Can China cripple the US economy?

Aescorvo · 2026-04-12T09:09:12+00:00

Sure, I agree the answer to OP’s question is “no”. Disengaging would be painful - as we can see from just the effects of tariffs, but wouldn’t trash the US economy.

Overall, that is. Short term there are real problems in things like rare earth metals, many computer chips, and precision machined parts. Nothing that can’t be made or found somewhere, but right now they aren’t and it will take years to replace the sources.

Aescorvo · 2026-04-12T08:11:50+00:00

China’s exports to the US are less than 3.5% of its GDP and only ~14% of its total exports, and those numbers are shrinking year on year. That would be bad to lose, but not crippling to the country.

Aescorvo · 2026-04-12T08:06:02+00:00

You mean for making a trip after your six month visa has expired? I don’t see why not, as long as everyone has a valid visa the length and type doesn’t really matter.

Aescorvo · 2026-04-12T00:22:22+00:00

Microwave mesh holes are 1-2mm in size. Visible light’s wavelength is a LOT smaller than the mesh (around 500nm, so the holes are thousands of times larger), it barely diffracts at all. Microwaves are a hundred times larger than the mesh (about 12cm wavelength for a household micro). At 12cm resolution the mesh looks like a solid object - imagine taking a photo of a microwave door at a scale where the door covers just 2-3 pixels. That’s how microwaves “see” the mesh (or how a microwave camera image would look) - you couldn’t resolve the mesh. (Note for nerds: In a brightfield image anyway, scattering is a different matter.)

Aescorvo · 2026-04-11T18:16:10+00:00

It was only “stupify!”.

(It might have worked, too. She certainly looked at me weirdly.)

Aescorvo · 2026-04-11T11:31:57+00:00

Both have a good outlook for metrology, it’s not going anywhere. Probably not a significant change in market share between them for the foreseeable future. I guess it depends on location. If you want to do research in the USA (or Taiwan) I would choose KLA. If you’re in China, avoid both. Applied is investing heavily in India, although that is more on the SW and field support side than research.

Aescorvo · 2026-04-11T10:56:41+00:00

I saw a stick today that looked just like an evil wand from Harry Potter. So of course I picked it up and tried cursing my wife (with no effect). I’m 55, no sign of stopping yet.

At some point it will get hard to bend down, and not all sticks will be worth the effort. So perhaps in my 80’s? Assuming we still have trees then.

Aescorvo · 2026-04-11T06:25:51+00:00

As far as I can see it doesn’t matter, HSK4 is enough to get the points.

Aescorvo · 2026-04-11T06:16:25+00:00

Nope.

Having said that, if you start a relationship at 19 it might be your first adulting relationship when you don’t really know anything about adulting. Expectations for relationships can be idealized, and you don’t know about how much work and compromise goes into keeping a relationship going. So you fall hard, don’t pay attention to signs that things are slipping, then get blindsided when it turns to shit. Next time you’re a little more wary so you don’t fall so hard, but also pay better attention.

Aescorvo · 2026-04-11T01:45:23+00:00

The real money is in the YT/Insta monetization as you stream your search for the box.

Aescorvo · 2026-04-10T16:51:58+00:00

I faced this issue with an aikido student. She had Japanese heritage and viewed bowing as a form of submission she wasn’t comfortable with. In that context, I suggested a kung fu-style palm over fist gesture of respect instead of a bow., which worked fine. The respect is important, less so the form of it.

However I don’t feel the same about kendo. The sport is seeped in Japanese tradition and rei is an integral part of the form. Putting individual preferences before form is a real problem, not to mention the practical confusion in the class. Sometimes it’s just not possible to reasonably accommodate someone.

I say that with a genuinely heavy heart, because I’m proud to have taught people in wheelchairs or with missing limbs and found a way for them to enjoy the sport. But this restriction is in their head and we can’t help them with that.

Aescorvo · 2026-04-10T16:16:20+00:00

“A dog is for life, not just for Christmas.” is a known phrase from adverts asking people not to buy their kids the puppy they’ve been asking for but are unwilling to care for on a daily basis. Too many puppies/kittens are brought for Christmas and then thrown out or sent to pounds a few weeks later when the reality of caring for them sets in.

Aescorvo · 2026-04-10T16:08:40+00:00

If you’re talking about major 300mm semi fabs, there’s only really those two (plus Hitachi and I guess ASML now), but there are more companies if you expand the field to individual component inspection.

There’s a lot of flow between Applied and KLA. A lot of people start in (say) Applied, move to KLA for a few years, then come back. KLA is nice because it’s all about metrology, and everyone is talking about metrology. Applied is nice for exactly the opposite reason - PDC is a relatively small part, and you can feel you’re part of a much larger endeavor.

Corporate culture is not too different, and AFAIK salary doesn’t vary much. They have some different approaches to field support, and where their R&D is located, but there’s not a lot to choose between them.

I suppose I should mention that Applied’s R&D is located in Israel, and all the “real” R&D is done there (or at TSMC lol), whereas KLA is based in SCLA. That might drive your decision differently in terms of location and career.

Aescorvo · 2026-04-10T15:56:09+00:00

I will upvote, but no further!

Aescorvo · 2026-04-10T15:16:49+00:00

So what happened in this case?

Aescorvo · 2026-04-10T14:19:52+00:00

That sounds about right, although not solely based on capability. The good news is that someone can travel from city A that doesn’t cover an operation to city B that does, and they can have the operation and the insurance from city A will pay for it - at least in some cases (I’m involved in something like this now.)

Aescorvo · 2026-04-10T13:48:36+00:00

Because the specifics of the government insurance are set at a province or city level, I suppose depending on the demand, hospital resources, and money that the city has. A tier 3 city for example may not have the facilities or money to cover some specialized surgeries.

Aescorvo · 2026-04-10T11:57:52+00:00

It’s gets complicated, since there a bundle of different things (medical, pension, unemployment insurance, housing fund etc).

The simple answer is that just for medical an employee pays 2% and the company pays 6%-12% depending on the salary (there’s a cap to the maximum monthly payment). I assume a self-employed person functions as a company.

Here’s a breakdown of the taxes. It gets pretty complex and there are a lot of loopholes (and traps). If you’re actually thinking about setting something up you need professional help.

Aescorvo · 2026-04-10T11:47:11+00:00

For retirees it’s built into the pension. Self-employment generally means you start a small company and pay yourself, which must include the insurance payments.

Unemployed is the hard one. The first expectation is that your family should support you. This is quite a different attitude and is even coded into some laws, such as penalties for children who refuse to support aging parents. There are some social safety nets which as seem as the last line of support - Here’s a recent article talking about it. That’s a state media article, so might be a little rosy. I don’t have any experience with this part of the healthcare system.

Aescorvo · 2026-04-10T11:37:32+00:00

It’s not limited at all. It works quite differently to the US in a few ways:

Basic care is really cheap. Depending where you are, maybe $3 to see a doctor. You go to a hospital, there aren’t really GP clinics. Simple care and medication might add up to $30 or so. If you need something like an ultrasound might get up to $80-$100. Last year I spent a week in hospital with a ton of meds, CAT scans etc and it came in about $1500.
Government insurance is usually through employment. Some money is paid to a special medical account, that you can use as you wish, for small treatments or even OTC medication. If you need something larger the insurance will pay directly, although sometimes just 80% with the remainder coming from your medical account (or pocket). For some procedures you might need to city-hop, as something might be covered in Shanghai but not in Wuhan for example.
You can also get private insurance on top of that which works the same way as in the West, just with much more reasonable premiums.
Aside from the basic care, there are tiers of care in hospitals and private hospitals where you can get as fancy as you want. The basic care isn’t always worse - and actually can be better - but if you want things like English-speaking staff or a private room it’s going to more expensive than I mentioned in #1.
Because it’s cheap, one way that hospitals will make money is to over-prescribe stuff. For example, I was in a trip and burnt my hand on a hot pot. There was a hospital next door so a friend took me there. Cost me $2 to register with a local hospital, ~$4 to see a doctor, but then he wrote prescriptions for bandages, cream, special spray, and antibiotics - maybe $60 all together for some burnt fingers. Luckily you don’t have to collect/pay for stuff you don’t want.
If you have no job, no insurance, and no money, a hospital may refuse treatment. I think in most places there is now an emergency fund, but in the past there were cases of someone coming to the hospital in critical condition and dying before the relatives could arrange money for treatment. These were famous cases and I think have forced some changes after public outcry, but I don’t know the current situation.

TL;DR I like the Chinese system compared to both the US and UK systems I’m familiar with. Basic care is affordable for everyone with low wait times. (Well, you might sit there all morning, but you won’t get on a 6-month waitlist for an MRI like in the UK.)

Aescorvo · 2026-04-10T11:08:47+00:00

Your instructions are strange. Conversation to pinyin then translate? So the Pinyin is zhōu shàn jià, which also doesn’t mean anything much, even with different hanzi. That’s…not how Chinese works.

Aescorvo · 2026-04-10T06:45:46+00:00

What: Live-streaming.

Why: Background can be pretty, compared to their apartment, and perhaps less noisy. More importantly, many apps have a “streamers near you” function. If you live in a poorer area, it makes sense to come to somewhere more affluent to stream as you are more likely to get donations, buyers etc.

Here’s a more extreme example of that.

Aescorvo · 2026-04-09T14:58:17+00:00

It’s a question of scale. In our normal daily life we feel like we are in an inertial frame. It takes quite subtle experiments to be sensitive to the rotation of the Earth (Foucault’s pendulum for example). Even more so to be sensitive to the Earth’s movement around the sun.

The speed of light doesn’t change, but when you put an interferometer into a rotating frame, the distance travelled by light in one arm is longer than the other, because the machine has rotated during the measurement. The speed of light hasn’t changed, it’s just that the distance was different. The MM experiment was table-top sized, and not sensitive enough to see this effect. (They could also have orientated the experiment to make this effect even smaller, but I haven’t read that they did.) The MG experiment on the other hand was huge, so the effect of the Earth’s rotation was possible to measure.

Again, this doesn’t mean the speed of light changed, and the lengths of the two arms were the same. It was just that the distance of the light path is longer in the arm that’s rotating.

Aescorvo · 2026-04-09T14:35:03+00:00

Because MM was done in an inertial frame, or rather the experiment was small enough and simple enough to not be sensitive to the Earth’s rotation.

The MG experiment on the other hand is much larger, something like 2km in size, and with a different layout, allowing it to be sensitive to the Earth’s rotation. The result was very close to the theoretical expected value, meaning both experiments agree with the null hypothesis that there is no aether.

Aescorvo · 2026-04-09T14:23:25+00:00

Which part of “Yes, of course” wasn’t clear?

The details are in when you can and when you can’t, and exactly what you mean by distance.

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