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O REALLY ? ? ? Well yeah...CAN 2024 GET HERE ANY FASTER?
And say what about that so-called "Silicon Shield?? ?
"The U.S., which accounts for nearly 65 percent of TSMC’s sales, has long considered its dependency on TSMC unsafe. To buffer against the uncertainty, Washington has convinced the company to build a new $12 billion manufacturing plant in Arizona, which is expected to churn out 5nm wafers by 2024.
NOTE: Danger ahead That is a scenario no one wants to see. “Frankly, they’re in a pretty good spot,” Schneider said. “So long as we don’t have World War III.”
"The reliance of the world’s No. 1 tech power on TSMC illustrates its unmatched market dominance in making advanced semiconductors, capacities that even China counts on to support its fast-growing digital economy.
“TSMC
has clearly been the global leader in a very high-end commodity:
advanced chips that the world needs to help all these other
industries—aerospace, autos, electronic appliances, military equipment,”
Dexter Roberts, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told VICE
World News. “Nobody wants to see TSMC hurt.”
✓ 1
A Taiwanese Chip Giant Is Caught Between the US and China—and It’s Thriving
When U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in early August, she vowed support for the self-ruled democracy at a time when it seemed to need it. An increasingly powerful China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory, had sought to weaken the island’s international standing, and Chinese nationalists’ calls for an invasion had grown louder. By traveling to Taipei in defiance of Beijing’s protest, Pelosi said, she wanted to demonstrate the U.S.’ commitment to help Taiwan defend its freedom.
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But it quickly became clear that the unofficial U.S.-Taiwan relationship was more than just the world’s dominant power backing its weaker partner in a choice, as Pelosi herself put it, “between autocracy and democracy.” ...
On Wednesday, Arizona’s governor, Doug Ducey, visited Taiwan in hopes of wooing suppliers for the facilities in his state. Last week, Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb also went to Taiwan to promote academic and technological ties between the democratic island and the U.S. state.
But
most of TSMC’s operations are still concentrated in its sprawling
facilities near Taipei, where Pelosi rubbed shoulders with its
executives. They discussed the newly passed CHIPS and Science Act, which
offers $52 billion in subsidies for new chip manufacturing plants on
American soil. TSMC is also expected to get a piece of the pie. . .
“Nobody can control TSMC by force,” TSMC chairman Mark Liu explained in a recent interview with CNN, noting that an invasion would render the sophisticated manufacturing facility “inoperable” as it depends on real-time connection with the rest of the world, including the U.S., Europe and Japan. “From materials, to chemicals, to spare parts, to engineering software diagnoses—it’s everybody’s effort to make this factory operable,” Liu said.
China would shoot itself in the foot if it invades Taiwan ostensibly for the chips, Schneider said. “Its entire economy would be forced back to 1990s levels of microelectronics because the fallout from such an action would lead you to be cut off from the rest of the global semiconductor ecosystem.”
TSMC and its chip industry has given Taiwan such political and economic leverage that it has been dubbed by some as a silicon shield.
. . .
But as Beijing, stressing the historical mission of reunification, bears down on Taiwan, there are growing fears of a day when TSMC’s supremacy would not be sufficient to deter China. That would spell trouble not just for the company and the island but also for the rest of the world, which relies on its chips to function.
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“The constant backdrop is the very ugly, scary possibility that there could be military hostilities in the Taiwan Strait,” Roberts said. “Then all bets are off. Economic concerns may temporarily be off the table and it may be about whose side are you on.”
TSMC going dark would deal a critical blow to the global economy, an impact more severe than the COVID-19 pandemic. Imagine Apple unable to launch its latest iPhone and Amazon losing its web services. “Maintaining the daily operation of the business world would become an impossible task,” CLSA’s Chen said.
That is a scenario no one wants to see. “Frankly, they’re in a pretty good spot,” Schneider said. “So long as we don’t have World War III.”
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✓ 2 Tax Evasion; Don't do that
Washington, DC Sues Tech Billionaire For Allegedly Evading $25M in Taxes by Pretending to Live in Florida.jpg)
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On Wednesday, the District of Columbia’s Attorney General Karl A. Racine announced that his office is suing MicroStrategy executive chairman and Bitcoin-boosting billionaire Michael Saylor for alleged tax fraud. The District is also suing MicroStrategy for allegedly helping Saylor evade taxes on money earned while residing in DC.
Saylor co-founded the Virginia-based software company in 1989, but in recent years has turned his attention to Bitcoin. Saylor is one of the cryptocurrency's biggest boosters and has turned MicroStrategy essentially into a vehicle for investing in the price of Bitcoin. He claims to personally own nearly 18,000 bitcoins while MicroStrategy is sitting on another 129,699, according to an August SEC filing.
The DC AG alleges that Saylor hasn't paid "any" income taxes to the District since he started living there in 2005, avoiding at least $25 million in taxes.
The lawsuit is happening because of a recently-passed law called the False Claims Act, which empowers whistleblowers to come forward about alleged fraud against the government, and a whistleblowing realtor that came forward to claim Saylor failed to pay income taxes. Under the law, whistleblowers can be awarded up to 30 percent of the funds collected by the District.
"Arguably the wealthiest person in the District—Forbes estimates his net worth at $2.3 billion— he has never paid a dime in District income tax," the whistleblower's complaint, filed by realtor Tributum in April but unsealed on Wednesday, states.
After independently investigating the claims in the whistleblower's lawsuit—for example, that Saylor has in fact long been a resident of DC—the AG's office filed its own suit against Saylor and MicroStrategy, alleging that the company helped him evade taxes. . ."
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✓ 3
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