If we include the idea that either one of them is allied to a major power at war with the US over a hundred year horizon, right now that looks pretty likely, and arguably is one of the things the current US admin are trying to stop before it becomes inevitable.
The US admin is very clearly pushing us in the opposite direction. You believe that Trump's actions make war with Canada less likely? What's the mechanistic explanation?
This kind of answers your own question: the reality is you are only a reliable US ally [1] if you can hold them by the balls TSMC style. Given that countries go to great lengths to develop and maintain such dependencies. Canada's current weakness is at least in part because it has failed to do so.
[1] Edit to add: This was/is poorly worded - I mean that the US will only guarantee that you remain an ally while they are in some sense dependent on you, and while doing so they may work to break that dependence, which you may interpret as them trying to abandon you.
You are claiming that Canada will stop exporting to the US in the future? Populism does the opposite, they would likely stop importing. There's almost no risk to us that they would not export chips
My claim is Canada has no unique product that it offers that the US is sufficiently conspicuously dependent on for it to guarantee any real sense of true independence, and so it finds itself subject to the whims of a foreign state.
Right now there is a very large Canadian boycott of US products, services and tourism. I also had to explain to a client this week that because of the import tariffs on Chinese goods to the US the US assembled products are now no longer competitive with alternatives. The fact you were seemingly unaware of this kind of demonstrates the level of effect of it.
Historically there have been plenty of incentives to stop exporting. Its called an embargo. Usually in an attempt to get the host country to change foreign policy, though I can't think of any situation where it actually worked. Examples: Napoleon's "Continental System" against Great Brtain, US oil embargo against Japan prior to WWII, Confederate States of America cotton embargo against the UK during the early years of the American Civil War
Yes it's definitely possible, but very rare and as you pointed out (especially in the confederacy's case) it usually harms the exporter much more than it helps.
I'd say that in any case of a serious Canadian export embargo, it will have been in retaliation to US trade policy or US invasion, not the other way around.
We had essentially no risk that Canada would embargo us, there was no possibility of this happening for the last 150 years until we became the aggressors
The Nintendo Wii SoC was actually fabbed in Canada and exported, but that facility has changed into something slightly different because the whole east coast/hudson river valley fab world went sideways a while ago.
> We import tons of food and energy from them and have no alternative on time scales or 10 years
More importantly for Canadians that food or energy has no alternative competing market to sell into. Consequently the Canadians are totally dependent on the US market to even set the price of it. This applies to many other sectors as well.
Canada is currently having a huge desperate push to export to non US markets because of the levels of uncertainty that have been created. And I say this as someone not totally dismissive of the US position, but they need to do a far better job of bringing their allies into the tent with them.
At any time, Canada could decide to stop subsidizing its uncompetitive chip makers for the same reason so many people in this thread want the US to do, and the US would then become dependent on someone else who might be their enemy (eg. Chinese occupied Taiwan or China itself).
About 15 years ago I was introduced to an environment where approximately a hundred developers spent their lives coaxing a classic style expert system ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system ) into controlling a build process to adjust the output for thousands of different output targets. I famously described the whole process as "brain damaging", demonstrated why [1], and got promoted for it.
People that spend their lives trying to get the LLMs to actually write the code will find it initially exhilarating, but in the long run they will hate it, learn nothing, and end up doing something stupid like outputting thousands of different output targets when you only need about 30.
If you use them wisely though they really can act as multipliers. People persist in the madness because of the management dream of making all the humans replaceable.
[1] All that had happened was the devs had learned how to recognize very simple patterns in the esoteric error messages and how to correct them. It was nearly trivial to write a program that outperformed them at this.
Modern displays are better at this than those CRTs, you're playing back the wrong thing the wrong way. i.e. framerate conversion, badly streamed video or it's trying to sync to an external clock like your audio output.
I happen to have a 36 inch Trinitron in my garage. It stays there because moving it is impossible.
> Add to this that even the extremely well funded hardware startups: MakerBot, FormLabs, DesktopMetal, OnShape, etc. have all either totally failed to create better tech at all, or have been quickly commodified without a major impact to the hardware development process.
They simply succumb to the tendency to rest on their laurels the moment they start making money, and then especially stop investing in software, which is where Bambu have their edge, as many of their improvements are software related.
i.e. if you spend upfront in software you can create an improved experience with the same parts for every subsequent unit. The Chinese have actually internalized this lesson, while in the west we have forgotten it.
Re: "succumb to the tendency to rest on their laurels the moment they start making money"
I don't find that true of any of the companies I mentioned at least. They all were/are going hard on development, but the tech problems were just really hard compared to funding, and they never made any major breakthroughs on capability.
Chinese companies have been great at going from 1 to n in the 3D printing space with a lot of cost, reliability, etc. refinements, but I haven't seen a transformative technology from them yet either (re: comment on ~1995 SolidWorks being the last one).
> but I haven't seen a transformative technology from them yet either
The fact you would think this is the core of what I mean. Cultures in countries which have active and powerful manufacturing sectors view the increase in reliability the Chinese have achieved in 3D printing to be transformative. In the west we're way too focused on perpetual paradigm shifts, but never invest the effort in exploiting the developed technology to the fullest potential, and so sit around wondering why we are losing wealth generating capacity to the east.
Exactly. Bambu really showed how the overall user experience can be, while prusa etc. persist in the enthusiast niche, which isn't as big as it was now that alternatives are available.
Someone at Ubisoft was doing well when they agreed to officially license this. I have believed for a while that they should be attempting to sell off the Blue Byte IP, and maybe studio, to make the most of it while the nostalgia for it still exists.
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