companies were a hot startup sector until the government crackdown. This is almost entirely due to the Gaokao. Also, there's a difference between prizing education as a means to make money, and prizing education as a means to make a well-rounded person. The concept of a 'liberal arts' education in China barely exists, from the standpoint that education isn't about vocational skills to enr…
Are you supporting that assertion, or are you making an unrelated point about educational models? Because the connection isn't clear to me.
To the question of vocational training vs. liberal arts education, I think you're exaggerating subtle differences in cultural attitudes toward education that really do exist. Schools in China have compulsory classes in physics, chemistry, biology, geography, and history, among other things — vocational training for a few percent of the population, but liberal arts for the rest. The most respected form of education is still calligraphy.
And, despite paying lip service to free questioning and rebellion, Western schooling consists almost entirely of intensive training in obedience and conformism: https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
Steve Jobs wasn't the product of the Western education system; he was the product of LSD, his machinist father, a neighborhood full of engineers, working at Hewlett Packard at 13, Hare Krishna prasad, Zen Buddhism, a pilgrimage to India, Transcendental Meditation, and Primal Scream Therapy, but especially LSD. Elon Musk isn't the product of the Western education system; he's the product of his emerald-tycoon engineer father, his supermodel mother who spent her childhood seeking the Lost City of the Kalahari, and his Commodore VIC-20.
Maybe if they'd been schooled in China they would have had the independence conditioned out of them, I suppose. But I think that's more a matter of the surrounding society than the school system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the US was really serious about microchips being critical infrastructure we'd want over production. We have more roads than makes sense, we should have more chips on-hand than our critical power and data infrastructure needs to be rebuilt in the event of a catastrophe.
Strategies like this are how you end up with warehouses full of rusting parts. Government-funded overproduction leads to stockpiling at the taxpayer's expense. It's been done many times before (weapons, food, etc.) and always leads to the exact same result: garbage heaps and no available resources when they're actually needed. Offering companies grants and favors to encourage building real, sustainable, on-shore busi…
So I'm arguing we should over-produce infrastructure and you're arguing we should over-produce capacity? OK but you have to continue offering the favors else the on-shore companies are just going to fold up when times get tough.
In a catastrophic event though I argue the over-provisioned group is better off than the group that can ramp up their production to post-catastrophe needs, the over-provisioned group has backup supplies and can produce at their normal rate, the over-capable group still needs time to spin up their production.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fine, I'll bite. I downvoted you because TLS 1.3 isn't a conspiracy to make your old stuff break, and such an allegation is undeserving of a reply. You should be able to run an HTTP/S proxy supporting TLS 1.3 on any machine, issuing your own cert to machines that insist on unsupported HTTPS connection types, and route most of your traffic through it without issue. Raspberry Pis are out of stock because 1) companies t…
TLS 1.3 is not more secure then TLS 1.2 Now Mojang and Rockstar (on azure) have disabled TLS 1.2 on their servers on purpose to lockout Windows 7. Windows 10 offers NOTHING of value compared to Windows 7.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US isn't going to be caught off guard by China. What the west has been doing for Ukraine in the last few months in terms of weapons, the US and other countries have been doing for Taiwan over the last few decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_US_arms_sales_to_Taiwa... The latest sale involves adding 60 Harpoon anti-ship missiles to the pile of hundreds they already have. China will not have an easy time…
It’s not impossible. China moves at a different pace than the West. They might retake Taiwan in 2100, after a couple generations maybe care more about shared culture and language than democracy.
On the other side, the US obviously wants to see a war between the two side of the strait. And the US is actually prepareing for it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ukraine as a piece of land was Russia's only warmwater port.
> Ukraine as a piece of land was Russia's only warmwater port. Why is this obviously incorrect statement that can be easily disproved by just checking the map is being repeated again and again on HN? It is only second in popularity to "Russia invaded Ukraine to prevent NATO on its borders" which can also be trivially disproved by finding Estonia or Latvia on the map...
Can you list the other warm-water ports used by the Russian Navy? Here's a paper on the subject from the Air Force Journal on European, Middle Eastern, and African Affairs: https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/JEMEAA/Journals/...
>>>It is only second in popularity to "Russia invaded Ukraine to prevent NATO on its borders" which can also be trivially disproved by finding Estonia or Latvia on the map...
While technically true, there is a big difference between the Estonian/Latvian border, and the Ukrainian one. I discussed this 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30513745
China already declared that it will use force in Taiwan if "possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted". From Chinese Anti-Secession Law: Article 8: In the event that the "Taiwan independence" secessionist forces should act under any name or by any means to cause the fact of Taiwan's secession from China, or that major incidents entailing Taiwan's secession from China should occur, or t…
The US isn't going to be caught off guard by China. What the west has been doing for Ukraine in the last few months in terms of weapons, the US and other countries have been doing for Taiwan over the last few decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_US_arms_sales_to_Taiwa... The latest sale involves adding 60 Harpoon anti-ship missiles to the pile of hundreds they already have. China will not have an easy time…
China doesn't need to storm the beaches, they can passively blockade Taiwan until they give in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"already-proven-unreliable" How so?
Russia has switched off the gas before, such as when Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014. Hell, there's a Wikipedia page listing all of the Russia-Ukraine gas disputes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_gas_dis... ). One of the stated motivations for Nord Stream 2 was to improve reliability of gas to Europe in case Russia decided to cut off the gas because of a spat with one of the transit countr…
Russia switched off the gas 7 years after Putin was screaming from the rooftops that the US sticking ABMs in Eastern Europe was a red line for Russia. That's Russia being an unreliable partner?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
National security. TSMC is one of the key players in the 21st century. As we've seen with the supply chain issues from covid and the Ukrainian conflict, high quality semiconductors are a vital resource for modern nations' security and economies. TSMC is the only entity that can make the highest quality chips (3nm being not actually 3nm, but just called that way for marketing purposes). If Taiwan looses that unique ab…
That’s quite the gamble. If a competitor develops a 5nm capability, Taiwan and TSMC are both screwed. The fact that only TSMC in Taiwan has this capability makes Taiwan a jucier target for the CCP. All this talk of reunification may be little more than a power grab. Control the best semiconductors, control the world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But China doesn't actually have a lot of technological prowess on their own. The USG might be trying to slow them down but they're not concerned about China militarily. I worked for a defense contractor back in the early 2000s when the USG was selling a lot of arms and systems to Taiwan. I got to see the bullying in person via the ASOC (part of the C4ISR platform) system we were installing. China would routinely fly…
The US has no naval presence in Taiwan. USN ships might do port visits, but they have no basing rights. They will periodically transit the Straits on Freedom of Navigation (FON) exercises. The closest USN base is in Yokohama Japan.