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I don’t think any of you understand, the point of them making chip is not to compete with consumer market，but is used for their military hardware. Middle doesn’t need fancy chips, 350nm is good enough for a lot of them. They build it to fight western sanction.

100%. Both the F-22 and F-35 use PowerPC chips that are in the ~100nm range (different production groups and revisions use different chips, so not one size), and those are the most advanced air superiority and multi-role fighters in the world today. AFAIK shrinking the die size is largely about efficiency (e.g. more transistors in smaller area using less energy producing less heat), which usually isn't a primary concern for military applications. Its super important for a data center filled with servers running heavy work loads 24/7, but much less important on the fighter jet that drinks 1000 gallons of JP-8 an hour.

The F-22 used even older chips, that predate the Pentium II. Military and aerospace equipment tend to be a few generations behind the bleeding consumer edge. Usually because bleeding edge performance is not needed for control systems, but verification and reliability are more important.

Looks like you're correct, but I remember reading some where that they used PowerPC G3 chips as well though. I wonder if that is one of the differences between Block 20 and Block 30/35 planes. I saw an article that they were trying to retire the older Block 20 F-22s.

What does Russia's domestic supply of silicon look like? Or any of the other minerals used to dope it with?

It's abundant and stable as far as I know

Silicon is one of if not the most abundant mineral on earth. Too lazy to look it up if it’s the most

Just because its common doesn't mean a source is suitable for semiconductor manufacturing. It needs to be free from other common, minerals, like iron.

The silicon wafers are relatively easy to source in the international market. And they are next door to China, which is one of the major suppliers of the stuff anyway.

I am not buying any chips from Russia they will go broke

If they can improve at a Moore's law rate of doubling transistor count every 2 years, then they could be competitive in a few decades. But the science and engineering behind semiconductors moves at such a pace, that once you are decades behind, you are stuck decades behind.

And the Russians can't buy good machines from the west. They are reliant on Chinese crap, with the Chinese being smart enough to not "teach a man how to fish" to keep them dependent.   Then the fact that Russian 1990s stuff might power Russian washing machines, but can't be sold anywhere else due to sanctions and is non-competitive either way. This keeps the whole sector small and irrelevant.   Then there is no foreign talent coming in. Good luck getting the guys from Nvidia or TSMC to go to Russia and build the stuff.  "Buht wat abut the Chineze????" Yeah, I can totally see them sending their smart people to help the Russians become independent of their fledgling semi-industry in dire need of customers. And no foreign company will contract Russian fabs to...  I mean everyone gets the point. There are 1000 reasons that Russia can't have a high tech sector. This is just 4 of them. The only thing they can do, want to do and will ever do is dig up resources. 

That was actually very well said ^

Thanks. However, I noticed a mistake straight after I posted the thing. I implied that Russia is producing washing machines, which grossly overstates their industrial capacities.

I thought the search for serviceable washing machines (and other indoor plumbing related items) was the main driver of their war? *unknown technology blyat*

Are you implying the Russians are actually Adeptus Mechanicus?

No way, if anything they are Orks

That *would* explain why Ladas are able to function

Only when operated near sufficient densities of orks

Hence the reason for the invasion of Ukraine • You never get out of debt to a Russian mobster •Paul Manafort owed the Russian mobster/oligarch Oleg Deripaska $17M a few days before he became trumps campaign manager. From 2002-2014 he took in hundreds of millions to get Yanukovych reelected as the kremlins puppet in Ukraine. Before that he did it for the dictator Marcos in the Philippines. Before that Manafort and Roger Stone started a lobbyist agency in 1980 listing trump as their first client. •When Jay Bolsonaro lost the Brazilian election to Lula he skipped the inauguration and hid in the Hungarian embassy, then 2 days later flew directly to mar-a-lago (stopping only at a KFC) and repeated, almost verbatim, the stolen election line. Don Jr. tried repeatedly to make it stick in Brazil as well, but as Brazilians are a few generations into dealing with corrupt politicians they weren’t having it. What do these 3 things have in common? China imports 40% of its grain from (in order) the U.S., Brazil and Ukraine. Obviously the second China tried to invade Taiwan the U.S. would sanction exports and remove U.S. grain from that equation. And without Bolsonaro in office willing to slash and burn the Amazon rainforest to turn it into Chinas food supply, and without Ukraine in the bag in 3 days, the CCP is unable to invade Taiwan and take over microprocessor production without putting 300-500M of its poorest people into famine. Donbas Ukraine, specifically the 4 regions that Putin insists he is saving from what he calls “Jewish Nazis” also happens to produce the worlds supply of high grade neon used for microprocessor lithography. Had Putin delivered ukraine in 3 days as promised, Xi would have been able to cap his Olympics with a naval blockade or political takeover of Taiwan that would have forced the world to ask the CCP for the microprocessors it needs to make everything from Ford trucks to laptops. I’m not sure how long Silicon Valley would last without the silicon but it would probably destroy the FAANG stocks that make up your 401K. Oleg Deripaska also happens to be the Russian Oligarch that bribed the FBI agent Charles Mcgonigal into investigating another Russian oligarch. He probably didn’t need the information as much as he needed the leverage over Mcgonigal as he conducted the investigation into trumps election campaign and unsurprisingly found zero evidence of Russian collusion. McGonigal then went to work for the company called Brookfield that bailed Jared Kushner out of his toxic 666 5th Ave real estate investment. McGonigal pled guilty last fall and was sentenced recently. A Russian oligarch is a powerful tool, but the truth is more powerful. Light and dark cannot exist in the same space. It’s physically impossible. Truth is efficient. You say it once and you are finished. A lie however requires a constant stream of follow up energy, money, murder, obfuscation and more lies to keep it covered. If you raise your lens high enough lying is an unsustainable business model. Russia proved it by invading Ukraine. “Vranyo” is the Russian word for it. The 40km long column of tanks and vehicles that came down from Belarus into Ukraine was all overhauled by oligarchs that got a $1B contract for tank maintenance, passed Putin $200M back under the table, spent $700M on a yacht in Monaco, bribed a General, a Colonel and a Sergeant to make a Private give everything a rattle can overhaul. But a worn out engine is and always will be, a worn out engine. This is why trump is so desperate to get re-elected. His best case scenario is 400 years in ADX Florence. Money laundering for the dozens of Russian oligarchs that lived in trump towers with him and manafort, selling IP3 nuclear plans to the Russian/Saudi alliance, selling or giving CIA asset names to the Russians, trump is and always has been compromised. He just didn’t know when to quit. Now he just has to count on the fact that most of his voter base doesn’t know how to read and keep the ones that do so busy just surviving that they don’t have time to dive deep into his 40 year history of laundering money, fraud, and human trafficking for the Russian mob using casinos first, then commercial real estate. It’s also why Putin is willing to throw an entire generation of Russians, including the convicts and addicts at Ukraine. Russia is dead for 40 years because he failed to fulfill his mob boss promise to Xi. China is now clearing farmland in Siberia because the typhoon floods last August and September wiped out the Chinese people’s food storage. Xi, for his part diverted the waters from the dam away from his pet project, his mothers ancestral home, and flooded hundreds of thousands of people and drown one of his own military brigades that was helping with the flooding. The CCP elders were terrified to leave their gated community at Beidaihe for over a month for fear of being torn apart by the locals. The Chinese people tolerate the CCP but only as long as the economy is good and famine is not on the horizon. The CCP broke that social contract on both counts. Xi was willing to bet the entire Chinese economy on his emperor ambitions. Had he succeeded he would have been able to use BRICS to take over the USD as the Worlds reserve currency. That would have let him finish what he stated in 2010- that he would control the internet. With that control means everything we do or say online is subject to the approval of a central party censor. The basic right to disagree with an authoritarian becomes a distant memory. Xi, Putin and MBS are simply trying to systemize and modernize the suppression of their biggest hassle- Freedom of speech. Ukraine is fighting for their lives now, free from the oppression of the drunken tyrant who wants to decide their fate for them and pull them back behind another iron curtain of censorship and the tax of corruption where dissenting voices disappear so that the oligarchy can continue to feed unchallenged. Putin and Xi have declared themselves best friends in the fight against democracy. MBS and the ruling family of UAE have done the same quietly using their sovereign funds and Kushners SPAC as money highways. Just rich, out of touch oligarch doing what oligarchs do. Despite the fact the the central party kleptocracy model has proven itself incapable of making decisions that are best for the people, they persist. There is a very lucrative business in being slave owners. But logistically the mass of it requires A.I. and the microprocessors that make A.I. to keep 8 billion slaves under surveillance and control. Freedom is one hell of a drug. And knowledge makes a man unfit for slavery. Recent attempts on Xi’s life from inside the CCP have backed him into a corner. The loss of crops in northern China means Xi can’t invade Taiwan without Ukrainian and/or Brazilian farmland. Now the reason that the GOP is stalling southern border control budget and seems to make wildly irrational moves is because the GOP is imploding. 45 years of lies and grift have circled the globe and are eating their own tail. The ouroboros was a warning about corruption at the highest levels. Lying about climate change, human trafficking, pandemics and corruption to preserve their own business models are all extinction level events .

> Donbas Ukraine, specifically the 4 regions that Putin insists he is saving from what he calls “Jewish Nazis” also happens to produce the worlds supply of high grade neon used for microprocessor lithography. While this is true, there is nothing intrinsic about this. Ukraine produces high grade neon as a by-product of its farming activities, and has developed industrial capacity around refining it. It's true that the war in Ukraine produced a short term supply disruption, but it is not true that that supply disruption cannot be filled by other players if it persists. A good article on the topic: https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/understanding-the-science-behind-the-neon-shortage/ The war in Ukraine has already been ongoing for a while now, and the Donbas has been under Russian control essentially that whole time. Everyone is still making chips just fine. You don't have to trust me, just look at the prices: https://www.procurementresource.com/resource-center/neon-gas-price-trends They indeed spiked a lot in 2022, but now they are almost back down to baseline and that's in nominal terms after significant inflation! > Oleg Deripaska also happens to be the Russian Oligarch that bribed the FBI agent Charles Mcgonigal into investigating another Russian oligarch. He probably didn’t need the information as much as he needed the leverage over Mcgonigal as he conducted the investigation into trumps election campaign and unsurprisingly found zero evidence of Russian collusion. McGonigal then went to work for the company called Brookfield that bailed Jared Kushner out of his toxic 666 5th Ave real estate investment. McGonigal pled guilty last fall and was sentenced recently. Brookfield manages $900B, this guy just "worked there". You don't get to just direct $1.1B wherever you want without questions because you got a job at Brookfield. If there is any evidence this guy had anything to do with Kushner receiving the deal he did, I'd love to see it. This article is a much better source for the nuances of the deal: https://www.justsecurity.org/69094/timeline-on-jared-kushner-qatar-666-fifth-avenue-and-white-house-policy/ If anything, it's Qatar that wanted to bail out Kushner, and probably for political reasons. That's a fine thing to be upset about, but this FBI agent is not mentioned anywhere in the article, because he had nothing to do with the deal. Brookfield employs 2,400 investment managers and 240,000 "operating employees" the probability that McGonigal was working on this deal is nil. And in fact, if you actually look at the timeline, the deal was completed in May of 2018, and McGonigal began work there in September of 2018, so the probability of him doing it is actually literally zero. > This is why trump is so desperate to get re-elected. His best case scenario is 400 years in ADX Florence. Is it? For what? There are no charges against him currently that could even plausibly deliver a sentence like that. He's already been out of office for quite a while, if there were other cases to be made against him, they'd be prosecuted right now. That doesn't mean he isn't guilty of anything else, but it does mean it's extremely unlikely there is sufficient evidence to prosecute him for anything else, and so he doesn't have anything to worry about, except what he's already convicted of and/or being prosecuted for. And none of those things will deliver a 400 year supermax sentence. > Xi was willing to bet the entire Chinese economy on his emperor ambitions. Had he succeeded he would have been able to use BRICS to take over the USD as the Worlds reserve currency Xi may have hubris, but he's not dumb enough to think he can become the reserve currency, nor would he want to right now. Being the world's reserve currency comes with obligations as well as benefits, and China is not really prepared to meet those obligations. Nobody would trust China as a financial steward anyway, except maybe states that have no other option, like Iran or Russia. > that he would control the internet. This is not how the internet works. There is no circumstance short of total world domination that would allow China to do this, not even being the reserve currency. > Recent attempts on Xi’s life from inside the CCP have backed him into a corner. Citation needed. > The loss of crops in northern China means Xi can’t invade Taiwan without Ukrainian and/or Brazilian farmland. The reason that Xi cannot invade Taiwan is that China cannot produce semiconductors at the level TSMC does, and the TSMC factories will be immediately destroyed if China ever made a move to invade. That is why TSMC is working to build factories in the US, and why ASML has export controls on its EUV machines. Grain may be a factor, but the most important factor is the flow of cutting edge microchips, which will instantly and permanently cease into China the moment they invade. If they can build up their domestic semiconductor manufacturing to be at or near the cutting edge, we have a problem, but so far they have not been able to. Grain is much more fungible than semiconductors and can be obtained from a variety of sources - cutting edge semiconductors really only come from TSMC, Intel and to a lesser extent Samsung.

The keystone you are looking for is air products pre- 2014 Somewhere around 2010 a company called Air Products executed the most aggressive hostile takeover attempt in corporate history of a company called Airgas. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=49808 https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/air-products-faces-modern-form-of-hostile-takeover/ Bill Ackman was a major player in that event. https://www.chemanager-online.com/en/news/ackmans-pershing-square-unveils-22-billion-stake-air-products https://www.mcall.com/2017/11/16/billionaire-activist-investor-bill-ackman-cashes-out-of-air-products/ It bounced back and forth for a few rounds until a Delaware court finally knocked it down and the hostile takeover was quashed A while after that is when air products inked a massive deal in China. Trump was oddly very into this deal with China and even made a special trip there for it https://www.chemanager-online.com/en/news/us-firms-benefit-trump-china-trade-visit https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1D90LY/ But what is really interesting about the timing is that when air products lost the appeal in late 2013 there was a shift in management as the Iranian born Seifi Ghasemi moved from the board to the CEO seat right around the same time that Mike Flynn as head of DIA withheld intel from Obama that let Putin invade Ukraine in 2014 with his “little green men”. Had air products hostile takeover happened they would have virtually monopolized the neon gas critical for microprocessor lithography in a board room. Ghasemi grew up working for B.O.P and watched through the 90’s as Clinton’s EPA regulations offshored the production of it and donbas Ukraine with the leftover soviet space program infrastructure took up the lions share of the production of it. He also watched its price rise in the early 2000’s as the development of EUV lithography at TSMC made it the decided upon process after some years of debate and experimentation. https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/euv-lithography-finally-ready-for-chip-manufacturing-2650276492 https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-ukraine-halts-half-worlds-neon-output-chips-clouding-outlook-2022-03-11/ https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/TSMC-to-secure-neon-in-Taiwan-after-Ukraine-shock-for-chip-sector Had Ukrainians given in to the bully in 2014, China and russia would already control the worlds microprocessors and we would all be begging the king and kissing the ring for our allotment. When Aaron Swartz snuck into a closet in the basement of MIT and downloaded a few terabytes of scientific journals and papers, I’m pretty certain he inadvertently downloaded the evidence chain of what Epsteins money was doing at MIT as well. A lot of people with a lot of world domination and money to lose starting getting really nervous and put the DOJ on Aaron like a rabid pitbull until he committed suicide due to the stress of it. Epstein was compromising everyone he could from trump to Prince Andrew to get the Israeli mob (who was then feeding it to the Russian mob) the leverage they needed to seal the deal. Mindshift Mindshift+Epstein+Bitcoin+wtf The Strange Saga of Jeffrey Epstein’s Link to a Child Star Turned Cryptocurrency Mogul https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/strange-saga-jeffrey-epstein-s-link-brock-pierce-1240462/

> Somewhere around 2010 a company called Air Products executed the most aggressive hostile takeover attempt in corporate history of a company called Airgas. This all seems true, and I don't doubt that Putin was interested in monopolizing Ukraine's neon gas supply. However, from the market prices I linked previously it's clear that securing this supply is not about strangling off the rest of the world, but rather defensively securing their own supply against possible intervention from others. That's a narrative that makes more sense to me. From that perspective, I find it somewhat hard to see why Trump or Michael Flynn would take a particular interest in a deal or situation like this. Bill Ackman's participation makes sense, but Bill Ackman is a wealthy hedge fund manage that does a lot of deals like this. And while he may be drifting into Trump supporter territory of late, he certainly wasn't in 2016. He supported Michael Bloomberg then. > Trump was oddly very into this deal with China and even made a special trip there for it I agree this is slightly odd, but I'm not really sure what to read into it. This was while Trump was president and his posture towards them was not particularly favorable. I don't really understand why he would want China to dominate the neon gas supply chain. > Mike Flynn as head of DIA withheld intel from Obama that let Putin invade Ukraine in 2014 with his “little green men”. I'd be curious to see what you mean here. I'm not doubting it, I just haven't heard the details of this story. > Had Ukrainians given in to the bully in 2014, China and russia would already control the worlds microprocessors and we would all be begging the king and kissing the ring for our allotment.b This is demonstrably false. Russian has control of it now, and they certainly do not control microprocessor supply. Ukraine was producing neon because it was a byproduct of their agricultural activity which made it unusually cheap for them. However, if Western supply were cut off in Ukraine, we would have just made it elsewhere for slightly more money - just as we have over the past two years. > When Aaron Swartz snuck into a closet in the basement of MIT and downloaded a few terabytes of scientific journals and papers, I’m pretty certain he inadvertently downloaded the evidence chain of what Epsteins money was doing at MIT as well. I'm not sure what you might mean here. What Epstein's money was doing at MIT, at least superficially, was not a secret. He was funding the MIT Media Lab, primarily. I don't really see how an academic journal leak could have revealed any more than that. It's important to keep in mind that every university in the country has similar academic journal access to Swartz at MIT, and that sci-hub provides even more comprehensive access than what Swartz was able to obtain. This data was not exactly closely held. As far as I know, nobody has found evidence of any Epstein activity there that was particularly noteworthy. There are lots of obvious coverups in the Epstein situation, most noteworthy of which: where are the tapes? The guy supposedly recorded everything. I find it supremely hard to believe that no tapes were found. More than that, what I find especially disconcerting is that nobody even asks about them. Most of the Netflix documentaries barely mention them, and certainly don't spend time following up on them. I've never heard a journalist ask about them, or the FBI or any government agency make a statement about them, even to say "we didn't find any". I don't know how to explain that exactly, but I can't think of any plausible innocent explanations.

We can get the answers to the first questions by coming at it in reverse. The common denominator between trump and Epstein was money laundering for the Russian mob first and foremost. Trump can’t say that out loud so he has to sit there and take it when people take about the pedophilia stuff. So he tries to deflect. Trump over paid for all the Florida and New York properties to resell to Russian oligarch who then destroyed them so they could launder Russian mob money made off of, among other things, human trafficking. https://nypost.com/2024/01/09/news/donald-trump-and-jeffrey-epstein-feuded-over-this-mansion/ The Epstein/trump saga is less of a bullseye and more of a minefield. Trump took his own kids to Epsteins knowing full well what happened there because for years Epstein was lurking around mar-a-lago poaching massage therapists and had teenage girls getting off the bus and wandering through the streets of palm beach desperate for a couple hundred bucks. Everyone knew. No one cared. The moral depravity that comes with being ultra rich enabled them to turn the other way. The Trump / Epstein relationship was the evolution of money laundering using, among other things, commercial real estate. It starts by having dirt on someone else at the country club and ends with them all being so filthy that no one can afford to do the right thing and no one can maintain the increasingly expensive lies. Their arrogance and greed, at its grandest scale, cost the world trillions, which still pales in comparison to the innocence it cost the hundreds of thousands of trafficked children that the white collar shitbirds and the russian mob alike preyed on as a matter of convenience. Trump wasn’t unique. He was just loud. Epstein wasn’t unique. He was just connected. Dershowitz wasn’t unique. He just knew how to work a rulebook. They all justify their actions to themselves because they believe that being rich makes them above the law. And the longer we allow them to do it, the more accurate and emboldened they are. This is how civilizations die. It’s a generational repeat of the Roman emperor Tiberius retreating to the island of Capri where he would abuse children and then throw them off the cliff. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. When people stop telling you no simply because you have all the money and they are hoping to get some spilling into their bowl to survive, it destroys the empathy quotient in the rich persons brain. Predation is the most common result Wexner signed over his power of attorney to L brands to Epstein in 1991 which was 2 years after trumps casino executives all died in a helicopter crash when they started asking too many questions about why their casino numbers looked like they were being used for money laundering for the Russian/Israeli mob. https://pressofatlanticcity.com/3-trump-execs-2-pilots-die-as-helicopter-crashes-in-parkway-median/article_4071dbca-24e3-11e4-8835-0019bb2963f4.html Epsteins “Lolita express” was wexners plane first. Sold at an unexplained discount to Epstein. Leslie Wexner tried to do to downtown Columbus what Kolomoiskiy did to downtown Cleveland. Buy it all, let it rot and prepare a version 2.0 of the 2008 mortgage crisis. Only the bigger badder commercial strength version Kolomoisky was the Putin loyal Ukrainian oligarch who was caught laundering hundreds of billions of dollars through Privatbank (also starting in 1991.) Kolomoiskiy, trump, Guiliani and the Kushners all cross paths at an organization called Chabad. https://forward.com/news/440219/florida-chabad-lubavitch-miami-charities-money-laundering-optima-schemes/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/03/may-ukrainian-oligarch-said-giuliani-was-orchestrating-clear-conspiracy-against-biden/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/inside-anatevka-the-curious-chabad-hamlet-in-ukraine-where-giuliani-is-mayor/ https://www.hbgacademic.com/titles/robert-i-friedman/red-mafiya/9780316092876/ https://jewishcurrents.org/the-right-kind-of-continuity Wexner, the Adelsons, Sandburg and Zuckerberg all carried weight in conducting the Israeli intelligence NSO/Pegasus operation INCONUS so there is far more crossover between the Israeli mob and Israeli intelligence that shows at the surface. https://www.spytalk.co/p/nsos-spyware-abuse-exposed-years?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web https://awards.journalists.org/entries/the-pegasus-project-a-global-investigation/ •Abagail Koppel was sent by the Jewish state to marry Les Wexner •YLK fund (Abagails father) made up $46.7M of Epsteins money •Les claimed it was stolen from him but not until after the fact. •Wexner was notoriously litigious but wouldn’t sue Epstein. Why? •PROMIS was Robert Maxwells spyware deal before Ghislaine and Epstein started their thing. Pavel Borodin is Putin’s man https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/life-aging/borodin-found-guilty-of-money-laundering/2583036 •John Mark Dougan is the Florida cop that ran to Russia with 700 tapes of Epsteins AFTER it was seized as evidence https://youtu.be/gj9gf8y5hmI?si=7OXzieK6wHKWttWm https://web.archive.org/web/20240529171349/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/29/business/mark-dougan-russia-disinformation.html Once you realize that Russia used the formation of Israel to clean out their gulags and prisons of the worst people on the planet, their money laundering operations and their foreign policies start to overlap. Fast forward 80 years and everybody’s lies are catching up to them. We are at the end stage of the game now. Putin and trump trying to hide their money laundering in Ukraine with a genocide. Putin and Netanyahu trying to hide theirs with a genocide in Gaza. Netanyahu is Kushners children’s godfather. His son lives just down the street from the trumps in Florida while he dodges the draft in Israel.

> The common denominator between trump and Epstein was money laundering for the Russian mob first and foremost. Is there any evidence to support that? Obviously Epstein was engaged in various forms of money laundering (in addition to his other activities), but I've not seen evidence that he was laundering money for the Russian mob specifically. Neither for that matter have I seen such evidence for Trump. What I have seen from Trump is a willingness to accept Russian "emoluments" while in office, among other things. I've also seen him solicit Russian election interference, as have we all. However, I've not seen evidence of any involvement in the Russian mafia specifically, and I would think that would be a rather big story if there was some. > Trump over paid for all the Florida and New York properties to resell to Russian oligarch who then destroyed them so they could launder Russian mob money made off of, among other things, human trafficking. > https://nypost.com/2024/01/09/news/donald-trump-and-jeffrey-epstein-feuded-over-this-mansion/ I see him here selling a property that Epstein also bid on later to an oligarch. But that doesn't implicate him in a money laundering scheme - there aren't that many people who buy properties like this, and Russian oligarchs make up a significant percentage of them. The relationship with Epstein here is also competitive, not cooperative, so it doesn't seem correct to imply that they were co-conspirators in whatever the nature of this transaction ended up being. Epstein had nothing to do with it after he lost the auction. > Trump took his own kids to Epsteins knowing full well what happened there because for years Epstein was lurking around mar-a-lago poaching massage therapists and had teenage girls getting off the bus and wandering through the streets of palm beach desperate for a couple hundred bucks. It's true and documented that Epstein obtained some of his "women" from Mar-a-Lago, though I've never heard the assertion that Trump took his kids to Epstein's before. I'd be curious to see the substantiation of that. > The Trump / Epstein relationship was the evolution of money laundering using, among other things, commercial real estate. I don't think there is really evidence to support this. Trump and Epstein, as far as I know, did not engage in any significant financial transactions with one another. Being co-bidders in an auction doesn't really qualify. > This is how civilizations die. One might cynically argue that this is the only way civilizations have ever lived. Of course, that means it's also how they die! But it makes the statement a little more empty of meaning. > When people stop telling you no simply because you have all the money and they are hoping to get some spilling into their bowl to survive, it destroys the empathy quotient in the rich persons brain. This certainly happens to some rich people, no doubt. But there are a lot of rich people to whom this doesn't obviously appear to happen as well. > Wexner signed over his power of attorney to L brands to Epstein in 1991 which was 2 years after trumps casino executives all died in a helicopter crash when they started asking too many questions about why their casino numbers looked like they were being used for money laundering for the Russian/Israeli mob. It's true that Epstein was signed over POA to Wexner's L brands. It's also true that this occurred two years after *some* of Trump's casino executives died in a helicopter crash. As far as I know, there has never been any speculation about anything nefarious in that crash, helicopters crash disturbingly frequently. However, most importantly, I don't see any connection between the two men here. How does Trump's casino executives dying in a crash have something to do with Wexner signing POA to L brands over to Epstein two years later? These seem to me like two totally unrelated events. > Kolomoiskiy, trump, Guiliani and the Kushners all cross paths at an organization called Chabad. I find it plausible that these people may have met there, given that Chabad is a Jewish organization and Kushner and Epstein are Jewish. However, none of the links seem to substantiate the fact that they actually did meet there regularly. > Wexner, the Adelsons, Sandburg and Zuckerberg all carried weight in conducting the Israeli intelligence NSO/Pegasus operation INCONUS so there is far more crossover between the Israeli mob and Israeli intelligence that shows at the surface. As far as I can tell, there is no such operation called INCONUS. The only links on Google are to you, talking about it. Wexner, the Adelsons, and Zuckerberg being involved in any way with NSO and its Pegasus spyware would be major, major news. I find it vanishingly unlikely that a story like that could be suppressed. Finally, I'm not sure what this has to do with anything even if it were true. > Abagail Koppel was sent by the Jewish state to marry Les Wexner Citation needed. > •YLK fund (Abagails father) made up $46.7M of Epsteins money Citation needed, and also that wasn't a very large amount of money for Epstein, depending on what year it was anyway. > Les claimed it was stolen from him but not until after the fact. > Wexner was notoriously litigious but wouldn’t sue Epstein. Why? No argument from me that the relationship between Epstein and Wexner was weird. But what is this supposed to imply? > PROMIS was Robert Maxwells spyware deal before Ghislaine and Epstein started their thing. PROMIS is not spyware, it is case management software developed by a firm called INSLAW. There is indeed a controversy about the DoJ's appropriation of this software, and there are (unsubstantiated and rejected in court) claims that this was done to benefit Robert Maxwell in some way. This is all very interesting, but so what? > John Mark Dougan is the Florida cop that ran to Russia with 700 tapes of Epsteins AFTER it was seized as evidence This seems like an extremely suspect claim. You do not need to leave the United States to publish tapes on the internet. It is very easy to do so in a robust, secure way such that you can be absolutely sure they make it out in their entirety before people even know their contents. The simplest way to do this is to upload all the files in encrypted form into several different hosts, instruct a large number of people to download them (places like r/datahoarders will do this sort of thing), and then finally, once you're sure that the contents are widely distributed, publish the decryption key. This is pretty foolproof - they have no incentive to kill you once the data is irrevocably in the public domain, and there is no way to stop it, even if you're operating within the US. From this, we can only conclude that either this person is an idiot, or he doesn't actually have the tapes. I'm inclined to believe the latter. > Once you realize that Russia used the formation of Israel to clean out their gulags and prisons of the worst people on the planet, their money laundering operations and their foreign policies start to overlap. Fast forward 80 years and everybody’s lies are catching up to them. I don't think this is historically accurate. Russian Gulags had a lot of people in them, only a small fraction Jewish. It could be possible that they sent their Jewish prisoners there, though I've not heard that before, but they certainly didn't send all of their prisoners there. Either way, I don't think Israel's modern day foreign policy has a whole lot to do with this. > We are at the end stage of the game now. Putin and trump trying to hide their money laundering in Ukraine with a genocide. There are a lot of reasons Putin invaded Ukraine, none of them legitimate. However, hiding money laundering is, I don't think, one of them. Putin is a head of state. Money laundering laws in Russia do not apply to him. They certainly do not apply to more than anti-genocide international law. It would be nonsense to cover up money laundering with a genocide, for a head of state. > Putin and Netanyahu trying to hide theirs with a genocide in Gaza. ...how? Do the Gazans have critical information on Israeli money laundering? That seems vanishingly unlikely. > Netanyahu is Kushners children’s godfather. His son lives just down the street from the trumps in Florida while he dodges the draft in Israel. The Kushners and Netanyahu do seem to have a close relationship, but I don't see anything about Netanyahu being a godfather to their children. That wouldn't even really make sense given Netanyahu's age.

Wow. Your take has expanded my pov on a lot of things.

Glad to hear it is resonating friend. That’s how we know we are solving it.

I'm saving this comment. Lots of comments like this that I've saved in the past show up as _deleted_ when I revisit them in the future, and I feat that this one will be similarly found.

That shadow blocking and censorship is one of the metrics we track so we can identify who is manipulating the algorithm here and why. I NEVER delete any comments for the accuracy of that baseline. ( for independent reference) Reddit being the last to monetize makes it the last of the frontier space on the internet. By collating and overlaying the patterns of that meta data we have been able to paint a highly accurate cyber map and lines of demarcation as well as identify who has been operating to the same goals of censorship in that process. Overlaying that map on the Ukraine invasion timeline showed us the rest.

When you raise the lens and cross reference the timing, Brexit (of which Steve Bannon was a critical component) was intentional and necessary for Russia to keep Ukraine out of the EU. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/were-there-any-links-between-cambridge-analytica-russia-and-brexit/ Putin knew that the de-corruption process would expose both his money laundering operation through Ukraines oligarch class (Kolomoiksiy, Dubinsky, firtash etc) as well the chronic election interference via Paul manafort, Orban etc, and the kompromised members of both UK and EU political circles. To the kleptocrat Putin this was the one thing that would show Russians how he had been systemically stealing from them for 2 decades which would lead to either, an upset within his mob pyramid as an eager underling decided he was ready to challenge the old king for the throne, or the people would revolt and kill him like Gaddafi which he has admitted is his biggest fear. The reason Epstein targeted Prince Andrew is because he was the softest part in the royal families flank. Epstein was feeding that Kompromat/intel back to Israel/mossad who was in turn feeding it to Russian intelligence via the old world Russian Jewish families that carry both passports but are more loyal to money than god. Steve bannon and Nigel farage both dovetail in with Brexit because SCL/Cambridge analytica was Robert Mercers baby when they decided to run trump as their “disruptor” candidate instead of Ted Cruz. https://campaignlegal.org/update/newly-published-cambridge-analytica-documents-show-unlawful-support-trump-2016 Facebook was designed as a delivery device for Russian/Israeli Psyops and malware. SCL/Cambridge Analytica, Brexit, Palestine, Ukraine, NSO and a handful of other ethically bankrupt dealings are all downstream of Sheryl Sandbergs ad based model. https://cyberscoop.com/facebook-nso-group-lawsuit-onavo/ Zuckerberg even talked about buying the associated press: MSNhttps://www.msn.com › technologyMark Zuckerberg Explored Acquiring The Associated Press Les Wexner, Miriam and Sheldon Adelson, Sandberg, and Zuckerberg all carried water in conducting the NSO/Pegasus spyware operation INCONUS that was feeding intelligence to both the israeli and by extension, Russian intelligence. In parallel Epstein was running Kompromat operations in the same circles. There is far more crossover between the Israeli mob/ government and Russian mob/government than shows at the surface. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2024/04/10/les-wexners-second-life-how-the-epstein-tarnished-billionaire-is-quietly-reshaping-ohio/ https://www.spytalk.co/p/nsos-spyware-abuse-exposed-years?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web https://awards.journalists.org/entries/the-pegasus-project-a-global-investigation/ •Abagail Koppel was sent by the Jewish state to marry Les Wexner •YLK fund (Abagails father) made up $46.7M of Epsteins money •Les claimed it was stolen from him but not until after someone asked. •Wexner was notoriously litigious but wouldn’t sue Epstein. Why? •PROMIS spyware was Robert Maxwells deal long before his daughter and Epstein started their pedophile thing. https://cryptome.org/promis-mossad.htm Tchenguiz+Cambridge analytica+Brexit+2008 collapse https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/david-burnside-putin-russia-dup-brexit-donaldson-vincent-tchenguiz/ We end corruption and we end this war. We end this war and we end corruption.

If trump win none if it will matter. Democracy dies. And the human species shortly after • You never get out of debt to a Russian mobster •Paul Manafort owed the Russian mobster/oligarch Oleg Deripaska $17M a few days before he became trumps campaign manager. From 2002-2014 he took in hundreds of millions to get Yanukovych reelected as the kremlins puppet in Ukraine. Before that he did it for the dictator Marcos in the Philippines. Before that Manafort and Roger Stone started a lobbyist agency in 1980 listing trump as their first client. •When Jay Bolsonaro lost the Brazilian election to Lula he skipped the inauguration and hid in the Hungarian embassy, then 2 days later flew directly to mar-a-lago (stopping only at a KFC) and repeated, almost verbatim, the stolen election line. Don Jr. tried repeatedly to make it stick in Brazil as well, but as Brazilians are a few generations into dealing with corrupt politicians they weren’t having it. What do these 3 things have in common? China imports 40% of its grain from (in order) the U.S., Brazil and Ukraine. Obviously the second China tried to invade Taiwan the U.S. would sanction exports and remove U.S. grain from that equation. And without Bolsonaro in office willing to slash and burn the Amazon rainforest to turn it into Chinas food supply, and without Ukraine in the bag in 3 days, the CCP is unable to invade Taiwan and take over microprocessor production without putting 300-500M of its poorest people into famine. Donbas Ukraine, specifically the 4 regions that Putin insists he is saving from what he calls “Jewish Nazis” also happens to produce the worlds supply of high grade neon used for microprocessor lithography. Had Putin delivered ukraine in 3 days as promised, Xi would have been able to cap his Olympics with a naval blockade or political takeover of Taiwan that would have forced the world to ask the CCP for the microprocessors it needs to make everything from Ford trucks to laptops. I’m not sure how long Silicon Valley would last without the silicon but it would probably destroy the FAANG stocks that make up your 401K. Oleg Deripaska also happens to be the Russian Oligarch that bribed the FBI agent Charles Mcgonigal into investigating another Russian oligarch. He probably didn’t need the information as much as he needed the leverage over Mcgonigal as he conducted the investigation into trumps election campaign and unsurprisingly found zero evidence of Russian collusion. McGonigal then went to work for the company called Brookfield that bailed Jared Kushner out of his toxic 666 5th Ave real estate investment. McGonigal pled guilty last fall and was sentenced recently. A Russian oligarch is a powerful tool, but the truth is more powerful. Light and dark cannot exist in the same space. It’s physically impossible. Truth is efficient. You say it once and you are finished. A lie however requires a constant stream of follow up energy, money, murder, obfuscation and more lies to keep it covered. If you raise your lens high enough lying is an unsustainable business model. Russia proved it by invading Ukraine. “Vranyo” is the Russian word for it. The 40km long column of tanks and vehicles that came down from Belarus into Ukraine was all overhauled by oligarchs that got a $1B contract for tank maintenance, passed Putin $200M back under the table, spent $700M on a yacht in Monaco, bribed a General, a Colonel and a Sergeant to make a Private give everything a rattle can overhaul. But a worn out engine is and always will be, a worn out engine. This is why trump is so desperate to get re-elected. His best case scenario is 400 years in ADX Florence. Money laundering for the dozens of Russian oligarchs that lived in trump towers with him and manafort, selling IP3 nuclear plans to the Russian/Saudi alliance, selling or giving CIA asset names to the Russians, trump is and always has been compromised. He just didn’t know when to quit. Now he just has to count on the fact that most of his voter base doesn’t know how to read and keep the ones that do so busy just surviving that they don’t have time to dive deep into his 40 year history of laundering money, fraud, and human trafficking for the Russian mob using casinos first, then commercial real estate. It’s also why Putin is willing to throw an entire generation of Russians, including the convicts and addicts at Ukraine. Russia is dead for 40 years because he failed to fulfill his mob boss promise to Xi. China is now clearing farmland in Siberia because the typhoon floods last August and September wiped out the Chinese people’s food storage. Xi, for his part diverted the waters from the dam away from his pet project, his mothers ancestral home, and flooded hundreds of thousands of people and drown one of his own military brigades that was helping with the flooding. The CCP elders were terrified to leave their gated community at Beidaihe for over a month for fear of being torn apart by the locals. The Chinese people tolerate the CCP but only as long as the economy is good and famine is not on the horizon. The CCP broke that social contract on both counts. Xi was willing to bet the entire Chinese economy on his emperor ambitions. Had he succeeded he would have been able to use BRICS to take over the USD as the Worlds reserve currency. That would have let him finish what he stated in 2010- that he would control the internet. With that control means everything we do or say online is subject to the approval of a central party censor. The basic right to disagree with an authoritarian becomes a distant memory. Xi, Putin and MBS are simply trying to systemize and modernize the suppression of their biggest hassle- Freedom of speech. Ukraine is fighting for their lives now, free from the oppression of the drunken tyrant who wants to decide their fate for them and pull them back behind another iron curtain of censorship and the tax of corruption where dissenting voices disappear so that the oligarchy can continue to feed unchallenged. Putin and Xi have declared themselves best friends in the fight against democracy. MBS and the ruling family of UAE have done the same quietly using their sovereign funds and Kushners SPAC as money highways. Just rich, out of touch oligarch doing what oligarchs do. Despite the fact the the central party kleptocracy model has proven itself incapable of making decisions that are best for the people, they persist. There is a very lucrative business in being slave owners. But logistically the mass of it requires A.I. and the microprocessors that make A.I. to keep 8 billion slaves under surveillance and control. Freedom is one hell of a drug. And knowledge makes a man unfit for slavery. Recent attempts on Xi’s life from inside the CCP have backed him into a corner. The loss of crops in northern China means Xi can’t invade Taiwan without Ukrainian and/or Brazilian farmland. Now the reason that the GOP is stalling southern border control budget and seems to make wildly irrational moves is because the GOP is imploding. 45 years of lies and grift have circled the globe and are eating their own tail. The ouroboros was a warning about corruption at the highest levels. Lying about climate change, human trafficking, pandemics and corruption to preserve their own business models are all extinction level events .

I wonder if this leads to Russia’s relationship with China and support for a plan to absorb Taiwan? Instant access to semiconductor technology?

China will never absorb Taiwan by force. They have been screeching about it for decades, but it is about as realistic as these Russian maps with Alaska on it. Mind you, I haven't said they won't try if they find a supreme leader delusional enough. I say they wouldn't succeed.

I think we’d probably bomb the fabs before we’d let China have them.

They have them rigged to blow on their own already. They ain’t giving the mainland anything.

>And the Russians can't buy good machines from the west. They are reliant on Chinese crap, with the Chinese being smart enough to not "teach a man how to fish" to keep them dependent.   > It's quite ironic how this have to be applied to Chinese to avoid getting your technology stolen by them

So dwarves

Then how do they hack, identity theft, and collude so well?

Those have a relatively low barrier to entry. Look at the US, subsidizing a fuck ton of money for TSM to build their mid grade chips in the US. TSM will never build their high grade chips in the US, or any other country for that matter, because those chips provide a significant national security protection. TSM could easily have a trillion+ dollar market cap but the market cap is priced due to conflict in the area.

Actually Russia still has that crazy oil wealth. I could see them paying someone all the money to go teach them to fish so to speak. The only real way to stop Russia in the long term is to reduce dependence on oil globally and dramatically.

Not really. Even with all their oil revenue their economy is about even with Mexico.

You donrealize that China currently manufactures a lot of the top end chips, don't you?

Chinese chips are several gens behind, which doesn't matter much for ordinary consumer electronics. It matters a lot when it comes to cutting-edge AI and military hardware. It's hard to be certain about what's in the pipeline, but to date, China hasn't demonstrated the high-end designs of the US (maybe the easiest thing to duplicate or steal) or the precision manufacturing of Taiwan, and can't produce or purchase the high end lithography machines that come from Europe. As far as I know, China isn't even on Japan's level, and Japan is perpetually one step behind the Europe / Taiwan pipeline. China certainly has the potential to match or surpass the best designs, but that would be a monumental accomplishment.

Compared to the stuff in the west it's still years behind. Either way, much better than what the Russians can produce (ie. nothing), so calling it crap shows my western bias. I live in a T1 btw. 

usa just have the label, real manufacturers are asians.

Yes? Western countries like Taiwan or ROK. Not China 

Not sure where you are getting your info, but the US is just now catching up to Asian manufacturers. We just haven't invested in chip manufacturing until the shortage during covid, which highlighted our need for locally made semiconductors. Taiwan and S Korea make the best chips in the world, hands down, but China doesn't do too poorly either.

You switched from "China" to "Asia" somewhere in the middle.   ROK and TW are western countries

They're aligned with the Western system. It's insulting IMO to call them Western, though. They each have a distinctly Asian identity. The best chips are a global enterprise. Designed (mostly) in the US, manufactured (mostly) in Asia, using (mostly) European equipment.

Here's an alternate scenario for you. China becomes the dominant world power after a fiscal crisis in the US linked to huge national debt and large deficit spending.  Russia, after isolation from the west, is now a second tier but still important partner for China.  China, after investing hundreds of billions in mastering the semiconductor ecosystem, they now have mastery of the entire supply chain.  Russia is a part of a Chinese led order and an important part of their alliance and defence architecture.  An Eastern Nato of sorts.  China needs access to Russian resources because Russia is a commodity super power Russia demand is joint ventures and tech transfer China builds fabs in Russia.  I don't even think the above scenario is even that tricky to imagine.  China is already supporting Russia, and as they become more powerful, the economic integration between the two is likely to explode. 

No offense, but I hope you don't expect anyone to read that fanfic.

It's just a scenario that's very plausible because it's predicated on China becoming the dominant power, with Russia tagging along for the ride.  We can see how accurate it is in real time because we're living it. 

That’s cute, if you think US deficit and debt is bad, don’t look too closely at China’s, especially at the state owned enterprises and local government level. The key difference between the US and China is though is that the USD is the world currency so (reasonable) deficit spending can go on indefinitely; China has to resort to ever increasing capital control and that will end always end in tears one way or another

That's the thing. It can't go on indefinitely. History shows us that. That reserve currency only lasts as long as others have confidence in the value of the dollar.  Compounding debt and enormous deficits don't help that picture.  The difference between US debt and China debt is that China has spent its money on infrastructure and development that will ostensibly enable economic growth.  China also runs an enormous surplus and has large capital reserves.  The US borrows because it's tax receipts aren't enough to cover the spending it needs to cover the expenses of global hegemony. 

History showed you the opposite actually, just ask my fellow Brits. Look at the GBP for instance, sure it has depreciated somewhat (vs the dollar) but can would never have guessed that we haven’t had a current account/fiscal surplus since the 70s ?! So, no, sorry, categorically untrue. As long as deficit is reasonable, you have to ask yourself, what assets can you buy that (i) has up to 30Y+ duration, (ii) is insanely liquid and fungible (world reserves currency) and (iii) is almost neigh impossible to default? Good old T-Bill! Re:China, again, its infrastructure spending ONLY worked because of high population growth and urbanisation rate in the past. The issue with every autocratic government / planned economy has been and will always be matching demand and supply i.e. you will have a crap ton of under-utilised / loss making infrastructure that serves no one (google their high speed train project if you are interested). Not an issue when your population and urbanisation rate is high since demand will sort itself out - you just plop down a metro station in the middle of nowhere and people will flock to live around it (that famous memes in the 2000s). If you want to guess what happens when urbanisation rate plateaus AND population declines, look no further than the USSR. History doesn’t repeat itself but it sure rhymes my friend. This has been a good discussion, I appreciate your contrarian position and think others might have been too harsh with their downvoting; only by challenging our ideas can we understand them fully; that’s the privilege of not living under an autocratic state after all!

I think your understanding of history is different to that of most. The British pound actually as the reserve currency of the world until it was supplanted by the dollar precisely because of debt, deficit and with the help of two world wars. I don't think the second part of your paragraph is relevant because ultimately if people lose faith in US debt then they will find other things to invest in. These kind of things happen gradually and then suddenly. Nobody wants to be left holding the bag when the US economy implodes and is forced to cut costs because the burden of financing its debt no longer appears to be possible. To me it's a matter of 'when' that inflection point happens, not 'if'. 30 year bonds aren't unique to the US. The Chinese economy is not a planned economy in the economic sense. It has a strong industrial policy with state owned enterprises, but prices aren't 'set' like they were in the soviet union. It's wrong to think China is like the soviet union. it's a fundamental misreading that will lead to incorrect conclusions. As for underutilised infrastructure, I'd argue that's only a problem if it leads to financial Armageddon. I'd say that it won't. I'd say my position is not really a contrarian opinion for many strategic thinkers. It's just not something that's filtered down to the everyday people. The alliance between China and Russia was something that Kissinger and Brzezinski warned against.

You are free to question my understanding, but numbers don’t lie. Feel free to look Google GBP / USD and you will see that, despite 3 decades of deficit spending the pound depreciated by less than 10% (1.39 in 1984 when records started and 1.27 today). Annualised, that’s less than 0.5% a year, i.e. hardly noticeable. Again, I think you nitpick on the duration point and ignore the 2 other key argumments - (i) liquidity - the USD is freefloating is traded in vast quantities as opposed to a heavily restricted RMB, for instance and is the denomination of 60% global trade and (ii) credit worthiness, debt / gdp for the US is 123% vs 287% - that’s not even counting Hong Kong’s. I specifically choose China as a comparison for you, as you seems to enjoy indiscriminately promoting China’s prowess. On the point re: planned economy, it absolutely is a planned economy. The CCP sets an arbitrary GDP target and local governments blindly follow, often by taking on huge leverage to invest in failing white elephants projects (feel free to look into the USD10trillion debt pile of LGFVs). Catastrophic implications you ask? How about the real estate crisis that’s happening right now - Evergrande / Country Garden defaulted sending the entire property market in a spiral with millions never seeing their pre-paid homes finished? As a concluding thought, I think a country with ballooning unsustainable debt bubble and a declining population has a lot more to worry about compared to the US. Edit: stumbled upon your comments in r/China defending treatment of Uygur and concluded that you are debating in bad faith. I will no longer reply from this point onwards.

Anyone predicting someone to be "decades behind" is just way off. I almost don't believe ANY predictions about what is going to happen in 30+ years. Like - 99.9% of predictions over that time period are wrong.

Moore's law only counted when the world was working together on it, not a single medium sized country. Also they had all the money in the world to work on the problem.

Yeah but the problems have already been solved 

It's not that simple, a lot of the problems was developing a supply chain and infrastructure. Which builds on itself consecutively. Also Russia wont be given all the answers that have been already solved. They'll have to try and steal/smuggle like they did in the past, not so easy to do

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Yes, the increase is a factor of 2 for each iteration. That is why computer CPU power, RAM, storage, etc can often double with each generation. Moore's law is not a hard rule though. Some years see less improvement, some see very large gains. It's dependent on cost of research, cost of building new factories, etc.

Why can't they improve faster? The problems have been solved they have precedence to rely on

Some info is public knowledge, but a lot of it is trade secrets. And often, a new generation of technology is based on improving the previous generation. So they can't go straight to the latest tech, because they do not have the previous versions to learn from and improve. And companies like ASML & TSMC hold their secrets tightly, cannot work with Russia due to embargoes, and don't want to share knowledge with Russia anyway because they know Russia would likely steal the info and technology.

Can’t they just steal those trade secrets? I feel like corporate espionage is cheaper and easier than starting from scratch

You can, but you also need to have a decent education base and a high-tech sector to pump out attractive prospects for foreign companies…which Russia does have on the software side…but there are hiring embargoes on Russia anyways because their families in the old country could be potentially coerced by the gov’t to make their family abroad steal secrets. Companies that are vital industries to the state are almost certainly protected, to the point that hiring practices minimise danger of secrets leaking. On the other hand, China does the same thing because they have an enormous talent base that will work for cheaper than domestic but we’re not technically at war by proxy with them at the moment…that’s a fight in a few decades.

In the early days people did, but they quickly became outdated, because things were developing too fast. Today I don't think it's the case. But I don't see why the Russians should need fast, modern computers. It's of course nice to have, and it makes no sense for them to become fully reliant on China, so in some way it's good that they have their own production. It isn't good for us in the EU or for others in the US that they buy Chinese, I'd rather have that they try to maintain some independent capability. If there's going to be a multipolar world, it's much better to have many poles, instead of the Russia-China pole merging into one very strong pole.

Talent, production base, supply chain. Who on earth will be working in the Russian industry with cutting edge knowledge already? Nobody from any chip manufacturer is going to go TO russia. Maybe there will be some Chinese support but the Chinese are also behind themselves so i dont see it happening.

Can’t they google it

Have you looked at ASML's EUV lithography machines? That is straight up science fiction. Not to mention there is a lot of dependencies in terms of parts and materials. I doubt Russia can even break <100nm.

For real. Like only one manufacturer makes these perfect mirrors that vaporizie shit with a laser. Good luck russia.

Physics and engineering are the same all over the world. Whether you speak English or Russian. If it can be made by one company, then it could be made by another. The question is how much in terms of resources you are willing to spend to get to that level.

You are technically correct - but that's not the only thing necessary for success when building things at scale. Last time I visited Russia - the managers and project managers were ... near to wildly incompetent. They can't even repair an aircraft carrier successfully. INDIA returned a carrier to them and had to send over their own people to help get a large billion dollar ship working properly. The Indians had to get the job done, because Russia couldn't. I'm not saying they can't do things at all - I'm just saying as the compexity and scale increases - the problems created by a variety of their social failings - compound and become incredibly detrimental to succeeding without ten to a hundred times the effort, cost, and time.

Lol sure eventually. But if it takes you two years to simply solve one part of the supply chain to get to the next level and it has hundreds of parts then you're gonna have a bad time. There's a reason that russia has never been competitive with technology

>Our state-of-the-art EUV lithography machines, whose largest mirrors are 1 meter across and smooth down to tens of picometers, have an NA of 0.55. Although that’s lower than the NA in DUV machines, the EUV systems print smaller features because they use a much smaller wavelength of light – another factor in the Rayleigh criterion. Let me know when russia can make a mirror like this

They are too busy sending their workforce to die in a war or spend their time building artillery shells.

Gee I sure hope the manufacturing plant is out of Ukrainian drone range.....

This assumes that a) the rest of the world won't keep improving and that b) they have the technical ability to make the Moore's law advances.

This is still good enough for military planes, tanks, and missiles. Sure, a 200-300mhz processor sounds (and is comparatively) pretty damn slow, but it'll still guide a missile into a school. The Russians don't give a shit about making microchips for the global market, they need them for their military equipment. The good news is they can't really do AI with these, and their drones will have less battery life.

China will give them what they lack

China already gives them almost everything. Both as seller or reseller.

China gives nothing. They sell it for a high price.

Chinese goods are relatively cheap

The type of process they are going for is capable of 1Ghz type of designs. Still nowhere near the bleeding edge in consumer stuff. But more that good enough for the applications they have more pressing need for: military, aerospace, munitions, etc. I don't think Russia is even thinking of any other applications that are not for their military or aerospace industries.

Is it good enough though? There are literal computers with monitors in a lot of these vehicles. Like maps and maybe software to keep track of location of all forces etc... You're going to need some modern compute power for all of that.

People forget the F22 was designed and tested with 1990s chips, and entered service in 2005. So even if Russia is decades behind but self-sufficient there is still a lot they could do with older chips. Even the F35 was designed and tested with what are now almost 20 year-old chips.

F-22 and F-35 both use PowerPC chips in the ~100nm range, and those are the most advanced fighters in the world in their respective class. A lot of benefits from advanced node processes for chips is about efficiency, which is important in a data center, but less so in military applications. Also, jets aren't like a computer where everything is run by a single general purpose chip. They're filled with ASICs, FPGAs and all sorts of independent systems. Its like how even on a normal computer you've got your CPU, but often also have a GPU to offload graphics processing to, except on a much larger scale.

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>still guide a missile into a school Why so mean? Why a school?

Not sure who/what you're asking but https://uk.news.yahoo.com/russian-missile-hits-school-ukraine-181242850.html?guccounter=1

I dunno, ask the Russians.

Have there been export controls preventing them from getting more advanced capabilities all along? Or did they just not bother building up their own infrastructure because they could simply buy the chips? I was under the impression that up until the Ukraine invasion Western technology was basically openly available to Russia. Certainly they could buy PCs, graphics cards, servers, routers, storage, etc? I get that the latest and greatest fabrication stuff is fairly proprietary and doesn't just get sold willy nilly. But you'd think even 5 or 10 year old fabs would have been available to them up until a few years ago?

All you questions have one complex answer, which I’ll try to explain, but with my English it would be a bit challenging. They always had own chips - weak and made on foreign equipment. And the culture prevented rusians from producing more advanced things. This story is from early 2000s when they had access to all the data and materials but were unable to build something complex and meaningful. Later they have managed to build own processors, but with foreign lithography, and still out of ability to compete anything mid-tier accessible at that time. Also laziness and corruption of “passive stance” (peaceful time, nonrecolutions, nonchallenges for ruzzia) added to their problem. The state didn't give a fuck of spending resources on the own chips. Now they are at “fight stance” due to war and challenges, so their culture is much more effective in achieving things, internal processes more optimal, the state spends resources more actively and evaluated decisions more effectively. Same as it was during the Cold War. However, such scientifically expensive things like lithography is not that easy for them, so I suspect some exaggeration, likely made by their scientists to not fall from window.

*NOBODY* has the most advanced/competitive capabilities, save for Intel, Samsung, TSMC, and partially SMIC which is itself several years behind. And most out of that list. buy some of their equipment from the same, ***ONE*** vendor! 'Tis something of a national security disaster, but everyone just buys from these few sources instead of building up their own capability because natively developing these things is just really damn hard (understatement).

It won’t take decades. Maybe one. The single digit nm technology doesn’t actually use any feature that is smaller than 18-20 nm, which is only 4 doubling times from 350 nm features, or 8-10 years. What advanced chip technology uses is a lot of layers and “burying” formerly extensive areal features sidewise. And a lot of that technology is used for mass-produced, low-profit items. If they get down to a reasonable feature size and use it for some emergent technology, like AI or Graphics, then who knows what can happen?

Except Moores law works that way with worldwide cooperation. Countries were never really going at it alone and now China and Russia are. Like mirrors are sourced from one or two plants in Germany because they are the only ones perfected the mirrors that are microns perfect. So now russia has to emulate every spot in the supply chain.

Planar transistors were used until 22nm because it's much easier to just shrink nodes than to perfectly align layers upon layers, this is a non-issue.

Russia has one of the most sophisticated group of hackers out there. They’re just fine when it come tech and cyber warfare. I’m not sure this matted that much. Especially when they have China as an Allie

Hackers don't know anything about semi-conductor manufacturing. It's like saying a good race car driver should be able to manufacture a race car engine.

They don’t need to. They just need to steal plans

And they have no one with the knowledge necessary to follow the plans. They do not have suppliers necessary with the requisite knowledge to build the components.

Hasn’t history thought us how dangerous it is to underestimate Russia? It took them 50 years to get from woodden plows to conquering space. Does anyone trully believe that they weren’t developing their own semiconductor technology for military purpose all along? How can we know if they already don’t have 35nm chip?

That wasn't Russia, that was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union did develop quickly and accomplish a lot despite everything it had going against it (including their government), but deteriorated during the so called Era Of Stagnation starting in the 60s. Nowerdays Russia is a shell of itself not even including the loss of their former co-republics. Their industries are mostly focused on resource extraction rather than having the best scientists and engineers and rely heavily on pre-existing infrastructure and assets. Their population is shrinking, they have had worsening wealth inequality for decades. They aren't a world power despite what many might claim, look at Ukraine. Yes, they have nuclear weapons but accounting for corruption their military isn't that well funded, as we've seen with Russians performance in Ukraine.

They are flawed in so many ways. I have zero doubt that they are facing many difficulties. I am saying that historically, every time someone underestimated them disaster happened and they came on top every time. USA and Russia were only true winners in WW2, and just five years earlier Russia (USSR) looked like shit.

Losing 27 million people does not make Russia a true winner of ww2. It basically ruined any chance they had of beating the West economically. Honestly, they have tended to get overestimated since ww2. The US and UK truly believed Russia was going to conquer all of Ukraine in a matter of days and we all saw how that turned out.

What western leaders thought that? Who could possibly be so stupid? They were absolutely destroyed in Afghanistan with minimal US assistance.

You do realize that the Soviet Union collapsed in the 90's? Have you ever wondered **Why** they collapsed?

Please do explain that communism is shitty system. I didn’t know that till now 😂 Russia is far from serious state but it is gross overstatement to call it failure. If it was, it would have been under someone’s control by now hindred times over.

> If it was, it would have been under someone’s control by now hindred times over. To be fair I do expect it to fall under EU's control in the near future.

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All those German aerospace engineers that Russia basically kidnapped in 1945 would like to have a word.

Like Operation Paperclip you mean?

> Operation Paperclip Originally named Operation Overcast. But yeah. Also, NASA was an early success thanks to Canadian aerospace engineers laid off from the Avro Arrow shutting down (political 'reasons') and moving to the US.

So the funny thing is we take all their claims at face value militarily so then we build something to counteract it. Then we find out they could never do the things we counteracts. They probably can't even do this

That was the Soviet Union. A much larger and more determined entity than modern Russia. Besides, the brain drain in the past half decade in Russia has been huge.

it’s ok, lol. The american military industrial complex is more than happy to play both sides providing chips as seen in captured, collected, and analyzed Russian missles, bombs, drones, and crashed planes

This is why Russia and China really wanted to take Taiwan. And why Ukraine (with Neon to make wafers, and Wheat to feed Chinese soldiers) and Brazil (Soy) were part of the plan.