Huawei building vast chip equipment R&D center in Shanghai

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Te...ng-vast-chip-equipment-R-D-center-in-Shanghai (open in incognito mode)

China will spend whatever it takes to build its own semiconductor supply chain. This includes compensation and living conditions required to attract top scientists and engineers, both expatriate Chinese and others. There are also advantages to being a "fast follower", rather than a pioneer, since mistakes and dead ends can be avoided. In particular, I wonder whether there are alternative EUV light sources than the tin plasma system used by ASML.

 

I wish that the US would redevelop their domestic manufacturing capabilities.

 

We are. Its one of the few good things in the giant infrastructure bill (prolly the one thing that sold the bill ...the rest of it was pretty awful). And its progressing at the breakneck slowness only federal bureaucracy could hope to achieve, but it is progressing.

 

China is trying to develope their way out of the cheap labor industry. They got a long way to go, but this is a big step.

The problem is that thats how they got most of their international business, and now that business is moving to places like Vietnam where labor is still cheap.

 

The cost would affect share price and profitability and in an investor climate that requires immediate returns on investment, they will see immediate hits. Maybe we need a hybdid forumla for "profitability/valuation" that encourages much more than just immediate $ bottom line.

 

Apple, for example, has moved 1/7 of iPhone production to India. Actually, it is movement by Pegatron, Foxconn, and Wistron who actually assemble the iPhones. This reduces the Foreign Direct Investment by Taiwan and Singapore in China. However, a lot of parts probably still come from China to India, either from Chinese manufacturers or the Chinese factories of Japanese and Korean suppliers, e.g. displays, cameras, and memory.

 

The United States is doing the same thing.

And Trump nation is whining about it.

 

Right Trump was the one actually trying to level the playing field. You know, Hey china if you're going to tariff my goods, I'm going to tariff your goods. The left lost its mind and Biden ofcourse kept the tariffs. Now the left pushing electric cars and guess who makes the batteries with slave labor and god awful pollution and dirty energy, China. Brilliant but yea Trump! TDS is real.

 

That is not the way of dying empires. America is following the footsteps of Britain when it lost it's empire. China is more powerful than America and has an order of magnitude more people with the IQ and skills necessary to do the extreme high cognitive work associated with chip manufacturing. China just passed by American and Japan COMBINED. While America spends its scarce resources in wars in Israel and Ukraine, China spends its scarce resources building relations with 3rd world trading partners. There foreign policy is an order of magnitude more intelligent and forward thinking than Americas. They aren't running around toppling foreign governments to install puppets. They work with every government without regard to their internal policies. This makes them far more attractive to work with than America.

 

It can be hoped that we will go directly to Britain's late 1940s and 1950s when it shed its empire and sole superpower status, without going through Britain's WW I & II first.

 

well, China set a goal to be the world leaders in battery and solar, while right wingers here were whining about Solyndra (and declaring that renewables would never work).Trump. Of course, would not commit government resources to a clean, secure energy future. Not as long as the GOP is big oil’s pet.

A decade later, the US was significantly behind the other major nations in research and use of renewables. And right winger and the oil patch work to try and keep it that way.

 

This. If the US RW wants to stay in the past and boycott the inevitable transition to alterantive energies of the future, they shouldn't be surprised that the rest of the world, and especially China, is leaving us in the dust. Trump is already complaining that cheap Chinese EVs, like BYD, will be eating the US car industry for lunch. Now, what is the US doing about it? Build more gas-guzzling trucks? Newsflash, large pickup trucks aren't in demand anywhere in the world, except for rural America. That's a dying market.

 

That’s what the Kremlin and Beijing hope for.

And the faction of the parochial right that wants the US to give up being a world leader hope for too.

Of course, with the latter group, they will explode in self righteous jingoism when they finally realize the influence they gave away.

And, of course, Trump nation tries to pretend that he is a “peacemaker” for wanting to leave the field to Putin and Xi.

When, in fact, he is a coward afraid that when a crisi comes, he won’t be able to stand up to bullies like Putin (which has been in evidence since 2016)

As for rising to meet a crisis, the Covid debacle and Trump’s own declaration that he took no responsibility for it tell all anyone needs to know about his weakness.

 

Big trucks aren’t going away anytime soon.

But it is ironic to see Trump nation whining about the cost of electric cars, while gladly shelling out $1000 a month for a 12mpg truck that will seldom do any work.

 

And what is Trump touting as he campaigns? "Drill, drill, drill" to great applause, as his followers completely ignore the fact that we already are drilling, and the US oil production has never been higher, also ignoring or not realizing that the impetus for US oil production is higher price, price, price, meaning that if the price of oil drops, so does US oil production. Coming around full circle, the whole drill, drill, drill thing is ridiculous, as US oil production and oil prices, the thing that makes most of the difference at the price at the pump, are diametrically opposed.
Either Trump is an idiot or he thinks his voters are.
Moving on, there is only a finite amount of oil on planet Earth. There will be a day when there won't be enough oil to fuel the planet's needs, along with all the other needs for oil (plastic and other products), so, like it or not, we HAVE to find alternative energy, and the closer the US is to the cutting edge on this the better.
My personal thought is that helium-3 will be the future power source for producing electricity, and more and more we will be powered by electricity. The technologies will improve.

 

Solyndra is an interesting example to bring up. It attempted to construct solar panels out of tubes containing copper indium gallium selenide solar cells plated on the inside of the tubes. It burned through several hundred million dollars of government and investor money before going Chapter 11 in 2011. Basically, it was a very novel approach, but the world of tech startups is littered with science experiments that didn't scale up economically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra

Meanwhile, the Chinese drastically cost reduced the proven crystalline silicon solar cells to the point that none of the novel thin film and/or continuous process solar cell ventures started in the US were able to survive.

Old engineering motto - "When in doubt, make it stout, out of things you know about."

 

China's population is over 4 times larger than that of the United States. There is no reason why China's GDP per capita should not continue to grow from $23.3 K (PPP) towards the United States' $80.4 K. As it does, China's economy will be 2 or 3 times that of the US.

At present, the US seems unwilling to calmly contemplate this new reality in economic and military power. Thus the well known Thucydides Trap seems the likely outcome, followed by World Wars III & IV, which we may or may not win. Even if we win, as did Great Britain in WW I & II, we are likely to emerge economically emasculated and politically exhausted. That's the best case. The worst case is that mutually assured destruction via nuclear and biological weapons results in a global hellscape from science fiction's worst nightmares.

So I would prefer some more rational pathway of mutual accommodation between the US and China rather than Armageddon.

 

This is why I don't particularly worry about global warming.

As gas and oil fields continue to be exploited the cost of production rises. The cost of exploration also rises as more inaccessible geography is explored. Thus, I expect the price of hydrocarbon energy to inexorably rise. Eventually, it will no longer be used for low value energy production and instead be used primarily for higher value purposes as a chemical industry feedstock. People will be willing to pay more for plastic than gasoline.

So economics, rather than global policy agreements by governments, will eventually cause the change to renewables, fission and fusion power. Eventually, the major megapolises will be powered by massive fusion reactors.

 

I think both are important. It is good to produce reliable and cost effective means to get the job done, but it also is important to experiment with emerging technology to further advancements in technology. Experimentation is expensive and often fails, but with each failure, much should be learned, so that even the failures are leading to a success down the road. It requires patience and commitment, something that seems to be waning with each generation.
Like your old engineering motto!

 

That’s true. While every right wing disc jockey and GOP politicians was yelling about Solyndra, the Chinese decided to dominate the market and drive the US out of the business.

Back in those days, big oil’s mouthpieces and junk scientists were still telling the talk radio/Fox audience that global warming was a myth.

‘They got what they wanted and Federal investment and policy to promote renewables was pretty much relegated to sound bites, while China moved ahead.

Now, the very same people who did their best to undermine the adoption of these technologies are ranting that the Chinese may dump large numbers of electric cars on the world market.

 

WW III and IV aside, the scenario you recommend is the exact same one that Zbignew Brezinski reccomended in his 1971 book “Between Two Worlds”. Which was (is) the informal bible of the Tri-Lateral Commission. One roundly attacked by right wingers ranting about “globalism” and the formless imaginary “ New World Order”

 

The Chinese just cost reduced and built out capacity in the proven technology. Innovation and refinement of manufacturing processes for existing tech is often the winning approach. It tends to win out over moonshots on unproven tech that also requires new manufacturing systems which tend to have lots of teething problems.

It wasn't the oil companies that killed the US solar companies. It was their own hubris.

Sunburned - The Solyndra Story
https://medium.com/@kennedymaize/sunburned-18e9d17d238

 

Do you mean "BETWEEN TWO AGES, America's Role in the Technetronic Era", Zbigniew Brzezinski 1970?

I'll have to read it.

 

But China isn't transitioning to alternative energies. We are mired in the dust. Had it occurred to you that pickup trucks are useful in rural America?

 

They are actually building more solar than other countries, and they also have some windpower developments.

Of course, they are also building coal and nuclear. "I don't care whether the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice."

They are less ideological than us and more pragmatic.