Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Foreign Policy & News Chinese take out

Trump firing the US Ambassador to Ukraine in 2017, then asking Volodymyr Zelenskyy for a quid pro quo and withholding Zephyrs let Russia know it was ok to mess with Ukraine.

BFF simply means "best friend for ever." There is no homosexual context to besties.

I changed planes in the new Hong Kong airport once. Lots of military people where hanging around just watching people. Their uniforms were nice, olive green uniform coat jackets with a red-orange star on the shoulder.

Also, lots of hanging foul at the food kiosks.

I hafta say, I used to think the far right was having the most fun with their politics. They had their politicians fighting the lizard people down in caves, freeing the kids and keeping us safe, etc.. But now I’m seeing Libs have a lot of fun with blueanon intrigues and LARPing.

I never said Libs were using homophobic acronyms. What I said was ‘ I personally liked the homophobic memes liberals were using with Trump and Putin’.

Heck, SNL was doing skits of Trump being Putin’s beyatch. It’s politics amiright? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, there’s no solidarity in a meritocracy. Libs are fickle with that big tent of theirs.

Anyhow, back to Taiwan. Looks like the Chinese navy will be doing live fire exercises around Taiwan. Looks like it will tie up airline flights and shipping. Wonder what the total cost of the stunt will wind up being?

Glad we took care of Flynt though. Boy, we’re those folks hurtin.

China should just leave Taiwan alone. Clearly Taiwan is not into China.

My observation is that when countries mess with other countries, it usually does not end well for those countries doing the messing with.

SEE: Russia, 1930s Germany, Argentina and Falkland Islands

Their trade flows beg to differ. But, if it’s a matter of opinion, I think we should let China and Taiwan work it out

See: Yemen, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Iran, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, Panama, Philippines, China, Mexico, China again, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Australia, France, Italy, China again, Etc, etc, etc..,

See the US in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, et al...

The age of imperialism is over. The age of war is over. There is only mutually assured destruction from here on in.

Chunks, a lot of supply chains are snafued right now for a lot of reasons. I don't see why the US has to kowtow to China's every wish. They don't walk on eggshells as far as our feelings are concerned and I think geopolitically it's a bad idea to bow down before the Bear or the Dragon.

Power is shifting subtly during this uncertain time and it's probably best to present a strong front against our economic competitors.

I'm really glad that the bipartisan bill to invest billions of dollars in domestic semiconductor manufacturing and science research was passed in both Chambers and is becoming law.

And Senator Sinema just signed on to a modified version of the Democrat's Cut Inflation bill. But not modified much and she has promised to work on a bill to get rid of the Hedge Fund manager's loophole.


Sinema Agrees

“ Chunks, a lot of supply chains are snafued right now for a lot of reasons. I don't see why the US has to kowtow to China's every wish. They don't walk on eggshells as far as our feelings are concerned and I think geopolitically it's a bad idea to bow down before the Bear or the Dragon”

That almost sound reasonable. Then one has to look at the tens of thousands dead in Ukraine, millions displaced and Europe’s economy imploding to see it’s not actually reality. Negotiating a security framework would have been better.

But that’s not what we have going on anyway. It looks to be a clash of two economic models. One flailing to hold on to its empire while it hollows itself out. The other a mixed economy that has a firm grasp on keeping the things that are necessary to sustain life public utilities. If the oligarchs can’t control those resources, they’re fine with destroying those countries governments.

I’ll repeat myself and say it’s all well and good (and quit racist) to bomb from the air and kick in doors of underdeveloped non-white countries to maintain empire. It’s another matter trying the same with a peer competitor. We tried that thru are proxy army in Ukraine. My fear is we’re trying it again thru Taiwan.

It’s just been announced we’re sending the Ronald Reagan and it’s battleships/cruisers thru the Taiwan strait in the next couple of weeks.

Also, who made China a peer economic competitor in the first place? Hint:same people who are now trying to provoke it into a military confrontation.

The very first official "W-2" taxpaying J-O-B I got hired for was in 1973, stuffing American made "op-amps" and semiconductor microprocessor IC chips into circuit boards for the very first digital modems, made by Penril Data in Rockville, Maryland. Later they moved me to running the wave solder machine and then later into Q-C and burn-in testing. I was still a morning high school student and would have graduated in 11th Grade except I decided that partying was more fun and wound up having to stick with two classes every morning AGAIN, in order to finish out my senior year.

Oh well, good paying US manufacturing job!



But with this new semiconductor act, some or maybe even a lot of these jobs might just return here...but having visited a facility like that in Plano, Texas in 2009 to shoot a corporate video, I can say this:

It is not going to be anything like the job I had in 1973.

At Penril Data, it was a long line of tiny Vietnamese, Korean and Filipino women and a couple of guys who sat at an assembly line, stuffing those tiny parts onto the boards by hand. And most of them didn't really have any grasp of electronics because they didn't need to.
The line supervisors trained them in their native languages to do the equivalent of "bead work".
A disc capacitor was called a "galleta" (pronounced "guy-YET-a") because it was shaped like a tiny little cookie.

"Poner la galleta en el agujero acqui" --- loosely translated "Put this little cookie into this hole here.

Every miniature electronic component part had a nickname related to what they looked like and the ladies would grab them from little cubbyholes and they'd follow the illustration on the chart in front of them. Each one had to stuff a certain number of parts into a section, then pass the board down the line where the next lady would stuff more, lather, rinse, repeat, until the board was finished and ready for wave soldering.
Each board took about 20-30 minutes to finish before solder.

Today, at least as of 2009 anyway, gone are the adorable little ladies who stuff the parts by hand and a robot can stuff even a large board, like a computer motherboard, in about a minute or two. The component parts are loaded into the bot the way a belt fed machine gun gets loaded with a belt of ammunition and the bot literally "sews" the parts onto the board with lightning speed.

So the point I'm getting at is, any American semiconductor job is likely more of a robotics job than anything else, care and feeding of all those happy bots that sew components onto board, shuffling them into the wave solder machine, moving them down the line to washing and drying (a chemical process with no water) and then into semi-automated quality control and burn-in testing.

I wager that the most human operations still done by hand will be mechanical assembly of cases and cabinets, and packaging for shipment, and dealing with the units that get culled and sending them back for disassembly and remanufacturing or recycling.

We are going to need low cost or even subsidized robotics training outfits on every other corner in every city if we expect to make this happen.