question: When does all this hit the fan? Been reading for months that gas will rise to astronomical prices. When? answer: it depends heavily on China. If China were to jump into the global oil market with both feet, prices would shoot upwards. To date they have largely stayed on the sidelines.They have huge amounts of oil in storage. Their behavior so far has been the big surprise. They have been providing a pressure relief valve for the entire globe.

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fragmede 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I wouldn't call what they're doing "staying on the sidelines". It's a very big thing they're doing to stop global oil prices from shooting up by using up their stockpile for as long as they can. As to why, it's just the... I dunno, Chinese? thing to do. Quietly fix someone else's fuckup and not seek glory. Whatever you want to attribute it to, it's an ethos and makes total sense to some, because things are gonna get fuuuuuucked if gas prices go to the moon.

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aprilthird2021 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It is to their benefit in several ways:

They can use this ability to keep oil prices down to sort of back up their strategic goals. They could block a strait themselves while taking Taiwan. They could open the stores for concessions in other ways. They can also use this current Iran War to study how the US handles economic problems like oil-inflation. By having their finger on the scale they can push and pull and see how the US reacts in a war scenario.

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toomuchtodo 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

China’s economy depends on exporting to the world, as it will never have enough domestic demand to meet domestic supply. If the global economy crashes from an oil price shock, China goes down with it.

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fragmede 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Power is better than money though. China is communist in name only now, but they could extract huge concessions out of the rest of the world right now if they wanted to.

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toomuchtodo 7 hours ago | parent [-]

They could, but they’ll wait, they’re not ready yet. Until then, they’ll continue to electrify their economy, build out domestic energy supply, rebuild their oil inventories from Russia and Iran when able (at below market prices, dominated in yuan, avoiding dollar systems and sanctions) and prepare to take Taiwan as the US continues to weaken itself.

If Taiwan toasts TSMC when that happens, well, that’s part of what China is rapidly building out their domestic chip industry. China will then have a monopoly on that chip production besides what can be produced in the US and Europe, and have achieved reunification. And who is going to stop them? Nobody, based on the evidence and current trajectories.

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DivingForGold 4 hours ago | parent [-]

>If Taiwan toasts TSMC when that happens ...

You can bet that all TSMC chip factories in Taiwan have strategic installs of explosives just for this scenario, China will get nothing, and the US has multiple TSMC chip factories now and will gladly accept Taiwan victims.

	▲	maxglute 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Bad bet, wanking about TW blowing up their golden goose fabs is US hopium/threat - literally US Army War College insinuated US would blow up fabs to deny PRC while TW politicians/defense minister retorted under no circumstances was that acceptable nor would they evacuate semi talent to US before women and children. Not that they could under PRC blockade/quarantine. The entire notion is fundamentally stupid, TW with fabs is at least useful to PRC and sustains wealth after, or they'd be subsistence pineapple farmers. US has 0 TSMC factories that would operate for long with TW semi sole supplier, Arizonal would grind to halt until US reshores every piece of semi supply chain which even CHIPS ACT didn't pretend US was capable of. Only PRC pursuing end to end full vertical semi integration. TW goes byebye in next few years, PRC will likely be capable of making wholey indigenize 7+nm while entire western semi is fucked because they lost TW inputs. Now consider PRC land based munitions can make anything on TW go byebye in 7 minutes, reality is PRC has maximum semi leverage during war while US has semi leverage during peacetime (lawfare/export controls etc).
	▲	toomuchtodo 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		As mentioned, they won’t need the fabs. They’re spending tens of billions of dollars to advance their own vertical chip industry. The US just pulled temporary status from hundreds of thousands of Hatians, so I wouldn’t be so confident what the future looks like for Taiwanese refugees in the US. TLDR China is going to build whatever chip technology they need to accomplish their technology and geopolitical goals. They have the resources, the will, and the time. China’s EUV Lithography Progress: Parsing Signal From Noise - https://thediplomat.com/2026/07/chinas-euv-lithography-progr... - July 2nd, 2026 China begins mass production of homegrown DUV chipmaking tools - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49076684 - July 2026 China Tells Telecom Carriers to Phase Out Foreign Chips by 2027 (2024) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48767466 - July 2026 US tells ASML it is concerned China may have top chip tool - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48602369 - June 2026

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cyanydeez 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

when the rich people stop talking to their LLMs and realize their hand servants have access to guns.

	▲	krapp 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They know that. And they know that Americans won't do a damn thing with those guns except shoot one another.

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aaron695 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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