Throwawayaerlei

The claim "By one estimate, the National Institutes of Health spent $17 billion on vaccine technologies fundamental to the Covid-19 vaccine." goes back to the mid-20th Century, is so broad as to be useless and is obviously disqualifying propaganda: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-04-covid-vaccine-built-b...

Pretty sure 1.4 billion people believe or have to pretend what I said was incredibly offensive.

Plus many powerful entities outside of the PRC who depend on it for some, a lot or all of their wealth, production, whatever.

That never happened during the Cold War from what I've read, and from what I observed starting in the early 1970s it steadily got worse.

Simply moving most of our attack subs into the theater after full weapons loadouts would massively if "silently" bolster our posture.

We could also shift surface assets there. We're not going to be able to build many more Standard missiles in a 2.5 month timeframe, but we could move a lot of Arleigh Burke class destroyers into the theater and extending all the way to Guam. We might have some anti-missile equipment we could move to that island, don't know how much the war in the Ukraine has drained those.

That's just off the top of my head before I go to sleep, I'm sure there's lots ore.

The world also cares very much what happens with Taiwan if that results in one way or another it no longer exporting chips. That island also makes quite a bit of higher end stuff for many nations' and companies' supply chains, as well as finished goods.

History? Until Deng's reforms created a private market in food, block and village Chinese Communist Party (CCP) committee had absolute power of life and death over those under it through their issuing of food ration coupons. This data from some Chinese grad students I knew who lived through that and the transition, plus it was generally known. See also how the one child policy was implimented. They also still execute a lot of people, and politically a lot of corruption cases which sometimes go that far are clearly Xi and his new Tsinghua clique eliminating competition. Which has created a great many enemies in the CCP, that is its ruling class especially now with the suppression of tech companies.

At a higher level, the estimated 70 million people the CCP killed after gaining power in 1949? That may be high, a lot of it is from Mao's enemies, but on the other hand we keep increasing the estimates of deaths from the Cultural Revolution. Which Mao used to regain power after his very costly Great Leap Forward and the ensuing famine per those estimates killed tens of millions and cost him de facto paramount position.

Post-Mao and the Gang of Four the rulers of China made various agreements to ensure such things would not happen again. Xi and his new clique shredded them, and for a less contentious than the issues with Xinjiang Muslims example look at the brutality of Xi's Zero COVID policy. If Xi navigates the current every five year congress meeting to get his third term there's no reason to expect things to get better. Very possibly the same if he fails and is effectively deposed.

Those thousand year old traditions? Mao did his very best to stamp them out, especially in the Cultural Revolution. I would wonder if they're done at any greater than a cargo cult level today, although that might be enough for the public. Except of course those members of metro areas that are getting smashed when a few cases of COVID are found in them, those "owning" real estate, or those without a social safety net where 4 grandparents depend on 2 parents who depend on 1 child for the extremes of the effects of the one child policy.

For the economics you cite, also see how the residential property bubble is bursting now. That's not necessarily the fault of Xi, was inevitable sooner or later, but it is happening now in concert with other negative things including backlash like this very uncertain in its effects US chip tech embargo (the US Commerce Department has a great deal of discretion in what it will license someday).

One thing you'll lose with the older phones sooner than iOS updates is AppleCare support, but if you get a good bargain to begin with....

Doesn't include indirect costs, which include non-recurring engineering (NRE). Which is huge for a company like Nvidia designing and verifying new parts, and paying for the masks to make them, which appear to go down to TSMC's 3nm node. Also making new reference designs for boards, I hope tech support for OEMs etc.

They're also one of the very few hardware companies that's good at software and that appears to be done with six figure market salaries per a search I just did.

High gross margins also give them maneuvering room when the market turns against them like now and very possibly for a while longer, and I seriously doubt they've ever believed they could confidently predict what the cryptocurrency market would do with their repurposed systems.

Look at who you're replying to, I'm not advocating that at all!

The Semiwiki guy credibly claims TSMC has reached this worldwide pinnacle of chipmaking in part by being trustworthy and creating an ecosystem based on trust. That of course includes being fair with your customers, which has allowed the latter to fund the creation of new fab lines and nodes knowing TSMC won't screw them over once that money is spent.

Also not the guy who made potato analogies.

This was IBM. For fundamental, structural reasons, they were dethroned."

I think they did it to themselves, first by eschewing virtual memory in the System/360 and first models of the System/370, thus losing the higher education market and what people eventually moved to like UNIX, thus their big machines become a specialized niche of the whole computer market. Then in moving from a preference of leasing to sales which gave them a one time goosing of revenue which they didn't prepare to lose when the cycle of that ended.

They did do well in PCs for a while, but the unit that did that in Florida eventually got blue washed (there's lots more to the story of course).

"Again, it’s similar fresh-MBA thinking that tanked Intel."

Also very unsure of this, I don't see that resulting in the 10 nm now Intel 7 debacle. More like their decades long high level very bad engineering management eventually caught up with their crown jewel of fabrication. The not so fresh MBA I assume CFO who was made an interim CEO actually had a plan which might have succeeded.

I don't think the current CEO's plan has much if any chance at success, especially since I don't see him making the brutal moves necessary to change the company culture to work as a foundry. In particular, I note while he worked for Intel for a long time, he's a design instead of fabrication guy, the latter is what they needed and I wonder if they couldn't hire anyone good from that field.

I don't think that's the case, as I understand it this comes from the US wanting to onshore some of TSMC's capabilities and Taiwan screwing up electricity production on the island.

It does Taiwan the government and ruling class no good whatsoever to place assets beyond the PRC's military reach, rather the incentives are entirely opposite of that. The more valuable TSMC's fab lines there are, the more incentive the US has to help with the ROC's defense, or war if it comes to that. Which in the case of torpedoes from attack subs can even be done with some plausible deniability.

To sell it to anyone else but a large or giant company like Sony/Crunchyroll is going to be hard as I said. For what we as consumers would like you'd need to find another otaku or group of them who are wealthy and/or trustworthy enough to pay in installments out of ongoing gross profits, and you'd have to trust their business sense.

You'd want someone like my father to do some of the footwork and all of deal making to avoid distractions from running the business and lowering its value. Or you have to find an interested big player of which there just aren't very many. And here this clearly fits in with Sony's previous actions in America like buying Funimation and Crunchyroll, but unfortunately they're likely one of the worst case buyers.

From the viewpoint of the owners, Wikipedia says Shawne Kleckner who's still with it is 50 and the company was founded in 1987, 35 years is a long time to be running a company. Wven if it started out as a shell to buy and resell telescopes, pretty soon they started bringing the classic Astro Boy to the direct to home market and in due course became a competitive general mail order reseller as well as localizer. When TokyoPop nuked their reselling arm after Y2K they became the highest profile one as far as I know, not counting increasingly untrustworthy Amazon. Which Right Stuff regularly also uses as a platform while doing their own fulfillment.

What does the context matter when the person who made the change, not mistranslation, freely admits to it!

How can you claim to be an authority about these issues when you're not aware of what may be the single worst example of it, and have no interest in investigating this when it's brought to your attention?

You really think "sus" will stand the test of time, be intelligible to viewers years and decades from now? It's at least a debatable point although you're comparing it to Japanese that by your own admission has survived a quarter century. But claiming our complaints about major and minor changes to works by Crunchyroll, the entity which officially bought Right Stuff Inc. are bogus do not stand up to examination.

And needless to say there's a lot more where the above came from. For another major corporate example see Seven Seas which just can't stop censoring and altering the work of the "bilingual professional translators" who are native Japanese speakers they hire and credit who are not at all happy about it, for doing that silently and without consulting them reflects on their professionalism.

One very real alternative is just shutting down when the founder get too old to run it.

For that matter, I think your original proposition has been partly proven wrong, the traffic jams at West Coast ports have deprived the US of timely container deliveries from the PRC and Asia in general. Some high value low weight and volume stuff got through via air, but somehow we continued to operate a modern technological industrial civilization.

Yes to both. Maybe I'm misinterpreting the concept. "Steady" to me in this context means the same, thus financial shenanigans to make sure you don't report "excess" earnings in one period so you can have them in reserve for a future one where you have a slump.

"Regular" profits are ideal, but Toyota today is not a good example, it's a mature company in a country with a mature automobile industry. As a counter example, see the story sold to the investing community about Amazon, not that they would make a steady profit, but that they would become huge and then do something like that. Which they've delivered on (and I wouldn't judge them on anything in the COVID disruptive period 2020 to now).

The time period doesn't quite match up, but I found Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed by Ben R. Rich https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316743003/ to be quite interested if not quite as interesting as I'd hoped when I bought it.