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Comment by helsinkiandrew | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to think about what the solutions to this problem are. The advantages of buying from TSMC are presumably they have a lead in both technology and cost that will make your product better and cheaper. The disadvantages are that in natural disaster or war/military event the chips won't be available and you'll have difficulty shipping your products.

It's very hard for a company to take the latter seriously (like the supply chain issues that arose due to covid) when it is a very rare event that will likely have other large effects on your market and your competitors also.

Governments stepping in to subsidise/force use of other companies will likely reduce the short term profitability or commercial appeal of your product.

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The solution is to stop playing the bullshit game of Taiwan non-recognition, give it a seat in the UN and protect it.

Can a place be recognized as a country by the UN if a Security Council member vetos?

Perhaps, if all the rest of the security council members and other countrises recognize it individually. You can veto a UN decision but not a sovereign country decision.

There is no way Russia will join other countries in such a UN recognition of Taiwan, as it will open a very nasty door for them regarding the Crimea...

So 2 of the 5 permanent members of the UN is already not going to do this.

And it is not only limited to non-western countries, the same argument holds for Spain with Catalonia for instance.

Real-politik is complicated.

Recognition of a country does not require the security council, a general assembly vote is all that is needed. That said, the UN isn't exactly a body known for it's lawfullness or fidelity to procedure. When the UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon rejected Taiwan's bid because of resolution 2758, there was no real legal basis for him to do that, but people just went along. Neither is there a "supreme court" of the UN that can settle these disputes, as the ICJ is intended to resolve disputes between two member nations, not disputes between the General Assembly and the Secretary General.

It's best to think of the UN as a meeting place where consensus can form, rather than as a law making body with a well functioning appeal and dispute resolution process for its own deliberations.

I support recognising Taiwan. But doing so won't make it any more secure.

The Taiwan government would probably welcome some US military/naval bases.

Yeah. There is an airbase I think? The US took it over from Japan but I'm not sure its really used...

I think if I were Taiwan, it would be US bases or we leave the NPT and build some warheads...

No, sold them some old F-16s though.

Wake up, dude, look up "Operation PBSuccess".

"For anyone waiting for US to exercise justice on this matter, might want to read that article about Secretary Clinton considering selling Taiwan to China."

My previous comment on a previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26382543

Seems relevant.

There's something to be said about going nuclear. For all that shit about proliferation, the ability of a small country to inflict drastically disproportionate damage to a larger country really cripples military offensives.

How would that be a solution? What does Taiwan’s standing (or lack thereof) in the UN have to do with protecting the chip supply chain? Isn’t the US already defending it?

If done by a majority of countries, it would greatly reduce the military threat of China invading Taiwan, because it would imply that those countries would not ignore an invastion or only protest inconsequentially, which is what China can currently assume rather confidently.

Even the US has been very carefully not fully committing to a defense of Taiwan, giving China the impression (according to some reports) that they might get away with it if they just act quickly enough.

Of course, none of this affects non-military threats to TSMC's production, like earthquakes.

That’s not necessarily what Taiwan wants, either its people or current government. It still claims the whole of China as its territory, for one.

The investments needed to improve processes have been going up every year. There can only be so many companies that can pour billions of dollars into R&D each year.

If you want to sustain a local cutting-edge manufacturer even when its capacities are redundant or too small to be economical then the pot of subsidies would have to increase yearly and not be spent wastefully. Is there a precedent for that?

The solution is to collectively, clearly, and politely tell the Communist Party of China to get fked. A lot of companies will lose money and a lot of things will get expensive, but it’s either rip the bandaid off now or amputate a limb later. Does the world have the courage to do it?

Unfortunately, it seems the path the world is taking is to become less dependent on Taiwan and China while avoiding upsetting China.

We're going to see a repeat of these events 20 years from now when Vietnam's economy grows, thanks to manufacturing relocation, and we're just as dependent on them for various things. Right now the world is hoping and praying that Vietnam will liberalize when money flows in, but it's more likely they'll follow a similar path as China, albeit less powerful.

They tried to relocate manufacturing to Vietnam (and Thailand?) due to labor cost increase in China, then labor cost increased in Vietnam/Thailand too, not a very successful story.

Looking at the Sudetenland crisis of 1938, it doesn't.

It took several iterations of territorial expansion for Germany to be considered an actual fightable foe. Austria, Memel, Sudetenland, the rest of the Czech lands, Poland. Even after the invasion of Poland, when war was declared, it was a Phony War in the beginning. The fighting in the West only really started in 1940.

The world didn't tell Russia to get fked when they occupied Crimea and started a shadow war with Ukraine.

There is a very simple way of telling a country to revert course: deem their passports no longer valid. Fundamentally, the right to move between countries is provided by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Article 12 which says "Everyone shall be free to leave any country, including his own" but then continues "The above-mentioned rights shall not be subject to any restrictions except those which are provided by law, are necessary to protect national security, public order (ordre public), public health or morals or the rights and freedoms of others, and are consistent with the other rights recognized in the present Covenant".

For China, it'd be even easier since they signed but didn't ratify this treaty despite it has been signed in 1966 and in force since 1976.

I doubt it would have been the same if Crimea(or Ukraine in general) had the world leading chip manufacturer on their territory. Unfortunately other powerful countries had little reason to care about it, outside of some sense of duty or agreements which were signed decades ago and no one really felt like enforcing.

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