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Leading node semiconductors come from Taiwan and South Korea. In the event of WWIII nobody is going to be getting those until the fighting stops. Of the acces

Leading node semiconductors come from Taiwan and South Korea. In the event of WWIII nobody is going to be getting those until the fighting stops. Of the accessible fabs the US has better domestic silicon manufacturing capacity than China. Also China's economy is just as reliant on importing cheap raw materials as the US is on importing cheap manufactured goods. Hypothetical non-nuclear WWIII is terrible for everybody but the US, with the ability to control oceans that aren't within a few thousand miles of the Chinese mainland, is probably in a better position than China is to recover economically.

javajosh 6y ago
Americans in 1941 were much different than they are now. My sense is that Americans then were more practical, more humble (while still being feisty), and they had a better handle on physical and social reality. We could do so much so quickly then. But now, during late-stage capitalism, information systems dominate physical systems, and that's a great way to lose a war. When everyone wants their cut, wants their say, is willing to fight dirty, with tooth and nail in the legal system to get their way, it slows everything down to a crawl, and makes everything more expensive. Want to preview Americans in wartime? Look at any and every city infrastructure project currently deadlocked and billions over-budget. That's us. And while our broken justice system grinds through the paperwork, the courthouse gets bombed by the barbarians who were never slowed down by paperwork. This is less an argument against civilization, and more like a wake-up call: America has multiple interlocked badly broken systems that all need massive reform. Forget about justice, I think its necessary for our civilization to survive. It is urgent that we reform our judicial system (where any involvement IS the punishment), our medical system (where getting sick is a prelude to bankrupcy), our social safety net (where getting fired without a personal support net means homelessness), consumer rights (where deregulation and arbitration clauses leave individual consumers to fight alone against huge well-funded interests), the tax system (which is too large and complex for anyone to use properly), and education (where students must take enormous debt to get educated, and so much of that debt funds administrative overhead). Personally, I don't even think these things should be about your location on a politcal scale - right or left, these are table stakes for a 21st century democracy. The lack of on-shore manufacturing, particularly for big infrastructure projects, e.g. things like roads, the electrical grid, tall buildings, and factories, is merely a symptom, I think, of all the rest. Yeah, the consumer market is strong, but for the everyday Joe, it is painful to deal with all these broken systems on a day-to-day basis.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > where getting fired without a personal support net means homelessness I think you're spot on, but I want to point out the above situation was created by design. IIRC, part of the creation of a modern market system was the demolition of traditional social safety nets, so peasants were put in the situation where the alternative to selling their labor in the market was starvation. Early market advocates understood this clearly, and praised the motivating power of an empty stomach.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

javajosh 6y ago

Americans in 1941 were much different than they are now. My sense is that Americans then were more practical, more humble (while still being feisty), and they had a better handle on physical and social reality. We could do so much so quickly then. But now, during late-stage capitalism, information systems dominate physical systems, and that's a great way to lose a war. When everyone wants their cut, wants their say, is willing to fight dirty, with tooth and nail in the legal system to get their way, it slows everything down to a crawl, and makes everything more expensive. Want to preview Americans in wartime? Look at any and every city infrastructure project currently deadlocked and billions over-budget. That's us. And while our broken justice system grinds through the paperwork, the courthouse gets bombed by the barbarians who were never slowed down by paperwork. This is less an argument against civilization, and more like a wake-up call: America has multiple interlocked badly broken systems that all need massive reform. Forget about justice, I think its necessary for our civilization to survive. It is urgent that we reform our judicial system (where any involvement IS the punishment), our medical system (where getting sick is a prelude to bankrupcy), our social safety net (where getting fired without a personal support net means homelessness), consumer rights (where deregulation and arbitration clauses leave individual consumers to fight alone against huge well-funded interests), the tax system (which is too large and complex for anyone to use properly), and education (where students must take enormous debt to get educated, and so much of that debt funds administrative overhead). Personally, I don't even think these things should be about your location on a politcal scale - right or left, these are table stakes for a 21st century democracy. The lack of on-shore manufacturing, particularly for big infrastructure projects, e.g. things like roads, the electrical grid, tall buildings, and factories, is merely a symptom, I think, of all the rest. Yeah, the consumer market is strong, but for the everyday Joe, it is painful to deal with all these broken systems on a day-to-day basis.

ardy42 6y ago
> where getting fired without a personal support net means homelessness I think you're spot on, but I want to point out the above situation was created by design. IIRC, part of the creation of a modern market system was the demolition of traditional social safety nets, so peasants were put in the situation where the alternative to selling their labor in the market was starvation. Early market advocates understood this clearly, and praised the motivating power of an empty stomach.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]