verne arase

GeorgeBMac said:

If, as he says, it's all about Trump's trade war, then that will no longer be necessary once we can return to facing our real enemy:  Russia.

The UK said the same:   They were bowing to Trump's geopolitical pressure at the expense of their own best interests....

And as to there being "infrastructure anywhere" -- we saw how false that statement is as China quickly returned to full production while India and the U.S. are still struggling to control the virus.

You're very gullible.

The truth is that pretty much all autocracies are inimical to our way of life.

Russia has a deep-rooted jealous antagonism because they lost the cold war and revel in past glories, and China has been fighting an undeclared war with the western world for decades.

Gullible western politicians who thought they were much smarter than they really were attempted to secure China rights and privileges and economic prosperity in hopes that a western standard of living and membership in international organizations would cause China to assimilate into the tenets of modern western society, but they failed to take into account the Chinese Communist Party and its stranglehold on the citizens of China.

As a lifelong conservative, I abhor Trump and what he's done leading to the corruption of the Republican Party and conservative movement. They used to be the party of statesmen - but now they toady to this reality TV star who constantly engages in magical thinking and ignores experts of any sort.

But - no one is right all the time and no one gets everything wrong.

The one constructive thing that Trump has done - no matter what the motivation for his actions - has been to push back against the Chinese Communist Party.

The CCP is a truly evil organization and is guilty of heinous crimes which dwarf those of the other boogymen who we actively revile. They are an organization who takes but never gives, an organization without morality or honor whose only reason for existence is their own survival. They completely control the truth in China, deny their own people aid when disaster strikes, and use their resources to influence other societies. They attempt to take control of international organizations and push their soft power throughout western media with paid propagandists. They attempt to export their own brand of Big Brother autocracy to other countries in hopes of shaping the world in their own image.

We need to divest ourselves of China and move non-Chinese consumer manufacturing out of that county.

Anyone know where the TSMC fabs are located?

Hmmph ... just ordered a 5K with a core-i9, Radeon Pro 5700 XT, 4 TB SSD, and 10 gb ethernet.

I sure hope the storage is on a daughter card as rumored.

I actually wanted the old form factor, so the RAM door would still be there.

gatorguy said:

And on the other side of the fence the Chinese have actively blocked many US/western services as being dangerous for use by their Chinese citizens. Seems perfectly expected since apparently no one trusts anybody, that's the position the world has placed itself in. Heck a lot of us probably don't even know our neighbors anymore. Trust no one. Geesh, it's a wonderful world.

You make it sound that this is a recent development, or a response to our actions.

In reality, the CCP created the Great Firewall, and no Chinese citizen has been able to see outside social media or news for quite some time.

In fact, the only ones who see outside the Great Firewall are those courageous enough to install illegal VPNs or the 50¢ army who pervasively post in western media pushing CCP soft power.

Thanks Cisco - hope you made a few bucks helping to block out the truth from China.

Why doesn't the Google/Apple framework allow contact tracers to download the data off the phone?

That way it can be stored decentralized until it's needed.

corrections said:

verne arase said:

Ugh ... there's no telling when this COVID-19 outbreak will end - heck there's no telling if it's going to visit us soon (our numbers have been frozen in amber and we're not testing symptomatic patients, even on request).

This thing probably has a R naught waaayyy higher than most popular estimates - and stock prices are just staying up buoyed by good thoughts.

Apple's got way too much reliance on China - they've got 10,000 CNC milling machines in their China facilities, and you don't just throw ten into a first class envelope and mail 'em to India.

Between the demand, manufacturing, and parts-sourcing ends, they're pretty much stuck in China for the foreseeable future.

If they activate a factory and they get a single COVID-19 case, they go into lockdown with all workers quarantined (despite what the schizophrenic central government wants to do). And I sincerely hope they're UVing all product through each macro stage of the assembly line. (Their JIT production/delivery model is way too fast for my comfort level).

China is similar in land area to the USA. Fires in California, or floods in the South don't shut down the entire country. Three mile island didn't turn the whole country into a wasteland. About 40,000 Americans die in car crashed every year. That doesn't stop all economic activity across the country. 

Also, a factory is probably one of the easiest facilities to keep clean. The rapid spread of this virus is largely related to lots of people living in close quarters with janky plumbing. It's more surprising that this sort of thing isn't occurring more often in China and in emerging nations with extremely dense populations. 

China's shutdown of massive transportation and big events to contain a rapid spreading of a cold virus is excessive caution. If this were a really deadly plague, we wouldn't be reading of 1500 deaths after two months of 11 million people being confined in a megacity. 

While the Chinese government was wallowing in denial, they held a 40,000 family festival in Wuhan seven miles from ground zero. Then came the new year, and five million Wuhan residents began the diaspora to destinations all throughout China to visit their home towns before the Wuhan quarantine. This basically shotgunned COVID-19 throughout the country.

Before February 14, in order to be included in the official infection pool you had to have a positive PCR test for COVID-19 RNA, and there weren't enough test kits to go around (and they were only available in urban hospitals). Afterwards, you were included if you were symptomatic with respiratory difficulty and a blood oxygen level below 93 requiring hospitalization. There are currently 150 million Chinese citizens under lockdown. Take a gander at the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 map for geographic distributions.

The issue isn't just keeping the factories clean - it's keeping the workers from infecting one another in close quarters (watch a video of an average assembly line). COVID-19 spreads by droplet, droplet depositation, and possibly aerosol (and yes, probably via fecal contamination).

Most cases are pretty light like a cold or flu, but 15% or so are serious enough to require hospitalization and 5% or so involving ARDS. Of those, about 1-2.1% die. It affects most strongly the elderly and infirm, and seems to bypass (or infect asymptomatically) the very young.

I've seen R naught values from 2.5 to over 6 and it spreads like the dickens. There is the possibility that secondary infections - infections after the first infection - may be particularly deadly. In any case, snuffing out this thing, even with the draconian methods used by China appears to be very, very difficult. If it spreads in the west, can you see any western country quarantining entire cities?

I've seen statistics that if this escapes into the world at large, there is a possibility of 60% of the world's population being infected, and the strain it would put on heathcare systems would be untenable.

While the fatality rate seems low, it seems to have a death rate 50-100 times higher than the H1N1 currently burning its way through the world, and a serious (hospitalization) rate way higher than anything we've seen recently. Remember: we've got a vaccine for H1N1 and a certain level of herd immunity - no such thing with COVID-19.

As for the death rate in China: you're not a COVID-19 death unless you're officially in the COVID-19 infection pool, and what we see when we see the numbers are the cases serious enough to go to the hospital. Most COVID-19 cases are staying at home, and the crematoria in Wuhan which previously ran 4 hours a day are now running 24x7. There's so much SO2 that it's visible from space, and there's currently no industrial activity there to account for any of that.

I got out of Apple when it first started hitting the fan, and the market has buoyed it up - probably due to index fund buyers - who are going through a pavlovian streak of buying the dip.

I think all tech companies (not just Apple) are in serious doo-doo, because the atoms used to build our modern devices come overwhelmingly from China, and a good part of manufacturing takes place there due to local expertise, low labor costs, and proximity to parts suppliers - whose factories have also been incapacitated by the quarantines.