Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab
electronicsweekly.com
electronicsweekly.com
(1) German BASF is one of the manufactures for "semiconductor chemicals".
(2) More important: Getting parts from Malaysia (etc) is no issue as I don't think they plan to attack any neighboring countries in the next decade. Also, they did not start a trade boycott against Lithuania just over the name of an trade office.
Malaysia can still be a partner, however this is a big step that opens the door for replacing labor in distant countries with another EU neighbour. This is good for the entire EU.
Any of the things you describe can easily be replicated locally, fabs much less so.
Even more to the point is that it gives countries the chance to develop a high value competitive advantage that others cannot replicate.
Places like the EU would argue that they have the human capital to compete globally but they don't have the industry because of historical factors.
https://gamingnews.cyou/here-is-intels-plan-for-europe-a-pac...
And an R&D center in France
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/eu-new...
Much of critical blockers for chemicals, consumables, materials will still be in Taiwan just because the semi industry is that huge there.
All 300mm fabs working outside of Taiwan are just few shipments of consumables away from stalling all the time.
When Russia attacks Ukraine, the 3rd world is fucked.
When China attacks Taiwan, the 1st world is fucked.
You have to start somewhere, it took us decades to delocalise everything to Asia, it'll take decades to build these industries locally.
There are no individual chemical plants, there are huge chemical complexes owned by many companies with own well guarded know hows. There may be 2-4 suppliers in a row producing some intermediary product used in making of only 1 output.
Just to make the semiconductor grade hyperpure propanol you need ultrapure catalysts, ultrapure sulphuric acid, ultrapure water, and ultrapure input hydrocarbon stock. Ah, forgot, you also needs an ultrapure tare manufacturer, because bottles you ship ultrapure materials are single use.
You need decades just to replicate this. Now you need to move 100+ of such material chains.
> If it's just for historical and/or economical reason
Simple answer, yes! Taiwan has quietly swallowed near an entirety of the wider precision manufacturing industry.
It been consistently swallowing very capital intensive industries producing exportable niche products one after another simply because nobody else been taking such hard, and risky ventures. Yes, their profitability is not high, but their "moat" is gigantic.
Taiwan been an industrial titan for 20+ years, and the US only finds out about it now.
Better get started right away then.
"The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The next best time is today."
"The best time to stop quoting stale platitudes is 20 years ago. The next best time is today."
I think decades is a stretch. Keep in mind most of these chains sprung up in the last 3 decades organically in Taiwan and China (and many of them are still elsewhere-- e.g. BASF is still a titan.)
If it's a national priority, you can get some production going a lot faster than this.
Defeating CoVID was too a national priority. Did they manage to build a single new mask manufacturing line?
No, but they actually tried really hard. Dozens of companies were recruited for the effort, and they just gave up after realising that they can't even get a single part in the blowing machine to be made in the US.
I don't think this is a fair representation of what happened. US capacity existed and some additional came online, but then largely failed because of overseas product still coming in below their cost. Semiconductors after a shooting war with China would be a different picture: an imminent return to normalcy wouldn't be in everyone's economic calculations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/05/business/dealbook/america...
> that they can't even get a single part in the blowing machine to be made in the US.
Not even a single part? Now you're in hyperbole-land.
Of course it's not enough to just pay Intel to open a fab you have to compete successfully with places like Taiwan and have a growing industry, otherwise that won't happen. That's the main risk here.
With a fab, that's still difficult, but necessary.
Without a fab, however, that would have been deemed impossible and unrealistic.
China would be shooting themselves in the foot by invading, because it would equally fuck them. I've read in may places that as soon as China invades, Taiwan will blow up all the fabs and supporting supply lines. So even if China takes control of Taiwan, the semiconductor industry will be a smoldering pile of nothingness.
This article[1] does a great job in describing why this would be the case. Even if China prevents the destruction of those fabs and factories, there would still be tons of obstacles.
[1]: https://doxa.substack.com/p/why-a-chinese-invasion-of-taiwan
The average Chinese person is no more responsible for Chinese foreign policy than the average American is for American foreign policy.
During the Opium Wars, foreign invaders occupied many of the mainland's ocean ports.
Taiwan, as part of the First Island Chain, represents a critical strategic asset for those wishing to control mainland China.
Invading Taiwan...the risks are substantial and the gain is legacy. Hardly a convincing for a nation, but potentially convincing for a man facing mortality.
We can also hope that the US refrains from creating another conflict to try to provoke China the same way they have been doing in Ukraine for the last 8 years. This "Pacific NATO" is the next thing. I am very pessimistic because the US is not going to allow China to overtake them in any way, and they have been behaving like that in their entire history.
That sounds incredibly stupid. If China invading is shooting themselves in the foot, then Taiwan blowing up their (worlds most advanced) fabs would be suicide. Nobody ever won a conflict by doing that.
It would still suck in the interrim, of course.
Which supplies specifically? Aren’t the big ones just silicon and solvents?
You mean like Linde, Air Liquide, Dow, Merck, BASF, Entegris, Shiply, Fujifilm, Wacker and so on?
Those are not Taiwanese.
Edit: Yes ASML is obviously not a chip fab but they supply the machines that actually fabricate the chips.
If ASML (and all their knowledge) disappeared off the face of the earth today progress in semiconductors would probably be set back a decade or two.
The fact they are a single company in one country that the global industry depends on for progress in semis should be of concern.
With EUV the challenge is the crazy difficulty of generating the required light source at the right intensity and focusing it. At that wavelength things behave differently, to say the least.
You can do a lot with 6502s, which are still being made. (And we can probably make better than that. 80486s?)
Most relevant as far as I can tell this situation was intentionally created that way to be able to better keep China off the high end chip market.
Intel FLIR DeBeers Westinghouse for nuclear stuff Lots of specialty suppliers for aerospace where there is only one or two companies that do a particular thing.
Its actually super common.
https://www.asml.com/en/news/stories/2020/inside-high-tech-m...
"ASML has five manufacturing locations worldwide. Our lithography systems are assembled in cleanrooms in Veldhoven, the Netherlands, while some critical subsystems are made in different factories in San Diego, California, and Wilton, Connecticut, as well as other modules and systems in Linkou and Tainan, Taiwan."
And you can assume those factories depend on sub-assemblies from lower tier factories which are made in even more places.
...or even the humble pencil:
from all the way back in 1999 - https://www.eetimes.com/u-s-gives-ok-to-asml-on-euv-effort/
The hot paths in most important high-end computing are mostly quite efficient.
it’s hard to determine the lower bound on a lot of these things. in scientific computing (e.g. physics sims) i still run across a lot of runtime branching that could easily be compiled out if we were using languages that had stronger type systems/templates. we use linear approximations for a lot of things, but it’s been shown that smarter interpolation can let you decrease your resolution without losing accuracy/stability. there’s an easy 2x or more perf gain every time you do that successfully. there’s also the boundary conditions: we always simulate more volume of space than we’re actually interested in so as to avoid certain types of distortion (reflections from the boundary of the simulation). over time we’ve learned tricks for reducing those reflections: we’ve applied a lot of general-purpose optimizations, but there’s evidence that we can go further if we encode more simulation-specific information at these boundaries. this whole area has just been slow, steady, compounded optimizations.
i don’t work in ML, but i find it very unlikely that (a) optimizing neural networks is a completely solved problem or (b) that you all know how to train them using the fewest iterations.
you make sweeping statements that just aren't obvious to me.
> If push came to shove we might just consider making better software?
as you say, "a _lot_ of software out there runs in the 'hardware is my driving cost' locale." if something changed -- say, we lost access to high-end fabs -- then my argument is that we have room to focus higher on the stack to make this far less impactful than it would otherwise be. in most places, software is not "optimal", as you seem to agree. in very few places have we even calculated a bound of what optimal _is_. the HPC example was to highlight the latter part: we shift from something like a linear gradient descent to some different descent algorithm and it works better in practice. ML training techniques are always changing to get faster convergence. very, very few of these HPC areas have actual, well-defined performance bounds. it's just a tradeoff of "how much do we invest in algorithms" v.s. "how much do we invest in hardware". i read GP as suggesting otherwise, based on the content of the comment they were replying to.
i'm not even sure there's a disagreement between you and i. maybe not even between me and sneak. i kinda wonder if all of us here just have a different number in mind for what qualifies as "mostly quite efficient". i'm completely confident we have at least 2x perf gains sitting around in just about any computational area that's presently dominated by hardware costs (e.g. HPC, but not e.g. packet-switching/networking). 10x perf gains in many of them: not by micro-optimizing things like memory allocations, but by being inventive with algorithms. that kind of gain is meaningful to me in this area: enough that i wouldn't dismiss it as "mostly quite efficient" as a rebuttal against that original "if push came to show we might just consider making better software".
Look at your average website with 85 megabytes of JavaScript and Bootstrap for the UI.
TreeShaking in theory can get rid of all that unneeded JS - and there should be something that can do it for CSS, too.
But most people aren't using it. And even if they did, there would still be a lot of bloat left over from using the libraries to make life a little bit easier.
Go to average midsize startup and the amount of this going on is multiplied exponentially by the number of developers.
There's not really a cure here.
There's not enough engineers that know how to do things absent these frameworks - that even if you do know - it's still not worth it because the people you'll be working with probably don't.
I think the problem is, decision makers need to understand what interconnectedness means, and not just on an abstract level. If you make things, you're intimately familiar with just how many components come from China. You're deeply aware of the fact the machines you use are made in basically every country in the globe. That the materials you consume come from literally every corner of the planet.
People tend to think about globalization as a matter of buying discrete commodities from different places: bananas from panama. They don't understand that essentially all products today are amalgams from different factories scattered across the globe. That leads to crazy weird decisions like Brexit, silly trade wars, etc. People don't realize that cutting a country out of the system is less like not talking to somebody, and more like cutting out a big chunk of one of your organs.
I think about the line in West Wing: "Free trade is essential for human rights...the end of that sentence is 'we hope because nothing else has worked.' ...Chinese political prisoners are going to be sewing soccer balls with their teeth whether we sell them cheeseburgers or not, so let's sell them cheeseburgers."
While war and human rights are different, they're also pretty correlated.
A recent study by the Democracy Perception Index shows that Chinese feel that their country is democratic. But this is ludicrous, how can this be? It's because Chinese define democracy by whether they believe their government works for their interest and whether they yield good results, not by how their government is elected. It's not just propaganda; this result is consistent with earlier studies by Harvard and York University, as well as by my own experience on the ground.
https://latana.com/democracy-perception-index/
The concept of 民主 is much more in line with the 19th century definition of democracy, when the concept was brought to China. It was only in the latter half of the 20th century that (in the west) democracy became synonymous with electorialism.
So, not commenting on any other countries. But in case of China, Chinese view democracy and human rights differently. I think we should let them.
I'm going to be thinking about this sentence for the rest of my life
They constantly fall short, even of the narrow interests of whatever their particular constituency is. But there's kind of a floor where we just throw up our hands and say "WELL THEY WERE VOTED IN"
Do our officials receive less psychic pressure? Does the Chinese government work harder to align the populous' desires with their actions?
Pretty fascinating rabbit holes.
Their study took data from nearly 2000 public opinion surveys and compared it to the policies that ended up becoming law. In other words, they compared what the public wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of 90% of Americans have essentially no impact at all.
https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-...
E.g. In such a system, if a state has 50 seats and a party manages to win 24 of them (while the second place only wins 23 seats), that first party gets all 50 seats of representation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting
To be fair: My comment is mostly focused upon "Western" parliments, which includes two geographically non-Western places: Australia and New Zealand! If you look at the constant dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Japan... look _very_ closely... you realise there are many competing factions within the party. So LDP _acts_ like multiple parties and forces the Prime Minister to compromise to get things done. Not perfect, but many outsiders fail to understand this about the Japanese (national) political system.
It has been repeated a lot in the past decade because overall things improved but recently the population of Shanghai was put under a terrible lockdown, the government didn't have their best interest at heart and what happened? Nothing, because they can't change anything and because the party doesn't care about their best interest. The party only cares about itself.
Making the populace happy is a lever amongst many they use to stay in power but when their interest and the people's interest doesn't align they have other, brutal means to enforce their policy.
Yes the Shanghai mess was gigantic. But even so, by and large, the Chinese people are supportive of lockdowns even if they protest against specific logistical problems, fuck ups and the overall strain placed on their lives. The Chinese government doesn't lock down because they are an evil oppressive regime, they lock down because the public is at large still very supportive of lockdowns as a measure (especially given the fact that vaccination rates in China are relatively low, and that Chinese people fear COVID much more than people in the west do). If they don't lock down and they let millions of people die through COVID, that's when you will see mass protests and riots.
That "they don't have recourse" is false, this is a stereotype. Protests are commonplace in China. There are literally thousands of protests every year, and often the government is responsive to such protests. Not every single protest is respected, but many are. The Chinese government performs a lot of polls and surveys to elicit feedback and to gauge satisfaction. There's a reason why hard data from a decade of research has shown that Chinese people increasingly believe that the government represent their interest well.
All this stereotyping of the party "only caring about itself" doesn't even make sense when you consider that the party consists of 95M people, or about 5% of the population. Everybody has some extended family member that's a party member. That's a big amount of representation.
I'd say most of the ideas about China come from some sort of reasoning on what a stereotypical authoritarian regime looks like, as opposed to actual facts on the ground. Is China actually authoritarian? From a western perspective, I guess so. But even so, what's underappreciated is that China is a very atypical "authoritarian" regime with a lot more grassroots representation and feedback than one might expect from a stereotypical authoritarian regime.
Making the populace happy being a lever to stay in power — sure, agreed. That's not a bad thing, that's how it's supposed to work in China — the party derives legitimacy from doing good work, and if they stop doing good work then all hell will break lose and the country will plunge into a civil war, as China has seen time and again in the past 2000 years. The government knows this, the people know this, thus the government knows it better do a good job, or else their heads will roll.
That being said, I think there are limits to this philosophy. It's pretty clear by now that not everyone in China is getting a fair shake, to the extent that perhaps it is time for other countries to evaluate their relationships with the output of those in China who are experiencing something that goes beyond the pale in terms of human rights violations i.e. the Uyghur population and the work that they are being "voluntold" for as well as the "re-education" they are experiencing.
I think that for as much sense as it makes for China to do whatever it does, it makes sense for Western countries to do something about the obvious misalignment of values between the two groups. The West not accepting / becoming dependent on economic conditions that result from violations of their views on human rights or democracy is a very reasonable action to take from an ethical and moral standpoint, just as an example.
And here is the crux of China's zero-covid policy. Follow the Western lead and run covid run its course? That would be millions of deaths even with Omicron being not as deadly, simply because Sinovax is nowhere near as effective as the mRNA vaccines are. It's too late (and politically unwise, given how CCP propaganda praised its selfmade vaccine) to mass-rollout mRNA vaccines, so the only option that prevents millions of deaths (and so, keeps the "social contract" of freedoms vs. wealth) is to brutally suppress Covid.
The interesting thing will be when the Chinese public deems the zero-covid policy "not good enough"...
The "Chinese vaccine don't work" talking point is a bad faith myth created by western mainstream media, which misrepresented this study by comparing single- or two-dose Sinovac with 3-dose Pfizer. This sort of misrepresentation is unfortunately common practice in mainstream western media.
What is true however is that Chinese population has less immunity against omicron due to lower vaccination rates, especially among the elderly. For one, the Chinese don't see vaccination as really necessary because lockdowns work. Second, the Chinese worry a lot more about vaccine side effects. Here in the Netherlands, vaccines are sold as "100% safe, everyone should get it", whereas in China doctors would recommend against getting a vaccine if you have another medical problem such as heart problems. My other grandparents in law choose not to get vaccinated because they have many other health problems due to old age.
Finally, the Chinese public is by and large very supportive of lockdowns despite the Shanghai mess. Rather than "don't lock down" they now just believe "lock down earlier, don't turn into the next Shanghai".
This isn’t true, and if you look at table 2 in the paper you link it is obvious. With equal dosing, SinoVac is less effective than Pfizer in basically all categories.
SinoVac doesn’t start to have _any_ protection against mild/moderate disease until 3 doses, and even then, it’s significantly worse than Pfizer. It’s hard to know how that relates to disease transmission, but it’s probably fair to guess that less protection against mild/moderate disease means increased viral loads and faster disease spread.
Back when there were fewer variants, the Janssen vaccine only required 1 dose; was Janssen "better" than mRNA, and did "mRNA vaccines not work very well"?
Here in the Netherlands, once Omikron arrived, the Dutch CDC advised everyone to get a booster (third dose). Nobody here counts on Pfizer having enough protection with just 2 doses. Why would anyone then compare 2-dose Pfizer with 2-dose Sinovac?
What matters is the eventual efficacy after sufficient boosters. Besides, we already live in a "booster subscription" reality. Here in the Netherlands, the elderly are encouraged to get a booster every 3 or 4 months. In light of all this, I'd say it's very disingenuous to compare based on number of dosis instead of eventual efficacy.
And you say "even [after 3 doses] it's significantly worse than Pfizer". Where in table 2 do you see that?
Severe/fatal disease:
- Three-dose BNT162B2: 99.2 for 60-69 yr, 99.5 for 70-79 yr, 95.7 for >= 80 yr
- Three-dose Coronavac: 98.5 for 60-69 yr, 96.7 for 70-79 yr, 98.6 for >= 80 yr
Mortality:
- Three-dose BNT162B2: 98.9 for 60-69 yr, 96.0 for >= 80 yr
- Three-dose Coronavac: 98.7 for 60-69 yr, 99.2 for >= 80 yr
I'm sorry, these numbers look nearly identical to me? They're all >= 96% for the elderly.
I think you're looking at the "mild/moderate" section. Yes the numbers there are lower for Sinovac. But so what? Protection against severe/fatal disease and mortality is the most important. That it's less effective at mild/moderate disease prevention doesn't make "Chinese vaccine don't work very well".
Heck if we go back in time before there were so many variants, various studies showed Sinovac as having roughly 70% protection against mild/moderate COVID (depending on country; efficacy is context-dependent). That 70% was then branded by western media as "Chinese vaccines are junk, they don't work at all, because our mRNA vaccines provide 90%+ protection against mild disease". And now Pfizer has only 70% protection against mild omikron but it's still represented as "mRNA vaccines are much superior, the Chinese are fscked until they get their hands on mRNA". Yes, what's wrong with that narrative?
For some reason, outside of the context of comparisons with China, everybody agrees that Pfizer works kinda "meh" against omikron; it's merely "good enough to get the job done". But when comparing with China, all sorts of people are suddenly inclined to represent mRNA as the holy grail that can end the pandemic, which the Chinese unfortunately don't have.
I have not paid attention to COVID-19 recently and I recall that Chinese vaccines were problematic against Omicron.
If it is so efficient then why the hell they have this security theater in China?
Not sure why you call it "security theater". The lockdowns in China work, even against Omicron, even if it has become way more difficult. Shenyang, Guilin, Shenzhen, Guangzhou all defeated omicron without the Shanghai mess.
As for why they don't push vaccines more, that I don't know. Possibly because they are more cautious about vaccine side effects than we are. As I said, doctors in China recommend against getting vaccinated if you have other health problems. The same elderly in the Netherlands would just get a recommendation to get vaccinated because "vaccines are very safe", as we are officially told here.
A similar notion existed in Taiwan until they got overwhelmed by Omicron. Lockdowns worked and they were able to keep COVID out of the island, so people weren't interested in vaccines hence low vaccination rates.
Western societies view lockdowns as draconian human rights violations, and don't take COVID very seriously relative to "freedom", but not all societies look at things that way. Chinese people are very afraid of COVID, much more so than westerners, and see lockdowns as an inconvenient but absolutely neccessary measure. Chinese society values responsibility more than freedom.
Unlike mainstream Chinese media, which always represents facts objectively and doesn't use a headline generator to deflect attention whenever there's some trouble in the country.
I always see this amusing sentiment of "evil Western xyz doing things and stuff", meanwhile it's just something that happens all around the world, and usually even more so in other, less developed places. Maybe the main difference is that I don't get much media from, say, Zimbabwe, but I sure do from the US and even Canada, even if I don't particularly care about the happenings in either place.
The cry over whataboutism is funny when you're sharing a paper funded by the Chinese CDC, and taking that as gospel. I'm not excusing Western media anywhere, I'm simply saying "Western" is a pointless qualifier when the problems you are describing apply to media driven by profits and/or vested interests, which is almost every news source.
You are throwing "Western media" under the bus, but in contrast to what? Not Chinese media, which the discussion was about, so I'm curious what your reference point for good media is in this case, that happens to be better than "Western media". Keep in mind that quality levels differ, and if you only follow Murdoch rags, obviously you're not getting quality reporting of any sort.
> When you're poor, you're not free.
I appreciate someone 'qualified' making this point. Whenever I tried to argue this in the past, I inherently got dismissed as being in a privileged European position not knowing what I am talking about, (even as an Eastern European), so thanks for your post.
Please don’t buy the government propaganda that legitimizes everything from stupid to evil as a price that has to be paid to raise people out of poverty.
- economic freedom is an equally valid form of freedom.
- societies can make up their own minds on what sort of freedoms they value most.
As for "erosion of freedom in the last 10 years in China": this is the mainstream western narrative, but the Chinese people don't view it that way. By and large, they view China as way better off now than 10 years ago. All the data and on the ground talks show this. What else is there it argue about?
It sounds like you are like me, born and raised in China but having lived in the west for a long time. If you live in the west and all you hear is liberal thought and western ideas on political freedom, then after a while it seems like that is all there is that matters.
But I am saying no: what we think here don't matter at all, what the people there think is all that matters. We here can consider China's government illegitimate for whatever reason, but that doesn't make them illegitimate. The Chinese people have way more right to consider what sort of government is legitimate, for whatever reason they want, even reasons that we don't agree with.
This is only possible peacefully if you have political freedom.
Really? My girlfriend and her friends would strongly disagree with that statement. From my understanding they grew up in a time when internet in China was a lot younger and they actually had an ability to discuss political discussions, or items that highlight the government in a negative manner.
Now everything that isn't the government's view is incredibly censored/filtered online. It might hard to not see the erosion of freedom when it's being prevented from being communicated online.
Fwiw I'm not disagreeing with your statement on economic freedom and I find the amount of people lifted out of poverty and the growth China has gone through in the last few decades to be incredible but it seems a bit disingenuous to say certain "freedoms" haven't been eroded in the last 10 years comparatively.
The data from decades of research is very clear on this. People like your girlfriend and her social circle, who value freedom of speech the most, are a minority in China. A decreasing minority even. By and large, people are happy with the direction of China. Even if various groups may disagree with specific parts of policy, overall satisfaction is quite high. Freedom of speech is considered a nice to have, not a must, and ranks below many other things such as freedom from poverty, freedom to get quality education, freedom from disease, freedom from anarchy, freedom of security, etc.
Freedom is not about the freedom of the well-off and the majority. It's always about the freedom of the minorities, the oppressed, and the different. Only their opinions matter. You can only determine the degree of freedom in the society by asking those who don't fit in.
I know many people who come from small towns and rural areas. Places where everyone knows everyone, everyone is part of the community, and everyone helps those in need. Places that are toxic to people who are different. For many of those people, freedom started when they moved to a big city. A city where nobody cares what you are and what you do, where you can safely be yourself, and where you can find other people like you.
The hard data from a decade of research is very clear about the fact that Chinese people are overall very satisfied about the direction of their country. No matter what rhetoric you employ, you argue purely from your own perspective and your values. That is fine — for your own country. The Chinese people should have a right to disagree with you on what they value in their own country.
The Chinese people have no right whatsoever to consider what sort of government is legitimate. The CCP deliberately, systematically deprives of them of exactly that right. Hence the total censorship of thought and expression and the repression of any group that might remotely offer an alternative to the CCP, even non-political religions.
The CCP is like the Model T of political parties - "You can have any government you want, as long as it's the CCP."
Don't think joining a party with clear views and goals would let you have any significant effect on its trajectory without decades and lots of luck.
You might be able to become a social policy research professor or something, or where you study Communist/Marxist/Leninist/Maoist/Jinpingist/etc thought and try to develop new applications of it to the modern world. But you won't get to change anything from the Politburu, and could lose your career or worse if you try.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politburo_of_the_Chinese_Commu...
In the West the words for referring to someone formally are words that used to refer to the nobility exclusively (Mister, Misses in English comes from 'Master, Mistress', Monsieur, Madamme in French, Señor, Señora in Spanish, derive from 'My Lord, My Lady' respectively).
So in the West, the cultural transformation was more than mere equality of political voice, but more, that 'we are all nobles', and (domestic?) political history in the West is the ever expanding circle of this inherent nobleness of all (arguably right down to trends in current American social issues).
'Rights' was something that, in the West, was first contested between the nobility and the King, then in the modern period between the wealthy merchant class and the nobility/royalty. James Madison, one of the American Revolution leaders, writes explicitly about how the masses are incapable of the requirements of absolute democracy. So there's definitely something to it when you point out that 'Democracy' in the West wasn't immediately interested in conferring a voice onto every Tom, Dick, and Harry (we'll just set aside the status of women and slaves)
You might be off about 'latter half of the 20th century' bringing electorialism to bear, rather the late 19th century/early 20th century was when, finally, the proletariat started demanding its rights, e.g. The Mexican Civil War that saw the establishment of collective farming lands, the struggle of labor and unions in America and Europe to secure worker's conditions backed by the threat of socialism (which, from Marx himself, is about endignity [ennoblement] of everyone's time), all of which, funny enough, have been desolving since the 90s (NAFTA eradicatd collective farming in Mexico).
Democracy in the West is more than a mere political configuration, its also the cultural precept (however divergent in interpretation), in stark contrast to what you're describing is the history of this idea in China, where, dare I say, the idea of ennoblement stops at a hard boundary unlike in the West.
P.S. I don't know a Chinese language so it may be that the words for formally addressing someone also share this genealogy of descending from terms formerly meant exclusively for nobility.
This was a hard concept for my Thai wife to grasp at first. I described it this way.
In America, each person represents their own kingdom. The government exists to serve (and be subservient) and protect us to keep the peace. I always try to remind myself that government by the people, for the people means that the balance of power lies solely with the people.
As a German believe me if I tell you that being under a totalitarian regime can backfire pretty quickly. It took Hitler only 6 years. Putin took longer but hundreds of thousands are dead for just this year alone.
They know about murderous totalitarian regimes!
The Mao background may also mean they appreciate even minor progress more than us.
Yes, the Chinese state has made some remarkable positive material achievements for most Chinese. No, it does an absolutely shit job for many of them. Imagine being Uyghur, critical of Xi, religious, lgbti+, black or a combination of the above.
What would it take for a national government to get more passable results on the veil of ignorance test? Try the thought experiment!
What about somewhere like Singapore (nominally democratic, but with a single party in power for decades and widely seen as authoritarian)?
> Imagine being Uyghur, critical of Xi, religious, lgbti+, black or a combination of the above.
Those are very visible examples, but if you're applying the veil of ignorance test you have to weight by how many people they actually apply to. (I wouldn't be surprised if all of them put together represented a smaller proportion of the population than incarcerated Americans, say). Every government system has some fraction of the population that it "gives up on", that much is unavoidable.
I am deliberately applying an individual level test to the social level. This is not fuzzy utopian everything-should-be-perfect idealism though. Think of it as an extensive test suite to run against a government's policies.
> What about somewhere like Singapore (nominally democratic, but with a single party in power for decades and widely seen as authoritarian)?
EHARDFAIL: active lgbti+ prosecution.
OK, but that doesn't answer the question. What's the pass/fail criterion for your test suite? For China to be such a particularly bad case, it seems like you must be focusing on those particular groups and weighting them more highly than in the actual veil of ignorance test (where one assumes an equal chance of being anyone), no?
On the other hand, the cost of significant armed conflict is already very, very high.
Sometimes, when it doesn’t touch you, you have some fancy theoretical poetry about it; the closer you are, the more you notice how the other is, indeed, wow, gruesome.
Not all cultures can mix.
It's a deep area of research with conflicting results [1][2].
[1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.85...
[2] https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=oRbfdWw4ozUC&oi=...
Polls show little interest in making McDoubles and tons of interest in healthcare and education jobs.
Somehow there’s always financing for cheap consumer jobs while costly jobs face more uncertainty: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1505597901011005442
The market is unfalsifiable like a religion now. Free trade is captured by rent seekers who believe past success in one special context makes them the best person to handle any context. The memes are no longer based in historical religion, but the lack of critical challenge and blind allegiance to normal humans self aggrandizing story, being dictated at by they who live privileged lives far away is as traditional as it gets.
I’d like to see a rescope of political power that better conforms to where all this value comes from: https://www.unlv.edu/news/article/future-american-city-state
https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the...
Coddling certain sensibilities and foisting nostalgia driven politics on the masses, tacit ageism towards youth through hand me down gossip and schooling of industrialist owners who need cheaper labor, are hardly hallmarks of a free society.
We moved manufacturing into rural areas a century ago seeking cheaper labor, then overseas for the same reason. Human agency is dictated by financiers empowered by political tradition. There’s no theory I know of that concludes they are absolutely making sound choices for anyone but themselves. The blind faith in grand schemes thing has got to go.
I'd start the 19th century after the Napoleon wars for this argument, of course.
In the (absurd) limit: There was no war between Australia and the Roman Empire in 100BC.
More practical: existence of a Cold War in the 20th century.
not absolute 0 % chance of war
What evidence do you have to make this claim? A simple thought experiment proves the counter. Let's say there is a population on one island, and another population on another island, and these populations have no way of reaching each other or even knowing of each others existence. These not-connected populations are guaranteed not to go to war. However, give one of them the means of reaching the other population, and most assuredly the chance of war has gone up not down.
With all of these things, context matters. If memory serves, Austria being an independent state was one of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, so if that had been the last act instead of the opening chapter, there still would have been hell to pay. Perhaps not on a par with Caesar crossing the Rubicon, but definitely starting something that requires a resolution.
The theory of comparative advantage (David Ricardo) means it's worth specializing. But the counter argument (local resiliency) is also important -- but it may mean less efficiency in the short run, as a kind of investment against risk.
All that is fine, but it opens up the opportunity for short-sighted decisions (basically a mercantilist view that exports = good and imports = bad) like tariffs to protect local mfrs (which removes incentives for them to be efficient).
In short, like everything in life, there's not a sharp decision.
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/16/1099079032/mcdonalds-leaving-...
Trade needs to be fair and mutually beneficial.
So that's an easy example of how trade helps keeps peace.
One may as well argue if Taiwan didn't have the world's most advanced semiconducter industry, it would have voulentarely joined China.
Without those sanctions, it is quite conceivable that a troubled war effort would not be nearly so much of a problem, but because of the trade dependency Russia feels quite threatened by the consequences of war. Not enough to have prevented it in the first place, but they overreaced.
Perhaps it will(as it seems now, also) be seen as catastrophic mistake. Like Russia selling Alaska to US. My point is, it is way to early to tell and even if we knew the outcome: we have to have few events/outcomes like that for them to become an example of mistake to not make.
Generally countries can do whatever, despite all. It is more important we deter them and have tools to do that as broader "world" community. Otherwise we would have to forcefully own "other" countries to secure such peace.
Unfortunately, it didn't work out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I
Of course this only applies in a vaccuum. If there are any nations you don't attack and win, they can just build up their economy while you tank yours fighting and then swoop in to defeat you on the cusp of your victory.
Basic strategy in the game of Civilization. The rest of the world gangs up against a warmonger and unless they can promptly achieve world domination, ultimately self-destruct.
I don’t think the result is a net positive. It looks more like keeping a lid on justified dissatisfaction while preventing any upset of the status quo.
1. It's reasoning a'la "It's economically inefficient therefore it's less likely to happen". In my opinions, governments are absolute experts in implementing economically nonsensical policies, international conflicts included.
2. Any link between nations can be weaponized, i.e. imposing tariffs, banning imports/exports, and so on. The greater your dependency on me the more ways I have to harm you.
3. Such weaponization will naturally harm your own citizens but you, as a decision maker, will bear very little cost.
4. The easier it is for me to replace you with an alternative the more likely I am to use that against you -- this is classic BATNA. You don't like my export quota? So what, I've got more interest than I can handle and you can build your batteries without lithium if you don't like that.
And of course, as you point out, if you only optimize on the local scale and ignore the global scale, you'll also create an unstable system. Hence the failures of extreme nationalism we've seen historically.
Both cases can lead to instability because of their relationship to one another (the global system is composed of localized systems). You need to look at balance across the entire picture, which means you can't just ignore your own country and its people but you also can't ignore the rest of the world, either. It's tough trying to create a good stable global system that isn't disenfranchizing some large segment of the population.
In this case, you don't want to be dependent on one geopolitically unstable island. If there is a war, it won't be the EU's decision to start/stop it. You'd want China to be dependent on EU and vice versa, to make it costly to start a war. But if China has nothing to loose by attacking Taiwan and the West would loose all advanced electronics... This is not going to bring any kind of stability. You might only be forced to buy those chips from China, giving the potential aggressor even more leverage (and money)
Multiple single points of failure is an oxymoron. Either there is one point of failure and it's "single", or there are multiple and by definition no longer "single".
All of economics looks great on paper until basically any little happenstance quirk utterly breaks the whole thing.
> Geopolitically interconnected trade is all well and good in theory, but putting two superpowers at odds
obviously, as we have seen in the past 40 years, both within and without there has been alot of economic turmoil (economic crisis) instead of pure prosperity and it turns out politicians couldn't outsource their jobs to the market
countries and regions need to politically strive for peace, cooperation and friendship, the market and trade isn't enough imo
In March 2020, I made the following predictions:
1) National governments will do what it takes short to provide for their citizens, even if they have to print money to do so, and risk inflation. Check.
2) Supply chains will be shaken up, costs for most goods will go up. Check
3) National governments in Western countries will seek to have strategic industries moved back to domestic or friendly territories. Check.
4) International trust will detoriate, and international conflict will become more likely. Check.
5) As inflation goes up, central banks will try to raise interest rates, but too slowly and too little. Check.
6) At some point, interest rates will rise to a level that causes a severe recession, with rising unemployment, even though inflation still remains higher than the interest rate. As people take to the street, central banks are forced to lower the interest rate, and possibly resume QE. Still open.
7. As interest rates go down, inflation goes even higher than before step 5. It will remain like this for the best part of 10 years (with high volatility), before some countries are willing to take the Volcker medicine for real.
8. As the economic forest fire ends, debts are erased, retirees have lost their savings and the next super-cycle begins.
Sure they can fabricate the chips, but a lot of the raw material needed will come from places like China.
It doesn't make sense to do that now, because you'd just be shipping local resources to a foreign fab, so that's still a bottleneck. But I think having a local fab is the tipping-point.
Norway is the fifth largest exporter of Quartz. Turkey is third. I think there's enough Quartz in Europe for silicon.
For silicon wafer manufacturing there's Okmetic Oy in Finland and Siltronic AG in Germany.
It doesn't necessarily matter to have local fabs: at least in the current situation, the worldwide chip production is still a mostly free market with products being sold to the highest bidder independent of location (as long as it's not Russia). But the confidence of this state continuing is certainly lower than it was a few years ago.
Nah, this is a bargain. Rather than chasing the technology for 50 years, they just waited until it's already mature (2nm may be the end of the road?) and spend a few billion after all the development has happened elsewhere. BTW Germany is already home to some fairly advanced non-EUV fabs with Global Foundries.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremermann%27s_limit :
>However, it has been shown that access to quantum memory in principle allows computational algorithms that require arbitrarily small amount of energy/time per one elementary computation step.[6][7]
Not the end of the road.
May have had something to do with these tweets [1] from Emily Haber @GermanAmbUSA German Ambassador to USA:
>> "The current geopolitical situation and its impact on supply chains has triggered a discussion about “technological sovereignty” in the US and Europe. For us, it means being able to help shape future technologies in line with our values. We see the USA as natural partners in this."
>> "It's one reason our Minister for Education and Research is visiting Washington. Welcome, Minister @starkwatzinger . Your visit will deepen our cooperation as we face intense global challenges! 2/2"
Wenn sie bereit sind, viele Prozessoren zu bauen, anstatt gefährliche Funktionen hinzuzufügen, um einen Chip oder Kern oder was auch immer zu verwenden, können sie dieses Mal vielleicht ein Vielfaches von zehn Jahren schaffen ;-)
Maybe their chips will end up in my next laptop.
(I think I can keep repairing this one for a while, sorry I'm a bad capitalist or whatever.)
Unless your laptop is also a car that's probably unlikely ;)
(AFAIK the new Bosch fab will mainly produce chips for the car industry)
(e.g. AFAIK the former AMD fab is now GlobalFoundries: https://www.silicon-saxony.de/nc/mitglieder/mitglieder-foerd...)
Why does the middle class taxpayer have to bail everyone out, with lower living standards due to taxation and inflation.
>President of the European Council Donald Tusk said that Nord Stream 2 is not in the EU's interests.[19] Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán have questioned the different treatment of Nord Stream 2 and South Stream projects.[19][20] Some claim that the project violates the long-term declared strategy of the EU to diversify its gas supplies.[21] A letter, signed by the leaders of nine EU countries, was sent to the EC in March 2016, warning that the Nord Stream 2 project contradicts the European energy policy requirements that suppliers to the EU should not control the energy transmission assets, and that access to the energy infrastructure must be secured for non-consortium companies.[22][23]
And, just because they want to diversify, doesn't mean the present geological and economic reality allows for it. Utopian policy in place of realpolitik is foolish. Same with ESG and insane green anti hydrocarbon, anti-nuclear policies.
It was also opposed by Eastern Europeaners such as Tusk who (understandibly) dislike Russia.
Heaven forbid any Europeans have any interest themselves in not helping a warmonger. Obviously they can only do this at the behesr of Uncle Sam.
Whereas Europe might directly suffer from instability and chaos, as well as loss of Russian energy supplies, the US would not and in relative terms becomes stronger if Europe is severed from Russian energy, and the continent is in conflict and chaos.
Europe having tight relations with Russia, economically especially energy-wise, is greatly beneficial to Europe and detrimental to US hegemony.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geographical_Pivot_of_Hist...
You're once again excluding any calculations of Russia using the money to run around overthrowing democracies. "It's greatly beneficial if you ignore all the mass murder."
The whole reason why they're now cancelling NS2 is because of this. Germany likes cheap energy, sure, but they're less than enthused about the money paying for that cheap energy going into executing and raping civilians in Ukraine.
And if you are looking for a mass murderer, is there a bigger mass murderer than USA after 20 years of mass murder in the Middle East?
To fight ISIS, it is mostly a joint effort of US + NATO + Allies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Joint_Task_Force_%E2%....
> The United States accounts for the vast majority of airstrikes (75–80%), with the remainder conducted by Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Jordan, Belgium, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom.
Isis was a direct consequence of American invasion of Iraq. You can't do what America did in Fallujah and not expect some kind of blowback.
Furthermore, it is worth studying the Arab Spring and what the underlying causes were: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring#Causes
You have to consider the EU vs Russia.
It's not in EU's or Germany's intrest to keep trading with Russia
It is immensely in the interest of Germany to have good relations and continued trade with Russia.
Germany's intrest is for Ukraine to win as quick as possible
Before the war Germany at least had a reasonable sounding argument (peace through trade) but it's been proven totally wrong they need to admit they were wrong and move on
It is not possible for Ukraine to win, they are slowly but methodically getting their country destroyed. What does Germany lighting money on fire funding this destruction do for German interests?
How does this solve their energy needs? It doesn't, it along with sanctions makes energy more expensive. Where they used to be able to buy all energy in Euro's, now some of these purchases now require buying Rubles. Thus Ruble exchange rate is up and Russia's trade surplus is growing.
Germany's alliance with NATO expansion and US meddling in Ukraine along with following US lead to cancel Nord Stream 2 is crushing their economy. Self-sanctioning out of Russian cheap energy supplies will further destroy their industrial output.
>hope it ends the war sooner
hope. That's all they have. It will only impoverish them sooner. Diversification of energy is a worthy goal, but it insane to do this now by first cutting off their primary cheap energy supply. First, continue to buy as much cheap energy as Russia will sell them (instead of selling it to the East). Then, cancel ESG green insanity and pursue oil/gas investments and nuclear expansion wherever possible. But at the end of the day if your neighbor wants to have good trade relations with you, you shouldn't throw that away in service to your "ally" across the ocean.
This is backwards, its not possible for Russia to win since Russia is having much more trouble with getting recruits and training them then Ukraine is and can't easily manufacture replacements for lost hardware while equivalents are being provided to Ukraine. The longer the war goes the worse it goes for Russia. Yes Ukraine faces death and destruction but the mood in Ukraine is a determination to keep fighting and Russia is incapable of inflicting enough damage to change that.
Russia was the one meddling in Ukraine, not the US, to Russia's detriment. They are the ones who have set Ukraine against them with their actions. Their actions have led to Finland and Sweden to apply to join NATO.
Based on Russia's actions its clear that Nord Stream 2 should never have been built
>But at the end of the day if your neighbor wants to have good trade relations with you, you shouldn't throw that away in service to your "ally" across the ocean.
Russia is not willing to have good trade relations with Germany. Decades of German politicians have bet on buying Russia's good or at least tolerable behavior through economic interdependence.
Russia made all of them into fools and proved their critics right.
This isn't about America. This is about the EU, about Poland and Czech Republic and Lithuania and Finland. And most of all this is about Germany. Russia is the one who threw it away and proved that Germany's interest was not to buy from Russia
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/02/germany-depend... (Germany has been forced to admit it was a terrible mistake to become so dependent on Russian oil and gas. So why did it happen?)
> In recent weeks even Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president, a totemic figure of the Social Democrats and greatest German advocate of the trade “bridge” between east and west, has recanted. He admits he misread Russia’s intentions as he pursued the construction of a new undersea gas pipeline. “My adherence to Nord Stream 2 was clearly a mistake,” he told German media in April. “We held on to bridges that Russia no longer believed in, and that our partners warned us about.” This is an extraordinary admission for a man who acted as chief of staff to Gerhard Schröder, the Social Democratic chancellor from 1998 to 2005 and thereafter a lavishly rewarded, and much reviled, lobbyist for Vladimir Putin. Steinmeier was also foreign minister under Chancellor Merkel, and a great evangelist for Wandel durch Handel, the concept that trade and dialogue can bring about social and political change.
My definition of winning is the same definition of winning war has had since the beginning of time: achieving one's political objectives.
Ukraine's political objectives are:
* To be in the strongest possible position at the peace table
* To get military and political support from the West against Russia during the conflict and after the conflict is over (EU membership, military protection from NATO if not NATO membership).
They are on track to achieve both.
Russia's political objective was clearly regime change, which miserably failed, and then control of Donbas, which they are struggling to achieve.
So, who's winning?
The only way Russia wins is if nonsense Russian talking points infest Western public opinion so much that we stop arming Ukraine.
The only place Ukraine is winning is in Western media.
Two months ago Russian forces controlled a greater fraction of the territory that they do now.
While wars are fundamentally unpredictable, most military experts agree that further Russian advances are extremely unlikely, and that the best result Russia can hope for is a stalemate along the front as it is right now.
Two months ago Russians were still trying to take Mariupol and Sievierodonetsk. The first one is now taken, and the second is almost taken.
> most military experts agree that further Russian advances are extremely unlikely
Most military experts you are reading maybe. Russia has been slowly and steadily continuing its advance.
You are making assertions all over the place and don't seem to care that you're getting assertion failures from all of them.
Yes, Russians didn't manage to take Kiev or Kharkiv. But that doesn't change the fact that they are making progress in the east and the south. Wars have more than one front.
https://www.reuters.com/world/putin-likely-still-wants-much-... And the thing is even if they conquer Donbas and declare victory that wont end the war since Ukraine will keep fighting to reclaim them.
Russia does not have what it takes to dissuade Ukraine from continuing to fight and they can't sustain the war effort as long, the longer the war goes the larger the Ukrainian military gets and the more hardware from the west it gets while Russia struggles with recruitment and military manufacturing under sanctions.
I know youtube videos from random people are rarely convincing but Perun has a really good one going step by step how Russia is unable to win this war just based on their difficulty with waging a long war. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2ptG1IxZ08
Russia's currency is stronger than before the conflict, their trade surplus is larger, they are making more money from elevated energy prices, they have and will have more territory.
Europe / Germany through stupid sanctions, and talk of more, against Russian energy have inflated energy prices and now have to purchase energy in Rubles after they confiscated Russian Euro and USD foreign exchange reserves. Whereas before they could purchase all in their own currency and were in talks to expand gas supplies through Nord Stream 2, now they've cancelled that project and on the margins have to buy Rubles to buy energy.
Prediction: The pain will increase on Europe and they will realize their bread is buttered in the east, they will come to the conclusion that positive trade relations with Russia, compared to the US are more advantageous and eventually they will approve Nord Stream 2. They will do everything they can to regain the ability to buy all or most energy and commodities from Russia in Euros, meaning ending sanctions and not expanding them.
Good video describing the geopolitical dynamics of European / Russian trade relations after the war ends in Russian victory: [0]
The problem comes from what they've decided to use their exports as leverage for.
Economic interests don't have to perfectly align for one nation's relationship and favor to be preferable over another.
Economic interests don't exist in a space devoid of cultural, ideological, or emotional ones.
Reaching the conclusion that relationships should be normalized is only truly ideal if you're viewing it: A) in an economic only vacuum and B) from a lens of maximizing Russia's resource based leverage, because that's all they have.
Russia has regularly ppl killed on european soil. Sometimes using chemical weapons that cause collateral damage.
Russia has an extensive propaganda and disinformation network running in europe.
Russia massively buys political influence by shopping for ex politicians, this way corrupting the political process.
Russia has a history of military conflicts with its neighbours, see occupation of Trnsnrista in moldowa, abchasia and south ossetia in georgia, the annihilation of chechnia, all the stuff in ukraine and helping belarusian dictator Lukachenko suppressing his people.
Looking at the levels of gas storage in europe by gazprom it is very obvious that its behaviour was not driven by good faith financial interests but as a weapon of the kremlin against europe.
And lets not forget the shooting down of MH17 where, not only did the russians deny any responsibility, they even clogged the public discourse with disinformation campaigns of tons of ridiculous and contradictory theories.
So, no it is not immensely in the interest of Germany to have good relations and continued trade with Russia as long as this regime is in power. Flood ukraine with heavy weapons till the russians are driven out. Then put up a new iron curtain till something substantial changes for the better.
It is not in US's interest to let EU keep trading with Russia
USA wants the EU to be their giant marketplace where they can sell their culture and products
USA also wants to weaken Russia so they can finally contain China North, East, West and South
Seems like you were sleeping the past century, blurry days ahead!
Russia's been blatantly assassinating people across Europe for years and would invade Poland in a second for personal pleasure even if it caused an economic loss for them again.
They haven't evolved past Mongol horde methods of living with their neighbors and are relying on everyone else always taking the "rational" result of appeasing them rather than fighting back. The correct response in this iterated game is to punish them and let their more productive people immigrate to you.
They haven't evolved past Far West horde methods of living with their neighbors, they are killing each other with firearms and countless death in schools
They let their people die, and their house burn because they have no money
They impose trade sanction to whoever doesn't want to knee and show their submission
They'll also impose their military base in your country [1]
Look at the evolution of Russia past 3 decades, and look how it has improved significantly, same can be said with China, they are barely in debt, what can be said about the USA? during that timeline
Ohhhh, yeah, the USA can trade with Saudi Arabia, no bid deal there ;)
But yeah they are good at seducing people, so the pill is easier to penetrate, i will give that to you
[1] https://news.cgtn.com/news/2022-05-16/Japanese-protest-U-S-m...
Have you noticed that literally nobody cares about this? Even the people we killed don’t care. Even Greenwald, who started this line of argument, doesn’t really care - he just hates Obama, he dropped it the second the next guy did it even more. (And Biden has completely stopped doing it.) Even you don’t care, you’re just doing whataboutism.
That’s because the ME countries aren’t actually allies just because they’re next to each other. More importantly, we don’t lie about it when asked, and we don’t use wacky spy methods like poison and radioactive weapons.
well, it's like saying people left SF because the grass is greener the other side of the country, not because it'll be a nuclear warzone
America is not a friend to Europe. We have no business joining America in a struggle against Russia.
We did warn then it was a bad idea. Other countries especially countries in Eastern EU warned them it was a bad idea. And lo and behold trying to bring peace through trade didn't work with Russia.
Unless Germany wants to exit the EU like the UK it does have to take the interests of other EU countries into account, many of them are much more anti Russia then America for obvious reasons. And even if Germany were to leave, not sanctioning Russia now would still be bad even if only considering German interests
>it was a bad idea
It isn't a bad idea. It's a very good idea for Europe. Cheap plentiful energy supply from your neighbor and expanded economic relations would be a very good thing for making Europe economy strong.
Sanctioning Russia is hurting Europe severely. They have massive gas and oil needs supplied by Europe. The sanctions hurt German industry and this energy cannot be replaced by other sources anywhere near similar prices or volumes
The question OP asked is why it matters to you that the company that owns the fab is not European? The local investment is what should matter, no?
But semiconductors is much much much more than high end CPUs. There’s totally a huge opportunity for local chip companies to grow. And having company like Intel may help, as people who work there will get a lot of know how that they can take to smaller local companies to help them grow.
Why? Intell lost the mobile, and is currently losing desktop/server. RISC-V is more promising each passing day. If India can do this, why can't Europe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31243674
Intel never really had the mobile market and was seemingly never particularly interested in it. They are currently heavily pressured by AMD and ARM based cpus both in the consumer and server markets.
India is hoping it can convince Intel and TSMC to set up fabs in the country as part of their multibillion-dollar manufacturing expansion blueprint.
Bloomberg reported Tuesday that India's government is making pitches to both companies, backed with a $10 billion subsidy plan that can be used to cover up to half of the cost of a new chipmaking plant. The plan also covers new plants for display manufacturers.
By the time any incumbent in Germany would be ready, even assuming they start right now, that fab will be heavily outdated.
But there’s literally bazillion other semiconductors (and they are the main reason for the shortage, not high end CPUs) that you can competitively manufacture and increase supply chain locality for critical components.
They do only care about short term profit. They triggered the chip crisis in Germany by stopping there orders and then restocking. I am not sure if any government can fix this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Fab
"The X-FAB Silicon Foundries is a German group of semiconductor foundries, with headquarters in Erfurt (X-FAB Semiconductor Foundries AG is located in the south east industrial area between Melchendorf and Windischholzhausen). The group specializes in the fabrication of analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits for fabless semiconductor companies, as well as MEMS and solutions for high voltage applications."
And:
https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2021/03/apple-to-invest-ov...
"Apple will invest over 1 billion euros in Germany and plans European Silicon Design Center in Munich"
How about the three fabs that Bosch has in Germany? Or Infineon, X-Fab, Globalfoundries, TI, Prema, Elmos (now Siltech), Vishay, Nexperia?
[1] https://on5g.es/en/ec-sets-targets-for-european-digital-sove...
Germany already has advance chip fabrication - see Global Foundries (formerly AMD fab). It's not EUV, but even Intel still needs to figure out how to make those chips.
It's about building an ecosystem, much like SV. People on HN of all places should know this.
I didn't read anything good about working for Intel.
This is why they have changed the top management, and are changing internally, as much as I can judge by the press.
As an American, would I (hypothetically) rather have a Germany company building F-35s in the US than an American defense contractor building F-35s in Indonesia? I think the answer is obviously "yes".
How does germany funding a foreign/non-german company's fab part of national security? What about expelling a foreign occupying force? If the germans cared about national security, shouldn't they be looking in that first?
If germany was funding a german company's fab, it would be national security. What germany is doing is paying tribute to a dominating foreign empire. No different than india sending their goods to britain during the colonial period.
Besides which, it’s extremely common for entities to invest in mutually beneficial agreements with other entities.
It gives the ruling class a mechanism to excuse war crimes of our supposed "allies" and drop bombs on supposed "enemies" for perceived minor infractions.
But I think it’s the quality of response the parent deserved, given their ridiculously hyperbolic framing of “a foreign occupying force”.
An ally doesn't firebomb a nation, murder thousands of innocent people and forcibly occupy it. Germany is a vassal.
> In fact, I believe “German” is the largest ancestry group in the US.
Who cares? We are not a german nation. We are an anglo nation. Germans don't have much political power in the US. If they did, we would have been allied with germany during ww2.
The state we occupied doesn't exist anymore unless you think we're going to re-invade Germany and Japan from our bases there.
No. Australians think they are british.
> We're a German nation that thinks we're British.
No. We are an anglo nation. We speaking german right now? Don't think so.
> The state we occupied doesn't exist anymore unless you think we're going to re-invade Germany and Japan from our bases there.
Re-invade? For what? We already are occupying them.
Yours is the most bizarre and nonsensical comment I've read in a while.
*looks over at Ukraine*
Yes, I'm sure the Germans are eager to expel American troops right now.
What? It's only wrong for russia to occupy a foreign nation?
> Yes, I'm sure the Germans are eager to expel American troops right now.
If the germans were smart, they'd take this as an opportunity to liberate themselves. Besides what do they care? Trading one foreign master for another.
Stock buybacks are a simple standard way to distribute company profit to it's owners (alternative options are dividends, retaining the profits in the balance sheet, or reinvesting them). This is decided by Intel's management and overseen by the board who represent the interest of the stock owners (who are widely dispersed and include lots of pension funds of commoners, not just billionaire fatcats).
The EU by way of the European Commission appears to have decided that it's of strategic interest to subsidize Intel fabs as a way to induce them to build in Europe, as opposed to Asia (which according to Intel is 30%-40% cheaper). The European middle class is not "bailing out" anyone here.
If you want to rant, a better starting point IMO is to 1) contemplate whether the European Commission is acting in the interest of the German/European citizen (and if not, how to fix this democratic deficit) 2) check if Intel's claims are truthful, and if so, why Asia is so much cheaper and whether that is worth doing something about that
In any case, I don't see what Intel's stock buybacks has to do with European taxation and inflation in this case.
A better example for wasteful subsidies may be the competition for their new HQ Amazon ran between US cities, only to place it where they wanted to go in the first place. There, as well as in the Intel case, a deal prohibiting competition by subsidy would be in everyone's interest.
Notice all the zeroes https://www.intc.com/stock-info/dividends-and-buybacks
Also, "Upcoming Dividends: There are no future dividends presently declared for INTC as of Jun 7th, 2022. The declaration and payment of dividends are at the discretion of the Company."
I suppose one could argue that they shouldn't have done that in the quarters before now but they are where they are.
https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/INTC/dividends/history edit: added history
Germany's negative interest rates indicate they haven't been spending nearly enough, though.
Plugging this into Excel, you get the following distribution:
Country Count:
China 156 Japan 40 US 30 Taiwan 26 South Korea 23 Vietnam 21 Malaysia 15 Philippines 15 Thailand 15 Singapore 14 India 9 Germany 8 United Kingdom 4 Austria 3 Mexico 3 Belgium 2 Brazil 2 Czech Republic 2 France 2 Indonesia 2 Australia 1 Cambodia 1 Costa Rica 1 Finland 1 Ireland 1 Israel 1 Italy 1 Malta 1 Netherlands 1 Norway 1
apologies for the formatting.
China 156
Japan 40
US 30
Taiwan 26
South Korea 23
Vietnam 21
Malaysia 15
Philippines 15
Thailand 15
Singapore 14
India 9
Germany 8
United Kingdom 4
Austria 3
Mexico 3
Belgium 2
Brazil 2
Czech Republic 2
France 2
Indonesia 2
Australia 1
Cambodia 1
Costa Rica 1
Finland 1
Ireland 1
Israel 1
Italy 1
Malta 1
Netherlands 1
Norway 1Strategically, you want the semi jobs to seed local expertise.
Mercedes got $260m in Alabama in the early 1990s, BMW got $150m in South Carolina in the early 1990s, Volkswagen got $570m in the late 2000s in Tennessee. That's close to $1.6 billion inflation adjusted from just three examples of it.
The US economy is six times the size of Germany's economy, so those are massive subsidies in relation.
It’s not like there is such a large choice of companies if you want to be able to produce chips in Europe.
For example, America has a habit of forcing American companies to push American foreign policy. For example: Google dropping Huawei.
They don't even have all of the x86 market. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/335650-amd-achieves-al...
That's false. For USA to be able to block exports of the technology, more than 25% (if I remember correctly) of parts has to be of US origin. When the EUV program started, the share of US technology was much higher, but as the program progressed, it was diluted.
USA could still block sale of EUV machines, by refusing export/licensing of critical components, but they'd have to change their laws first.
Fact is that ASML voluntarily chose to block exports to China. In part because they want to keep good relations with USA. It's the US that funded the EUV program in the beginning after all. But I'm sure ASML was tired of China copying their stuff too, so it probably wasn't hard to convince them.
And the US does the same thing in terms of tax breaks for German automotive companies building manufacturing plants.
Which again, makes sense, because you want to make sure you have manufacturing across continents in case Russia invades Germany and blows up all of the auto plants (for example).
The best Russia could do is bomb Germany from a distance, which could pose a small threat to valuable infrastructure like fabs.
The origin of the company is irrelevant if they respect basic norms.
How exactly is "intel" a monopoly when Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is also American?
This is not correct. American govenment has a habit of using American companies to push foreign policy objectives.
but they'll bring CPU/Semico talent to germany and other eu countries
then with talent you can start building your own start ups, dont ya?
As we've seen with Iraq and many other times, trying to stop internal genocide is not really doable.
American/Italian and agreed.
Though I worry what will happen is they just spin up plants in the various totalitarian states of SE Asia in parallel.
(Eg: Vietnam is communist, Thailand is a kingdom, on the ground they are allegedly very similar, but I haven't been to either personally.)
Or, if the Taiwan and Korean foundries are the best on the planet, everyone should contribute to the international stability it takes to maintain access to those resources. Almost every part of the tech industry benefits from global low-friction trade.
Brexit regret is a solid majority opinion in the UK. The US recently lowered trade barriers to solar panels from China. Hopefully sanity prevails. While it is possible to overdo the offshoring and JIT inventories, increased trade volume makes everyone more prosperous.
The most economical solution is to hand virtually all industrial expertise and capacity to China, who not coincidentally massively subsidizes its industrial base. China's government puts its thumb on the scale. Not doing the same is unilateral disarmament.
What a government needs to do to attract real manufacturing entrepreneurs:
- pro family policies (for people)
- pro immigration (for people)
- cut environmental laws (for capex make-right)
- cut business taxes (for gm make-right)
- cut personal taxes (for people)
- fight back against china-sponsored economic maneuvering at the multilateral level (to create a competitive market)
I'm with you on all but this. Cleaning up the environment is a very expensive, time consuming process. There's still about 20 superfund sites in Santa Clara County due to its heyday of tech manufacturing.
Our local community has been fighting for the cleanup of a 60 year old disaster. That they agreed to clean up 20 years ago. But they've barely started.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-13/korea-unv... [1 Non paywalled]: https://archive.ph/9Gs8q
> pro family policies (for people); cut personal taxes (for people)
For those old (or well-read enough in history) enough to have a sense of just how dominant Germany once was, world-wide, in science, technology, chemistry, optics, etc. etc....this news feels kinda like a tombstone of German identity.
They're still have world leaders in power semiconductors with Bosch and Infineon.
This isn't the only fab in Germany btw. Global Foundries has a fab in Dresden doing advanced low-power FDSOI ICs.
You can't expect a single country to lead a majority of technical fields forever. That's unrealistic. I'd say Germany is doing completely fine.
And in case you want to do something larger there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KfW which at least gives you loans.
[0]https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2013-11/agrarreform-landwirts...
[0] https://www.iamexpat.de/career/entrepreneur-germany/start-up...
[1]
Imagine you got given subsidies to live somewhere. I'm not talking about your wages - I'm talking about something extra. Well that is a direct equivalent here.
How any governance structure can think this is ok boggles the mind.
Is it not clear how we already live in a fascist state - where government + corporations are working together at the people's expense?
$5.5 billion.
Do you think there are better ways to do this within capitalism or are you proposing we dismantle capitalism?
In some countries capitalism simply works the opposite way.
Or are companies telling companies what they want?
Why do we have a situation where companies have so much and are given so much, and the people have so little. But pay for government largesse.
If you ask me, Intel and all those companies should never have grown so large. But, if you have to spend that money, why not use it to create a genuine home grown solution? Where is the German Intel? Wouldn't a German Intel provide the resilience you really want?
I don’t disagree with you that companies are given so much and have so much. I just wonder if it’s idealistic to think it’s easy to just “create your own intel”. Maybe not it’s not like Intel is without competitors. But just like the Plumber example, even if it’s not about the money, do they want to spend the time on developing a skill that may not be one of their core competencies? It’s not that I don’t get where you’re coming from ideologically, I’m just not sure where you’re coming from practically. But I’m no expert, maybe they should try!
Its pretty equivalent to food and energy security, I'd say.
Why it isn't a major concern, I don't know.
[1]:https://www.techspot.com/news/94856-economist-china-must-sei...
What kind of skillset is needed there?
Couldn't Volkswagen build their own foundation for a sovereign and independent ecosystem?
Fine it out of Google, give it to Intel.
Still, two nice fabs would be cooler than twitter.
And before the chip hipsters crawl all over my back to prove we ackshually have a powerful domestic semi industry, please name me another EU company, other than ASML (a company 90% of people here never heard of before the chip shortage), that has the same margins, dominance and ability to shape the market, as much as the US based Intel, Quallcomm, AMD, Nvidia, Apple. I'll wait.
The thing is, other than ASML, most of our domestic semi companies (NXP, ST, Ericsson, Nordic, Infineon, Bosch, AMS, etc.) are only competing for relatively low margin chips with high competition, therefore bring home relatively little money, compared to their US counterparts which have monopolized high margin sectors (general compute, AI, graphics, etc) and rake in the big bucks.
Don't get me wrong, it's great we have our own semi industry, and we make great chips to boot, but I wish we could do more high margin products, as Chinese companies are hot on our heels with massive support from their government.
Remember the failed attempt from the merger of ST-Ericsson to take on QUALCOMM's ARM Snapdragon SoCs and modems in the mobile space 10 years ago? I was talking to a former Dutch manager who had a stint there and his reply dropped my jaw: "Yeah, that merger was never meant to ship any chips that can beat Quallcomm, it was just a vehicle designed to suck up as money as possible and funnel it into the right pockets, while some managers pad their resumes so they can move up at other companies later."
Source: Former EU semi engineer.
"TSMC, Samsung want slice of America's $52b chip subsidies" -- https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/28/tsmc_samsung_chip_sub...
"Intel and Micron pushing hard for subsidies from the US government" -- https://www.pcgamer.com/intel-and-micron-pushing-hard-for-su...
"Subsidy Tracker: Intel" -- https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/intel
"Intel boss presses Congress for manufacturing subsidies" -- https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/24/intel_chips_subsidy/
And what is wrong with Europe propping up a US company? You shifted the goal post from your original comment ("When will we ever learn to build up our domestic tech industry?"). I showed you that the US is doing exactly that, and now you jump to some other argument.
And, in the event of a US/German war, that plant is and will remain German, not American.
I think there's an excellent case for distinguishing that from companies from China, where non-Chinese citizens have a great risk of confiscation of their assets by investing, Chinese companies are subject to a lot of other rules even when operating outside China, etc.
Of course it matters. The profit goes in the direction of headquarters, tax is paid in the country of headquarters, and the government of the country of headquarters has much bigger influence to the company.
Tax havens have something to say about that.
The French semi giant, ST, is financially incorporated in the Netherlands (STMicroelectronics N.V.), as is the French giant Airbus (Airbus Group N.V.).
There seems to be a pattern here. It's almost as if companies don't want to pay taxes, regardless if it's their home country.
That's a recurring issue for France because they are not business-friendly. It's not even a question of being a tax-heaven (the Netherlands are not) but simply to make everything unduly complex and costly. We've also seen that following Brexit: Banks would move from London to Paris! Err, no they didn't move or moved to Amsterdam...
I disagree with that characterisation, doing business in France is not that complex. Amsterdam has a giant advantage though - the English language is widely spoken and accepted, which really isn't the case in Paris. If an international organisation is looking to move from London, Amsterdam makes much more sense than Paris, even if we disregard the taxes side of things.
It's complex and costly enough enough that France keeps losing out. It's ridiculous, really, because there is no good reason for this. It's a mix of lack of self-awareness and ideology.
France is not an isolated case, though. Many countries are like that, sadly.
Respectfully disagree. The current president, who was just reelected, literally won his first campaign on "i'll improve things for business, make it easier, enable startups, optimise government expenditures". And he enacted many business-oriented reforms that have enabled quite a startup boom ( for the French and EU standards, of course it's nowhere close to the US due to a myriad of factors like available financing). There's awareness of the challenges, and what ideology would that be?
Ideology, well just with my comments here many would label me 'liberal', which in France is borderline derogatory for some people with the meaning of 'free market capitalist bent on exploiting the working-class', simply for stating that there may be no need for millions of civil servants, myriads of taxes, and red tape for everything... the far left dominates the left at the moment, after all.
Self-awareness because many people in France do not even realise this or how simple things could be. For instance, the 'attestation' people needed to fill in to leave their homes during Covid lockdowns. From abroad it looked like pointless red tape madness, while in France someone obviously seriously thought that was a good idea and they were very serious about it.
Airbus are not a French giant. They're the result of a merger of Spanish, French, German and British aircraft companies. The HQ of Airbus civil aircraft is in France, but for Military aircraft it's in Spain, for helicopters it's in Germany. Wings are made in the UK. There are factories all over those places ( which presents unique challenges in terms of logistics, there's a lot of material out there on how they handle shipping various parts to the correct factory for final assembly, it's fascinating).
The Netherlands is a nice neutral location ( of course with a good tax regime and simple corporate structures) to have the registration.
I agree that China impacts its companies beyond its borders, but the US government does not. The US government has enough trouble regulating the US operations of US companies,
Unless you bribe someone. They seem to actually care about that.
Unless you think Intel will refuse to do business with a European company vs a US one.
Whether or not that extremely ideal scenario actually happens remains to be seen.
This is just Germany paying Intel to make unreasonable business decision reasonable.
These things usually happen for strategic reasons. For example, it could be possible that from purely business perspective it's the best to produce all the food in Africa, Russia or China but this leaves EU vulnerable to stuff going on in these places or conflicts with them, therefore you have common agriculture policy and food import-export controls.
The decision makers probably decided that completely relying on foreign IC supply is a risk they cannot afford, therefore they will pay to make it fixed. I wouldn't be surprised if EU also chips in.
Bosch and Infinion have the fabs there
Then maybe they should compete? (though those are not small companies - and with most products that are not as popular with Intel but are popular in other areas)
I think they missed the ARM boat, possibly. But they should go and ask for a slice of that money.
There isn't any. That's because EU taxes and regulations make running a large-scale business less attractive - and because there really is no market for another big-chip manufacturer; if you want to break into that segment (even if it was a 'fair' market), the only way to compete is on the price, and that China can do better.
XFAB-specialty fab in germany
I have some confidence that the EU would set favourable terms for given the level of investment.
Many of these mega-companies are publicly listed. Norway alone owns a significant amount of stock in some of these companies. I'm not sure we have a problem. But I'm not gonna complain about trying to change this and get giant high-margin tech company going here in Europe. I'm just not sure how to do it.
No, but do you really have a choice? When you're selling tech products, you're competing on the international market, against everyone, including USA and China. If you work 35h/week and you get outmatched by a team who worked 60h/week, the end user will not care, they go for the best one, and the others loose. That's how international competition works.
And if they can deliver a better product at a cheaper price, they get the customers. The customers don't care if the devs who worked on that product are from US, China, or Europe and if they worked 35h/week or 60+.
That's why Europe is so underrepresented in big-tech internationally and the biggest wealthiest European companies are fashion related(LVMH) where the selling point is the name brand without any substance. That's why EU has not developed the iPhone and why Nokia, Ericsson, Sagem, Alcatel are gone from the mobile space.
Not sure market cap is really the metric here (and only 2 of the top 10 are currently fashion related, the rest is pharma, semiconductor, food, ecommerce, banking, etc.), since those can be easily inflated to completely unreasonable levels and are more an indicator of marketing success than anything else. Maybe take a look at the export statistics and you'll find machines and chemicals taking up a very large fraction.
However much more interesting is how much of the global economy depends on certain companies: Siemens automation (larger market share than the next two competitors combined). Chemicals - BASF is currently the largest chemical producer in the world (with also the largest chemical production complex in the world being located in Germany). Semiconductors - Without ASML, Zeiss and Trumpf (nevermind all the chemical companies) you will have a hard time producing the chips in your iPhone or any modern desktop/laptop. No matter how much I am not a fan, but SAP might also be of relevance in a few companies..
Also Nokia and Ericsson are not gone from the mobile space, they just focus more on the backend stuff. So while your phone might no longer be from them, there is a decent chance that your phone will be talking to a Nokia or Ericsson device over the air (especially since Huawei hit a bit of a snag in the US and parts of the EU).
with them you'll be able to build start ups, etc.
The rich get richer and stay rich. It's hard not to get cynical about the fact that the whole of Europe is working so that a couple of countries ensure their continuing wealth.
That being said, I do agree that paying 5.5bn of taxpayers money to foreign tech is silly. Such money can be easily used in investing local companies which will provide more employement and ROI to Germany.
And for nuclear, IMO „nuclear phobia“ was financed from the same pockets as sea pipeline.
Not to mention in the case of Germany, Russia's army would be obliterated by NATO if the warfare was purely conventional.
Same for China. It was contained for some time. Then West propped up China via trade and now China is starting to flex it's muscles.
It goes like this: EU gives billions of dollars to EU national governments but with many strings attached -> an important part of those strings is related to digitisation -> the EU national governments redirect the money they received from Brussels to digitisation implementations -> US tech companies get even more wealthy, as there's almost no local European competitor that can compete when it comes to the cloud, hardware and even software (just think of all the EU funds that will go almost directly to paying Oracle licenses).
Similar thing happens with re-directing EU money into China's coffers, as most of the EV batteries are now produced in China and there's a big push at the EU level for us, EU, citizens, to purchase EVs.
The issue with there being no good local competitors is a more fundamental one-- it's extremely difficult to spin up a viable tech business in the EU, period. In part, this boils down to regulatory issues including tech companies needing to abide by a myriad of complex regulations but also things like fairly costly labor regulations.
Why intel??? Why not ASML???
Even if they were both in the same business, it's not like ordering whichever brand you want from Amazon. If ASML wants to build something in Germany, they will, and Germany can incentivize that, but it's still up to them. Germany can't just tell them to do it anyway.
Is this a joke?
The Xilinx devices above are also FPGAs with ARM cores (a natural evolution from FPGAs with soft cores, MicroBlaze in the case of Xilinx and Nios in the case of Altera).
Microsoft first needs to recapture their developers. They still have those that target their platform with Visual C++.
The form factor might change. We might go from a large box to a docking station for a tablet or laptop, but the mouse + keyboard + monitor(s) is never going away.
At that point, might as well start my dream recycling business where we desolder, test everything and sell them as parts. They do it in China at scale, why not Europe... Main question is, would there be enough buyers? Small repair shops are also dying...
Microsoft partnered with Qualcomm 6 years ago and there have been a number of terrible systems released. You probably haven't heard of them because of how bad they are. If there's any progress for Windows+ARM, it's really from Qualcomm's exclusive agreement expiring. They're hyping the Nuvia team right now, but Qualcomm's track record is ridiculously bad, and there's a bit more work involved here than incanting "ARM".
Economic ties also foster greater cultural exchange and understanding, so the less of those there are the insular and navel-gazing the inhabitants of such countries will tend to be, which will also increase the likelihood of conflict as people tend to fear those who they aren't in close contact with and don't understand.
As bad as the world is today, it'll get much worse as countries isolate.
Do you know who was the biggest trading partner of Nazi Germany on the eve of Operation Barbarossa? You guessed it, the Soviet Union. It was responsible for the vast majority of imports of critical resources like various metals, oil, grain, etc. It didn't stop Hitler.
Do you know who were the main buyers of Russian gas, and via which country that gas arrives to them? You guessed it, EU, and the main pipelines pass through Ukraine.
On paper, yes, you're absolutely right. But you're assuming rationality where it's far from certain. Same as in the 1930s, we have a bunch of empty populists everywhere who are anything but rational, intent on blaming everything bad on "bad guys of today", be it the EU, migrants, Soros, the Jews, Nazis, have your pick. With those types of people, you can't assume rationality of actions. Brexit wasn't a rational decision, to give but one example. Poland infringing on press and human freedoms against the will of the EU, while receiving billions of aid from the EU, isn't rational.
Is interconnection perfect? obviously not. Does interconnection prevent more conflicts vs fully independent nations? Likely yes.
I think what we are seeing is societies and governments forgetting how bad wars are for stability, on a backdrop of slowing or reversing quality of life for many modern nations.
I actually wish more nations provided for a youth international travel trip as part of a high school post grad type public benefit. I think it would do a lot for long term peace in the world. It would be better if money weren't the primary driver for so much.
And it's not sufficient. Most people will buy products imported from China without ever interacting with Chinese people (or their culture) and Chinese will export products to the rest of the world without ever interacting with foreign cultures and their ideas and viewpoints. Tell me how a gas pipeline between Russia and Germany helped build ties between the citizens of either country, aside from the politicians who got rich off of it and turned into apologists.
No, an inverse relation between propensity of dyads to go to war and their degree of trade integration wouldn't be hard to prove, if it were true.
No, it's not. Wars between major trading partners aren't historically uncommon at all.
> When countries are completely independent of each other they will be able to more easily shrug off economic consequences of their aggression.
When countries (particularly those toward opposite ends of the extraction -> intermediate goods -> finished goods -> finance & services spectrum) are integrated with trade, it produces durable inequalities through ricardian specialization and strong resentments that are either subjugating through imperial domination, mollified through political union and welfare policies, or expressed in war. Sometimes the latter even after the former through political union.
Leaving them in a perpetual "developing" state, unless they smarten up, which is really hard without all the smart people that left, and even harder because the people in power are more than happy to keep things as they are because they get paid for it.