US Says It's Working With Taiwan To Secure Chip Supply Chain (bloomberg.com) 55
The U.S and Taiwan are working together to secure supply chains, Washington's envoy to Taipei said, as global chip manufacturers face a looming deadline to meet the Biden administration's request for company data. From a report: U.S. officials have met leaders of local semiconductor firms, Sandra Oudkirk, director of the American Institute in Taiwan, told reporters Friday in Taipei, adding that they had "excellent safeguards" to protect proprietary information. "The Commerce Department's request for information is designed to better understand the semiconductor supply chain," Oudkirk, who is the U.S.'s de facto ambassador in the absence of official ties, said at her first news conference since being appointed in July. She added that the drive was designed to enable the department make regulations to "improve or alleviate the disruptions to the supply chain." Those strains are due to a twofold by a surge in demand for goods and labor issues, both caused by the global pandemic. The U.S. Commerce Department's September call for companies to hand over information related to the ongoing chip shortage has faced resistance in Taiwan and South Korea due to concerns over possible leaks of trade secrets.
Demand Side Issue /s (Score:2)
Why do they keep calling this a supply side issue. CNN already stepped us through this, it's a demand side issue /s
https://youtu.be/hhnvilqpMIs [youtu.be]
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Sounds like the mob (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: Sounds like the mob (Score:1)
Thanks! Obama.
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Guess again. [outrider.org]
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Seems like a pretty good deal though. America's somewhat-vague not-at-all-binding promise is the only thing keeping Taiwan safe from invasion. How long it will last is a concern though - the American approach for many years (and many administrations) has been to hedge bets and avoid making serious commitments, and that might not be sustainable.
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How long it will last
It will last for as long as it takes China to build out its H-6N fleet of hypersonic anti-ship missile launchers that will keep the US Navy at bay; the US won't risk a nuclear powered and armed carrier getting blown in half. That's when the Chinese blockade of Taiwan starts. Taipei folds soon after.
the American approach
That's been SOP for every great power for as long as there have been great powers. Nothing particularly 'murkin about it.
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You really don't understand America.
We have always been willing to risk ships against dictatorships.
We're quite famous for it, actually.
Meanwhile, we will get chip supply if we have to invade Mexico to supply it, along with our national burrito supply and national salsa supply.
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Unfortunately those tortilla chips' electronics don't work too well for what we need them for.
No, these are windows 11 compatible tortilla chips. We pass them through 11 windows before sealing the compostable bag.
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You really don't understand America.
I think I do. The US hasn't faced an aggressive super power armed with effective weapons in nearly two generations. Today's America is governed by people that employ bag men to fill their foundation bank accounts with PLA money.
They don't want a fight. They'll knuckle under.
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If China tries to blockade with ships they will be shot to shit by missiles and torpedoes, don't even need hypersonics. Point defences aren't that good, missiles are so much cheaper than a ship that the asymmetry means the ship loses. Autonomous mine layer, torpedo platforms and long range anti-ship missiles can do a blockade ... but the carriers are irrelevant to that equation.
Manned stealth aircraft and aircraft carriers are just trillion dollar mirages used to fight enemies with 1970s USSR technology. Ve
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If China tries to blockade with ships they will be shot to shit by missiles and torpedoes, don't even need hypersonics.
This is all true. Where you go wrong is in thinking Chinese loses will matter. They won't matter. Taiwan is so close that China doesn't need warships that are much beyond littoral and losing them won't be significant. Meanwhile, the US will have to risk national assets. Carriers, destroyers and submarines that are named after presidents and states. And as we know from the Falklands, and as you point out about point defenses, some of these assets will be lost. China is building weapons for precisely t
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And whoever attacks those ships will face retaliation. At the very least and open war with China would be costs in the trillions, and at worst it's WW3 and the nukes come out. Will the US risk that just to defend one small island, even if an economically and politically important one? America has no legally binding agreement, only deliberately ambiguous promises. China might call their bluff.
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Yadda, yadda, yadda. Somehow you think the rest of the planet suddenly disappeared. Taiwan's importance far outweighs it's land mass. Let alone the South China Sea's importance to it's neighbors. China needs to worry more about at-home problems than it's pride being hurt because that fundamentally is what the issue is, and had been for several decades.
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Somehow you think the rest of the planet suddenly disappeared.
No part of the rest of the planet has anything like the will or the means to oppose China. At worst they'll say something mildly critical, and then resume collecting their PLA money.
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Yes, finally our plan to support Taiwan for over half a century in order to get leverage on a shortage of goods that barely existed when we started has now come to fruition.
Somehow I don't think the cold war would have lasted as long if we were that good at planning.
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.... And?
You'd prefer China invades a sovereign nation AND the US has no chips?
That would only make sense if you're pro-China and anti-USA... and I forgot I was on slashdot, nevermind.
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Really? Who's spinning this story?
Until 2020 the dock worker's union was no issue but suddenly it is? C'mon. If that story held a drop of water, Europe shouldn't have the same problem.
The problem is that container shipping companies scrapped all their ancient ships that were held together by the prayers of the crew and the best wishes of the owner during 2020 when the demand plummeted and the alternative would've been to moore these ships, which is insanely expensive.
So now there is a severe shortage of shi
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So now there is a severe shortage of ships.
What? No. There are plenty of ships, it is just there are so many sitting at anchorage waiting to be unloaded [portoflosangeles.org], reloaded and sent on their way. And again [businessinsider.com].
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I don't see anything out of the ordinary, aside of a rather anemic number of vessels berthing. What exactly is your point?
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A lot of that is because shippers won't wait for the LTL and FTL to be offloaded and emptied, and try to book it with empty shipping containers, instead of waiting to be loaded.
Try another time.
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Nope. The global ship registry shows that the number of ships has been slowly increasing: https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
I think its been pretty well documented that the poor application of "JIT" philosophies is the problem here. JIT is fine when supply-chain fluctuations remain within, say, 5% of average demand but fall apart quickly with larger disruptions. Also, it is very easy to shut down production but much harder to ramp it back up. Like the Great American TP Shortage of 2020, we'll see supply reco
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> Really? Who's spinning this story?
Who do you think. You idiots bought the hospital bed shortage narrative for 2 years. They figure you're dumb enough to fall for this too.
"The 16 best ways to sabotage your organization's productivity, from a CIA manual published in 1944"
https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract... [hsdl.org]
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And when they have those advanced chips (Score:1)
they will use them in advanced naval platforms running Windows for Warships.
joys (Score:2)
ah the joys of globalization
In other words (Score:2)
US companies can work with blacklisted Chinese companies as long as they provide a clean-looking front in Taiwan.
"caused by the global pandemic" (Score:1)
There were growing problems with semiconductor supply and discrete components before anyone heard of COVID-19. At the bottom of all of this is simply consolidation of manufacturing through globalization.
Depending on Taiwan (Score:4, Insightful)
The leadership(or lack of) across the top of government today is like the a Key Stone cops cartoon. It will take time to replace failed leadership and re build. The question is will our military and public opinion be able to weather the storm and provide that time.
In the 1864 presidential election General McClellan(D) was running on a platform of peace now, let the Confederacy keep slavery. Basically, agree to anything to end the civil war because of the high cost in lives. Lincoln(R) won, so the war was pushed to an end thus ending the era of slavery in the US.
Today, I am not sure any US guarantee of any kind is worth the paper it is written on.
Re:Depending on Taiwan (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah Trump really killed a lot of the confidence the rest of the world had in us.
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Compared to the west's dependence on China, the little extra Taiwanese dependence is just the cherry on top of the shit cake.
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The leadership(or lack of) across the top of government today is like the a Key Stone cops cartoon.
You're not nearly as graybearded as you claim to be. Keystone Cops was live action. Also black and white and silent.
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In a supply shortage rationing is expedient (Score:2)
The free market does not work well in a massive supply crunch, it just creates lots of hoarding and parasitism and in the current geopolitical environment easy and plausibly deniable avenues for economic warfare. Government needs insight into the supply chain so they can ration if absolutely necessary and to expose strategic hoarding by enemies.
Is China centrally planning parasitic hoarding to harm western economies? Of course they are, why wouldn't they? The West and China are strategic enemies which do to
Military Aid (Score:3)
Just heard a story yesterday about how the Chinese government is rather irritated that we have soldiers training in Taiwan and that we've stepped up sales of military equipment to them.
Well, the numbers are certainly adding up now!
As long as we don't bring any of this manufacturing on shore. I mean, sure, this ratchets up tensions with China even further but at least we're not providing jobs to Americans!
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>Well, the numbers are certainly adding up now!
Indeed they do! Silicon is the new oil, and this is the new Carter Doctrine.
As long as we don't bring any of this manufacturing on shore.
But, we are [reuters.com]. Again, very similar to the Carter strategy of fight for oil in the near term and develop domestic production as the long term solution.
The bigger chip supply risk (Score:3)
This seems like the definition of the worst possible single point of failure and potential bottleneck in the entire global economic supply chain.
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Pat Gelsinger just got an erection
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Re: Samsung disliked this post (Score:2)
Can't we just give them a nuke? (Score:2)
/ Denny Crane
99% certainty (Score:2)
Come on man we did not have the willpower to take on a bunch of literal cave men. Now we are supposed to wake up to fight China? We are only friends with Taiwan on paper. I hate to say the truth, but sadly most people do not care about Taiwanese. Many (most?) humans only care about the suffering of another if they can relate to or feel connected to that person. How many people have friends from there? Any confrontation with China will quickly escalate to nukes, and that provides the perfect excuse to not in
US to secure Taiwan chip supply chain - haaa (Score:2)
Well, if the US hadn't armed Taiwan to the teeth, the Chinese would be less likely to bomb the shit out of it.