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Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking

reuters.com

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Re: Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking

#81

Post by krnlpnc »

mvc wrote: post #38
atlantas wrote: post #10

90%! Did we really let ourselves become so reliant on Ukraine and Taiwan for computer chips? Taiwan being the next country most under threat. In fact, Reuters just reported that "Taiwan warns Chinese aircraft in its air defence zone" https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/taiwan-reports-ni...

Are we in favor of economics/capitalism here or are we not? Because the economics literature is quite clear that international trade is beneficial to all involved. It's what we insist that developing countries focus on exports when loaning them money. For many years, Taiwan has been the poster child that we point to when trying to change the ways of Cuba or Venezuela. Are these principles so weak that we would allow…

> Are these principles so weak that we would allow a dictator who doesn't even have the support of his own people to shake them?

In practice the principles don't matter too much. The reality is that industry has optimized for cost and converged on a small set of suppliers. The single points of failure introduced as a side-effect of this could certainly be exploited by a bad actor.

Re: Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking

#82

Post by rootusrootus »

actuator wrote: post #32
agilob wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, why does it still happen on a weekly basis?

Every time they do this Taiwan has to scramble their own jets in the air. So most likely it is to test Taiwan's response times and wear out their aircrafts. Each flight of those fighter jets adds to a maintenance cost on top of the fuel costs, which is disproportionately higher for Taiwan considering the size of the economy.

Indeed it apparently costs close to 10% of their military budget just to respond to Chinese incursions. That's a heck of an incentive.

Re: Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking

#83

Post by CogitoCogito »

mvc wrote: post #38
atlantas wrote: post #10

90%! Did we really let ourselves become so reliant on Ukraine and Taiwan for computer chips? Taiwan being the next country most under threat. In fact, Reuters just reported that "Taiwan warns Chinese aircraft in its air defence zone" https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/taiwan-reports-ni...

Are we in favor of economics/capitalism here or are we not? Because the economics literature is quite clear that international trade is beneficial to all involved. It's what we insist that developing countries focus on exports when loaning them money. For many years, Taiwan has been the poster child that we point to when trying to change the ways of Cuba or Venezuela. Are these principles so weak that we would allow…

> Because the economics literature is quite clear that international trade is beneficial to all involved.

Maybe the literature is wrong?

Re: Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking

#84

Post by e40 »

atlantas wrote: post #10

90%! Did we really let ourselves become so reliant on Ukraine and Taiwan for computer chips? Taiwan being the next country most under threat. In fact, Reuters just reported that "Taiwan warns Chinese aircraft in its air defence zone" https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/taiwan-reports-ni...

How? Short vs long-term thinking.

And Xi moving on Taiwan at the start of increased activities in Ukraine was the thing feared the most. What a shitshow it would be if China invaded Taiwan. The pandemic shortages would pale in comparison.

Re: Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking

#85

Post by oneoff786 »

mvc wrote: post #38
atlantas wrote: post #10

90%! Did we really let ourselves become so reliant on Ukraine and Taiwan for computer chips? Taiwan being the next country most under threat. In fact, Reuters just reported that "Taiwan warns Chinese aircraft in its air defence zone" https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/taiwan-reports-ni...

Are we in favor of economics/capitalism here or are we not? Because the economics literature is quite clear that international trade is beneficial to all involved. It's what we insist that developing countries focus on exports when loaning them money. For many years, Taiwan has been the poster child that we point to when trying to change the ways of Cuba or Venezuela. Are these principles so weak that we would allow…

Economics is clear on nothing. The curve maximizing behaviors for international trade have a few assumptions built in, e.g. that Taiwan does not get annexed by China and suddenly the trade incentives change horribly.

Re: Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking

#86

Post by roughly »

ajross wrote: post #73
roughly wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scale and geographic concentration tend to push prices lower, even if just fractionally, and relatively low costs of transport for basically anything in the world mean there's no penalty for buying from far away, so there aren't many factors pushing back from geographic concentration. Add to that concentration in other industries - a market with fewer larger buyers means larger average individual demand than otherwis…

> Scale and geographic concentration tend to push prices lower Neon is extracted from the atmosphere. There is no geographic concentration to exploit (well, I guess technically Antarctica is coldest and so has a volumetric advantage). If Ukraine had the bulk of the supply it's simply because someone decided to invest in a bunch of manufacturing infrastructure there.

I didn't mean geographic concentration of the resource (although that can be a factor) - geographic concentration of firms can often have a knock-on effect on both infrastructure and other supporting resources (a dock that can support exporting neon, neon-extraction-machine repair & service companies nearby, concentrated local expertise, etc).

Re: Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking

#87

Post by salawat »

roughly wrote: post #57
stingraycharles wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And most importantly, economics assumes that the market is perfect, which it most certainly is not in practice. What we didn’t do enough is take the geopolitical landscape into this equation (or a potential pandemic, for that matter), which I hope changes after recent developments. I blame the governments mostly for this, I completely understand the businesses needing to do what’s best for business.

> I blame the governments mostly for this, I completely understand the businesses needing to do what’s best for business. How do you blame government for businesses running around with planning models that miss wars and pandemics, the two most common causes of ruin and disruption for the entire duration of human history?

...Because making sure businesses in economies plan for that sort of thing is generally something that you have to be a non-transient actor to ensure.

Businesses/corps come and go ... the Nation of $nation only tends to do so on the next timescale up. When their actually looking out for systemic blindspots no one else is, and not pandering to the elite.

Re: Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking

#88

Post by e40 »

wyldfire wrote: post #49
atlantas wrote: post #10

90%! Did we really let ourselves become so reliant on Ukraine and Taiwan for computer chips? Taiwan being the next country most under threat. In fact, Reuters just reported that "Taiwan warns Chinese aircraft in its air defence zone" https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/taiwan-reports-ni...

Global trade has been a peacekeeping incentive for decades. But despots don't act for the sake of the people's will, so it's not easy to account for that. But anyways most markets are emergent, not planned strategically .

My non-expert POV says the problem isn't global trade it's unbalanced global trade. Everyone depends on China, so Xi has little incentive to fear economical reprisals.

Re: Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking

#89

Post by oneoff786 »

chongli wrote: post #43
CountSessine wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they'll be watching what happens in Ukraine very carefully. Then they'll be calibrating their predictions about what would happen if they invaded Taiwan with Russia's experience in Ukraine.

I doubt the TSMC fabs would survive a PLA invasion of Taiwan. If nothing else, the CIA would probably blow them up during the attack.

If I were Taiwan, I’d be stationing troops at the facility as a dead man’s switch to destroy it if invaded.

Re: Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking

#90

Post by genericone »

oneoff786 wrote: post #79
bingohbangoh wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when the orange man came and said we should bring it back, I laughed at home and call him an idiot!

Trump’s claims were largely about bringing manufacturing jobs to America. Not reducing defense dependencies on vulnerable nations.

That was the stated goal for bringing steel production back to the USA at least, not sure about the imputed goals of other manufacturing jobs, but it should follow a similar line of thought, redundancy of critical-supply-chain parts.
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