@washingtonpost @business @wsj @FT @reuters The critical importance of Taiwan semiconductor technology definitely merits a @nytimes op-ed. Many Americans may not be very aware of the issue, but semiconductors are to the information age as oil was to the previous era, absolutely https://twitter.com/nytopinion/status/1338551875776475141

critical. The article underplays the U.S. attack on China's Huawei via its pressure on TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor. This year Trump's hawks essentially banned TSMC, via licenses for equipment and software, from selling semiconductors of any type to Huawei, both standard and those

the latter designed itself, in an effort to put Huawei
out of business, economic warfare. It is hard to overstate the importance of Huawei, TSMC. Huawei is arguably China's most important tech company, even more than Alibaba, Tencent. In my view, TSMC might be one of the three

most important tech companies in the world, Samsung in South Korea and Intel in the U.S., being the other two, as together they supply the semiconductor chips that are the guts of modern computing/communications equipment that drive economies. Intel has fallen behind the other

two in the feature size race, the smallest dimensions of
the transistors on a chip (the article calls this "thinnest," which some might confuse as the width of the actual chip). By lowering the feature size to now 5 nm, billions of transistors are on each chip, e.g. in iPhones

(Apple does not make its own chips). China, unlike Japan, S Korea, Taiwan when they were developing decades ago, Japan caught up first in semiconductors in the 1980s, has failed to close the semiconductor gap with the west, despite knowing about this vulnerability for at least 15

years. I've always considered it China's Achilles heel. Even now China is a couple of generations behind in semiconductor process technology. One of its leading semiconductor companies just defaulted on its bonds, and the U.S. has attacked its leading one, SMIC. China has thrown

huge amounts of money at this weakness, even more now in the past year, but experts in the field are usually quoted as saying it will take China a number of years to catch up. The U.S., other countries are home to the companies that produce the critical manufacturing equipment

and design software needed for advanced semiconductors. China is hiring away engineers, including from TSMC, but semiconductors have always been a "learning curve" industry in which critical experience is accumulated over long periods. Two other quick points not mentioned in the

article. First, Taiwan is the focal point of increasing tensions between China and the U.S. over the issue of its status, which I will not go into here, but which if heated up too fast might lead to armed conflict that would totally change everything. Second, most Americans are

understandably pre-occupied with its elections, Covid-19, the economy, etc., etc., and are largely unaware of most of the stuff I've written about in this thread. I hope when Trump finally leaves office after his pathetic attempted coup travesty, the MSM will stop focusing on his

antics, as it has past four years, and debate out all the key issues now confronting America, starting with Covid-19, unemployment and massive inequality. There is another NYT op-today on need to improve the demand for good info in the U.S. w which I strongly agree. End thread.