guy who writes a whole book about the global diffusion of chip-making technology: “technology hadn’t diffused” (he says it was monopolized but that’s not the old tech, which inarguably has, it’s just the cutting edge stuff which are monopolized cause they were only invented in the last 10 years)

“taiwanization” is when a company in taiwan uses dutch made tools with world spanning supply chains to manufacture chips designed in america for use in products assembled in china and sold across the world 🙄

then we act surprised when the country which we have made it our official government policy to harm doesn't want to play nice with us in other venues, accelerates its efforts to reduce its dependence on us, makes friends with countries we actually have a reason to wage economic warfare against, etc

but instead of talking about those specific things they do that we don't like we roll them all up into a single ccp-evil-bundle that justifies us using any and all leverage we have to hurt them with the fully generalizable purpose of 'preventing china's rise,'

and like sure, china is bigger than all those countries combined and is making more of an effort to fully indigenize their supply chains (though seemingly entirely justified given the us response), and they have state backing making it not an entirely fair fight (though our asian allies do the same)

the middle third of the book is about how the rise of japan almost destroyed the us's domestic semiconductor industry but then we made some innovations and did some division of labor and everything was fine again, just with supply chains now including sk/japan/taiwan etc

like sure its fine for the defense people to think about that ahead of time but should we really be designing our whole govt/economy policy around planning for world war 3? can we at least acknowledge that that is the Very Bad Outcome we are trying to avoid, not the base case we plan for?

reading Chip Wars rn and just getting frustrated at how often phrases like "national security concerns" are used as a euphemism for "potential pressure points in an all out war with china"

not sure why yimbys would place a particularly high priority on planning to mitigate the second order effects of what seems like should be a massive first-order win for them

average skill level very low but the winner so far is definitely the guy doing (to the untrained ear) an impeccable bob dylan impression

sometimes i see an old clip of his and think “this is a man who would have a lot of fun on nick fuentes’s podcast”

he had a masterful delivery but that covered up that most of his jokes were glorified shock humor targeting liberal new york mores - though at the time i’m guessing that coded as less straightforwardly republican/conservative

the more i learn about this jeffrey epstein fellow the less i like him

well that and the fact that my infrequent posts on here don’t get any engagement but i’m not in the blame accepting business right now