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> Whether we look back in 20 years and think "wow glad we took that hit upfront" is anyone's guess Globalization is breaking down quickly. Chips are crucial to

> Whether we look back in 20 years and think "wow glad we took that hit upfront" is anyone's guess Globalization is breaking down quickly. Chips are crucial to national security and our economy. The supply chain for advanced chips is heavily dependent on East Asia which is a geopolitical powder keg and a demographic time bomb. The only thing more expensive than whatever we end up with is chips unavailable at any price because East Asia devolves into a war stricken basket case. We needed to have been starting this panic training/building 10 years ago but better late than never!

TremendousJudge 3y ago
>Globalization is breaking down quickly Is it? I don't know if there's a concrete way of measuring "amount of globalization", but I'd guess that right now we're probably the most globalized we've ever been. "More things that you use are made outside your own country" has only been growing, and with the advent of full remote companies that also includes much more software than before -- it used to be that only huge corporations would offshore software development, now everybody can do it.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  Global trade as a percentage of global GDP peaked somewhere around 2011 and has been steadily declining. If you look at the US in particular the relative value of imports and exports is down about 30% from the peak 10 years ago. That's a big change for such a short duration
  - adventured 3y ago
    And simultaneously the US has been ploughing massive amounts of capital into domestic manufacturing construction. Money that would have previously been invested into China or elsewhere, is now staying domestic (with a lot of capital also going to eg Mexico).
    - s1artibartfast 3y ago
      What do you mean when you say that the money would have previously been invested into China? Was the US federal government previously funding fab development in China? That is to say, it seams like this investment is to meet a very specific need, and wouldn't have happened otherwise. Similarly those paying aren't the same either.
  - j_maffe 3y ago
    Actually, it peeked in 2008 and I wouldn't say 4% over 18 years a steady decline. In fact, it seems to be recovering from Covid to reach a new high. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/WLD/world/trade-gdp-ratio https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/WLD/wor... Edit: Nevermind, it did reach a new record of 63% in 2022. Globalization seems to be doing fine. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.TRD.GNFS.ZS https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.TRD.GNFS.ZS
- jiveturkey42 3y ago
  You could proxy a measurement of "amount of globalization" by disruptions in global shipping of food, energy, manufactured goods, etc. Covid caused disruptions, Houthi attacks in the Suez Canal disrupted shipping, Panama Canal is facing issues with water due to drought.. US continues to withdraw from Naval security commitments from the Bretton Woods era Physical goods are much more complicated to move around the globe than code
  - adventured 3y ago
    > US continues to withdraw from Naval security commitments from the Bretton Woods era Would you mind listing all the naval security commitments - from the Bretton Woods era - that the US has withdrawn from (eg over the past decade or so, anything relevant to "continues to")? I'm not aware of any meaningful reduction in US naval security commitments. If anything the US is as busy as ever with its global naval security efforts. It's hyper busy everywhere: from Latin America, to Australia, to Europe, to the Middle East, to Asia. The notion that the US has stepped back at all is entirely unsupported by the actual facts. It's just a weak myth being posted endlessly since Trump began spouting isolationism in 2015-2016. Meanwhile, in actuality, the US just spent another hundred billion dollars on a foreign war in two years.
    - nyokodo 3y ago
      > The notion that the US has stepped back at all is entirely unsupported by the actual facts. 40 years ago the US Navy was equipped and staffed to patrol the global oceans. Now, the US has a relatively few massively powerful forces of naval power projection but is woefully understaffed and under-equipped to maintain the global order against multiplying chaos. This is unlikely to change at all let alone be fast enough to influence outcomes. Growing sentiment after decades of the war on terror is for the US to be hesitant to intervene internationally, and while that isn’t current policy it’s predictive of future policy. It’s not at all clear that it would be popular in the USA to, for instance, go to Moldova’s defense. > the US just spent another hundred billion dollars on a foreign war in two years. The vast majority of this was accountancy fictions about the value of stockpiled obsolete materiel we couldn’t sell but had to pay to maintain or pay to scrap. We have demonstrably not gone all in on supporting Ukraine and Congress is currently strangling any attempt to do so. This is another sign of the US inevitably devolving into an unreliable defense partner.
- chiefalchemist 3y ago
  I think you would measure it by trade deficits and trade surpluses. That is, now much "stuff" is moving around.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Ask me in 20 years. There are a lot of worring signs right now that things will get bad, but nobody really knows. When the Soviet Union broke down 30 years ago the US decided the biggest worries were small countries (Iran in particular), and things like 9/11 proved they were right. However Russia is now attacking Ukraine and many think that countries like Poland or Latvia (both in NATO) are next. China is setting up so that they could take military action to take Taiwan, and other countries in the area. Nobody knows for sure if either of these predictions will come to pass, but there are signs that should worry you.
zer00eyz 3y ago
>> Globalization is breaking down quickly. Food. Fuel. Renewables is shifting one of these, but the other will not go backwards, its that or billions will starve.
- xyst 3y ago
  Billions are already starving. You just never hear about them. Millions are starving today on American streets. Yet we do nothing but sit on our hands, play hot potato between generations, point fingers, start culture wars, start class wars. It’s all quite boring. Nobody is interested in solving the issue. Only a rat race to see who can con the next person(s). Some days this monologue from Westworld rings true: “ I think humanity is a thin layer of bacteria on a ball of mud hurtling through the void. I think if there was a God, he would’ve given up on us long ago. He gave us a paradise and we used everything up. We dug up every ounce of energy and burned it. We consume and excrete, use and destroy. Then we sit here on a neat little pile of ashes, having squeezed anything of value out of this planet, and we ask ourselves, “Why are we here?” You want to know what I think your purpose is? It’s obvious. You’re here along with the rest of us to speed the entropic death of this planet. To service the chaos. We’re maggots eating a corpse”
  - nyokodo 3y ago
    > Millions are starving today on American streets Millions of Americans suffer from "food insecurity" i.e. "reduced food intake and disrupted eating patterns at some time during the year." [1] This is very bad, but, there are also food stamps, soup kitchens, food banks, school lunches, family members, and random good samaritans that prevent actual famine amongst those populations because there is no shortages of food present. This is very distinct from real mass starvation where millions of people are dying of hunger in a famine where there is insufficient food available which is what I believe the GP is referring to. 1. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-u-s/key-statistics-graphics/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
- _heimdall 3y ago
  The battle is already lost if we can only feed the people Alice today through a global, centralized food industry. Such a system is doomed to fail eventually, there's no way around it. Not to mention the fact that its just a big shell game with everyone trying to hide the true external costs of industrial agriculture. The larger we build that system the harder it will fall unfortunately, and if there are no local food producers left in business we're all screwed like the Soviets after they realized killing all the people who knew how to farm was a bad idea if you also like to eat.
whimsicalism 3y ago
Globalization is breaking down because of actions being led by the US. It is not some inevitable process that we have to pre-empt, rather it is actively precipitated by our actions.
- echelon 3y ago
  It is US-led, but the US has good reasons. - The US has almost everything it needs in North America to be self-sufficient. Food, energy, natural resources, manufacturing, trade. - The US is tired of being involved in the Middle East. - The US is tired of protecting the oceans and trade for everyone else. - The US is tired of China stealing its tech, being protectionist, becoming an adversary, not being friendly to US companies, meddling in US trade, etc. - The US is tired of NATO not stepping up to the plate. It won't back out, of course, but would love for Europe to care more about its own security. There are so many reasons the US is pulling back. Both the Trump and Biden presidencies are completely on board with it. It's fully bipartisan, and it's going to accelerate. The US is going to near-shore, friend-shore, and to every extent possible, onshore what it needs.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    Good reasons that will raise costs for everyone and lead to measurable impacts on the pace of quality of life improvements. A world that moves towards near-shoring out of security concerns is a world that is long-term poorer. That's real medical innovations, improvements in tech, education, climate that will be delayed because of our new cold war. We are already seeing climate impact in the EV car market where we are hamstringing our own policy efforts. Globalization does not necessitate middle east involvement. > - The US is tired of China stealing its tech, being protectionist, becoming an adversary, not being friendly to US companies, meddling in US trade, etc. WTO already has the mechanisms to deal with this, the CHIPS act is hurting out standing with our allies because of its blatantly protectionist provisions. > - The US is tired of NATO not stepping up to the plate. It won't back out, of course, but would love for Europe to care more about its own security. Again, not contra globalization.
    - 3y ago
contrarian1234 3y ago
"because East Asia devolves into a war stricken basket case" The past decade of American media has been promoting this new cold war narrative as if there is inevitably going to be a major war with China. If there is war in East Asia then the whole international economic system will collapse, people will be starving in the streets. That's if it's not a nuclear Armageddon and we're left to rubbing two sticks together. Nobody will care about chips if there is a war. That will be really far down the list of actual concerns The world is so interconnected and everyone depends on everyone so much that there is basically no point in planning for this scenario
- _heimdall 3y ago
  > The world is so interconnected and everyone depends on everyone so much that there is basically no point in planning for this scenario There's always a point in planning for a scenario if you think the risk is high enough and there is something you can do to better prepare for it. In this scenario, the ones most impacted immediately will be the ones most dependent of the global economy. If you can't get the basics like food, water, and shelter if war with China breaks out then sure you'll be in a bad spot. But is it really an impossible task to prepare at all?
  - contrarian1234 3y ago
    I mean .. if you want to waste a bunch of money and prepare for an unlikely war then it still doesn't make sense to worry about chips. You probably should build fallout shelters and secure things like domestic fertilizer production and the make sure agricultural equipment can be entirely made domestically Even in the most benign case, if China is for whatever reason peacefully cut off from the global economy and we haven't been nukes into the stone age - having to move back to 22nm chips is going to be the least of our problems. To put it in perspective.. this is going to be a world where we no longer have cellphones and toiletpaper (b/c those are all made in China) and most equipment/machinery/refrigerators/washing-machines/cars/trains will overnight become at least in part unrepairable. Basically ever sector of the economy depends at least in some small part on the Chinese supply chain.

TremendousJudge 3y ago

>Globalization is breaking down quickly Is it? I don't know if there's a concrete way of measuring "amount of globalization", but I'd guess that right now we're probably the most globalized we've ever been. "More things that you use are made outside your own country" has only been growing, and with the advent of full remote companies that also includes much more software than before -- it used to be that only huge corporations would offshore software development, now everybody can do it.

s1artibartfast 3y ago
Global trade as a percentage of global GDP peaked somewhere around 2011 and has been steadily declining. If you look at the US in particular the relative value of imports and exports is down about 30% from the peak 10 years ago. That's a big change for such a short duration
- adventured 3y ago
  And simultaneously the US has been ploughing massive amounts of capital into domestic manufacturing construction. Money that would have previously been invested into China or elsewhere, is now staying domestic (with a lot of capital also going to eg Mexico).
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    What do you mean when you say that the money would have previously been invested into China? Was the US federal government previously funding fab development in China? That is to say, it seams like this investment is to meet a very specific need, and wouldn't have happened otherwise. Similarly those paying aren't the same either.
- j_maffe 3y ago
  Actually, it peeked in 2008 and I wouldn't say 4% over 18 years a steady decline. In fact, it seems to be recovering from Covid to reach a new high. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/WLD/world/trade-gdp-ratio https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/WLD/wor... Edit: Nevermind, it did reach a new record of 63% in 2022. Globalization seems to be doing fine. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.TRD.GNFS.ZS https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.TRD.GNFS.ZS
jiveturkey42 3y ago
You could proxy a measurement of "amount of globalization" by disruptions in global shipping of food, energy, manufactured goods, etc. Covid caused disruptions, Houthi attacks in the Suez Canal disrupted shipping, Panama Canal is facing issues with water due to drought.. US continues to withdraw from Naval security commitments from the Bretton Woods era Physical goods are much more complicated to move around the globe than code
- adventured 3y ago
  > US continues to withdraw from Naval security commitments from the Bretton Woods era Would you mind listing all the naval security commitments - from the Bretton Woods era - that the US has withdrawn from (eg over the past decade or so, anything relevant to "continues to")? I'm not aware of any meaningful reduction in US naval security commitments. If anything the US is as busy as ever with its global naval security efforts. It's hyper busy everywhere: from Latin America, to Australia, to Europe, to the Middle East, to Asia. The notion that the US has stepped back at all is entirely unsupported by the actual facts. It's just a weak myth being posted endlessly since Trump began spouting isolationism in 2015-2016. Meanwhile, in actuality, the US just spent another hundred billion dollars on a foreign war in two years.
  - nyokodo 3y ago
    > The notion that the US has stepped back at all is entirely unsupported by the actual facts. 40 years ago the US Navy was equipped and staffed to patrol the global oceans. Now, the US has a relatively few massively powerful forces of naval power projection but is woefully understaffed and under-equipped to maintain the global order against multiplying chaos. This is unlikely to change at all let alone be fast enough to influence outcomes. Growing sentiment after decades of the war on terror is for the US to be hesitant to intervene internationally, and while that isn’t current policy it’s predictive of future policy. It’s not at all clear that it would be popular in the USA to, for instance, go to Moldova’s defense. > the US just spent another hundred billion dollars on a foreign war in two years. The vast majority of this was accountancy fictions about the value of stockpiled obsolete materiel we couldn’t sell but had to pay to maintain or pay to scrap. We have demonstrably not gone all in on supporting Ukraine and Congress is currently strangling any attempt to do so. This is another sign of the US inevitably devolving into an unreliable defense partner.
chiefalchemist 3y ago
I think you would measure it by trade deficits and trade surpluses. That is, now much "stuff" is moving around.
bluGill 3y ago
Ask me in 20 years. There are a lot of worring signs right now that things will get bad, but nobody really knows. When the Soviet Union broke down 30 years ago the US decided the biggest worries were small countries (Iran in particular), and things like 9/11 proved they were right. However Russia is now attacking Ukraine and many think that countries like Poland or Latvia (both in NATO) are next. China is setting up so that they could take military action to take Taiwan, and other countries in the area. Nobody knows for sure if either of these predictions will come to pass, but there are signs that should worry you.

zer00eyz 3y ago

>> Globalization is breaking down quickly. Food. Fuel. Renewables is shifting one of these, but the other will not go backwards, its that or billions will starve.

xyst 3y ago
Billions are already starving. You just never hear about them. Millions are starving today on American streets. Yet we do nothing but sit on our hands, play hot potato between generations, point fingers, start culture wars, start class wars. It’s all quite boring. Nobody is interested in solving the issue. Only a rat race to see who can con the next person(s). Some days this monologue from Westworld rings true: “ I think humanity is a thin layer of bacteria on a ball of mud hurtling through the void. I think if there was a God, he would’ve given up on us long ago. He gave us a paradise and we used everything up. We dug up every ounce of energy and burned it. We consume and excrete, use and destroy. Then we sit here on a neat little pile of ashes, having squeezed anything of value out of this planet, and we ask ourselves, “Why are we here?” You want to know what I think your purpose is? It’s obvious. You’re here along with the rest of us to speed the entropic death of this planet. To service the chaos. We’re maggots eating a corpse”
- nyokodo 3y ago
  > Millions are starving today on American streets Millions of Americans suffer from "food insecurity" i.e. "reduced food intake and disrupted eating patterns at some time during the year." [1] This is very bad, but, there are also food stamps, soup kitchens, food banks, school lunches, family members, and random good samaritans that prevent actual famine amongst those populations because there is no shortages of food present. This is very distinct from real mass starvation where millions of people are dying of hunger in a famine where there is insufficient food available which is what I believe the GP is referring to. 1. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-u-s/key-statistics-graphics/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
_heimdall 3y ago
The battle is already lost if we can only feed the people Alice today through a global, centralized food industry. Such a system is doomed to fail eventually, there's no way around it. Not to mention the fact that its just a big shell game with everyone trying to hide the true external costs of industrial agriculture. The larger we build that system the harder it will fall unfortunately, and if there are no local food producers left in business we're all screwed like the Soviets after they realized killing all the people who knew how to farm was a bad idea if you also like to eat.

whimsicalism 3y ago

Globalization is breaking down because of actions being led by the US. It is not some inevitable process that we have to pre-empt, rather it is actively precipitated by our actions.

echelon 3y ago
It is US-led, but the US has good reasons. - The US has almost everything it needs in North America to be self-sufficient. Food, energy, natural resources, manufacturing, trade. - The US is tired of being involved in the Middle East. - The US is tired of protecting the oceans and trade for everyone else. - The US is tired of China stealing its tech, being protectionist, becoming an adversary, not being friendly to US companies, meddling in US trade, etc. - The US is tired of NATO not stepping up to the plate. It won't back out, of course, but would love for Europe to care more about its own security. There are so many reasons the US is pulling back. Both the Trump and Biden presidencies are completely on board with it. It's fully bipartisan, and it's going to accelerate. The US is going to near-shore, friend-shore, and to every extent possible, onshore what it needs.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  Good reasons that will raise costs for everyone and lead to measurable impacts on the pace of quality of life improvements. A world that moves towards near-shoring out of security concerns is a world that is long-term poorer. That's real medical innovations, improvements in tech, education, climate that will be delayed because of our new cold war. We are already seeing climate impact in the EV car market where we are hamstringing our own policy efforts. Globalization does not necessitate middle east involvement. > - The US is tired of China stealing its tech, being protectionist, becoming an adversary, not being friendly to US companies, meddling in US trade, etc. WTO already has the mechanisms to deal with this, the CHIPS act is hurting out standing with our allies because of its blatantly protectionist provisions. > - The US is tired of NATO not stepping up to the plate. It won't back out, of course, but would love for Europe to care more about its own security. Again, not contra globalization.
  - 3y ago

contrarian1234 3y ago

"because East Asia devolves into a war stricken basket case" The past decade of American media has been promoting this new cold war narrative as if there is inevitably going to be a major war with China. If there is war in East Asia then the whole international economic system will collapse, people will be starving in the streets. That's if it's not a nuclear Armageddon and we're left to rubbing two sticks together. Nobody will care about chips if there is a war. That will be really far down the list of actual concerns The world is so interconnected and everyone depends on everyone so much that there is basically no point in planning for this scenario

_heimdall 3y ago
> The world is so interconnected and everyone depends on everyone so much that there is basically no point in planning for this scenario There's always a point in planning for a scenario if you think the risk is high enough and there is something you can do to better prepare for it. In this scenario, the ones most impacted immediately will be the ones most dependent of the global economy. If you can't get the basics like food, water, and shelter if war with China breaks out then sure you'll be in a bad spot. But is it really an impossible task to prepare at all?
- contrarian1234 3y ago
  I mean .. if you want to waste a bunch of money and prepare for an unlikely war then it still doesn't make sense to worry about chips. You probably should build fallout shelters and secure things like domestic fertilizer production and the make sure agricultural equipment can be entirely made domestically Even in the most benign case, if China is for whatever reason peacefully cut off from the global economy and we haven't been nukes into the stone age - having to move back to 22nm chips is going to be the least of our problems. To put it in perspective.. this is going to be a world where we no longer have cellphones and toiletpaper (b/c those are all made in China) and most equipment/machinery/refrigerators/washing-machines/cars/trains will overnight become at least in part unrepairable. Basically ever sector of the economy depends at least in some small part on the Chinese supply chain.