Well EUV alone cost many billions of dollars to develop. It's also not clear that China is particularly good at leading high tech innovation. If you just look at the dollars and cents, they should be inventing new technology at a similar rate as the US. Doesn't seem like they're pulling their weight.
"If you just look at the dollars and cents, they should be inventing new technology at a similar rate as the US"
That's very debatable.
Maybe you are taking all the improvements China has made in construction, manufacturing and nuclear industry, and assigning them an 'innovation value' of zero.
Maybe you are assigning non-zero innovation to exploiters of gig economy like Deliveroo.
> That's very debatable. Maybe you are taking all the improvements China has made in construction, manufacturing and nuclear industry, and assigning them an 'innovation value' of zero.
I'm not.
> Maybe you are assigning non-zero innovation to exploiters of gig economy like Deliveroo.
In that case, Chinese innovation and efficiency in manufacturing alone rivals most other kinds in the world - it's truly a marvel for a country to be able to pay it's factory worker a higher wage than the average wage of several EU countries while actually doing the manufacturing at an integer fraction of the cost. That takes a massive amount of innovation that no country in the world is able to match. The value of this invention is arguably larger than the sum total of all innovation of the USA since the year 2000 in the amount of wealth it has generated.
Sure. I didn't say China has done nothing impressive (although it's emissions intensity of manufacturing and other environmental and labor rights records are horrible, which takes a some of the shine off its manufacturing for me, but that blame is equally on western governments and corporations who conspired to circumvent the environmental and labor standards demanded by their populations by farming them out to totalitarian dictatorships but that's a different story). But it's bite does not match its bark when it comes to developing and inventing new ideas and technology.
I'm sorry, I can't take you seriously. Nowhere in the world can match the efficiency of Chinese manufacturing. They can do more with less in a way no other country in the world can, which is the simple truth. Even countries with worse labour standards, even countries with worse environmental regulations (and there are dozens and dozens).
This is simply a product of developing and inventing new ideas and technology, and using them to produce trillions and trillions of dollars of wealth. If it was simply about poor labor rights and environmental regulations they wouldn't be where there are today, as there is a large number of countries with much more permissive environments.
Twenty years ago people said that it was all just because their wages are low. Now their wages are higher than several EU countries and almost all of South America, and they still are doing more with less. There is no other explanation, this is simply because they have expertise, ideas, and innovations that others countries don't or can't put into practice. The bite is absolutely matching the bark.
If there really isn't much innovation and expertise there, everyone else would be doing it. The prize here is in the trillions of dollars.
You can't take me seriously about what? That Chinese manufacturing has very poor emissions intensity and other environmental problems, or other labor and environmental regulations? It has not been able to match other parts of the world in manufacturing when it comes to those metrics.
> This is simply a product of developing and inventing new ideas and technology,
"simply" (also using vast quantities of coal, poor working conditions and other air and water pollution regulations).
> and using them to produce trillions and trillions of dollars of wealth. If it was simply about poor labor rights and environmental regulations they wouldn't be where there are today,
I didn't say it was simple, you are the one who keeps trying to say it is simple. But they definitely achieve competitive advantages that way.
> as there is a large number of countries with much more permissive environments.
Non sequitur.
> Twenty years ago people said that it was all just because their wages are low.
Lots of people say lots of incorrect stuff all the time, not just 20 years ago. This isn't really an argument. Environmental concerns have been high on the radar for a long time.
> Now their wages are higher than several EU countries and almost all of South America, and they still are doing more with less. There is no other explanation, this is simply because they have expertise, ideas, and innovations that others countries don't or can't put into practice.
Their manufacturing industry overall is clearly extremely good in general. Not in all specifics (particularly high-tech sectors) like automotive, aerospace, silicon, etc etc, but as a whole of course they are major leaders in many types of manufacturing.
> The bite is absolutely matching the bark.
Absolutely not in terms of innovation and development of new technology and ideas across all areas.
"But it's bite does not match its bark when it comes to developing and inventing new ideas and technology."
You just had a huge thread of repeating this over an over, and you have never stated why you believe this, what have you counted or measured to arrive at that conclusion? Patents? GDP growth, scientific papers? Is it 'just a feeling'?
Technology leadership and innovation and invention wherever I look. Which yes is anecdotal, but I did repeatedly say this, and gave examples https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29792311.
I just had a huge thread of others repeating over and over that I was wrong, without actually addressing what I wrote. That's why the thread got so huge.
It's like an argument about vaccines between housewives - firstly neither side actually understands the areas being discussed - that evident from how discussion of nuclear technology shaped up.
Secondly the statement is poorly defined - you have different ideas about what counts as 'innovation'.
Third, it is quantitive, but none of the arguments/statements given by either side have any quantities attached.
I don't have a dog in the fight, but if your centered your argument around patents, or GDP growth, or research funding and papers, you would have a more productive discussion.
> I don't have a dog in the fight, but if your centered your argument around patents, or GDP growth, or research funding and papers, you would have a more productive discussion.
No it wouldn't. You clearly haven't understood the discussion or issues if you believe that. I think that's why you're finding it so confusing.
Many companies were hit by digital trade secret theft that was sent to China, so they are more than capable of bypassing the billions of R&D by getting access to the designs and going from there with government backing.
Many companies sent their blueprints to China and asked them to find a cheaper way to build it, and so they did. The exclusivity guarantees must have been lost in translation.
Many ? Like who ? A secret stolen that way with company permission to stole and not just to a temporary permission to use the blueprint IMHO never happened and if happened has been a micro tiny fraction of stolen secrets ie by acquisitions, price dumping , expats coming back after having worked years in key jobs and then going in china to do a job where they can use what they learned without the restrictions of westerns laws
I didn't mean clandestinely, I meant that western companies choose to have their product produced in China, and are surprised when the product is sold without their label attached to it. I guess it is the media pirate in me quibbling over the definition of "stole", yes, as far as intellectual property goes, the Chinese have 'stolen' the goods, but I can only speculate that the vast majority of the time they did not have to sneak into an office in the middle of the night, instead the IP was handed to them with a "please don't make copies outside of this commission, or I'll tell the US government you stole." Without enforcement, there's no such thing as private property. Western companies should have kept their secrets secret.
That's true. And things will shift somewhat in that China will be less dependent on other countries for silicon for their economic and military security (most of which don't require cutting edge process). It's not going to happen by spending "millions" though, that will happen by continuing to aggressively follow.
China is very good at copying others’ homework though, thus the plethora of BEVs coming to the world market soon.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Chinese semi industry highly focussed on silicon carbide for automotive power electronics, with EUV being a skunkworks project taking place in Europe.
There are reasons they might not, and that is that the rest of the world also has time and money. China is not infinite.
Catching up is definitely a lot easier and yes it does take time, but it's not a given. They've been trying to catch up with jet engines for almost as long as the west or Russia have been working on them, certainly would have out-spent the Russians by a wide margin on the effort. So far unable to match western or even Russian designs. Although maybe in just the past few months they might have finally got something which is at least good enough, just spending a lot of money for a long time doesn't guarantee results.
The Chinese have been seriously trying to catch up in turbofan engines only since 1986. They are now far enough ahead as to be very comparable to the Russians.
They are nowhere even near to having spent as much as the Russians in resources. You forget that the economy of the USSR was a massive powerhouse, that allocated absolutely massive incestments in military technology.
The Chinese, on the other hand, acrually aren't incesting as much money on these technologies as one would think. The only company (SOE) that has any stake in jet engines is Shenyang, and despite also making whole aircraft, drones and so on, they have 15 000 employees for the whole operation.
Comparatively, Pratt and Whitney, which does only engines and nothing else, and is one of four companies capable of making modern turbofan engines, has more than twice the employees as Shenyang, which designs and manufactures multiple different aircraft. Boeing has ten times as many employees as Shenyang.
As far as outinvesting the Russians, we can compare again the number of employees. The most advanced Russian engines are produced by UEC Saturn, which only makes engines, and by itself has 21 000 employees.
That's again more than Shenyang, which doesn't only make engines.
So no, it's patently false that the Chinese are deploying more resources with less results.
No they have been seriously trying before then, it's just that they had failed and were somewhat covered by USSR. Even if we take that date, 40 years and countless actual engines to study and they're not even there yet!
> They are nowhere even near to having spent as much as the Russians in resources. You forget that the economy of the USSR was a massive powerhouse, that allocated absolutely massive incestments in military technology.
China is far bigger than USSR ever was, and has been for a while, it also has massive military investments and has always had far more people it could China is absolutely massive in terms of population it can bring to task. So I doubt this. USSR had a pretty large GDP by the end of it yes, but just looking at that is the same mistake as just looking at China's GDP now -- it was not always that large.
> The Chinese, on the other hand, acrually aren't incesting as much money on these technologies as one would think. [etc]
Well I don't think anybody actually knows what exactly they are investing other than they've clearly wanted competitive engines for 60-70 years. But either way this matches what I say about the noise coming from China not really matching the results coming from them, in terms of innovation and developing new technology.
Nope, before the Sino-Soviet split and shortly thereafter there was zero serious effort to build jet engines. They were producing Soviet designs under license and working on that until the mid 80s.
China never, ever, ever had anywhere near the engineering resources of the Soviet Union. To suggest as much is insanity. They arrived to that level somewhere before 2010.
China already has competitive engines. They can and do simply buy Russian engines. Domestic engine development is a nice-to-have, and not a huge priority. This is obviously reflected in the low budgets and the low number of employees in these programs. This is public information.
> Nope, before the Sino-Soviet split and shortly thereafter there was zero serious effort to build jet engines.
Nope, the WP-1A was built in 1958. Just because they were incapable of designing their own competitive jet engine does not mean they were not attempting to.
> China never, ever, ever had anywhere near the engineering resources of the Soviet Union. To suggest as much is insanity. They arrived to that level somewhere before 2010.
You mean somewhere after? Totally disagree. Clearly there were not good or well run resources like the soviets, but they had the money and the manpower earlier than that. If you're just looking at GDP overlap that is misleading because it does not account for more people in China, or the relative advantage it gets from much stronger computing power and ability to copy more advanced designs. Also you're taking the GDP from the height of the USSR, which is not representative of its economic power for those same 70 years it was designing engines.
> China already has competitive engines. They can and do simply buy Russian engines.
Not the most advanced ones.
> Domestic engine development is a nice-to-have, and not a huge priority. This is obviously reflected in the low budgets and the low number of employees in these programs. This is public information.
That shows how much you know. It is a huge priority for them and it has been for a long time.
In 1958 the Chinese built the WP-5/PF-1 the WP-1A, which was a license built version of the Soviet VK-1 and descendants.
The first Chinese-designed jet engine was the WP-14, and the project started in the mid 80s.
China did not have enough engineers to rival the USSR until after the fall.
> That shows how much you know. It is a huge priority for them and it has been for a long time.
It really hasn't. Defence in general is not a big priority of the Chinese state. Even within defence, producing new airframes is a much bigger than domestic engines.
> Not the most advanced ones.
Incorrect. The most advanced Russian engine in mass production is the AL-31F series, which is sold to China. Further developments intended for production, the AL-41F, are not in mass production.
> In 1958 the Chinese built the WP-5/PF-1 the WP-1A, which was a license built version of the Soviet VK-1 and descendants.
The WP-5 was the VK-1 clone which was the first jet built in China in 1956.
The WP-1A was a Chinese design in built in 1958.
After that they claim not to have developed any, but that's because they were all failures until Kunlun which they don't want to boast about so they make that one sound like the very first effort. It was not.
> China did not have enough engineers to rival the USSR until after the fall.
Maybe. It doesn't take 30 years to train an engineer though. How many engineers did they have?
> It really hasn't.
It really has. They've been trying to reverse engineer and clone Russian engines for a long time. Why would they be doing that if they were satisfied just buying Russian?
> Defence in general is not a big priority of the Chinese state. Even within defence, producing new airframes is a much bigger than domestic engines.
That's what they claim of course because they don't like to draw attention to their failures.
> Incorrect. The most advanced Russian engine in mass production is the AL-31F series, which is sold to China. Further developments intended for production, the AL-41F, are not in mass production.
China has singlehandedly (to the extent that a billion people can be considered a "single hand") dropped the cost of solar energy from five times as expensive as fossil fuels to half as expensive as fossil fuels in only ten years, an innovation that will probably stop global warming and usher in an unprecedented age of energy abundance starting about eight years from now. And it's not just solar; Chinese-designed nuclear reactors are also starting to be exported around the world. JLCPCB has automated custom circuit-board assembly to the point where you can get prototypes in your hands for US$10, two orders of magnitude cheaper than previously. When covid hit China, before PCR tests and antibody tests, they haled people caught with fever into walk-in fever clinics where they got chest-only CT scans, and by July they had developed a vaccine and were vaccinating people who had to travel abroad, five months before any vaccines were approved in most other countries, including the US, Germany, the UK, and Russia. And obviously every electronic device you own is mostly made in China unless it's an antique.
Can you imagine an Englishman in World War II saying, "It's also not clear that the US is particularly good at leading high tech innovation. If you just look at the pounds and shillings, they should be inventing new technology at a similar rate as the UK. Doesn't seem like they're pulling their weight."?
Sorry to see you downvoted, it is extremely irksome to me that China is so often characterized as "copying others homework" -- if we could do what China does, why do we go to China every time we need something done?
It is not westerners exploiting cheap labor, tho it may have started that way. It is really the scale of their talent pool, the number of engineers that graduate every year is nearly 10x what the US gets around to, and they idea that they just sit around waiting for an American company to design something for them is farcical.
> if we could do what China does, why do we go to China every time we need something done?
Ricardian comparative advantage, which doesn't require the party you go to to be better at the thing you are going to them to do than you are, only that you are enough better at something else that doing the thing you are outsourcing would require giving up more of the other thing.
It's about opportunity cost, not absolute proficiency.
While I've taken an intro to economics class, I've also taken Chinese bullet trains across the country, something I sadly cannot say for America. There are few metrics where they are somehow behind us in proficiency.
> I've also taken Chinese bullet trains across the country, something I sadly cannot say for America
But exercising centralized control while eliminating internal dissent through propaganda or ignoring it because dissenters are effectively disenfranchised, as much as it's a thing many people in the US would love to do, isn't one of the things we outsource to China (neither, viewing the same claim through a different lens, is physical Infrastructure in the US.) So, to the extent that that story reflects something they genuinely have absolute advantage in, it's not really relevant to the “why do we go to them for the things we go to them” for. Heck, a lot of the things we have gone to them for, like low-cost manufacturing of a variety of goods, are moving out from China to other places as they develop just as they moved out of more developed places to China, because with more development comes higher proficiency in areas that less developed states can't substitute for at all, so comparative advantage leads to them getting more of the things they can do, even if they aren't great at them on an absolute scale.
I have a very different opinion on China's totalitarianism (which I am very unimpressed by); I only meant to argue that China possesses expertise that we do not, yes, because of our own Ricardian motivations, but that leaves us in a position where we cannot build our own bridges, trains, nor even computer chips even if we wanted to. You can say we are no longer burdened with manufacturing our own goods, and have moved onto more productive, intellectual pastures, but I'm not so sure. It seems like we spent our capital building up off-shore talent and have enjoyed the largess of lower cost of living, leaving a lot of infrastructure unmaintained. I could go on with my cynicism, but it's not especially productive ;)
The bullet train story isn't all light and luster and progress, even though the system is really good for photo-ops and interesting for railway fans (which I do not deny to be one).
The West tends to take interests of people whose real property (including homes) blocks the right of way into account. While it does encourage NIMBYs from blocking everything, I find it better than the "here be the state railway, now pack your things and begone" approach.
Also, dissenters and politically unreliable people are forbidden from using such trains in China [0].
China has done a lot to reduce cost and increase efficiency of solar cells, not alone though. And I didn't say they make no innovations, clearly they do.
In a now-deleted comment, "selimthegrim" posted, "Yes, let's talk more about their vaccine with 50% efficacy pre-Delta. Do you see other countries clamoring for it?" "saberience" followed up with, "The Chinese vaccine is totally shit though in terms of efficacy compared to other vaccines, and in fact, where I live the Chinese vaccines aren't accepted any longer if you need to travel etc."
Do you mean Sinovac CoronaVac, CanSino Convidecia, Minhai, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences vaccine, Medigen, Zifivax, or one of the three Sinopharm vaccines? Because actually China developed nine vaccines, not one.
One of them is in fact the one other countries clamor for most: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoronaVac says, "A real-world study of tens of millions of Chileans who received CoronaVac found it 66% effective against symptomatic COVID-19, 88% against hospitalization, 90% against ICU admissions, and 86% against deaths. ... As of July 2021, CoronaVac was the most widely used COVID-19 vaccine in the world, with 943 million doses delivered. As of 14 October 2021, CoronaVac is the COVID-19 vaccine with most doses administered worldwide." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoronaVac#Authorizations shows that it's approved almost everywhere in the world except the Five Eyes countries, Russia, and the EU.
But I was talking about CanSino Convidecia, the single-dose vaccine they wanted to give me here in the hospital until they heard I was probably going to need to travel to the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convidecia says, "In February 2021, global data from Phase III trials and 101 COVID cases showed that the vaccine had a 65.7% efficacy in preventing moderate symptoms of COVID-19, and 91% efficacy in preventing severe disease. ... According to the Chinese state media, the team registered an experimental COVID-19 vaccine for Phase I trial in China on 17 March 2020 to test its safety. The trial was conducted on 108 healthy adults aged 18 to 60 in two medical facilities in Wuhan, Hubei province. ... In April, Ad5-nCoV became the first COVID-19 vaccine candidate in the world to begin Phase II trials. ... On 25 June 2020, China approved the vaccine for limited use by the military."
Convidecia isn't approved in nearly as many countries as CoronaVac and the Sinopharm BIBP vaccine, but the particular achievement I wanted to point out here was being able to get vaccines (three different vaccines) deployed to people who needed them in the field, six months after the pandemic was discovered and six months before any other country in the world. And, contrary to your claims, it turned out to be a lot more than 50% effective.
So, in this case as well as in many others, "It's also not clear that China is particularly good at leading high tech innovation. If you just look at the dollars and cents, they should be inventing new technology at a similar rate as the US. Doesn't seem like they're pulling their weight," is the opposite extreme from the truth, to an astounding degree.
That’s slightly misleading. Most Chinese are vaccinated with CoronaVac whose protection is far behind against the Omnicron variant compared with SpikeVax or Corminaty that is being administered in NA and EU. That’s the reason why the chinese vaccine isn’t acknowledged in the EU as a full vaccination with all travel implications.
I appreciate the added context! Not just most Chinese --- as I said, CoronaVac is the most popular vaccine worldwide. Doesn't its lack of authorization in the EU, and its authorization in most of the rest of the world, predate the emergence of Ό?
True, most people in EU outright refuse to get any other vaccination than Corminaty if they have choice, even SpikeVax had some acceptance trouble because other vaccinations are perceived as inferior in public opinion. Chinese or russian vaccs would have no chance of acceptance by the public here.
The Chinese vaccine is totally shit though in terms of efficacy compared to other vaccines, and in fact, where I live the Chinese vaccines aren't accepted any longer if you need to travel etc.
Strangely enough, I had thoroughly rebutted your first claim and the implications of the second in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29792057 before you wrote your comment. I have now updated the comment to quote yours as well and to include additional evidence.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
Do you have any suggestions for how I could rebut this kind of chauvinistic propaganda without attracting comments like chx's?
Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting that throwawaylinux or chx is a paid government agent; I'm well aware that people frequently repeat chauvinistic propaganda like that simply because they believe them, because unthinking stereotypes come naturally to the humans. But I'd like to make that situation better rather than worse.
Edit: I wrote an entire reply and then realized you were asking about the thread before that comment, not about how to respond to it. So I should try to answer the question you actually asked.
The one thing I'm aware of that you can do, to help dampen the nationalistic emotions and flames that spring up around this topic, is to scrupulously make your comments as factual and as neutral as possible. If you let your frustrations leak into your posts in any way, readers who disagree will take that as license to respond with 10x of their own.
This isn't easy to do, but it does help. It's not, unfortunately, a sufficient condition to avoid getting flamey responses on this topic. I wish it were, because it's a big problem and becoming worse. (I even made a specific list of moderation comments about this because the issue comes up so often: https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod. There's no other issue I've felt compelled to do that about so far.)
Bad as the situation is, though, I would not underestimate the persuasive power of a commenter who's able to keep their cool and stay flamebait free in everything they post on a divisive topic. It's a judo move in the end because the ones who respond with flames effectively single themselves out as not having good arguments. But the judo move only works if you preserve the asymmetry—i.e. if both parties are flaming, then they're discrediting themselves equally and it's a wash. If only one party is, then the other one wins by default. It doesn't feel that way in the moment (I feel the tug to respond-in-kind as much as anyone!) but when you go back and look at those threads later once the ashes are cold, it's quite clear.
Edit 2: There's one other thing you can do to dampen flaminess and increase the persuasive power of your own comments, although it's not always easy either. That is to find some point of relational contact with the person(s) you're arguing with. The most straightforward way to do this is to find something to agree with in what they're saying; or, failing that, to find some way of supporting the positive intention behind what they're saying.
The reason this works is that when people are arguing, they're inevitably arguing on two different channels simultaneously: (1) disagreement about the topic—that's the obvious one; but also (2) what each person thinks of the other. When the disagreement in channel #1 is so stark that neither party can find anything to agree with or respect in what the other person is saying, it inflames channel #2 and starts to feel like a struggle to defend one's self against attack. In other words, it starts to feel like a fight to the death (this is absurd on the internet, but this stuff all relates to hard-wiring from long ago). Survival instincts start to get engaged. When people feel like their survival is at stake, they'll resort to literally anything. In internet forum threads, that means lots of the worst kind of flamewar, including "are you being paid to do this" and much worse.
However. In a way similar to the 'judo move' I mentioned above, you can turn this to your advantage—and not only to your advantage, but everyone's advantage, by finding ways to reduce the pressure on channel #2. That's what I mean by "finding some point of relational contact". If you can do this, you're basically sending the message "I don't want to kill you" on the side channel, or—less melodramatically—"I'm not trying to vanquish you, I just want to find the truth together". When people negotiate that successfully on the side channel, the discussion on channel #1 (the actual topic) magically becomes more meaningful and interesting. But of course it has to be done with subtlety—not in the manipulative sense, but just in a way that genuinely respects the other person and allows them to feel heard and save face.
This is stuff we have a lot of ways to take care of automatically in person, without even realizing we're doing it, but because things like tone of voice and body language aren't available online, it's easy to fall into the worst interpersonal situations very quickly. Part of the challenge of developing a good forum culture (which is what we want to do here) is developing a new set of techniques that can map what we do instinctively in physical space into virtual space, in a way that leads to more complex and more interesting conversation. I don't think this is easy at all, so I don't think it's so terrible that it's taking us decades to get there. I do think it's a good idea though.
--- original comment: ---
Honestly I think the only thing it really made sense to do with that one was to remember and practice this site guideline: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) ...which is our euphemism for "please don't feed the trolls", which strikes me as probably the wisest thing the internet ever said.
The reason I say that is that there literally wasn't any information in the comment to rebut—just a smear ("are you paid to do this") and a bunch of name-calling and innuendo. If you try to rebut it, you're forced to go to a non-factual, name-calling level just because there was nothing else there.
Of course it's frustrating, not least because it takes time for enough flags to build up and/or moderator attention to get attracted, but in the end the system takes care of these things fairly easily. You can always email hn@ycombinator.com in egregious cases to speed that process up.
(Separately, in case anyone feels I've been too harsh here: I don't mean to pick on chx - it's easy to make these mistakes when emotions are high. But important to learn not to.)
Thank you very much. There's a lot to think about here.
I think that to a significant extent it's not actually absurd for such political debates "to feel like a fight to the death". Death is the currency of politics; the reason for the anti-China propaganda in the US and the anti-US propaganda in China is specifically in order to facilitate organized killing, because organized killing is how states stand or fall; it's what distinguishes the state from other forms of organization.
Even in arguably less consequential cases, like what happened to my friend Aaron or to Julian Assange, successful political factionalism can provide the factions who have control of the state with the opportunity to kill their individual enemies. (I can't count how many people I saw repeat the argument that Assange should give himself up to stand trial for rape, a trial everyone can now see was never in the cards.) At a scale in between, we have the drug war, which enabled Nixon, Biden, and their allies to imprison tens of millions of hippies and black people (who were inclined to vote against them) and strip them of voting rights. This directly killed many of them, forced others into violent prison gangs, and reduced their ability to organize politically to resist further damaging policies. And of course political debates over the death penalty and healthcare directly determine who gets to live and who has to die.
Even when there's no state, there's factional violence, so politics still determine who lives and dies.
So I don't think the humans are necessarily wrong when they feel that their lives are at stake in discussions about these divisive topics. No individual forum thread will, probably, determine their survival (though the HN thread where Aaron begged for help and mostly got told to suck it up might count as one) but the aggregate shifts in public opinion that emerge from the discourse will, ultimately, kill many of them.
In a broader sense, though, nobody's survival is at stake, because everybody who posting on this thread, every human alive today, is going to die. Their survival is a lost cause; their death is only a matter of time, and none of them has very much time left, a few decades at most. So the survival instinct, strong though it is, is the most futile of all human instincts.
(not the OP) Do you want to point to anything that is only half true? I similarly choose to defend China against lazy characterizations that they can only steal what westerners design for them, and it's not because I want the communist party to succeed, I don't. Why are you so sure what you've read about China reflects the situation better? I have visited factories in Shenzhen and Shanghai, I am impressed by what they have accomplished, and I believe the people in this thread do themselves a disservice by having such a tainted picture of their fellow human beings.
China was not solely responsible for solar panel cost/efficiency improvements of the past 10 years, so that's embellished.
And yes they make vaccines and nuclear reactors like many countries do or have done. And I'll just repeat that I didn't say they produce or invent zero new things.
For all their rhetoric, there is not matching output of new technologies in my opinion. Almost everywhere I look yes they often play catch up and are close behind in copying or are doing the manufacturing cheaply, but the idea or the innovation and research came from elsewhere. Smartphones, electric cars (or even conventional cars and internal combustion engines -- innovation and quality come from Japan, Germany, SK, etc), jet engines and airliners, CPUs and GPUs, reusable rockets, operating systems, software languages, pharmaceuticals, AI, crypto, for a few random things I can think of off hand. China obviously must do some innovation, it's just nowhere near the size of their economy or boasting, from my experience.
Who else has reduced the cost of solar panel manufacturing over the past 10 years? As far as I can tell it's entirely, 100%, Chinese companies. But maybe you know something I don't.
I don't know enough about smartphones, electric cars, conventional cars, reciprocating engines, jet engines, airliners, reusable rockets, or AI to comment on what the big innovations in the last few years are, where they came from, and which ones are being adopted in China. Can you go into more detail?
The most interesting innovations I've seen in CPUs in recent years are from Padauk (China) and RISC-V (everywhere, especially Berkeley, but also including China). NVIDIA seems to be leading in GPUs; like Lam Research, it's an American company with a Chinese-American founder. But now the critical innovation bottleneck seems to be not designing a working CPU design but successfully manufacturing it, and the supreme giant in the field is TSMC, a Chinese company, though Samsung is mostly keeping up. Of course the field is extremely international, which is why we're interested in ASML's fire in the first place.
In terms of crypto, it's an extremely international community, but two of the most significant achievements of the last 20 years were the collision attacks on MD5 and SHA1, which were found at Shandong University, which is in China. (Of course nobody knows where Satoshi is from, but China is near the bottom of the list of possibilities.)
I agree with you about operating systems and programming languages, though of course if you `git annotate` Linux you will find a rather large slice of it is written by people with Chinese names, a lot of whom work at Chinese companies.
As for drugs, well, I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29792057 how far China is from "playing catch up" with respect to covid vaccines. But maybe in other drugs it's true. What are the big new innovations in drugs, and where do they originate?
Look I don't have time to try to answer all this now I'll try to get back to it but I would like to make clear that I am not talking about Chinese people or people of Chinese race or ancestry here. I'm talking about China the country. There are brilliant people of Chinese ancestry who are responsible for many such innovations, many papers and inventions you see coming from western academia and companies have the names of Chinese people associated.
And nor do I say China has done nothing. They just aren't the infinitely-resourced borg that will end up overtaking everyone in everything that people seem to take as a safe assumption.
And nor do I say China has done nothing. They just aren't the infinitely-resourced borg that will end up overtaking everyone in everything that people seem to take as a safe assumption.
> Who else has reduced the cost of solar panel manufacturing over the past 10 years? As far as I can tell it's entirely, 100%, Chinese companies. But maybe you know something I don't.
The solar cost reduction numbers come in the form of reduced cost to manufacture and improved panel performance. There is a lot of non-Chinese research into the latter, but even in the former case a lot of inventions and technology is developed then licensed. USA and Germany.
> I don't know enough about smartphones,
Smartphones, invented in the US.
> electric cars,
Obviously not recently invented, but the recent push to make these competitive and take market share has all come from US, Germany, Japan, and SK.
> conventional cars, reciprocating engines
> jet engines, airliners,
China has been trying to develop their own jet engines for 70 years and desperately needed a competitive jet engine since 40 years when they broke up with the Soviets. No dice. They also want civilian airliners rather than having to buy from the US or EU. There's always rumors this time they might have got something workable last year, but it's quite amazing how difficult it has been for them.
> reusable rockets,
Well the Chinese rocket program is basically repeating the rockets of the 60s. Meanwhile US companies are basically re-inventing commercial rocketry with innovations significantly reusable rockets. China has quickly tried to follow that naturally and they could well do a good job. My point is the innovation and the new ideas aren't coming from there. It's just the same story where ever I look.
> or AI
Just more same thing. The inventions around the recent AI boom ("deep learning" advances like neural networks on GPUs, GAN) has not come out of China.
> The most interesting innovations I've seen in CPUs in recent years are from Padauk (China)
What's interesting about Padauk?
> RISC-V (everywhere, especially Berkeley, but also including China).
RISC-V is another great example that's not come out of China. Despite the fact they desperately need an unencumbered ISA (which is part of the reason for their extraordinary hijacking of their ARM subsidiary), they had never taken the step to create their own (before that they were using MIPS). Using RISC-V is just more of the same thing: following not inventing or leading.
The ISA is not really where much innovation is going on in computing though. You just need something as an interface, and everyone is more or less the same (although RISC-V is not very good as ISAs go, sadly).
> NVIDIA seems to be leading in GPUs; like Lam Research, it's an American company with a Chinese-American founder.
Yes, and yet again not Chinese.
> But now the critical innovation bottleneck seems to be not designing a working CPU design but successfully manufacturing it, and the supreme giant in the field is TSMC, a Chinese company,
It's both, for high performance CPUs and GPUs. There are only a few companies on the planet who can do the logic and circuit design, Intel, AMD, Apple at the cutting edge, and say ARM and IBM after that.
Also we're talking about mainland China or the nation governed by the CCP here (the context was "China" catching up with "not China" in silicon manufacturing). So China does not have TSMC.
> In terms of crypto, it's an extremely international community, but two of the most significant achievements of the last 20 years were the collision attacks on MD5 and SHA1, which were found at Shandong University, which is in China. (Of course nobody knows where Satoshi is from, but China is near the bottom of the list of possibilities.)
Comparatively little crypto has come from China compared with, say, USA. Who developed the crypto math and algorithms that you're using right now?
> I agree with you about operating systems and programming languages, though of course if you `git annotate` Linux you will find a rather large slice of it is written by people with Chinese names, a lot of whom work at Chinese companies.
Not actually a lot compared with how much they rely on Linux (a non-Chinese invention). Recently it has picked up in number, but you actually find a lot of those are janitorial and automated linter type of patches. There are some good developments from China, but very few compared with many other countries.
> As for drugs, well, I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29792057 how far China is from "playing catch up" with respect to covid vaccines. But maybe in other drugs it's true. What are the big new innovations in drugs, and where do they originate?
Well since we're on the topic of COVID their vaccines have been a great achievement. Chinese vaccines use inactivated virus, adenovirus vectors, subunit/protein, which were all techniques developed by the west for a long time. The new mRNA vaccine they are developing is based on this new mRNA vaccine technology which has largely been developed and invented outside China.
> The solar cost reduction numbers come in the form of reduced cost to manufacture and improved panel performance. There is a lot of non-Chinese research into the latter, but even in the former case a lot of inventions and technology is developed then licensed. USA and Germany.
It's come entirely in the form of reduced cost to manufacture; mainstream solar panels have been about 21% efficient and low-cost ones about 16% efficient for decades. Thin-film panels have gotten a lot more efficient over the last 10 years, but they've also been completely eclipsed by traditional silicon panels.
Can you name one or two inventions that have been important in reducing silicon PV manufacturing costs in the last 10 years that originated in the US and Germany? I can't.
I'm confused about why you're bringing up the original invention of things like smartphones (arguably Finland and Japan in the 01990s, rather than Danger in the US, but there's been continuous development), and jet engines. I agree with you that 40 or 70 years ago the US was inventing a lot more things than China was; 40 years ago China was still largely Communist. 1000 years ago China was doing more; the Song had a paper-money-based fossil-fuel mass-production economy administered by a centralized bureaucracy. 2500 years ago the center of innovation was Greece and India.
But I thought we were talking about a much shorter timescale here: where are things being invented now, like, the last ten years. And the US definitely didn't invent jet engines or smartphones in the last ten years. What have been the crucial innovations in smartphones in the last ten years? I think you'll find that most of them came from China, though the M1 is designed in the US.
> Well the Chinese rocket program is basically repeating the rockets of the 60s.
Until a couple of years ago, the US couldn't even "repeat the rockets of the 60s"; it was relying on Soyuz to get its astronauts to the ISS. Reusable rockets themselves aren't a "new idea" on the timescales we're talking about here; the US tried that in the 70s and failed so badly it destroyed its entire manned spaceflight program. Presumably SpaceX has been able to succeed at this in part due to coming up with some genuinely new ideas; do you have any idea what they are or where they came from?
> Also we're talking about mainland China or the nation governed by the CCP here (the context was "China" catching up with "not China" in silicon manufacturing).
If you want to start talking about that, I guess you're free to, but I have no interest in starting to talk about that subject.
> What's interesting about Padauk?
Padauk's CPUs (another Taiwanese company, by the way, in case you're keeping track) have two particularly interesting innovations:
1. They use a second hardware thread on the same CPU (or, in theory, up to three of them) to do things like PWM, SPI, or quadrature decoding which are usually done in hardware (or, say, pioasm on the RP2040, or the tiny amount of programmable logic on some new Microchip AVRs). This means you aren't limited to the peripherals included on a particular chip; you can in theory do things like generate an NTSC signal while running application code, which is something I've sort of done on the ATMega328, but I had to settle for running application code during the HBI and VBI.
2. They cost less than many discrete signal transistors, so it's reasonable to use them where you would use a transistor. Harder to second-source tho.
They also invented their own programming language for the chips, an assembly language with C-like syntax, but I'm not that impressed with it.
> It's come entirely in the form of reduced cost to manufacture; mainstream solar panels have been about 21% efficient and low-cost ones about 16% efficient for decades. Thin-film panels have gotten a lot more efficient over the last 10 years, but they've also been completely eclipsed by traditional silicon panels.
> Can you name one or two inventions that have been important in reducing silicon PV manufacturing costs in the last 10 years that originated in the US and Germany? I can't.
Yes, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187661021... LeTID problems in PERC panels were comprehensively examined and solutions found by these researchers. The parent company is South Korean (also not Chinese), but PERC was one of the biggest jumps in efficiency of cells in the past 10 years.
> I'm confused about why you're bringing up the original invention of things like smartphones (arguably Finland and Japan in the 01990s, rather than Danger in the US, but there's been continuous development), and jet engines.
Everything is built on other things, but still you can see significant advances. By smartphone I'm not referring to cellular radios or batteries or computer chips (all of which themselves build on other things), but the invention that revolutionizes a technology. The iPhone. I'm aware there are things people claim are smartphones before that, but that's not what I'm talking about.
> I agree with you that 40 or 70 years ago the US was inventing a lot more things than China was; 40 years ago China was still largely Communist. 1000 years ago China was doing more; the Song had a paper-money-based fossil-fuel mass-production economy administered by a centralized bureaucracy. 2500 years ago the center of innovation was Greece and India.
And today US is still inventing a lot more things than China was.
> But I thought we were talking about a much shorter timescale here: where are things being invented now, like, the last ten years. And the US definitely didn't invent jet engines or smartphones in the last ten years.
My point with jet engines is that China is incapable of developing them independently after 70 years of effort and with the luxury of having samples of good jet engines to copy for the entire time.
> What have been the crucial innovations in smartphones in the last ten years?
iPhone is near enough (I never mentioned 10 years, just general modern).
> I think you'll find that most of them came from China, though the M1 is designed in the US.
Which of them of them came from China? Not software, not silicon manufacturing, not digital logic design, not LTE modems, not screens, not new NAND technologies, not cameras. So what is the "most of them" that exceeds those things?
> Until a couple of years ago, the US couldn't even "repeat the rockets of the 60s";
Of course it could.
> it was relying on Soyuz to get its astronauts to the ISS.
A matter of funding, the rocket technology did not go away obviously they still maintain ICBMs and SLBMs.
> Reusable rockets themselves aren't a "new idea" on the timescales we're talking about here;
No, I'm talking about inventing an actual working reusable rocket and all the technologies and inventions required to achieve that.
> the US tried that in the 70s and failed so badly it destroyed its entire manned spaceflight program.
I'm not sure what you're talking about, but a lot changes in 50 years. 70s was only a decade after the first manned space flight.
> Presumably SpaceX has been able to succeed at this in part due to coming up with some genuinely new ideas; do you have any idea what they are or where they came from?
Certainly not China, which (yet again) is following and copying.
It's an American company though, with very strong restrictions on who can work for them (non-citizens / permanent residents I thin are not allowed).
> If you want to start talking about that, I guess you're free to, but I have no interest in starting to talk about that subject.
This is what the conversation is about. Read the thread, it started from wondering about whether China will catch up in silicon manufacturing. That does not make any sense if you count China as including Taiwan does it?
All my comments apply to mainland China.
> Padauk's CPUs (another Taiwanese company, by the way, in case you're keeping track) have two particularly interesting innovations:
I'm not sure what is innovative about what you're describing as hardware multi threading or software DSP but I'll take your word for it there's probably more to it that I'm not understanding. Still, they're also not mainland China, not surprisingly.
Also, it is not very generous to describe something like this as innovation but at the same time say that iPhone was not innovative.
You also don't address any of the rebuttals I made to other things (e.g., RISC-V, crypto, AI, GPUs). Does that mean you concede on those points?
