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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

I wrote here years ago that it is in every countries best interest to do the following: 1. Be able to fab chips required to run their infrastructure (business and military). 2. Either have a home grown commercial operating system, or their own Linux distro and required application software. 3. Maintain their own unique culture and arts. 4. Have some degree of food independence, even if it is an emergency only limited meat diet.

Small countries can only partially achieve this level of independence, but all countries should try. I think the world is even more beautiful with more diversity.

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There would also be more wars. One of the big changes in the 20th century is that now every country is interdependent on every other, so going to war is even more costly for both sides, being cut off from half the world's supply chains.

If you draw a chart of percentage of all humans alive who die in war, there is a sudden dropoff around 1900.

> There would also be more wars. One of the big changes in the 20th century is that now every country is interdependent on every other, so going to war is even more costly for both sides, being cut off from half the world's supply chains.

This is often repeated, and I believed it myself in the past as being self-evident, but the Russia/Ukraine war has changed my mind. Russia was selling gas, the west was buying gas. Other countries produced e.g. iPhones and Russians were buying them. It seemed to be a classic case of a situation where everyone loses if there's war, but yet the war happened anyway.

> if there's war, but yet the war happened anyway.

That doesen't mean that 10 additional wars wouldn't have happened otherwise. It's a bit like saying that safety standards don't matter because people still die in car crashes.

Of course, you're right in a way. For the system to work you have to assume that states are governed by rational actors and that their citizens prefer having access to iPhones and other foreign goods (and not destroying their economy in general) over "fighting nazis/homosexuals/{insert idiotic thing}"...

Russia's current account surplus finally became negative in the last few months so if that continues and their currency continues crashing, hopefully living standards for ordinary Russians will start decreasing at a faster pace and maybe they'll start thinking about regime change.

Then again 2x more deaths during a single years than throughout the entire 10 year long war in Afghanistan didn't bother them to much so who knows...

> This is often repeated, and I believed it myself in the past as being self-evident, but the Russia/Ukraine war has changed my mind. Russia was selling gas, the west was buying gas. Other countries produced e.g. iPhones and Russians were buying them. It seemed to be a classic case of a situation where everyone loses if there's war, but yet the war happened anyway.

I think you will find that this was an actual example until out outright invasion was made, because since 2014 the EU was buying gas (to the major benefit of Germany) while the US and UK who signed the Budapest Memorandum looked the other way in order to keep 'business as usual' going in the EU while hand-waving about the whole thing.

Putin made the grave mistake that the West would capitulate to this once more and Kyiv would fall, instead it finally unified the West to finally see the threat for what it always was (Russia has invaded or outright attacked nations 7 times since '99).

What you saw was the deterrence taking place, you probably just didn't realize how detrimental it was because you measured it's success in iphone sales rather than total casualties and displaced people (look at how Syria kicked off the current diaspora out of the ME and Africa).

Personally speaking, Globalization did work to a limited extent for a while but the issue is that the Western powers enabled their corps to hallow out their domestic manufacturing Industry/workforce and benefit from labour/regulatory arbitrage and allowed it to have record profits: it ultimately funded these despots who felt all to comfortable relying on Western greed and fecklessness when it came to geopolitics.

Cheap trinkets from China aren't worth living in a World with a nuclear capable despot thinking he can kick off WW3 if we don't indulge them at anytime because we rely on them for a broken supply chain, and it never was worth it despite the ability to rationalize this Stockholm Syndrome so many are under.

Russia is not that great an example because they don't actually manufacture anything at all that we'd miss, and we can quickly get gas and oil from elsewhere (and have done so).

The Chinese and US economies are far more inter-dependent and the Chinese understand that war is unthinkable -- are are very annoyed at Russia.

The Western response to Ukraine has also put China off the notion that they could quietly take Taiwan without anyone making a fuss.

But this is very far from RISC-V.

China has long since (5+ years) taken everything from RISC-V initially done in the West that there is to take. The ISA specification itself, gcc and llvm and Linux and things like that. It is far too late to change that. They have local git clones.

At present China is contributing more to RISC-V than anyone else. For example they are doing almost all work on Android and all the parts that go into that, including things such as the Chromium browser.

All their improvements go into public repositories that the rest of the world can access.

Companies such as WCH and THead and StarFive are also at the forefront of RISC-V cores and chips that normal people can actually buy. WCH's $0.10 microcontrollers are really great (as are their $0.50 and $1.00 chips). THead's C910 core is not only in the highest performance RISC-V SoCs (TH1520, SG2042) and boards you can buy right now, it is also open source (https://github.com/T-head-Semi/openc910) with a permissive license so anyone can audit it, or take the design as a starting point. StarFive's "Dubhe" core will probably be available on SBCs in the next 6-12 months, and will be similar to Rockchip's RK3588, currently the fastest ARM chip available on SBCs.

> Russia is not that great an example because they don't actually manufacture anything at all that we'd miss, and we can quickly get gas and oil from elsewhere (and have done so).

'We' as in the US, sure,I'm sure the US backed this as much as they have because of projected earning in supplying mainland Europe with natural gas as opposed to Gazprom. Europe however was incredibly reliant on Russia, even though N. Africa and the Middle East could offset the demand in time it was something that could only be done with such a drastic as this took place with the US filling the gaps in between.

As for teh US v China dilemma: personally speaking that has come at too great a cost, the fact that they black-mailed the West during COVID for PPE shows that Xi will not consider them as equal partners, and will do anything to disrupt them if he feels it is in his best interest. China ha a myriad of advantages of other nations because it was the nation the West outsourced most to for high tech to low tech. There is no question that this will be a hard tranistion, but it is one that has to be made: Evergrande collapsing was 2 years in the making, everyone knew from the outcry from domestic retail side that it had gone belly up and instead of trying to rectify the situation, tear gas and beatings were used to quell uprisings of it and other banks. I fully expect more inflation from China to be made to prop up there already crumbling economy and unless the West wants to remain in this subservient role for critical goods it must act now when China is more focused on Domestic issues than at any other time since the Industrialization of the mainland.

I don't profess to know every minute detail of the chips you mentioned, but if it is in fact in the public domain and the Inflation Reduction act has made enough concession to make fabs in the US with international partners (LG/Samsung) than the only thing waiting is to put this all in motion. Economies of scale will be an issue, and perhaps this will be the reason we revert the planned obsolescence built into every device coming from China. That alone would be a step in the right direction in my view.

> 'We' as in the US

I'm not in or from the US. I did once (2019-2020) spend 11 months officially living in the US, though even that was broken up by two 1-2 week trips to Christchurch and Moscow.

When I say "we can quickly get gas and oil from elsewhere" I am, obviously, meaning "we" as Europe. Sure, it was a scramble, but it was done, and contrary to Russian propaganda a year ago, no one in Europe went cold last winter.

> I'm sure the US backed this as much as they have because of projected earning in supplying mainland Europe with natural gas

I don't really care why the US tells themselves they are backing Ukraine. It's simply the right thing to do.

Firstly because Ukraine has been making a very serious attempt to follow the paths of countries such as Poland and Czechia who were lucky to get leaders of the calibre of Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel right after the end of the Soviet Union. Ukraine wasn't so lucky in the 90s. It's even harder to do now, but they've been doing it, electing better leaders, rooting out corruption, choosing their own friends. That's what Putin can't stand.

Secondly, and more importantly, because Putin should have been called out for his shit a lot sooner, not appeased. It was hard to do something about the Chechan wars as that is internal to Russia, but serious steps should have been taken after the invasion of Georgia in 2008, at the latest.

One exception does not make the theory untrue. Consider sworn enemies like China and the US still trading with each other despite their soured relationship.

And seeing how Russia has been severely weakened by Putin’s imperialist tendencies, other countries would be wary of repeating the same thing.

Taiwan is a very real concern, and China makes non-trivial efforts to prep for an invasion.

The middle east exploded after the Arab Spring, and major conflicts are popping off in Ethiopia, Sudan, and now Niger.

China would much prefer taking over Taiwan peacefully, constant threat of invasion while increasing trade ties between both countries make it more likely.

As long as China is a credible threat Taiwan will never declare independence. That doesen't mean there is a real of an actual invasion as long as everyone knows that.

It isn't trade that keeps the peace, it's MAD and the United States policing the seas.

And in the century that followed 1900, history's first two world wars occured.

If anything, interdependence creates more destructive wars because countries group themselves into (global) blocs who now go to war.

War is the most costly when a government cannot fund it through debt and inflation. Nations used to go bankrupt waging war when precious metals were money. Now, they can defer the financial consequences approximately indefinitely, at least until we discover the straw the breaks the camel's back (IMO this is when debt servicing cost overtakes all other expenses and starts to consume more wealth than economic output).

I don't know why people mention precious metals as "harbingers of peace". What happened in the Roman empire is that private citizens assembled their own armies instead to usurp the emperor, repeatedly, several dozen times. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracks_emperor

The Romans still physically debased their money, and in the late Western empire, this was a strong contributor to its inability to hold onto its military units as citizens and barbarians became increasingly unwilling to accept denarii as pay. Thus, the erosion of its authority and the rise of barracks emperors.

I should note that much later in the Eastern empire, after a long period of wallowing in inflation, corruption, and an ineffectual army, Anastasius I reformed the monetary system by refining the purities (and thus supplies) of coinage, which allowed him to clamp down on the state's accounting and tighten up the army.

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

I would love to see this chart, as I doubt that’s at all accurate considering how many died in the two world wars.

Mostly due to vaccines.

Wasn't WWI the first war in which more soldiers died from trauma than disease?

Its nonsense and totally unnecessary and wasteful for every country to try this.

An IC fabrication machine (+ cleanroom around it) doesn't get more efficient if you heap 100 of 'm together.

Sure there's economies of scale. But @ some point you get diminishing returns, where many-billion $ investment is needed to eek out another few % of margin.

And if latest tech is too high a bar: older process nodes are simpler / cheaper. No reason a country of 10M+ can't have a few of their own to manufacture uC, automotive chips, jellybean stuff like opamps, etc. And don't forget supply line issues like shipping IC's across the world just to package them. Just wasteful.

Having only the very latest tech made elsewhere, would be a good start.

Agree with 2/3/4 of OP. Not always possible, but should be tried.

this idea is so tremendously disconnected from the actual force of movement every day that makes up the changing nation-states for the last three thousand years.. ending with a beneficial wish. it almost indicates a single brilliant mind is actually pretty-useless when it comes to daily practical trade.

Yes, but this runs against everything the globalisation movement of the last 50 years wants

> I wrote here years ago that it is in every countries best interest to do the following:

Been saying the same thing myself. Every major company should own their own tech, media, etc stack. They should ban all competitors until they have their own homegrown champion. When india banned tiktok, I praised it thinking india will also ban facebook, google, twitter, etc in order to establish their own social media and tech ecosystem. Instead, the indian leadership just handed their social media space to facebook. China talked big about developing their own operating system, but seems to have limited it only to the public sector while microsoft, google and apple dominate the private sector. And lets not get started with the EU. Even though it's not a country, but the lack of participation by any european country in any major tech development of the past few decades is embarrassing.

> Small countries can only partially achieve this level of independence, but all countries should try.

Small to mid sized countries should form blocs of some kind to achieve some kind of independence.

> I think the world is even more beautiful with more diversity.

Exactly. What I despise are those who claim to support diversity while demanding everyone speak the same language, adhere to the same 'values', partake in the same culture, etc.

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