ultimate semi shortage (2023 Update)

That's been concentrating a lot of minds, I expect. I hope.

A year ago, I'd have said that if the PRC did that, they'd capture a lot of smoking ruins, but then the People Who Know Best in DC pulled out of Afghanistan in a self-inflicted rout, despite the coalition IIRC not having lost a single soldier in 18 months. I'm not a big fan of foreign wars, but it seems like they could have taken their time about it.

Who knows how high the treason reaches?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

"Don't assume malice when incompetence will do."

Meh. I don't use many chips from Afghanistan. Do you?

Taiwan is different.

-- john, KE5FX

If it weren't part of a pattern, I'd agree. But the stink coming from DC is too bad to ignore.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Do tell. If the US did to Taiwan what we just did to Afghanistan, the result would be....?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Government is power and power corrupts. We are increasingly ruled by grossly inept power mongers of both parties, people who were their high school class president and never looked back... or had a real job.

And there is no shortage of experts to give them guidance.

Hong Kong.

They did take their time. This was in the works since Trmp's time in office.

Which treason are you referring to?

Indeed, but with the new administration as much as possible is being done about it. Some smells take time to get rid of.

As usual, Larkin is here to criticize anyone who isn't an electrical engineer. Every other profession is incompetent even though Larkin has no better ideas on how to work the problems involved. He is VERY good at providing energy in the form of hot air however.

Can you elaborate on the point a bit more? Fact is, we didn't invade Taiwan after 9/11 -- although we might as well have, for all we accomplished invading other places -- and we didn't spend 20 years trying fruitlessly to train the Taiwanese locals to stand up for themselves.

So I'm having trouble following the argument you're making here. There aren't just vanishingly few parallels to be drawn between Afghanistan and Taiwan, there seem to be none at all.

If Xi screws with Taiwan, he'll find it to be more than adequately defended, at least until TSMC has some serious geographical redundancy in place (or at least some competition). That's realpolitik for you.

-- john, KE5FX

Okay, if I really have to spell it out: The obvious one is that both are/were underpinned by the US military, and has been since 1949. That's why all the naval posturing in the South China Sea.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Taiwan

We are being ruled by hidden entities. Our politicians are just clowns that are there to give the allusion of democracy.

"China ominously declared..."

"In explosive comments published in Chinese tabloid The Global Times on Saturday, editor-in-chief Hu Xijin was blunt in his analysis of Australia's promise..."

So more like just tabloids re-publishing the retarded things each other's editors say. Got me all excited there for a second I thought someone who mattered made a statement.

We sold a bunch of VME to Australia, to upgrade submarines, and bid on some fiberoptic systems for the Jindalee radar, which job we didn't get.

Australia needs to sell coal to China so they can build up their defenses against China.

Really? Politicians give the "allusion" of democracy?

Which hidden entities are you referring to? TPC perhaps???

China stopped buying our coal for a while - as well as our barley and wine - as device to bend us to their will. They would have liked to stop buying our iron ore as well, but nobody else had as much as they needed. They've gone back to buying our coal - same problem. The barley and the wine found other markets.

We make a lot of money out of selling coal, and the people who collect most of that money have a lot of political power. Like the rest of the fossil carbon industry they couldn't care less about anthropogenic global warming. It's going to take quite a while before they see sense. There are people around in Australia who plan to make a lot of money out of using solar cell generated power to make hydrogen, which we can liquify and load into tankers to ship off to the people who are now buying our coal. The fossil carbon extraction industry isn't going to like that. It could get quite nasty.

Military defense against China would be difficult, but why would they bother? There are more valuable assets a lot closer to China, and if we stick a few hydrogen bombs under the natural resources that they might want to go after we can do scorched earth pretty effectively.