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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • hello~

    westerner tech guy in China here. they haven’t thrown me out yet, but then they haven’t grown up an equivalent of we do yet either. they haven’t tried to steal it or learn our secrets either.

    nope for the last 3 or 4 years they’ve asked to license it to a local firm or better yet sell it outright to them. each time the price goes up and I suspect at some point it will become so irresistible that the founders will do it.

    interestingly the sanctions closed us off from a lot of big institutes and companies who faced with losing the capability entirely just went ahead and acquired a bunch of Japanese stuff and jerry rigged it together. so that sucked.

    because that’s it, if we don’t sell it to them someone else will and that’ll be the end of the party for everyone.

    pretty sure this has played out in history before.




  • shrooms can be a bit of a dice room on visuals.

    once boiled up half a shopping bag of shrooms and split the tea with one friend.

    There were infinite moments where the fabric of space time twisted up into the cosmos believably revealing to me a path into the heavens. I had to control my breathing otherwise the torrent of everyday objects flowing past me would move too quickly for me to get enough traction.

    I once had three tiny died shrooms, and a bong hit disconnected my soul from my body and transferring me into an ancient dog sleeping in the sun on a wide open field in the wilderness. the entire thing seemed to go for eons but collapsed back into my living room in and instant when some rang the doorbell.

    Then I’ve had shrooms where the trip was extremely profound and emotional but the only visual was the leaves of the trees just looked a bit brighter and more flappy in wind or some swirly clouds of colors bouncing around my hifi speakers.




  • If you can train is less than say 6 hours. Trains are hands down better.

    They are much more reliably on time.

    The station is usually much closer than to the ultimate destination than an airport.

    There’s little or no waiting in queues or what not, in a lot places you can roll up the platform 10-20 mins before departure.

    The seats are better for pretty much every class of ticket. sans a standing ticket but Planes don’t have those.

    Once you factor getting to and from the airport, messing about with check in, security, and boarding at around 6 hours a train is better than a 2 hour flight.


  • maybe I misinderstand your meaning but at its heart the real problem is that chip engineers salary has been stuck at ten years ago for about twenty years. Like 50k usd.

    This in and of itself is not a huge problem but with no downstream opportunities there isn’t enough talent considering a career toward the top of the value chain.

    The 1980s and 1990s saw alot of people come back to Taiwan, but the 2010s and 2020s sees it happen in another direction (mainland, the salary is awesome).

    Of course many will say factory workers don’t need to smart enough to do design. but IC production is complicated and needs skilled labor with some understanding of what they’re doing.


  • There’s a very simple way to measure the migration of manufacturing out of China.

    get a list of the top ten cargo ports in the world. count how many are mainland China?

    7 or 8 right?

    okay let’s go down the list until we get Vietnam or India or someplace where’d you’d expect the manufacturing to go to.

    aight… now compare all the cargo capacity for that entire country to one of the eight ports in China? tell you what, let’s include India, and Rotterdam, and LA… just add them all together. How many of 8 does it take to keep up with that 2 or 3 ?

    so, cargo shipping capacity… big difference right? day light.

    Vietnam wants to make iPhones. you gotta ship 110% of the various bits into Vietnam and then ship out 99% of the finished goods.

    all those ports come with piles and piles of back end infrastructure. roads. trucking. rail. skilled workers…

    there are infinite alternatives to China. but it will take 40 years to develop any of them to that level.