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Comment by robinwhg | Hacker News Reader

It's still absolutely fascinating to me that basically the whole modern tech industry and the economic growth from it rests on the shoulders of a single company that has all of their important factories on a single island that's under constant threat of invasion. On top of that they themselves are reliant on a single company that's able to produce the machine required to print the wafers.

I don't know if TSMC has anything to do with hard drive production, but the reliance on very few players is also a problem in that industry.

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Investors love a monopoly, and establishing this required more than a trillion dollars of investment sustained over a couple decades.

> Investors love a monopoly...

Indeed, investors left to their own devices act in this way. Underlying such a single point-of-failure is an implied but immense hope and thus pressure for stability. I wonder what the prediction markets saying about current levels of geopolitical stability in Taiwan?

> Indeed, investors left to their own devices act in this way.

Interesting. Capitalism is often touted to be more decentralized than socialism, but this is an example of how it can centralize.

Socialism is always talked out how it works out in practice, capitalism is talked about how it works out in theory

We don't even get that far in the US. It has been largely verboten in "nonpartisan" life, either socially or by dint of an active purge in eg academia and Hollywood, to discuss anything beneficial coming out of Soviet, Chinese, or Cuban administrations.

A partisan Republican will reliably interrupt you to shout nonsense, as if admitting a single positive outcome is trying to deceive them. As if a cost-benefit analysis can just be cut in half. As if these were not just authoritarian/totalitarian, but completely lacking domestic support.

This outcome was achieved with a great deal of money and propaganda over more than a century.

I often compare systems in terms of how well they tolerate adversity. To oversimplify, it feels like top-down command-and-control communism suffers under one powerful corrupting force. Capitalism can suffer from many kinds of market failures which get exacerbated when corrupt people in the surrounding government gain power.

At a distance, I've started to view disorganized, inefficient messes of systems as not all that bad in the grand scheme, because chaotic systems are often harder to co-opt.

> rests on the shoulders of a single company that has all of their important factories on a single island

Isn't this just taking the oft-proposed explore vs exploit dichotomy to the logical conclusion of the "exploit" side?

Every single arbitrarity-finely-divided thing "should" be handled by the single (group|process) that has the greatest relative advantage at that one thing.

And you end up with the total variety/detailedness of everything matching what the substrate of the economy (ie, people with specialized training or education) has capacity to support. So at the limit there is at most one person who knows how to do any one specific thing.

(And the global economic system becomes infinitely fragile, but eh who's counting.)

There are three pillars for the bleeding edge, aren't there? TSMC, ASML, and the Spruce Pine quartz mine.

It's only this way because the American ruling class would rather ship jobs overseas to increase their wealth than competently establish an industrial sector that would pay good wages to average people.

Turns out letting a bunch of MBAs plan your economy is extremely foolish.

Hey now they went to school for at least 1.5 years and not all of that was at a 9th grade reading level! Some of it was 10th grade

> under constant threat of invasion

And isn't it also in a seismically active region, also prone to eathquake and/or tsunami?

Prone to earthquake yes. Tsunami no

> It's still absolutely fascinating to me that basically the whole modern tech industry and the economic growth from it rests on the shoulders of a single company

Stop getting your news from news.

> that has all of their important factories on a single island that's under constant threat of invasion.

Threat of invasion? Who would dare invade taiwan when it's protected by china?

> I don't know if TSMC has anything to do with hard drive production

Then why bother commenting here?

> but the reliance on very few players is also a problem in that industry.

Ah, you have a political agenda.

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