Tankiedesantski

joined 4 years ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I'm sure that the admission staff will take your application very seriously if you claim you were James Bonding it up for a few years.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (2 children)

That's not how employment NDAs work. They never forbid a candidate from disclosing that they worked for a company and the general nature of their work. They just forbid the candidate from talking about specific knowledge gained at the company.

Do not use this excuse because it's an instant red flag for anyone who knows even a little about the hiring process.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Please America. Please scuttle NAFTA over your dinosaur pickup truck industry. Nothing would be funnier.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago

I'm doing my part im-doing-my-part

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

No Todd plz, I already bought the Nokia nGage version!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

ICBMs are notoriously difficult to intercept. Nobody realistically has an interception system able to take down enough of them to matter. The problem with old ICBMs is that they're less survivable if the enemy strikes you first so you need even more warheads and delivery systems to compensate.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Nuclear war planning isn't as simple as applying a rate of interception or failure to your stock of warheads. You have to plan for eventualities like what happens if you're subject to a first strike - can you ensure that enough of your own warheads will survive to retaliate? If not, or if your opponent thinks not then your opponent is much more likely to try a first strike.

Modern missiles aren't just faster or harder to shoot down, they're also more survivable. Have you noticed that while the Russians and Chinese parade their missiles on big ass trucks, the US doesn't seem to have any? That's because there isn't a road or rail mobile variant of the Minuteman 3. So those MM3s have been sitting in silos only for decades, more than enough time for opponent satellites to pinpoint exactly where they are. On the other hand, a Russian or Chinese missile can drive around their own road or rail systems and be untraceable unless you have real time satellite footage that just happens to catch them moving.

So if your missiles can't move, you can only protect them by hardening their emplacements and silos. Unfortunately, most American silos are about as old as the missiles in them and were designed to withstand much lesser yields of warheads. Maybe some could be brought up to a newer standard, but building of that scale would also paradoxically tip your opponent off to which missile sites to target first.

Therefore, if you're in a position where you aren't convinced your own missiles will survive a first strike, your only move to maintain deterence is new missiles or more missiles (or both). Contracts were passed out for new missile designs around 2017 but it seems like nothing has come to fruition. Therefore the only other option is to build more warheads so that they can be fired from planes and other systems instead.

This leads on to the next point which is that warheads are not all necessarily sitting on missiles read to go at all times. Most of the time they're in central stockpiles that are easier to guard and maintain and are only parcelled out to units in times of heightened nuclear tension. A modern nuclear power has more platforms that can deliver nukes than actual nukes themselves - the whole point of a nuclear triad (ICBMs, planes, subs) is to ensure maximal redundancy so that no one type of attack can destroy all delivery systems.

Hence, a nuclear war planner has to figure out how many ICBMs and warheads are likely to survive a first strike, then figure out how many warheads are needed to put on planes and ships and subs for a counter strike. If the US military is thimking it needs more warheads, then one major reason could be that it's realized it's delivery platforms are not as survivable as predicted.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (5 children)

America has a lot of warheads but its delivery systems are relatively behind Russian and Chinese systems. For instance, the current US land/silo based missiles are Minuteman 3s, which were first built in the 1970s. Even with upgrades, they are generally understood to be inferior to much more recent Russian Yars and Chinese Dong Feng missiles.

That said, increasing the number of warheads doesn't really help in terms of that deficiency so the between the lines conclusion is that the new American missile systems have hit such snags that the military is considering making up the deficiency with numbers of warheads.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Maybe Todd Howard?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The PRC chip industry doesn't need to develop exponentially. TSMC is not developing exponentially either.

Monopoly pricing is not just broken when w 1-for-1 peer competitor at the same price appears. Monopoly pricing can be broken by a less performant alternative at a cheaper price that is suitable for the vast majority of applications. You can see this in a number of industries where incumbent players are being displaced by new Chinese suppliers who don't quite make cutting edge stuff but can sell at a fraction of the price.

Hell, you can see it now with older chips at bigger physical nodes where China is now a significant portion of global production.

Will the PRC chip industry face many challenges? Of course it will. However, the PRC's track record of going from nothing to 5nm in a few years cannot be ignored by TSMC.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (3 children)

TSMC knows full well that its monopoly (or oligopoly, depending what you think of Samsung I suppose) is on a timer with the development of the PRC's chip industry.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

The rules based order actually just means "we rule with an iron fist"

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