If China actually catches up and surpasses the West/TSMC in fab technology and production, I think they'd have a better option, which is simply flooding the world market with high-end chips and obliterating the Taiwanese economy. Eventually, joining an economically dominant China might become more palatable, or a necessity.

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noosphr a day ago | parent | next [-]

At this point I'm willing to wave around the little red book for a 1TB of ram.

I don't have that many kidneys left to buy gpus, ram and ssd at the prices they are now, let alone the prices next year.

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simmerup 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How much money would Taiwan have to be offerred to voluntarily place their heads under the boot of China

	▲	kjkjadksj 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The leadership will have a price in mind and they won’t be the ones under the boot. Everyone has a price to look the other way even if they think they are principled now.

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treyd 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This would be more in-line with their strategy in other areas. Quietly massively improve technical capability and then utterly out-compete international competitors. They did this with solar, multicopters, are in progress with doing this with TVs, nuclear power, etc. War is expensive and destructive, it's easier and nicer to just negate the economic relevance of your opponents if you have the time and resources to do it (which they do).

	▲	mywittyname 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		China is also doing this with weapons. It's just a little more difficult normal people to see the results because people can't get a Dongfeng 2x series rocket from Ali Express. Realistically, the general public doesn't have access to an honest appraise of their capabilities. So we are left to infer from their accomplishments in other high-tech areas what their military industry is capable of producing.