Red Mosquito

simple schoolboy wrote:He's made some pretty recent claims about Russian Nat Gas/ Oil well heads/pipes freezing up due to condensate. Might be specific enough to be falsifiable.

spike wrote:

simple schoolboy wrote:He's made some pretty recent claims about Russian Nat Gas/ Oil well heads/pipes freezing up due to condensate. Might be specific enough to be falsifiable.

I was like Bama students ain’t that smart!

tragabigzanda wrote:Politico: Taiwan’s Tech King to Nancy Pelosi: U.S. Is in Over Its Head
“Fifty billion dollars – well, that’s a good start,” quipped the 91-year-old Morris Chang, warning that Washington’s new bipartisan industrial policy may not add up.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/1 ... y-00082646

Zeihan makes it clear that China will see a significant decline in their capacity to finish microchip production, so this all makes sense.

tragabigzanda wrote:

simple schoolboy wrote:

tragabigzanda wrote:Politico: Taiwan’s Tech King to Nancy Pelosi: U.S. Is in Over Its Head
“Fifty billion dollars – well, that’s a good start,” quipped the 91-year-old Morris Chang, warning that Washington’s new bipartisan industrial policy may not add up.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/1 ... y-00082646

Zeihan makes it clear that China will see a significant decline in their capacity to finish microchip production, so this all makes sense.

It's still not clear that Taiwan has the will to stay independent. Enough of their population might just want to be Chinese.

If not a full on invasion, China could pull off a blockade ala cuban missile crisis and we would have limited recourses. If they capture those fabs intact and there's nothing stood up in the US that can make equivalent chips how could we compel the Dutch to go along with us?

Update on this:

Rattled by China, U.S. and allies are beefing up defenses in the Pacific
But ‘everything needs to go faster,’ says Indo-Pacific command’s top admiral

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... eterrence/

Zeihan suggests that a Dutch/UK economic partnership makes a lot of sense for both parties, and that a UK/North America partnership makes a lot of sense too… UK is completely screwed on their own, but could leverage their military forces for safeguarding trade, and their tech workforce to stay in the game where they can.

As for your Q: re: US chip manufacturing, he’d say that the future is:

1. America continues to buy what it wants in the open marketplace because it can

2. Upstream manufacturing gets done in Mexico, and some in Colombia (with lots of raw inputs from Brazil), as downstream chip manufacturing gets relocated to US and Canada. And I don’t think it’s crazy at all: the entire stretch of Colorado > Montana is starting to see new chip production, and there are well established producers in the Boston area too. But the real opportunity is in TX, where the Dallas - Houston - Austin triangle provides soup-to-nuts production opps for half-finished products that will cross the border.

The shift won’t happen over night. Taiwan will continue to lead in high-value production of chips, Korean robotics tech, and high quality monitors WITH the requisite trade support. The US can buy Taiwan’s loyalty with energy inputs, then protect their cargo from point A to point Z.

tragabigzanda wrote:Straight out of Zeihan’s book:

U.S. seeking partners to safeguard ships after Red Sea attacks
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... ask-force/

E.H. Ruddock wrote:I was born a generation too early