Globalization Phase III/Friend-shoring/Indo-Pac Economic Framework (Don’t call it TPP!!)/China/etc…

I've found some more context on this. Yes, EUV is export controlled, but so are a bunch of DUV techs. Basically, for CPUs and RAM, China is going to be stuck at 2013 levels for the foreseeable future. For CPU fabs, the export controls are on 16 or 14nm (or smaller) FinFET and GAAFET techs. FinFET came out at the 22nm process node, so they're not stuck in 2011, but still. It's about the same age for DRAM fabs (18 nm half pitch or smaller), maybe they get early 2014 levels. NAND flash fabs they get more leeway, basically cutting them off at 2019 levels (max 127 (read: 64) layers of V-NAND).

So that's where we're drawing the line. "Above IOT level" is definitely wrong, but this is a huge blow to Chinese computer technology progress. I think I read that China has already filed a protest at the WTO. If it fails, I have to imagine Xi is weighing the options

1. Seize any newer equipment still in-country, making it clear China isn't a safe place for anyone to do business (hastening their manufacturing implosion), risking their entire economy.
2. Accept losing a decade and half a dozen process nodes for their surveillance state, risking consumers getting ahead in the cat and mouse game of evading censorship and surveillance.
3. Try to seize Taiwan or at least blow up TSMC, setting back the west a few years and tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, risking, well, armageddon.
4. Liberalize, or at the very least return to the Hu or Jiang policies to try to get restrictions lifted, the latter guaranteeing a loss of face, the former risking the CCP's power entirely. Very unappealing to them on a personal level, but pretty clearly what Biden is looking for, given the references to the surveillance state and Xinjiang that always seem to accompany articles about this.

Let no one call Joe Biden timid. This is SO much more one-sided pain than Trump's tariffs.

EDIT: come to think of it, it's likely that someone will make a 127-layer version of a V-NAND fab, which will put them at about 2020-2021 levels. And there are 176-layer fabs that are working by stacking two 88-layer dice. It's quite possible that the NAND flash tech restrictions won't have a large effect for very long.

Its kind of simple, demographics have become top heavy. In the agrarian days children were a source of free labor, now they are an expensive pet people cant afford to have.

Interesting podcast.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-presidents-inbox/id1172546141

Don’t know why a legit foreign policy think tank like Council of Foreign Relations would waste an entire episode on Sino-Seal-Clubber relations but they did and I was bored so listened.

It has gone from 53% of moose thinking they should have good relations with China to 28%.

Only 8% of maple syrup drinkers think that having a strong relationship with China is a national priority.

For the first time ever they have created an actual Indo-Pacific Strategy. Shock to everyone but it focuses first and foremost on economic power not military or cultural which the host and guest both say the current US Indo-Pacific Strategy is lacking so good compliments to each other.

Looks like the frozen tundra of the north could be joining the IPEF and that after Japan it is the second largest economy in the CPTPP (TPP after US left) and that this could lead to further integration of IPEF and CPTPP.


Anyway. If you are bored and want to catch up on hockey player drama take a listen.

hmm.. from statsCan

"Chinese" (1.7 million people), "Indian (from India)" (1.3 million) and "Filipino" (0.9 million) were also among the ethnic or cultural origins reported most often.

that's a lot of people, figuring Chinese had a couple generations worth of a head start.

@Ten Lubak would know more but I think that might be a bit of an E/W coast divide.

From my interactions both in BC and with the Canadian invaders that come south folks out here are much more Hong Kong not Mainland oriented and there are A LOT of South Asians in BC.

I’m not lying about the invaders.

It's an exchange program to make up for the yankee hoards that show up here all summer? (do you not have one way streets in the US? nobody with american plates seems to know what the sign means until they get halfway around the corner).

But yeah, SEA population has been expanding massively in the last 30 years, especially NW of Toronto. "Little Indias" are getting to be as common as Chinatowns. Hell, Brampton is talking about building a 20000 seat cricket stadium to replace the 5000 seat one they already have.

Yeah I always joke that I grew up between India and China, that's just how it is in Vancouver. For the better I think. The Sikhs we have here are great people and some would say the backbone of our local economy (longshoremen, distribution, etc)

We do have a massive Hong Kong related population that really exploded prior to 1997 when the Brits handed the colony over to China. Lots of people got the hell out, and Vancouver made a ton of sense as a destination. Half the people I work with are tied to Hong Kong in one way or another. Happened again more recently when China tightened its grip on HK

Not to say we don't have Mainland Chinese though, they're definitely around. They're the ones that give their kids Ferraris and Lambos and bully and intimidate pro Democracy HK'ers like they did in 2019:

https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/pro-china-folks-clash-with-hong-kong-supporters-in-richmond

No one really likes them (in fact there's a constant protest outside the Chinese embassy that's been going on for years) although I do appreciate how much they've raised the value of my property

Decoupling is not deglobalization
"Protectionism vs. free trade" is not a good way of thinking about the changes facing the world economy.

Noah Smith
14 hr ago

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/decoupling-is-not-deglobalization

Don’t agree with everything but hits on some of the themes we’ve discussed here and has lots of good links.

The key points are that: globalization ≠ China, and that the Biden sanctions aren’t protectionism. I don’t know if I agree with the latter — that may not be their primary purpose but it’s doubtless a not-unwelcome effect; more new fabs are being built in the US right now than at any time in multiple decades — but I strongly agree with former. Now that China has its own Chinas, many in Africa, but also Bangladesh, just thinking Made In China as a proxy for globalization is totally wrong. Add to that the off-offshoring to Vietnam, India, etc. And that’s a good thing. Manufacturing brought millions of Chinese out of poverty. Time for the same forces to spread to other parts of the world.

Trade isn't globalization. Of course trade will continue. But the US ensuring all trade everywhere for everyone under Pax America will be protected is done, and that's going to be a major change from the globalization we've seen for the last 50 years.

I don’t see us completely walking away.

I think CTF-151 is a good example of the direction we are heading. The US stood it up and provided most of the initial ships and manpower and then gradually transferred more responsibility to partners with us still providing intelligence, coordination, logistical support, etc.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Task_Force_151

Completely? No. But Iran alone has hijacked 3 different oil tankers in 2021-2022. This barely made the news here. There was no US response. We simply don't need the oil the same way we once did, so our foreign policy is changing.

Hmmm… That is interesting. I wonder how it compares historically. And what the current US/GCC tensions play into it. Could we be reminding MBS why it is important to be our friend?

Thanks for bringing it up. I’ll have to look into it more.

https://twitter.com/ranenetwork/status/1629145540096307200

Hadn’t put two and two together re China supplying military assistance to Russia (which the U.S. is saying we have intelligence that they are considering doing) and the likelihood that it would cause decoupling to speed up and intensify.

We could be hurtling into interesting times.

If I had plans for a factory in Vietnam, India, etc I would definitely be speeding them up.

This thread gives me that same brain tickle/eye-ache as when I try to read the label on a bottle of Dr. Bronner's soap.

Yep, this has been coming down the pike for a while now, which is why I've been saying the days of globalization, where everyone was free to trade with everyone enforced by the US Navy, is coming to an end.

We could see a massive economic upheaval if this isn't handled very carefully. On the plus side, I think the US is about to surge toward self-sufficiency again.

All of this is predicated off the fact the US is largely energy sufficient already. Until that happened several countries had us over the literal barrel.

Informative thread on implementation of the CHIPs Act that hits on on shoring, globalization and the IPEF.

https://twitter.com/modeledbehavior/status/1631399160451588098

Anyone have access to the Economist?

These countries could lure manufacturing away from China
Call them “Altasia”

Mar 3rd 2023


Alot of new portmanteaus have appeared in the pages of The Economist in recent years, many of them referring to phenomena in business and economics. Readers (and correspondents) have acquainted themselves with Bidenomics, permacrisis and DeFi. This week we came up with a new one: Altasia.

Short for the alternative Asian supply chain, Altasia is a result of the widening geopolitical rift between America and China. This is forcing global manufacturers to look elsewhere in Asia for new production sites. No single country in the region comes close to matching China’s importance as an export hub. But a crescent of 14 countries are together beginning to provide competition (see map).

https://www.economist.com/graphic-d...ries-could-lure-manufacturing-away-from-china

I’d love to read the whole thing.

Dude swears he isn’t making it up or that the guy was joking but C’mon! this can’t be true.

chinese tech ceo explaining to me why china is falling way behind on AI tech over dinner:

ceo: “chinese LLMs can’t even count to 10”

me: “what? why?”

ceo: “you can’t count to 10 without also generating 8,9 and ‘89 is a politically sensitive, censored year”

not making this up.
​

https://twitter.com/blader/status/1634089493295931392

It’s probably an exaggeration, but not as big of one as you might imagine. Far more likely it can’t count to 100 for that reason.

I don't remember enough of my Chinese to hazard a guess at specifics but given that the Chinese government has strict controls over what can be posted on the web, I can well imagine that this would wreak all kinds of havoc on LLMs. (Also, in Chinese, as well as a number of other languages, they don't use the same kind of labelling for numbers that English does. So, for example, whereas you and I would see 80 and say, "Eighty," a Chinese speaker would say the equivalent of "Eight zero.")

I'll also point out that we've got some stupid shit with even simple crap like the search engine on this board. It won't look up things that have only 3 letters, no matter if the particular combination of letters is highly unlikely to be part of a larger word. For example, you can't look up "DLL." It's not like trying to look up "the" where not only do you have a word that's used zillions of times, but could also be buried in other words, like "other."

The literal translation of 80 from Chinese is “Eight-ten”. It’s arguably more consistent than English (except that there’s a different word for cardinal 2 vs counting 2) and basically the same up to 10,000, which has its own word. IIRC it effectively has its separators every 4 powers of ten instead of 3.

Correct, because the indexer has a minimum word length of 4 to avoid blowing up the search index and killing performance (both of search and posting). At one point we had it set to 3 (back in the vB days, so Tex could search for mentions of himself) and the search index blew up. Only whole words (and possibly plurals and/or verb conjugations) are indexed, not parts of words.

As I said, my Chinese is rusty. Another complication is that the Chinese had some fairly sophisticated mathematics figured out before Arabic numerals were introduced there, and using the old number method is as common as the Arabic numerals are today. It's sort of like doing math with Roman numerals but not quite.

Well, yeah, I get why one might want to restrict the ability to search for three-letter words, but it'd be nice if this was done based on a list of really common three-letter words, rather than a blanket lock-out of anything that's three letters. I mean, something like DLL isn't going to be posted here all that often. And, yes, I understand that with the way the software works, it isn't possible to change this but it sure would be nice if someone came up with some software where it was.

This is worth a listen:

The New American Foreign Policy of Technology

The open nature of the internet has allowed malicious actors to abuse technology. Information operations, offensive cyber, and IP theft are just some examples of this misuse. The Biden administration has pursued an industrial policy that hopes to counter the weaponization of globalized systems. This approach includes technology subsidies, export controls, and rethinking supply chains. But this approach could undermine efforts to advance global rules and values.

To discuss how the United States can push back while bolstering democracy and human rights, Eugenia Lostri, Lawfare’s Fellow in Technology Policy and Law, sat down with former Ambassador Karen Kornbluh, Managing Director of the Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative and Senior Fellow with the German Marshall Fund. Ambassador Kornbluh is the lead author on the new GMF report “The New American Foreign Policy of Technology.” They discussed why there’s a need to rethink American foreign policy, how to center democratic values, and the crucial role of a multistakeholder approach.

https://shows.acast.com/lawfare/episodes/the-new-american-foreign-policy-of-technology

Philippines offers the US four sites for military bases near Taiwan.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/philippines-names-4-new-military-camps-us-forces-rcna78057

Pedantic but Camps not Bases.

No permanent stationing of troops (although equipment staging is allowed) so units will be rotated there.

There is a possibility this is just a toe in the water situation and they will invite us to (re)establish bases but we aren’t there yet.

US manufacturing investment doubles after Biden subsidies launched | Financial Times

https://twitter.com/richard_florida/status/1647599354310541314

US manufacturing investment is booming

✅ $204bn committed to manufacturing projects since IRA & Chips Act passed

✅ FT tracked 75 manufacturing projects worth at least $100mn

✅ Semiconductor & clean tech investments 20x the 2019 total

Cc: @Noahpinion @JesseJenkins



https://twitter.com/scienceisstrat1/status/1647586137286799366

So to be clear I currently sling paint at Lowe’s. My Bachelors in Int-Poli-Econ has two decades of dust on it.

So definitely not an expert. THAT SAID. I feel like going from $40bn in cutting edge technology fab investment to $200bn in half a year is a pretty big f’ing deal.

Meanwhile, Seattle's killing jobs