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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

TSMC is the world leader in semiconductors. Were they "breaking laws, fraud, stealing technology or slave labour"?

Visa/Mastercard are the world leaders in payment processing. Were they "breaking laws, fraud, stealing technology or slave labour"?

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I’m simplifying things greatly here, but TSMC was founded by a man who took his US semiconductor experience to Taiwan and got his initial fab partially bankrolled by the Taiwanese government to get it off the ground. Personally, I’d say that counts as unfair advantage.

his US semiconductor experience to Taiwan

He took knowledge he gained as part of his employment to Taiwan. Was there any allegation of IP theft or are you saying everything you learn when working for an employer stays with the employer..that you can never use that knowledge at your next job. Figured out how to build a CI/CD pipeline for BIGCO1? Can't use that knowledge at BIGCO2..

I did not say that at all and I'm disappointed you would jump straight into a straw man argument. The parent comment and mine are about unfair advantage, not about IP theft. If you take your years of industry insider experience and start a company that directly competes with your previous employer, under the patronage of an entity that other people don't have access to, you have an unfair advantage in comparison to your would-be startup competitors. And that's the whole point of this particular comment thread - many successful companies had some kind of unfair advantage they were able to leverage to gain market position.

Also, as a side note, knowing how to build basic software tools is not even remotely comparable to having the extremely specialized knowledge required to build a microchip fab.

Taiwan was, and is to a lesser degree these days, also highly patronistic in terms of you needing to know people to get that kind of government support. That kind of corruption was why the locals were protesting and organizing against the KMT in 1947 and still echoes today in a wide investment gap between northern and southern Taiwan.

Morris Chang may be a great guy but he was directly recruited by an authoritarian government that was still operating under martial law, and that absolutely was not an option available to most Taiwanese.

Visa has been breaking laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc.#Litigation_and_regul...

You could easily argue they both did and do. Raw materials (see Cobalt mining in DRC as example) for semiconductors are tracible to mines throughout central Africa and South America that use child slave labor. Visa/Mastercard uses computers, which have semiconductors, which use slave labor as seen above, so they too use slave labor. It just depends how far you want to set the scope of the argument but you could easily trace all companies in all developed countries to slave labor arguments similar to the above.

Even being born in a developed country/society is an unfair advantage, especially to well equipped parents or families.

“Unfair advantage” doesn’t have to be exactly one of those 4 items.

I forgot nepotism :) it's not an exhaustive list

they got whole of resources from government, this is a very special condition. do it happen on most of big companies?

they hired Taiwanese talents from silicon valley that left with IP, no ?

Last one's a joke. Right?

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