Exactly. Chinese companies were happily building low density semiconductors for home appliances etc while slowly climbing the tech ladder as the next level of tech matured and dropped in price. But then the US imposed the first semiconductor sanctions. The Chinese government took notice, saw where things were headed and within six months had a long term target, a comprehensive strategy and 15 years of guaranteed funding for achieving the target.

Same thing happened in the 1950s when the Soviet Union suspended tech cooperation for the nuclear reactors they were building in China. China responded by investing in the development of its own tech stack, and even when they made up with the Soviet Union they didn't invite back the Soviet technicians, they just continued to invest in their own tech.

2030 is the target date for reaching state of the art tech stack parity, but using only 100% Chinese owned IP top to bottom.

They know the world is changing and they're planning for the change. They just can't speak it out loud because that'd be defeatist.

For semiconductors, China is targeting 2030 for when it'll converge with the world's best tech stack but with the IP owned 100% by Chinese companies. 1.4 billion people quickly moving up the wealth ladder, with India, Africa, South America and the rest of Eurasia all on the same trajectory. Guess who those price sensitive markets will be buying from if they have any choice? It won't be Intel.

After the first sanctions hit and factories were left idle, China developed a plan: Converge every year until by 2030 they have a full semiconductor stack using 100% Chinese owned IP that is equal to the best the world can make. It opened three STEM universities dedicated to churning out the 10s of thousands of workers the new industries will need. Some of the first teachers in those universities were workers left without a job because of the original sanctions.

By 2030, just five years from now, I'm guessing that China will have an entire sanction-proof industry churning out semiconductors on a scale only China can do.

Imagine what a world drowning in semiconductors is going to do to the share price of the incumbents. Imagine how the government will react. Imagine the global turmoil that'll result.

All of those ideas stopped when the Cold War stopped. There was no longer any need to keep the masses happy because the masses no longer had anyone with which to contrast their lives.

Things are changing. Now we have YouTube etc showing people living a happy, fullfilling and prosperous life in China, and that makes us wonder about our own lives and the lives of our children.

It'll take a decade for enough people to join the dots and turn it in to real change.

This is why America is failing.

There's a saying that unimportant decisions are made by the many, while important decisions are made by a few. The US seems to have opted to involve the many in both big and small decisions, and that leads to gridlock because it's much easier to oppose than support.

Started with BitKeeper changing its license because someone in the community had tried to reverse engineer the protocol. Linus tried to defend BitKeeper, but the other devs were spending their days shouting at the BitKeeper guy while searching for something freer. Linux coding pretty much stopped.

Then one morning Linus posted git v0.1 and instead of searching for another system the linux devs spent the next week critiquing git. Then they started to add patches and within a couple of weeks the system was fit for casual use. Overnight git became the VCS that every dev used at home and dozens of other VCS' companies were out of business within the year.

Good times.

Another example of our wonderful mainstream media working hard to bring us truth and accuracy every day.

An old timer from various IEEE committees told me that it's tough to find sanction-safe ways for Americans to work with Chinese on global standards committees. This is a big problem because the Chinese companies (specifically Huawei in his case) are happy to throw a ton of engineers at the committees while western companies just drip feed them in their spare time.

Because he had a phone. Because he had the ability to connect to a local wifi in a top secret environment, or a USB cable to do it. Because his computer had open ports. Because the server with the top secret data gave him the rights to export data to a local computer. Because the local computer gave him rights to copy data via wifi or to a USB device. Because he had porn on his phone. Just little clues like that.

Exactly. I'm guessing this wasn't a high security area - probably a corporate office annex. I'm also guessing the information involved was some corporate document that he wanted to work from home etc and he didn't have a work issued home computer.

When the failure happens, they'll blame the regulations and the fix will be to change the law rather than fix the code.

If the current system is being out-competed by other economic systems, then change the system. An economic system is just a utility, it isn't something we should have an emotional investment in like a sports team.

How to start? China's five and ten year plans seem to be working pretty well. Worth a try.

The narrative was that technical education was old fashioned and those who went down that path were doomed to low wage jobs. That fitted because the MBA's were sending all the technical jobs to China, our factories were closing and the demand for technical jobs was plummeting.

China went in the other direction by designing an educational system that encouraged vocational education at the expense of low value soft degrees.

Interestingly, Russia had a vocational heavy education system that churned out trades and even had PhDs in vocational trades. Post Soviet Union they dropped that system and adopted the western system that emphasised soft degrees. Fast forward to now and Russia has returned to the old system of vocation heavy degrees.

Lawyering is a technical background. It requires a lot of critical thinking, the ability to dig in to the detail and a respect for other fields of expertise. On the other hand, MBA's invented the executive summary because they don't understand or respect expertise - in fact, they're suspicious of expertise.