Hacker News Reader

Comment by deadbabe | Hacker News Reader

I don’t get the doom and gloom, isn’t this just taking us back to before the CHIPS act, 2022? Weren’t we fine then?

No, the CHIPs act was a direct result of Covid-19 highlighting the fact that we do not posses the ability to produce the amount of chips required by both private companies and federal agencies. When trade from China basically stopped, companies were scrambling to source the chips required to continue production. CHIPs was an attempt to solve that. What if the next emergency is not a natural disaster, but a consequence of wartime action. Our weapons needs those chips.

If that happens, the govt will commandeer all the Big Tech data centers, and strip-mine them for gpus to stick inside weapons.

Kinda-sorta like how car factories were repurposed to produce military aircraft during World War II.

I think it'll be ironic if things come to that -- NVidia unable to get fresh silicon, and scads of them sitting around, powering LLMs... we could see amazing shenanigans where certain folks cut deals (cough graft cough) to get to keep most of their gpus, while others get liquidated, and implode.

And you think that's acceptable and our only play being desperation looting of our economy is a "fine" place to be?

That is a befuddling naive take. Why make any progress at any point if we were fine before that progress? As many things should be static as possible, no matter what might happen in the future? Situations change.

I seem to recall a presidential candidate recently claiming that they wanted to bring manufacturing back to the states. Chip manufacturing seems like it would fall under the category of manufacturing.

At this point we're just throwing away money already spent, which doesn't seem particularly efficient, which this administration is obsessed with, given the creation of an entirely new department/not-really-a-department to increase efficiency.

Some folks support the idea behind the CHIPS act, the rest is the slow motion train wreck for the US that is the current administration.

We’re fine until China invades Taiwan and the tech companies that prop up our economy can’t buy high-end chips anymore.

Agreed. This is nothing to worry about unless you have the ability to predict probable future events.

What if we simply do not let China invade Taiwan?

That’s probably not possible anymore given China’s increasingly large and advanced military.

So instead of spending _billions_ to support a domestic advanced chip design and production, we spend _trillions_ on a war with China?

But think of the profits of the defense contractors!/s

That’s incredibly expensive - orders of magnitude more than the CHIPS act – and likely isn’t even possible any more without massive loss of life. China does not have the huge but technologically unsophisticated military of the 1970-80s where American aircraft carriers could prevent an invasion. They’ve spent a lot of effort and espionage building up more equipment and I highly doubt they’ll prove a paper tiger like Russia. If it came to a shooting war with a large, well-equipped adversary with stealth aircraft, good missiles and drones, advanced submarines, etc. you’re looking at a lot of American casualties very quickly – and that’s before we consider a Pentagon headed by people who were selected for political loyalty rather than merit.

The CHIPS act is expensive, but I doubt we would do nothing if Taiwan was invaded, so we would end up spending money on both.

Let’s just save the money upfront by scrapping CHIPS and be ready to defend Taiwan from Chinese invasion? Trump was one of the first presidents to recognize Taiwan with a direct phone call.

I see it a bit differently: there’s no way to reliably deter a military invasion of Taiwan short of committing to a nuclear response - the Chinese military is too advanced to be stopped if they make a serious effort. That leaves the primary deterrent as economic: China depends on the global economy and would suffer significantly if they started a war of aggression. That becomes less of a deterrent when the President’s negotiating tactic with authoritarians is to give them what they want and envy their control over the country while his family members negotiate real estate deals. If the Chinese government thinks the United States won’t coordinate global sanctions, the risk is a lot lower.

The CHIPS act doesn’t deter conflict, but it does reduce the damage if it happens. Losing Taiwan now cuts off the most advanced processors in the world but if they’re making them in Arizona that goes from no supply to short supply with a straightforward path to scaling capacity. That’s a big improvement and it’s a fraction of the cost of a conflict.

Except the USA wouldn’t be satisfied with merely deterring conflict: they must ensure China doesn’t have any control over the most advanced processors in the world. And given that Trump is at the helm, nuclear conflict is a very real possibility China has to consider.

Under the aggressive stance of this administration, the CHIPS act doesn’t seem necessary.

That's not the only threat.

China is racing to catch up. Sure, they're still behind, but as much as I dislike their autocratic government, they're actually smartly spending many many $billions to create a domestic chip design and manufacturing. And once they do that, well, it'll just be one more area in which we'll have handed leadership to the Chinese, except with much more critical ramifications.

There's been no indication of that yet.

No indication of what?

In the sense that Ukraine was fine in 2021, sure. Ignoring years of threats from Russia.

Taiwan is the Ukraine of Asia right now. And even without that we are worse off because Trump increased tariffs to Taiwan this month. expect any electronics you buy this year to surge in pricing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com