libertyandfree

avon b7 said:

davidmalcolm said:

For people saying, “oh these chips are made in the US then shipped somewhere else” you don’t seem to get it. Right now Apple is so incredibly dependent on operations in China. If war broke out between the US and China. (Realistically right now a China would be much smarter to look north and absorb large chunks of Russia. Winning a land war with Russia would seem to be much easier than picking a fight with its many heavily populated south Asian countries. Though China clearly would like to reabsorb Taiwan.)

Right now if America went to war with China or Taiwan that would mean no access to the best fabs in the world (also the fabs would be destroyed and the kinda behind them lost.)

by ensuring Apple and other companies can build advanced chips off the Island it gives China less leverage and motivation. One of the benefits for taking Taiwan would be disrupting the west. Because without Taiwan we as a society would be falling back on much older less efficient fabs in the US and Europe they can’t make power efficient chips that are perfect for mobile devices.

also Apple has manufacturing operations in China, India and Brazil. I suspect those plants in Brazil are in part there because Apple is hedging their bets not just because the labour is cheap. 

It’s also pretty obvious that as soon as it’s practical Apple will move device assembly to robots. Even if it costs more they’ll have at least some products being made in part by robots so that as climate change destabilizes the warmer/poorer parts of the world, they’re still able to pump out devices. (Also let’s be honest, COVID  put a huge wrench into things. So the sooner they can move to a system where they don’t have to rely on large groups of humans breathing the same air, the sooner they will.)

I can't see how that is relevant in a war scenario. China would target semiconductor facilities on US soil, just as the US would do the same to China. 

However, for 'disruption' everyone is fully aware that all the undersea fibre cabling (powering the digital age) would be snipped, causing digital havoc worldwide. Satellites would be targeted too.

And let's not forget that military hardware mostly doesn't run off the bleeding edge nodes. 

The military tries to build computing/communications resilience into its designs but while the military may be able to get by to some degree, the rest of the world isn't prepared for any such situations. It is highly susceptible to many types of disaster scenarios, from energy, supply, raw materials, extraction, refining, manufacturing, distribution...

Not to mention the financial side of things. 

The modern world is very different to the world of previous World Wars and people (especially in the developed world) are very different too. 

A major superpower conflict (even without the use of nuclear resources) is hard to imagine right now, although you can never completely rule out some madman taking the wrong decisions and pulling the wrong triggers and getting something started. 

StrangeDays said:

foregoneconclusion said:

The whole point of tariffs is to increase the domestic prices of the goods that are subject to tariffs. It makes them less competitive versus the goods that don't have the tariff. The problem with just generally slapping a tariff on anything manufactured in China is the sheer volume of products that it would impact. In many cases, American consumers wouldn't have a cheaper choice. Everything would be priced higher due to the tariffs. 

Also worth pointing out that the foreign nation (China) does *not* pay these tariffs, the US-based importers and distributors do. And they just pass it on in the form of a higher price tag, as you've described.