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Comment by ENOTTY | Hacker News Reader

Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post wrote two in-depth articles on this topic over the past couple days:

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/china-hyper...

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/biden-admin...

The TL;DR is that one of the sanctioned companies, Phytium, designs chips used in a Chinese supercomputer that the PLA's researchers use to simulate hypersonic weapons. The chips are designed using tools from Cadence and Synopsys (both American companies) and fabricated at TSMC.

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The sad thing is, there is >0% chance that CCP will invade Taiwan one day using the weapon that TSMC help them build.

But they will pay for said weapon via the net economic extraction some boomer provided paying $300 instead of $400 for his lawn mower

Why boomer? Are millennials or any other generation looking forward to paying more to avoid Chinese-made products?

As a millennial, I go to pretty significant lengths to avoid Chinese-made products and gladly pay quite a bit more to do so. I'm personally very aligned with Taiwan independence.

Cool. What phone do you use?

> ...I go to pretty significant lengths to avoid Chinese-made product...

Not sure where I saw them say

> I don't buy Chinese-made products

Neither did I. What's your point?

No, what's your point?

if it wasn't clear already, same as TeMPOraL. Do you have a point? Instead of this meaningless conversation I'd kindly suggest you use your majorly Chinese made phone and laptop to reply to that message instead. If you have something to add that is.

Yes okay then, I confess to being pre-emptive

As already asked, what point are you trying to make?

No, it wasn't clear, maybe it's a reflection my own insight, I can only apologise for jumping the gun.

It appeared to me as if you were making an attack on the sentiment of reducing Chinese purchases, because the replier obviously can't be avoiding Chinese brands completely because he uses a mobile phone.

Oh. Yea we were talking past each other in this case but we do agree. I'm should have written in a more comprehensive manner about how pervasive Chinese manufacturing is on our daily lives.

As I say, it was, at least in part, my fault for jumping the gun by reading what doesn't exist between the lines.

And yes, it is nigh impossible to escape unless we are willing to live as we did 100+ years ago

Have a good day.

Wonder what the lengths are. Anything that you can share, particularly that could scale to more people?

Serious question. I wouldn't even know how to approach it. China is the world's factory - throw a dart at a random non-food storefront, and anything it hits was almost surely made entirely or in part in China. Hell, a quite a lot of locally-made products get packaged in China. I personally know of local producers in Poland that send their products to China to be packaged there and sent back - it turns out it's much cheaper to do that, even accounting for multi-month round trip on a container ship, than to pay locals to do the packaging...

It annoys me to no end that boomers sent all of our manufacturing overseas to make a quick buck and then turned around and criticized the “globalism” of the economy that they created, so yes. I gladly would pay a little more for quality, domestically produced goods. Technology has progressed far enough that the costs would be minimal in most cases.

Many of that generation honestly believed market capitalism went hand in hand with the spread of liberal ideology, and that trade with China would ultimately bring about an end to the Communist Party. Maybe that was just a convenient excuse, but I believed it when I was younger.

Honestly that's where a strong guiding government comes in. Since we know that the free market is a race to the bottom... they knew the money would go for the highest return in China.

The US government in the 70's, 80's, and especially 90's should've known that the CCP was playing a game and a long game at that. No doubt they had surveillance on high level communications.

Knowing they were playing the long game, they should've had strict laws that were basically limiting the US 1 for 1.

ex. For every US student that studies PhD in China, one Chinese student can come here.

What happened was that thousands of Chinese learned about the highest levels of physics and technology at our universities and then used that information back in China to build hypersonic missiles that will be used to destroy our carrier fleets in a few years. As well as medium range missiles to destroy Taiwan.

> The US government in the 70's, 80's, and especially 90's should've known that the CCP was playing a game

They were blinded by their ideology, which told them that capitalism is inseparable from freedom and democracy. And bringing the first to China would bring the other 2 as well.

> For every US student that studies PhD in China, one Chinese student can come here.

Were there a lot of US students lining up to go to Chinese universities in the 70s and 80s? How would that even work?

> thousands of Chinese learned about the highest levels of physics and technology at our universities

If they could learn it at universities, was it really all that secret?

1. Yup. They were naive.

2. No. That’s the point. They got all the knowledge transfer benefits and we got some tuition money (who cares).

3. You think studying a PhD in physics at MIT or a large CA State institution is gonna be commonplace knowledge? I’m not talking about undergrad or even grad stuff.

That is not really want happened at all.

Technology was stolen at times, copied or given. Students studing in the US are not the cause. If that were the case the Saudi's would be on the same level / India included.

One student studying in China to one student in the US sounds like a bad deal. If the US education system is better shouldn't it be two to one?

Besides the money charged to foreign students (which is very high) helps pay for US students and keeps those fees lower.

Now if the ask was no ivy or tier I schools because of a shortage of space and crazy demand. I could come around.

1. Yeah so the US system is better and educated those that now design next gen missiles and drones for the PLA

2. Colleges are expensive because they go carte Blanche. If they kept costs down by cutting frivolous positions, they could be sustainable.

Boomers also lost jobs to overseas manufacturing. Rural America was hit hardest, boomers there too. Now, only some boomers profited directly from this and indirectly all did by getting more bang for the dollar for manufactured products. Little did they know that the real bill comes decades later.

Every generation needs it's whipping boy/girl and for the current crop of middle-agers it's boomers.

That's why.

Milliennials in general don’t have lawns to mow maybe?

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