zippy1

No, you are exactly right. It was there and it caused quite a lot concerns when the law passed a few years back. China is a "rule-by-law" society and not a "rule-of-law" society. The laws are written for government to "govern" the people. You can see this philosophy clearly based on what was put in the law.

"The composite rate for I bonds issued from May 2022 through October 2022 is 9.62 percent. This rate applies for the first six months you own the bond." https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/indepth/ibonds/res_ibonds_iratesandterms.htm

Thank you for your support. All of us, who work at TSMC shall do our best. We come to work everyday knowing that how we perform at our jobs matter very much to our families, friends and our society.

Maybe I can also share my point of view as a Taiwanese. My ancestors moved to Taiwan 200 years ago from China, well before the Japanese rule. Neither of my parents, now in their 80s, have been to China. I studied in US for my graduate degrees under a professor of German ancestry, lived and worked in US for 10 years before moving back to Taiwan. I spent 17 years of my life in US and not a single day in (mainland) China. Just like Americans of German ancestry do not think they are Germans. I don't feel that I am a Chinese, to be frank.

Most of Taiwanese prefer status-quo even under incessant Chinese threats... Would it be reasonable to force Taiwan to become part of China?

I think this point may not have been brought up here. That is about the relative trade volume of US-China and US-Taiwan. In 2020, out of the top 10 Chinese exporters, 6 are Chinese subsidiaries set up by Taiwanese companies. (link https://beyondnews852.com/20211108/95882/) These are companies assemble your notebooks, mobile phones and so on. But the components(ICs) often come from outside of China from places Taiwan, South Korea and US. Their customers are demanding these Taiwanese companies to shift production bases to places with less geopolitical risks. They have to listen to their customers. They are gradually moving to South East Asia and India. The US-Taiwan trade volume looks small since Taiwan makes chips primarily, that got shipped to China to build phones, notebooks and so on.

That what exactly Taiwanese are against. We are a real democracy. We are just different than you, ok? I know next you will say what Taiwanese want do not matter. Typical thuggish argument…. anyway, if you think shorting Taiwan is a good investment idea. Go ahead. If you had started shorting Taiwan following your 2018 visit, it would be less profitable than shorting Shanghai Shenzhen and Heng Seng. So go ahead…

Shortage is partly because everyone wants to have more inventory to be safe in case there is a supply chain disruption. I am not on the business side to know how this will play out. But anecdotally I have heard that people even try to "hoard" equipment instead of finished chips. When people "hoard" equipment, those equipment is not being used to make chips.... The other question is really too hard. That really is not a purely technical question. Even if you look at the supply chain today, you don't know what will happen tomorrow. I think if any single country can do it, it will be China, though.

To answer your question, you probably ought to find out, beyond the pandemic ( hopefully an one time event), what drove the semi shortage. For people working on semi, the answer is quite clear. before 2017, when the US China trade war started, Taiwanese market did not appreciate much.

For the past 5 years (03/05/2017-03/01/2022), The Taiwanese stock index (^twii) is up 85.51% The Shen Zhen composite index (399001.sz) is up 29.42% The Shanghai composite index (000001.ss) is up 7.58% The Heng Seng index (^HSI) is down 3.57% Taiwanese stock market appears to benefit from the geopolitical change in the recent years.

My parents, in their 80s now, still use them and would periodically ask me to check/reconcile the passbooks for them. I consider this our family time as they would chat with me about what they did with the money, whether they got a good deal etc.....

I saw that in Japanese drama once and I thought maybe Taiwanese banks got this from the Japanese colony days. Several state owned commercial banks, which are not big by any international standard, were set up in those days. Cheers!

The banking system indeed is not the competitive part of the economy. Many banks still use paper-copy passbooks. Don't ask me why they do that.

Every Chinese friends told me that, which is what we like actually.

Would it be ok to ask you how many years ago the conversations took place? I think the attitude shifted a great deal over the past couple years. With the current geopolitical situation, many Taiwanese companies are moving back to Taiwan. Due to Covid-19, most of the companies in the Hsinchu Science park had record earnings last year. Engineering students are now given job offers 18 months before the graduation. The job market is excellent for engineers. Many companies have to boost their pay just to keep the current staff. Maybe your view reflects what the attitude was before 2018. But I don't think it reflect current attitude any more.

Maybe you all can look at the last election's result to gauge what Taiwanese think. If TSMC, MediaTek and a host of Taiwanese companies can make the most advanced semiconductors in the world, do you think the Taiwanese are that dumb to not notice what happened in Hong Kong? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Taiwanese_presidential_election

I wonder how the recent Texas winter storm would affect the home insurance companies?

Yes, the mainstream media should be all over a silly spat between China and an Australia newspaper. That should distract us from the mass graves being dug in NYC: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/video-shows-giant-trench-getting-built-nyc-s-hart-island-n1181056 Don’t mean that specifically but the role China and WHO played in all this. Should be investigative reporting on the cover up. And WHO/Tedros/China connection. And censorship of Taiwan. Also, the misinformation campaigns being waged against Taiwan and world right now. If world and media doesn’t investigate this, it’ll just repeat again. Just like coverup of SARS I in 2003. Taiwan warned WHO at the end of last December about human-to-human transmission. Yet, nobody in the mainstream media wonders why WHO never passed this information? Even worse, on January 14th, WHO even published a note saying that there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission. Even after January 23rd, when China shut down traffic between Hubei and rest of the China, WHO on one hand praised China's response and at the same time said that other countries should not follow suits to restrict traffic to China. Trump may not be perfect. But I think WHO fails miserably. Being in Taiwan, compared to the SARS outbreak, we look at the way how WHO acted this time and think that it is just a mouthpiece of Chinese government. https://www.ft.com/content/2a70a02a-644a-11ea-a6cd-df28cc3c6a68

So you're saying that the shutdown caused exponential growth of deaths? Like, your expectation would be if you isolate people into groups of 4 and never let them have any sort of contact with any other group, your death rate from COVID-19 would be higher than allowing everyone to intermix to their heart's content? Huh. That's kind of a strange theory, but OK. Yeah, I included those in there because I thought you wanted an explanation of when deaths should be decreasing, not to discredit your "quarantining causes order-of-magnitude spikes in COVID-19 deaths" theory. My mistake. I dont have any theory. I dont think there is enough information to make a theoretical model. Empirically the theory YOU proposed doesnt match the data at hand. In India the exponential growth started after lockdown. Thats not a theory. Thats data. Also, the deaths all of South East Asia are low where there were no lockdowns till now. Thats not a theory.. Not a model. Thats data. That sure sounds like a logical cry you are making - Yes that is DATA. In itself it is useless, and has to be interpreted in some manner within a context. You keep talking about South East Asia - What countries are you counting in those? Eventhough not separate country, Hongkong, and then Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore. There were a bunch of articles about Taiwan how well they managed. And they didnt have shutdown. Ok let's assume they have managed it, tell us please how they managed it and at what stage. And let's say that we were too late to manage it the way they managed, what were the options left for us? Regarding Taiwan there were many articles recently. I posted earlier a bloomberg article: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-05/taiwan-s-advance-on-who-in-covid-19-shows-its-place-in-world Two points given in this article are 1) Early travel restriction from Wuhan and then China. 2) Early implementation of masks, in January itself. As per worldometer the tests/million for Taiwan ~1700 US ~6500 S.Korea ~9300 Italy ~13000 So, it doesnt seem Taiwan did a lot of tests. But as per reports they did have early travel restrictions along with strict quarantine for visitors. "Like, your expectation would be if you isolate people into groups of 4 and never let them have any sort of contact with any other group, your death rate from COVID-19 would be higher than allowing everyone to intermix to their heart's content?" I dont think there is enough understanding to answer affirmatively. But it is possible if most of the infections are caused in close proximity in closed environments. There are articles talking about dangers of bringing home young adults from colleges who may be asymptomatic carriers and put them in homes with grandparents. Also when people are out, there is automatically more distancing than people are restricted inside, especially in small homes. To the level aerosol microdroplet transmission is possible, closed environments will be worse. Please watch this video about microdroplets https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2azcn7MqOU As given in that video, masks would help with microdroplet transmission. Again, I dont think theoretically its easy to come up with answers. What I am trying to do is look at it empirically. There are other possible contributing factors that may have helped Taiwan in this crisis. I am not sure whether they will help US or Canada at this stage of crisis or not. Nevertheless, let me put them down as they may be useful for future crises. 1. It has universal BCG vaccination. Before 1973, it used French strain (Pasteur). After 1973, it used the local Tokyo strain. 2. The societal acceptance for social distancing is high. Part of this was cultural. In our culture, hugging people and kissing people on the cheek are not normally done. Part of this was from the experience of SARS. So people stopped shaking hands but greets people by holding two hands together 3. Even though there is no lock-down, people do have to adopt. a. many industrial companies in Hsinchu Science park organized workers in TeamA/TeamB and physically separate these teams to reduce face-to-face interaction. b. restaurants do see big drop off in traffic c. people reduce going out. However, when they do go out they drive instead of use public transportation 4. Taiwan increased its mask production from 1.8 million/day in January to current 15million/day. The projection is that by end of April, the number will reach 20 million per day. Government reached a "equipment for mask" deal with the mask making industry. The deal is that the government would invest US $6.7million to buy the production equipment. The companies then install these in their factory and in return need to give the government 72million masks. Afterwards, the companies own the equipment outright. This really is not a big investment, to be frank..... This is the reason why the Taiwanese government can donate 16 million masks to US, EU and other of its allies. 5. its geography does allow it to use border control to contain the outbreak. However, throughout the crisis, Taiwan maintains flight with US, EU, China (except Wuhan and Wenzhou), Japan and other countries. So this is not a case of just shutdown the flights. The devil is in the details. Below is a PBS video showing a Taiwanese lady returning from London. I was told by friends that US and Canada did not utilize such procedures for their people returning from abroad. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/taiwans-aggressive-efforts-are-paying-off-in-fight-against-covid-19 Yesterday afternoon, the daily new COVID case count dropped to 1, which is a piece of good news.

Being a Taiwanese, here people believe that in this corona virus outbreak, the more a government believes what the official Chinese government says, the more its citizens will suffer. The health minister leading the Taiwanese COVID task force was quoted saying that "what they (CCP) did not allow us to see really worried us. So We (the Taiwanese government) kicked the initiatives into high gears."

I think you're not really interested in an answer. If I'm wrong, the answer has been all over this thread. Go look it up. I'm surprised that you have so much faith in the transparency of the Chinese Communist Party in sharing the number of deaths. (It's still noteworthy that USA has a 5x per capita death rate compared to Canada. If you think Canada's managing this poorly, you must think that the USA is managing this horrendously.) Aren’t they projecting 150k deaths in the US? US definitely managed this horribly. There was opportunity for them to do very well had they acted early. But I’m not that optimistic about the situation in Canada. I think it’s being mismanaged here as well.. The federal heath minister just said there’s no reason to doubt Chinese #s. It’s a conspiracy that Chinese #s are higher.. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-health-minister-says-canada-has-no-evidence-that-china-is-under/ I trust muscle 10x more than China or Trudeau. You're completely right to trust Muscleman - kudos to that guy for telling the truth at his own personal risk. https://www.dailywire.com/news/washington-post-evidence-coming-out-of-wuhan-suggests-real-death-toll-over-40000 That China is really doing a bang-up job containing CV ! Washington Post: ‘Evidence’ Coming Out Of Wuhan Suggests Real Death Toll Over 40,000 What is Muscleman's personal risk? He was from Wuhan and still has friends (probably family members) living there.

The temperature is 88 deg F. So warm weather is really not going to solve the problem magically. :'(

https://www.ruv.is/frett/two-types-of-covid-19-in-one-individual I wonder how this affects the effort of finding a vaccine....

Yeah, I'm talking to friend in Japan right now and it's super weird. They don't test. There is pretty much no social isolation. Trains are packed. Masks are used, but not by majority and even people using masks take them off, wipe face with hands, etc. It's just super weird that they don't have superspread. There is a Olympic game on the line. Some people believe that if it is decided the game is to be delayed to next year, they will do very different things.

This is a report from The Journal of the American Medical Association about Taiwan's efforts to slow down the Covid-19. I think it does a good job to summarize what the government has done with the support of the Taiwanese companies and Taiwanese people. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689 One thing that is interesting is that the government has a daily press briefing, which is broadcast online. The minister of health and welfare, trained as a dentist, runs this press briefing. Other regular attendees include one medical professor/practicing doctor and one medical doctor specialized in disease control. The briefing is further supported by deputy ministers of other ministries as needed. The presenters are civil-servants and university professors, not politicians. As an engineer, I actually found the press briefing rather entertaining. My wife originally follows Korean drama. Now we watch together the press briefing every night. Today, they had a professor from National Taiwan University to discuss the genetic sequencing of one particular patient to see whether the case is from outside of Taiwan or not. It is quite interesting. I had never in my life thought that I would see some professor explain this topic in a joint-ministry level press conference. ::)