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Taiwan and the chips

The New Neo Posted on by

This is an old story, which appeared in January of 2021. But it’s taken on even more significance now, because there’s so much talk of Taiwan being vulnerable due to Biden’s weakness and inability/unwillingness to defend US interests.

An excerpt:

As China pushes the world to avoid official dealings with Taiwan, leaders across the globe are realizing just how dependent they’ve become on the island democracy.

Taiwan, which China regards as a province, is being courted for its capacity to make leading-edge computer chips. That’s mostly down to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest foundry and go-to producer of chips for Apple Inc. smartphones, artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.

Taiwan’s role in the world economy largely existed below the radar, until it came to recent prominence as the auto industry suffered shortfalls in chips used for everything from parking sensors to reducing emissions.

I have little doubt that there are a lot of things that exist below the radar and of which we should be aware. Any important product or service that isn’t geographically diversified and is in the hands of any nation that could fall into the hands of a potential enemy (or certainly rival) should be red-flagged.

It’s not like I have a solution – in fact, until today I was barely aware of the problem. But my guess is that a lot of you have a lot to say on the matter, so feel free.

“Feel free” – those words have taken on even more meaning lately, haven’t they?

Comments

Taiwan and the chips — 44 Comments

  1. Yeah, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) has a near monopoly on cutting edge fabrication. Intel used to be the largest fab but struggled for years with the transition from 14nm to the 10nm node and were surpased by TSMC.

    On the bright side, both Intel and TSMC are constructing new fabs in Arizona that should be operational by 2024 or so. I believe the TSMC AZ fab is going to be for 5nm (which won’t be bleeding edge by then, 3nm will be) but the Intel fabs should be more cutting edge and they’re planning on becoming a “foundary”, meaning they’re going to be producing chips for customers other than themselves (for context, Intel generally never used to produce chips for 3rd parties). These obviously won’t come on line soon enough to make any kind of difference for our current supply troubles, but it’s better than nothing I guess.

  2. It’s been a couple months but I saw some interesting discussion of the semiconductor and automobile manufacturing snafu.

    For whatever reason many auto cos. have gone with some custom made chips particularly in the their more expensive models. For example, a certain chip used in a BMW series 7 auto, may be the only use for that chip. So if sales for the auto falls off because of covid, BMW would like the chipmaker to have a supply of those chips in stock somewhere for the recovery. But the chipmaker doesn’t want to have a big stock of it, because only a BMW 7 can use it and those cars aren’t selling. (Why didn’t BMW just pony up the money at the beginning of the sales decline and buy up their own stock?)

    Once the factory fab line has been shut down for that chip it may take a long time to get it up and running again. Perhaps there are long and complex pipelines inside the factory.

    Of course, the automakers could have avoided custom chips entirely. Not sure what those trade-offs are.

  3. TSM is building a processor chip fabrication facility in Arizona but it will not be online until some time in 2024.

    There are different sizes of chip construction and this will focus on 5nm chip designs which are some of the smallest made, more efficient,
    less power and size. Intel, which has 4 fab facilities in the US, mostly has 7nm processor chip designs. Intel is also planning an Arizona plant.

    But even with these processors, several smaller chips in electronic circuits are manufactured in China. Even if they are made in other countries, slowing Chinese production slows the world.

    I read there is a shortage for the silica used to create these chips. Also, people creating the crypto currencies has placed a huge demand on chips.

  4. Two years ago we discovered for the first time that 80% of our antibiotics and other crucial medicines are manufactured in China. One would think this would constitute a national emergency, but no.

    “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Sun Tzu

  5. Nonapod: I don’t have any faith in an Intel company return to greatness. Like Boeing and their persistent decline of quality problems, they’ve gone Woke.

    If there is ever going to be a MAGA Renaissance — which I believe Trump wanted (MAGA was a discarded Reagan campaign slogan in 1980) — then a solution to rooting out this menace and killing it off by circumventing neo-Marxists in the schools must take place.

    Boeing has set the example of bowing to mediocrity in corporate life that Workness entails.

    This is the foundational subversion of our young that’s happened. We must OUT this completely to save the future.

  6. “Boeing has set the example of bowing to mediocrity in corporate life that Workness entails.”

    And it’s already killing people. With more college engineering schools becoming woke, the bodies will start piling up in about 5 to 10 years as those students get hired.

  7. “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Sun Tzu

    Wilson H. Carroll:

    It’s occurred to me the past year that much of American leadership — political and corporate — is effectively allied with China against the conservative middle and working classes in America.

    We are the Enemy.

    My question is not whether this is happening, but how far it has advanced.

  8. I can’t dig up a link, however I read in the recent past a piece which said that the chip manufacturing processes at the high end are more art than science and need experienced personnel and have the very touchy processes go well to have any good chips. This doesn’t sound like a type of factory that could be taken over by force without wrecking it. Unless that is the goal of China.

  10. I heard a story about the automobile chip problem about a month ago. If I recall correctly, part of the problem is that auto chips are on a physical platform that is large and archaic. While this makes it easier to swap out defective chips (by mechanics, in the shop), it also limits the number of manufacturing facilities that can handle demand. Why? Because in the chip world, the manufacturing design platforms for chips have become more concentrated and miniaturized, to keep pace with the increasing demands of the advancing technology. There just aren’t that many plants that are set up to manufacture auto chips because of their old design. It’s like the old problem with the Space Shuttle, using 25 year-old computer designs to run the equipment because it offered the confidence that it was pretty well proven and bulletproof, even if it was hopelessly obsolete by the standards of the computer industry at the time.

    The problem is severe enough that the major auto makers have been parking completed vehicles in huge fields, by the thousands – all they lack are their chips. In other cases, certain luxury options have been simplified in order to reduce the number of chips required. Talk about unintended consequences!

  11. Almost all of TSMC’s production is done in half a dozen very large fabs clustered with a mile or so of each other on the China-facing side of north Taiwan. Very unlikely they would survive any kind of shooting war, not to mention that the Taiwanese government probably has them wired to blow if the war is lost.

  12. }}} Once the factory fab line has been shut down for that chip it may take a long time to get it up and running again. Perhaps there are long and complex pipelines inside the factory.

    It’s a production line. Why would they want to ramp back up on production of some old chip they don’t make that many of in the first place?

    }}} Of course, the automakers could have avoided custom chips entirely. Not sure what those trade-offs are.

    Oh, now HOLD ON!! How else is a modern parts department supposed to justify its existence if it isn’t by gouging the customer for some stupidly cheap PoS like carefully dirtied SAND?

  13. gee, i wonder if the rest of the world would get mad at the prc if they destroy such a major world facility (during an invasion).

  15. }}} “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Sun Tzu

    Wilson H. Carroll:

    It’s occurred to me the past year that much of American leadership — political and corporate — is effectively allied with China against the conservative middle and working classes in America.

    We are the Enemy.

    My question is not whether this is happening, but how far it has advanced.

    I have been making this comment for something on the order of 10, if not 20, years:

    PostModern Liberalism is a social cancer, eating away at the foundations of Western Civilization. That’s literal, not figurative.

    It has been doing this ever since the end of WW **I**, when it first began to accrete from the dismayed “Classical” Liberals, so proud of their Civilization, after seeing what idiot humans could do with the products of that Civilization.

    It doesn’t matter that everything else is WORSE, fixing it was never an option for them, they want to burn it all to the ground, like a woman scorned, they will happily do whatever it takes to watch it all burn, after it “betrayed” them by killing millions senselessly.

    This is not a “can’t we all get along”. It’s a war, one side having no interest in anything but getting the other side to hold still while they make bigger and bigger clubs to beat them with.

  16. A lot of people decided that manufacturing didn’t matter, that all the intellectual content & potential for competitive advantage was at the design level. Some chip manufacturers were happy to focus on the design and leave the actual manufacturing to others; Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing focused its business on doing that manufacturing.

    TSM’s market value right now is $549 billion.

    There is a lot more to manufacturing that members of the Chattering Classes tend to believe.

  17. I’m currently reading a history of the French Air Force. As the French strove to increase aircraft production in 1939, they contracted with Ford Motor Company to make the British-designed Merlin engine in France. But when war broke out in September 1939, Henry Ford, who was committed to neutrality, directed that the Ford equipment, tooling, and people be withdrawn. No Merlins for you, Mr Frenchman!!

    Closer to our own time, during the Iraq war, the Swiss company Swatch refused to supply components for the JDAM missile.

    https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2003/jul/24/20030724-113347-4214r/

  19. I would advise that Taiwan be proactive in this area. The CCP has long made its intentions absolutely clear.

    The great amount of Taiwanese funds should already be offshored to Swiss bank accounts.

    All intellectual property should already have been downloaded to secure offshore servers.

    I’d have passenger jets ready and plans in place to immediately evacuate the top scientists and their families from the top chip research and production facilities out of Taiwan, at the first sign of invasion. I’d evacuate them preferably to Switzerland through Guam.

    I’d also have prerigged the chip research facilities and factories with a great amount of strategically emplaced explosives.

    Let the CCP gain nothing of value.

  20. Good article geoffb.

    I think part of the issue may be that with need for some automobile functions to have ultra high reliability, you want some subsystems to be completely separate from other systems. The engine ignition and fuel injection control should be separated from the braking system control. And mobile phones, entertainment, and voice recognition should have nothing to do with engine and braking functions.

    So some of those functions don’t really require a dense chip, and you don’t want to schmush them all together on one chip.

    Plus, traditionally the electrical environment in autos is quite nasty with voltage spikes of various magnitudes and duration. The smaller the semiconductor feature size, the higher the electric field for a given voltage.

  21. What were industry and political leaders thinking about these last couple of decades?????
    Probably more than a decade ago, one of my uncles , who has a Masters in Mechanical Engineering and was the VP of a plastics moulding plant, commented that there was something going wrong in American businesses at the top. Something along the lines of a lot of crazy decisions being made.
    This particular uncle is one of the most level headed and skilled men I know. The man, like my father, is not just a paper pusher, but is a highly hands on engineer and skilled do-it-yourselfer . Totally old school Engineer.
    Not long before I got out of the military, my battalion commander told me that the United States and China would never go to war because there was too much trade.
    I think there is a lot of crazy in the water.

  22. “until today I was barely aware of the problem”

    not like i haven’t been trying to ring that bell for a long time….

    It is easier to stop things in the beginning, nigh impossible later on..

    most here are late to this party…

  23. Jon Baker…”Not long before I got out of the military, my battalion commander told me that the United States and China would never go to war because there was too much trade.”

    That was a popular opinion prior to World War I…

  25. david foster,
    Reminds me of what happened one time before 9-11. We were standing in formation waiting for the First Sergeant or the Company Commander to come out and call everybody to attention and do the morning announcements.
    There was some private or E4 type behind me saying how the National Guard would never be sent to war. At the time I thought that guy was seriously naive.
    Then 9-11 happened and two sand box wars plus the leftover Balkan Missions.
    Guardsmen did a lot of time , often multiple tours , in combat zones.
    Personally , I never went to the sand box, but spent 18 months in the Balkans. Not any combat. Did hear one car bomb and was there for the riots in 2004 that got pretty hairy, and that Jordanian machine gunned some US UNMIK prison guards on a bus, but my job was on base and never really was in any danger.

  26. OBloody Hell,

    I assume you caught Elon’s joke with the proposed school’s acronym? Especially in conjunction with his follow up tweet, “It would have epic merch?”

    Even if Musk is serious about a tech campus in Texas there is no way the state or NCAA would go anywhere near that name. For the record, I don’t think he’s serious. I think he was making a joke.

    However, this gives me a chance to plug one of my favorite, new, red state tech schools, Florida Polytechnic University.

    physicsguy, it’s a bit of a drive from where you are in Jacksonville, but you’d find it a fun, day trip. Really unique campus. Worth a tour. (And, who knows? Maybe they need some help in the Physics department…)

  27. I am wondering something about these new facilities starting to be built or at least dreamt up in the Southwest. Isn’t it the case that TSMC is trying to get big major tax breaks as an incentive for these? I heard that somewhere. If so, then isn’t that attitude a little incongruous in that one would expect them more to be coming hat in hand almost begging for a place in this hemisphere to start to settle into? That is, if the threat from PRC were really that great. Not that Arizona would hold the whip hand even in those negotiations, but certain leverage could be brought to bear for TSMC to moderate its terms in such a case, I would think.

    Oh, also, any thought on GlobalFoundries’ recent IPO in this context?

  28. jon baker,

    Industry leaders were thinking about making far more money, than previous generations in their management positions ever had.

    I became aware of this back in the 90s and your uncle was right about something being very wrong. This probably started in the late 60s- early 70s.

    The way they’ve done that and still are is through the financial compensation that stock options are capable of providing.

    The focus of management in publicly held companies is on pleasing investors and stockholders not their customers. Rising stock value ROE please them. Management focuses on increasing revenue in the short term. Regardless of how harmful in the long term.

    Typically stock options vest in 5 years. If the stock value rises substantially in that period, the make a killing.

    Stock substantially rising in value creates tremendous potential for upper management being vested with thousands of share options each year. It dwarfs salary compensation.
    “Golden parachute compensation” at the very top level adds to this dynamic. It leads to a focus on short term gains.

    At the height of Japanese business dominance, in the mid 1970s, the average Japanese CEO received 15 times the yearly compensation of the average Japanese worker. American CEOs received an average of 150 times more than their workers.

    Stock options raised the disparity to far higher levels.

    That wealth allows company management to donate large sums to politicians. Those politicians certainly know which side of their bread gets the butter. Example; 66% of Romney’s 2012 donations came from big donors. The result is most notable in Congress; more than 90% of congressional incumbents get reelected. Polls consistently show that voters are content with their representatives, it’s the other guys representative that’s a bum.

  29. It’s like cooking. It’s all in the Secret Sauce.

    Given enough billions, anyone can go buy all the bits and pieces that go to make up a leading edge fab. Talking about the <10nm stuff. Any fool can excrete several generations older generation chips like it's a Bombay Belly Bonanza.

    But making it work at scale and produce profitable yields is a whole other kettle of fish. It requires the right several hundred or thousand people and their man years of experience and expertise. <— Which is precisely what MBA and Finance BugXirsons bred or educated in the West do NOT grok. Talk to just about any MBA/CFO type and they will soon start blathering on about how "No-one is irreplaceable" — total @#$%tards and they have destroyed the West.

    One of the problems with TSMC is you can't just buy it or replicate it for the above reasons. It's a Taiwanese-flavoured Chinese working culture and free from the Poz/Wokeness — which is precisely why it works. There is some chance that their efforts to build Fabs in US will pay off. AMD (again TW managed when you get down to it) has been cleaning Intel's clock because the Chinese are smart enough to keep the Indian nepotists out without falling afoul of stupid American diversity laws.

    The other thing MBA/Finance types don't get is that you need an ecosystem. Extremely focused and elite universities like NTU to produce the scientists and engineers, and galaxy of smaller suppliers. They don't teach this stuff at Harvard Business school… and if they do, it's just bullshit case studies == Just So Stories.

    It's tough. Whitey Can Do. Originally Whitey Did It All. But much has been forgotten and will have to be relearned the hard way.

  30. “Boeing has set the example of bowing to mediocrity in corporate life that Workness entails.”

    Cannot be fixed in contemporary USA because R A C E features prominently in these @#$%ups. Imagine letting Indians Plural FFS do avionics software development! Trigger Warning: This is White People Work (and only the best of them) requiring an attention to detail and a sense of personal moral responsibility not associated with the Subcontinent on any given day.

    Combine that the ubiquitous and utterly predictable regulatory capture and better get used to more avoidable accidents.

  32. re Boeing, I haven’t seen any evidence that affirmative action, outsourcing to India, etc, played any role in the 737 Max debacle. The problem was rather with the specifications for what the code was supposed to do, rather than with the code itself, also, the appalling decision to *not* document the existence and behavior of this feature in the Pilot’s Operating Handbook.

  33. “Taiwan, which China regards as a province,..”

    The US formally agreed to that proposition in the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué. Every country that trades with or has diplomatic relations with China has also formally accepted it.

  34. @DavidFoster:

    Of course you haven’t. You don’t frequent fora where people say unkind and unpalatable (and yet how strange that they should be) Truths. And you’ve probably never been involved in obfuscatory coverups. Hang around any of the seriously anonymous discussions where software engineering guys talk about outsourcing and the joys of Diversity and you’ll get the idea. And a 5 second Google would have given you these two links:

    https://theprint.in/world/boeing-engineers-blame-cheap-indian-software-for-737-max-problems/256999/

    https://www.unz.com/isteve/737-max-and-outsourcing/

    Of course everyone denies Indians were in the loop… But then they would, wouldn’t they?

    Just two comments from the thread. Amazing how lovely and clean and pure of thought a person can be if they keep their hands scrupulously clean and don’t go reading anywhere ‘icky’.

    —
    In one post, an HCL employee summarized his duties with a reference to the now-infamous model, which started flight tests in January 2016: “Provided quick workaround to resolve production issue which resulted in not delaying flight test of 737-Max (delay in each flight test will cost very big amount for Boeing).”
    —
    I just updated the following list with the Boeing 737 Max entry. Turns out this is not the first time Indians wreak havoc in Boeing. Its Dreamliner ES software (written by HCL) was banned by the FAA. This list was compiled years ago. I am sure it is much longer now.

    Companies ruined or almost ruined by imported Indian labor in alphabetical order:

    Adaptec – Indian CEO Subramanian Sundaresh fired.
    AIG (signed outsourcing deal in 2007 in Europe with Accenture Indian frauds, collapsed in 2009)
    AirBus (Qantas plane plunged 650 feet injuring passengers when its computer system written by India disengaged the auto-pilot).
    Apple – R&D CLOSED in India in 2006.
    Australia’s National Australia Bank (Outsourced jobs to India in 2007, nationwide ATM and account failure in late 2010).
    Bell Labs (Arun Netravalli took over, closed, turned into a shopping mall)
    Boeing Dreamliner ES software (written by HCL, banned by FAA)
    Boeing – Boeing’s 737 Max Software Outsourced to Indian programmers caused two plane clashes.
    Bristol-Myers-Squibb (Trade Secrets and documents stolen in U.S. by Indian national guest worker)
    Caymas – Startup run by Indian CEO, French director of dev, Chinese tech lead. Closed after 5 years of sucking VC out of America.
    Caterpillar misses earnings a mere 4 months after outsourcing to India, Inc.
    Circuit City – Outsourced all IT to Indian-run IBM and went bankrupt shortly thereafter.
    ComAir crew system run by 100% Indian IT workers caused the 12/25/05 U.S. airport shutdown when they used a short int instead of a long int
    Computer Associates – Former CEO Sanjay Kumar, an Indian national, sentenced to 12 years in federal prison for accounting fraud.
    Deloitte – 2010 – this Indian-packed consulting company is being sued under RICO fraud charges by Marin Country, California for a failed solution.
    Dell – call center (closed in India)
    Delta call centers (closed in India)
    Fannie Mae – Hired large numbers of Indians, had to be bailed out. Indian logic bomb creator found guilty and sent to prison.
    GM – Was booming in 2006, signed $300 million outsourcing deal with Wipro that same year, went bankrupt 3 years later
    HP – Got out of the PC hardware business in 2011 and can’t compete with Apple’s tablets. HP was taken over by Indians and Chinese in 2001. So much for ‘Asian’ talent!
    HSBC ATMs (software taken over by Indians, failed in 2006)
    Intel Whitefield processor project (cancelled, Indian staff canned)
    JetStar Airways computer failure brings down Christchurch airport on 9/17/11. JetStar is owned by Quantas – which is know to have outsourced to India, Inc.
    Lehman (Spectramind software bought by Wipro, ruined, trashed by Indian programmers)
    Medicare – Defrauded by Indian national doctor Arun Sharma & wife in the U.S.
    Microsoft – Employs over 35,000 H-1Bs. Stock used to be $100. Today it’s lucky to be over $25. Not to mention that Vista thing.
    MIT Media Lab Asia (canceled)
    MyNines – A startup founded and run by Indian national Apar Kothari went belly up after throwing millions of America’s VC $ down the drain.
    PeopleSoft (Taken over by Indians in 2000, collapsed).
    PepsiCo – Slides from #1 to #3 during Indian CEO Indra Nooyi’ watch.
    Polycom – Former senior executive Sunil Bhalla charged with insider trading.
    Qantas – See AirBus above
    Quark (Alukah Kamar CEO, fired, lost 60% of its customers to Adobe because Indian-written QuarkExpress 6 was a failure)
    Rolls Royce (Sent aircraft engine work to India in 2006, engines delayed for Boeing 787, and failed on at least 2 Quantas planes in 2010, cost Rolls $500m).
    SAP – Same as Deloitte above in 2010.
    Singapore airlines (IT functions taken over in 2009 by TCS, website trashed in August, 2011)
    Skype (Madhu Yarlagadda fired)
    State of Indiana $867 million FAILED IBM project, IBM being sued
    State of Texas failed IBM project.
    Sun Micro (Taken over by Indian and Chinese workers in 2001, collapsed, had to be sold off to Oracle).
    UK’s NHS outsourced numerous jobs including health records to India in mid-2000 resulting in $26 billion over budget.
    Union Bank of California – Cancelled Finacle project run by India’s InfoSys in 2011.
    United – call center (closed in India)
    Victorian Order of Nurses, Canada (Payroll system screwed up by SAP/IBM in mid-2011)
    Virgin Atlantic (software written in India caused cloud IT failure)
    World Bank (Indian fraudsters BANNED for 3 years because they stole data).

  35. Zaphod:

    As I recall the great software outsourcing in the 90s was mostly to India. The effort failed and companies had to reel that work back to the States. I’m not sure if it was due to Indians or the underestimated difficulties of off-shore development or both.

    I have a senior engineer friend at GoPro, who supervises some firmware projects in China and says the work is done by “cowboy programmers” — insufficient discipline and testing.

    That said, I’d have to check just about every entry in your list myself. There are plenty of failures and shady activities in tech. There are plenty of Indians and Chinese in tech. It’s not necessarily clear that one has to do with the other.

    For instance, HP and Sun Micro were “Taken over by Indian and Chinese workers in 2001” then “collapsed.” Many businesses collapsed after the dot-com bubble burst. I’d need a meaty book chapter or magazine article to blame Indians or Chinese.

  36. Humorous aside: In 2014 one of my old companies got caught hiring some Indian PC assemblers, flying them to the Bay Area, then paying them $1.21/hour to work 100-hour weeks for a big IT relocation.

    Bad company!

  37. It’s my experience a great deal of programming for U.S. companies is done in India. I rarely see any reasonable sized, U.S. firm that does a lot of programming not job at least some of it out to India.

  38. Boeing at one point “owed” India almost a billion $ in offsets. That is they needed to buy almost a billion $ in Indian goods and services to offset Indian purchases of Boeing products.

    In the mid-90’s there was an internal e-zine at Boeing run by a feisty bunch. You knew they were headed for trouble when they had a scathing assessment of senior management titled “Airplane Farm”. They pulled no punches. They had an employee only forum section called “The Open Mind”. Some VP lost a battle of wits in said forum and it was ordered shutdown. The last issue was titled “The Open Mind is Closed”

  39. Zaphod, you assert that the software outsourced to Indian programmers caused the 737 Max crashes without providing the slightest evidence for your assertion. “Provided quick workaround” does not demonstrate that the workaround was flawed, much less that it caused the crashes.

    The idea that a single $300MM outsourcing deal from GM to Wipro was responsible for *the bankruptcy of GM* is ridiculous on its face. No effect from pension costs, customer acceptance of products, federal/state/local taxes, worker morale, etc, just that Wipro deal? c’mon, man!

  40. The Chans are full of White American software guys talking about how they were forced to train their H-1B replacements. Imagine the humiliation! But failure to comply means dismissal and loss of redundancy benefits plus a black mark re future employability (Raycisss. Not a Team Player. Jaysus Wept… What @#$%ing Team? But I digress.)

    And when they’re not talking about that, they’re talking about how as soon as one Indian guy gets into a position with hiring authority, he soon loads the joint up with his compatriots and drives out Whitey. Doubtless this is all incredible and new information to Economic Rationalists (there’s an oxymoron for you, now).. that Humans are Tribal and favour their own.. Except of course for the Cattle of the West who have been carefully taught and goaded into not looking after their own.

    Gets even better… Then you get forums where *Indians* are bitching. Prime situation is when some guy or girl from the Scheduled Castes manages to get into one of the few good universities (if it’s not part of IIT system in India u can pretty much wipe your bum on any tech-related diploma — not that *they* do:P) and then score a job in USA. As soon as the Brahmins find out that he/she is a jumped up hereditary toilet cleaner, well it’s off to job purgatory. Magically Indians can discriminate against Whites and even other Indians in America, but… but This Is Not Who We Are ™.

    It’s just a mess.. They should be back where they come from using their big brains to get the vast majority of their own population out of an almost literal cess pit of existence.

  41. David+Foster:

    Your measured response… I don’t quite like your thinking, but I do admire your restraint.

    A healthy sane company and national strategic asset would not outsource to India. Or any other country. Full stop. Possible exception for Japan given that USA simply cannot manufacture the highest grades of carbon fiber (Hello, Toray).

    Of course I cannot provide direct documentary evidence. But there is a smell about the whole thing. And there is plenty of chatter out there. Do I need to explain why nobody will go directly on the record?

    For sure there are going to be numerous other corporate cancer issues inside Boeing. My contention is that 90% of them cannot be fixed because they cannot be described or even THOUGHT by the kinds of people who can survive the Diversity and Wokeness minefield to make it into positions where they could actually do something about these issues.

    So back to Drunk Under the Lamp Post. Per usual.

    And seriously… Anyone who has had business dealings with different ethnicities knows that certain stereotypes give you better than 50% chance of being right. Of course you then iterate your internal Bayes algo as you have further dealings with them.

    But taken on the whole. Indians are sloppy, cheating, short-cut takers. Most of their programming shops are full of not very bright people who work to spec in the most unimaginative ways. That’s just how it is.

    The Chinese all over Asia, North and South-East, joke that the Indians are the only folk capable of cheating them.

    It doesn’t mean go genocide Indians. It means that Indians are suitable to be In India being Indian with other Indians… not with the Rest of Us who are not really equipped to deal with their unique and special ways of being and doing.

  42. @huxley:

    I’m as aware as you that that list is not perfect. But there are patterns.

    Not all Chinese programmers are great.

    So how about the US equivalent of DJI? I mean there’s an Apple for Consumer and Professional Videography drones, isn’t there? I use GoPro and Insta360 products. My contention is that Insta360 (Chinese from top to bottom) is out-innovating GoPro.

    The point is that GoPro has to use Chinese hardware and firmware guys. There simply is none of this ecosystem left in America because usual Financialising of Everything Social Asset-stripping Suspects offshored it all so they could score their personal sold gold messes of pottage.

    Guess who gets the pick of the cream of Chinese hardware/firmware/software guys? Chinese companies. Huawei, DJI, etc. They pay better and supply better benefits than Whitey MBA BugXirson will — his bonus depends on not paying them as much as the Evil Chinkies do their own. And make no mistake… a good software guy in Shenzhen or Shanghai can live a *very* good life and take holidays in Paris and buy LV bags for his wife. The sweatshop / slave labour stuff is mostly cope-ium or happens when an outsourcer is a real bottom scraper.

    For pure software ability… Don’t forget they hacked the heads of a generation *and* hoovered up a bunch of biometrics and location data with TikTok. There’s a lot going on inside that one to make the dopamine hack work better than the other competitors.

    You know who really sucks at software though? The Japs. Should be MBA Cases studies on how Sony died as soon as software became more important than the best engineered metal boxes and solenoid switches.

  43. I’m as aware as you that that list is not perfect. But there are patterns.

    Zaphod:

    That’s as may be. My point is that just because people at Unz are willing to say unkind things about ethnic groups doesn’t make them right. I need them to show their work with more detail than the above.

    Which is my general problem with Unz and Zman.

  44. @Huxley:

    How do you Show Your Work when doing so on the record and with details and witness depositions exposes everyone involved to Cancellation for Life?

    I’m more of a Z Man fan than Unz — I like Unz because he will publish literally anyone who cannot get a platform elsewhere. The fact that many of those are seriously deranged is neither here nor there. Even a lunatic can speak the truth or fragments of it. In these troubled times perhaps more so than many of the ostensibly sane and sensible. Z Man was smoking the Cope-ium a week or two ago because apparently the Chinese can’t have tested this hypersonic missile because Physics. So he ain’t perfect. Not when he disagrees with my evaluations, anyway!

    The point of these people is that they say the Unsayable… and by making so much unsayable in the current climate, the Woke have made far too many things Unthinkable. When you cannot discuss or contemplate the issues in their full complexity, as a society you’re cruising for some serious bruisings.

    Literally everyone has bad experiences with Indian outsourcing (whether it be e.g. Cathay Pacific totally borking their customer facing systems for a few year, or just the standard call centre idiocies). There comes a point when one has to admit that it’s raining and not hold off passing judgement until the annual general meeting of the American Society of Meteorologists has pronounced Holy Writ. In other words, things can be true even if they cannot be written in the New York Times. Or even here, on occasion.

    Yeah… it’s icky. I know. I get it. But so is Humanity… and Triply so when stuff goes all Babylon 5. Which is unnatural and now how we are programmed to live. And is asking for trouble from the cruel gods who coded our DNA.

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