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Final National Security Guardrails for Chips for America Incentives Program
- sneak 3y agoWhat are the "foreign countries of concern", and why do they write it that way instead of just saying China?
- miguelazo 3y ago[flagged]
- localplume 3y ago[dead]
- sib 3y agoCareful, your bias is showing... "kowtowing to US hegemony" "Xinjiang claims"
- kkzz99 3y agoWhenever I read comments like this I have to chuckle. The US state department spends 300m$ each year in anti-china propaganda. The capitalist comprador narrative sellers eager to jump on the bandwagon. When one reads US military think-tank papers explaining the next strategies and then, years later, seeing them being implemented, makes one really wonder, how organically the reporting is on things like Xinjiang. But of course, when you question the narrative of iraqy WMDS, incubator killings, the usage of ABCs by the US and then finally on the question of what really is happening in Xinjiang, one really shows their bias...
- miguelazo 3y agoThere was a good exposé on the Xinjiang situation recently, but you’ll have to translate from the German: https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/xinjiang-china-kampf-gegen-terrorismus-und-separatismus-ld.1753509?reduced=true https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/xinjiang-china-kampf-gegen-terror... The terrorism that provoked the central government’s heavy hand is totally dismissed in the West, if mentioned at all.
- jvanderbot 3y agoThere is a list. They'd rather the policy applies to that list, than the actual list items at the time of the writing, so that it can be updated. > The most recent Countries of Particular Concern designations were made by the Secretary of State on November 30, 2022: Burma, People’s Republic of China, Cuba, Eritrea, Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. https://www.state.gov/countries-of-particular-concern-special-watch-list-countries-entities-of-particular-concern/ https://www.state.gov/countries-of-particular-concern-specia...
- sneak 3y agoI don't see any chip factories in any of those except China and Russia. I wish I understood why they pretend this is something other than a cold war.
- jvanderbot 3y agoThe list has nothing to do with chip manufacturing. The list is used as a list of reasonable-to-exclude countries from the CHIPS act. The same list is used _all over the place_, including things like NASA mission collaboration, government funding for conference travel, background checks for visiting gov offices, etc.
- jfoutz 3y agoWhat does cold war in this context? My mom went to China with a group a few years ago, and had a great experience.
- SkyMarshal 3y agoThat’s an odd list. Eritrea? Nicaragua? Pakistan and the other stans? Are they concerned that chips or tech sold to those countries could get re-sold to China or Russia?
- rtkwe 3y agoEritrea and Nicaragua are because of religious persecution most likely. These recommendations don't directly result in being added to the list but they're a pretty hard push in that direction I think. https://www.uscirf.gov/news-room/releases-statements/uscirf-releases-new-report-eritreas-religious-freedom-violations#:~:text=In%20its%202023%20Annual%20Report,religious%20freedom%20concerns%20in%20Eritrea https://www.uscirf.gov/news-room/releases-statements/uscirf-.... https://www.state.gov/reports/2022-report-on-international-religious-freedom/nicaragua/#:~:text=contradicted%20government%20rhetoric.-,On%20November%2030%2C%202022%2C%20in%20accordance%20with%20the%20International%20Religious,severe%20violations%20of%20religious%20freedom https://www.state.gov/reports/2022-report-on-international-r....
- arduanika 3y agoWhat is 'MAX_WIDTH_CHARS', and why do they write that instead of just saying '80'? Don't you just hate how devs makes things way more complicated than they need to be? Granted I'm not a dev myself, but how hard can it be? I'm very smart and I could rewrite this all to be way clearer. (Maybe you were just asking a sincere question, in which case sorry for my sarcasm here. It's just, the sentiment reeks a bit of typical HN hubris to me.)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tester756 3y agoWhat?
- yuliyp 3y agoThey were making an analogy between developers using constants in code to avoid hard-coding values in all over the place, and government agencies using references to things defined in other places to avoid "hard-coding" lists of countries in random rules all over the place.
- xeromal 3y agoFuture proofing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- baybal2 3y ago> Classifies Semiconductors as Critical to National Security Well, in a case of direct war with China or Russia, it will not be microchips you would be worried about. USA is amazingly self sufficient nation, probably more than any other nation in the world, but... it lost far more critical items any nation must manufacture other than iphones. You will not die from not receiving a new iphone, but you will die from lack of antibiotics if you catch gangrene, or something as dumb as typhus (my uncle died from it in his twenties) USA can make a superweapons, but can't seem plainly make enough ammo for them. So much bad it is, a single German company produces more shells than entire American industry. All these big tanks, ships, and bombers will become useless in just 2-3 month of intense conflict. After a big war, you will need huge amounts of basic materials to rebuild fast, before the enemy does the same. I have just to say: China has passed 1 gigaton of steel output per year
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoIt's not iPhones that are the problem, it's everything built with modern technology. Do you honestly imagine that modern antibiotic manufacturing is anything but computer-controlled?
- ccooffee 3y ago> USA can make a superweapons, but can't seem plainly make enough ammo for them. So much bad it is, a single German company produces more shells than entire American industry. Can you cite this statistic about ammo/shell production? I haven't been able to find any reliable numbers on annual production by country or company. The sources I have found all seem unreliable and instead list the authors favorite ammunition companies. Among about a dozen of these low-quality articles, I've not seen any references to your magical German company as the highest volume.
- jandrewrogers 3y agoThe US does not have the capacity to make vast amounts of ammunition that the US military does not use. It isn’t a Soviet-style military that relies on shear volume of dumb ordnance to win battles. The US does have vast stocks and reserves of the equipment it does use. For ammunition it does use, the US has large overages that they can give to other countries when the need arises that greatly exceed what they have a use for. A lot of the equipment that the US sent Ukraine was rescued from the scrapyard and would not be used by the US in any case. The US military heavily relies on quick, precision fires in a way few militaries do as a matter of doctrine. Quantity matters much less than quality in these cases. Though the US has absolute numerical superiority for a lot of land war systems (e.g. the US has ~8000 Abrams tanks), half of which are in storage because they don’t have a use for that many. Ammunition for these systems is similarly in cold storage.
- SubiculumCode 3y agoThe CHIPs act is a very important piece of legislation for American national security. We really are in an untenable situation where certain key resources are almost entirely imported from regions closer to the sphere of geopolitical rivals than to ours. The decoupling from China that is happening is not the result of the CHIPs act, but it is certainly helping things move along. For Taiwan's sake, it is a good thing that chip production cannot be created or moved quickly, as I believe it is one reason that Taiwan hasn't been invaded by China yet. In the event of a Chinese invasion, those foundrys would be destroyed well before China could wrest control, and even if they did, it would be unlikely that they could keep them in production, given their incredible complexity, unique parts, and requirement of exceptionally skilled labor. Anyway, I'll use this moment to recommend some of my goto podcast source for info about trade and national security geopolitics: Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) https://www.csis.org/podcasts/trade-guys https://www.csis.org/podcasts/trade-guys https://www.csis.org/podcasts/chinapower https://www.csis.org/podcasts/chinapower https://www.csis.org/podcasts/asia-chessboard https://www.csis.org/podcasts/asia-chessboard https://www.csis.org/podcasts/truth-matter https://www.csis.org/podcasts/truth-matter
- saovq 3y agoI'd be remiss to not also recommend the gold standard of geopolitics podcasts imo, from Foreign Affairs: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-inte...
- DiogenesKynikos 3y agoThe CHIPS act and US sanctions against the Chinese semiconductor sector are now publicly sold as "national security" measures, but if you read the think-tank studies that led to these measures, the actual motivation is gaining leverage over China in a critical economic sector. Back in 2020, the Brookings Institution laid out the strategy that the Biden administration has subsequently followed, in a report whose title speaks for itself: "Maintaining China's dependence on democracies for advanced computer chips" [0]. The basic argument that the Brookings Institution made was that the US can directly or indirectly control several key bottlenecks in the semiconductor industry. Semiconductors are critical to any modern economy, so by maintaining control over these bottlenecks, the US can maintain a potential chokehold on the Chinese economy. The Biden administration publicly argues that this is all about national security, but there's no plausible national security interest in preventing Chinese smartphone manufacturers from importing chips fabricated by TSMC. The strategy is to control the flow of high-end chips to Chinese companies, and to prevent China from creating its own high-end chips by controlling access to the machinery necessary to fabricate them. Over time, these controls are going to expand into other areas, like cloud computing. Then, whenever the US likes, it can turn off the spigot, and China will simply not have access to modern semiconductors. That's the theory. Of course, China has something to say about this as well, and has been working like crazy over the last few years to develop substitutes to US-controlled imported semiconductors. The attempt to drive Huawei out of business with sanctions was the shot across the bow, and China got the message. Huawei's new smartphone with 7nm chips and 5G is an indication that China has made significant progress, but we'll have to see how things develop. 0. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/maintaining-chinas-dependence-on-democracies-for-advanced-computer-chips/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/maintaining-chinas-depend...
- gumby 3y agoSeems odd that NIST was the one defining this; the way things are phrased in this press release it doesn't look like a lot of technical knowledge (of which NIST is well endowed) was required. Rather it looks to me that the scope would be bread and butter department of State or Commerce.