DefinitelyNotAPhone

joined 4 years ago
[–] [email protected] 61 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Meanwhile, it has barely made a dent in the wests finances.

How long do you think it'll take liberals to figure out that derivatives and oil futures don't translate into ammunition and rations if you outsourced all your factories?

[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Water is a fantastic way of insulating radiation. Nuclear plants store used fuel rods in a pool that's only 20-30 feet deep, and you could theoretically swim to within a few feet of the highly radioactive rods without issue.

A melted down nuclear reactor at the bottom of the ocean has zero ecological impact. It's bizarre to consider, but it's been backed up by extensive research.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

There's a reason there are so many companies marketing multi-thousand-dollar bazinga gizmos and making a fortune.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Little known fact: Jesus Christ was a signatory on the Treaty of Westphalia which established the modern western concept of nationhood. Incidentally, he is legally Hamburgian.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The 5% unemployment goal is to ensure there's a reserve army of labor to depress wages. You're absolutely right that libs are ignoring the cognitive dissonance of ignoring that part of their ideology.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

It's sort of an anti-Chik-fil-a

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago

You're assuming these aren't the same losers who refuse to accept that Tracer's a lesbian because then their waifu wouldn't fuck them if she were real.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

and packaging this into a system that meets the scale and reliability requirements to make it commercially viable hasn't been reproduced to date

Your overall point about EUV being difficult isn't wrong, but this line is really where the typical liberal forecasting of China's capabilities fall apart: they don't give a shit about it being commercially viable, they give a shit about having the industrial capacity.

The reason why EUV is more or less a cartel monopoly in the West is that it's a cobbled together collection of scientific principles that work well enough that the first few companies that figured it out could make insane profits off of it, and then proceeded to patent the shit out of it to prevent anyone else from doing so. The engineering behind EUV is... not great from a reliability standpoint, most notably the fact that EUV has an average downtime of something like 10% (meaning your fabs are offline 10% of the year for maintenance), in large part because you're shooting little droplets of liquid metals with a high intensity laser which tends to splatter and require cleanup. There are potential alternatives to this process for creating the kind of UV light you need for lithography, such as particle accelerators, that are theoretically superior but the R&D into those alternatives costs tens of billions of dollars with no guarantees that any of it will ever become profitable, so Western capital doesn't bother trying.

China doesn't have that profit restriction. It needs the ability to produce bleeding edge chips to remove its reliance on an increasingly hostile West, and it has not only the engineering and scientific power to brute force that kind of R&D but the ability to devote a sizeable portion of its national resources to doing so. It doesn't matter if its profitable, it matters if they're able to decouple a critical industry from the West and ignore sanctions accordingly, and that has infinitely more value than a shareholder dividend, so they will put the resources into doing so and, inevitably, they will figure it out. And from what we've seen over the past 2 years since the trade wars have started, they're not only succeeding but doing so ahead of expectations, in large part because increasing tensions have made life a living hell for Chinese scientists and engineers abroad working in these industries due to racism and suspicions of spying which push them to emigrate back to China and lend their expertise there instead.

In 20 years, chips made in mainland China will be competitive or even superior to their Western counterparts unless the West undoes 50 years of neoliberal rot overnight and replicates what the CPC is doing for silicon manufacturing or the CPC collapses and China experiences the same shock doctrine that the former Soviet states did in the 90s, and neither of those outcomes look likely right now.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

I wonder how many empires' last futile efforts to maintain their hegemony are going to break on shipping through the Red Sea.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Amazon is supposedly working on it, but I wouldn't get your hopes up of it being any good.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 11 months ago

$132 billion in approved debt cancellation out of a total of $1.7 trillion, and that paltry percentage is planned to be cancelled if people subscribe to the right repayment plans and have no meaningful changes in income ("Sorry bud, you gotta keep working retail for your entire adult life because otherwise your monthly expenses go up by a thousand dollars!") over the next 40 years. And that's assuming the entire plan doesn't get scrapped by the next administration, which it almost certainly will be.

It cannot be overstated how absolutely, completely fucking useless this plan is. It makes the ACA look like the New Deal by comparison. It's like King Louis XVI walking out to a horde of starving peasants and saying he totally addressed food prices by handing out two dozen loaves of bread every three months.

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