Which is great since it's not in China, which the world's democratic countries needs to work on uncoupling from since it's a) a totalitarian regime, b) part of the weird BRICS network. Remember that the R stands for Russia.
We should aim to keep high-tech manufacturing in democratic countries. Automation is typically what makes this possible in new factories.
Whats your beef with BRICS? There should be competition in the world against the US dollar. It keeps the West more honest if there was someone nipping at their heels. Yeah its a mess backed by some unsavory countries but at least they are trying. Think about everything in your life. There is always at least 2-3 options. Why don't we really have that at a country level? We got the US, the rest of the west is essentially just vassal states for them and then we maybe got China but they may collapse before they amount to anything. Thats it.
> Whats your beef with BRICS? There should be competition in the world against the US dollar.
Well, there's the EUR and JPY, and to a certain extent the GBP.
As for BRICS:
> Pretty straightforward really. You combine Brazil's history of monetary stability, with Russia's respect for property rights, India's domestic tranquility, China's financial transparency, and South Africa's investment opportunities - and hey presto, you've got a new global money
When I think 'competition' I'd usually expect it to be from organisations that aren't hosting US military bases. The EU and Japan are in a poor position to resist the US when it insists on something stupid.
There is a lot of precedent for taking unreliable components and gluing them into a reliable system, the complaints he makes aren't strong ones. Also, the format reminds me of that famous joke [0] about all country stereotypes have strengths and weaknesses.
[0] Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks are French, the mechanics German, the lovers Italian and it's all organised by the Swiss. Hell is where the chefs are British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss, the police German and it's all organised by the Italians.
EUR and JPY each have their own issues. Again i've said this a ton of times now but I don't expect BRICS to succeed but its existence may help to start a shift or at least check the US in blunting some of its more severe actions.
While all of this is a heavy tangent to the actual article we're discussing, I'm not sure if Russia, China, Iran et al are exactly the kind of competition we should be fostering and cheering on.
Iran is also a member of BRICS, there's more members than the abbreviation lets on. The current list is Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia and Iran.
United Arab Emirates is not a part of BRICS, at least not as far as I last checked. They were invited to join and were scheduled to join early 2024, but at least early this year they still had not joined the organization [0]. I think the Wikipedia article intro for BRICS is incorrect, if you check the members list [1] then you see UAB is not in it.
It'd be really interesting to see some sci-fi set in the not-so-distance future (maybe 50-200 years ahead) predicting a future where the western-aligned democratic nations fall, and various brutal authoritarian regimes take over the world and variously compete or collaborate with each other. It wouldn't look pretty I think, but at least it'd probably be a realistic look at humanity's future. I'm guessing it would look something like "1984" but with more political powers and much better technology.
Lets hope that remains sci-fi. A better future is the rest of the non western world improving their living standards and eventually transitioning to some semblance of democracy.
At the moment, that possible future looks like total fantasy. Instead, it seems like many of the western democracies are going to turn into authoritarian governments, and meanwhile the non-western nations seem to be more than happy with their authoritarian leaders (or at least not unhappy enough to actually do anything about it). When was the last time an authoritarian system was toppled from within anyway, without a big western power coming in and doing it for them by force?
We just passed the 60 year anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. Since then we have seen enormous progress with humanity across the globe. Some have progressed faster than others and yes there has been some regression but if you zoom out, its a massive net improvement.
The US has even been here before. After Lincoln was assassinated, he was replaced by a guy who many historians agree was the worst president in the history of the US, a man who arrived to his own inauguration drunk and someone who plunged the country into a shameful part of its history. Im not saying we aren't in for some serious tough times but I am feeling confident that in the long run it will swing back into the direction of progress.
The US is currently in a period of immense transition to a new chapter. The upcoming generation (Gen Alpha) will be the first generation that is majority non white. What will the country be like when they come of political age? What values will it have? Given what I have seen so far from Gen Alpha (and Gen Z) Im feeling quite good that they will be positive values.
>When was the last time an authoritarian system was toppled from within anyway, without a big western power coming in and doing it for them by force?
Well you could argue the Soviet system was bound to fail due to the inherent hypocrisies it had. China is powerful enough that they cannot be easily influenced by the US but there is still massive trouble ahead for them. Their birth rate might stall their economic growth and that is the only thing really keeping the machine going there. I'm not saying they are guaranteed to collapse but it isn't looking good.
>Given what I have seen so far from Gen Alpha (and Gen Z) Im feeling quite good that they will be positive values.
From stuff I'm reading (and what I've seen myself too), the men of Gen Z are much more conservative than older generations. The women are the opposite, of course, and as a result they're not dating each other and Gen Z men are basically turning into angry incels. Hopefully the media is overblowing the proportionality of this, but it doesn't sound good.
>The upcoming generation (Gen Alpha) will be the first generation that is majority non white. What will the country be like when they come of political age?
I don't know, but I do wonder if it's going to just cause more trouble. Do we have examples of other cultures that had huge ethnic divisions like this, yet were successful? As it is, it already seems like the US completely lacks any kind of real shared culture, and is basically a bunch of radically different cultures living among each other but not interacting more than absolutely necessary. It's been like this for ages (centuries really) but with a dominant ethnic majority, it didn't matter so much (though of course it frequently sucked for the minority groups, unfortunately). But in a situation where there's no majority, I really wonder how effective the nation will be, or if it'll balkanize. And these days it isn't just racial either: there's an enormous division (probably the biggest division), for instance, between white rural culture and the culture found in many cities (which seems to be majority-white but with some other groups assimilated); the two groups really don't share the same values at all (e.g. religion+guns on one side).
>Well you could argue the Soviet system was bound to fail due to the inherent hypocrisies it had.
It fell, but not for very long: they briefly tried out a democracy, but then Putin took over and ever since then, it's been effectively a dictatorship with elections similar to the "elections" in North Korea, and now the dictator and the people alike all wanting to re-establish the old Soviet Union, including taking former Soviet-controlled territories/nations by force. So I don't think this is a very good example.
As for China, that's just conjecture; almost all the western nations have similar problems with their birthrates. Many have tried to turn to massive immigration, and that's just led to a huge rise in far-right-wing parties and likely coming authoritarianism.
I honestly can't think of many times when an authoritarian system was toppled from within, without the US or similar doing it by force. Perhaps Spain, but they only turned democratic because their dictator died of old age. Maybe Greece? The UK did it, but it took literally centuries, in a very slow process of moving power from the crown to the democratic parliament until the king/queen was nothing more than a figurehead.
Let's be honest here, there was a long period of negotiation that spanned the Reagan - Clinton admins as well as approval from congress required. Everyone said it was a golden opportunity to open up a huge new market for US goods. I was doing a concentration in Chinese History in the late 90s and was flabbergasted at the very mainstream idea that this was going to be a win-win. I guess at the time they thought Russia was going to be a liberal democracy, too.
I suspect a lot of powerful people knew that it would hurt US workers, US industrial strength, were neutral on the latter, positive on the former, and very positive about profits (during their lifetime).
The theory of comparative advantage is that both countries will benefit, and I think these people put a lot of stock in their own theories. As I understand it, what they wanted was a situation where high skill US workers focus on design and innovation, meanwhile China does the manufacturing for all of it. Not a bad setup really, if you ignore the fact that China probably wants to cut the US out of that equation.
Its the cycle of life and the people at the top win either way.
They export all industry for short term profit, the people whose lives are destroyed are then exploited further(all good property is sold at fire sale prices, they are sold drugs to cope with the pain,are sent to war because the military is the only good employer) until they revolt, they elect a demagogue, disaster finally erupts among the population and the people causing this mess go elsewhere to wait it out(EU, Israel, New Zealand, the Bahamas etc.) until there has been enough of a destruction, industry is painfully rebuilt and then the cycle starts again. The people making the decisions never got hurt, never will suffer any consequences of their actions and will continue to play chess while everyone else plays checkers.
I know several people who play games like this. They have like 3-4 citizenships, they buy up as much property as they can, own assets and even give up their US citizenship for tax purposes to then intend to buy it back with an investor visa when they decide to retire in someplace like Montana.
There probably were probably a bunch of people who'd internalised the message that capitalism favours the wealthy party and weren't expecting what actually happened. But nevertheless the history books will record the period as one of generosity, and a successful international strategy that is to be emulated. It is hard to look at a billion+ people rising out of poverty and call it anything but a win.
Quite frankly, why should they stick to WTO rules? It is an organisation that seems entirely beholden to Western interests, to the degree that the US has decided to simply stop it from doing anything by blocking judge appointments because they didn't want to follow their own rules. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that the WTO is essentially a feckless and weak organisation that exists to muscle smaller countries in line with US interest. No one powerful care about its rules, so I doubt that China's succession made much of any difference at all.
The impact of BRICS is really overstated, and is only really discussed on Reddit and HN (because Reddit).
In action it's been blunted because of China and India's rivalry, with each country vetoing expansion of nations that are fully lopsided one way or the other.
It's not different from the SCO or APEC in that sense.
If you want to learn further about blunting in IR I highly recommend reading Rush Doshi and Oriana Skylar Mastro's research.
Yeah I did mention that it is a mess. You don't even have a single entity that can be trusted by all partners. That itself makes it seem like a non starter but reminder: Just the threat of it existing is still something that can put pressure on the west and it may affect some sort of change against the west long term. The world would be even better off if there was some other democratic power that could provide balance by matching the US but thats not happening so this is what we have.
Thinking long term, there has got to be some sort of mechanism for the non western world to move forward. Right now if you are on the losing side of the western backed global order, you have no hope. Thats a large chunk of the planet. They have a right to at least try to compete in every category including reserve currency.
The "west" vs "non-west" lens is not a valid lens to use and is very reductive.
Use the regional/middle power lens instead.
Every country wants their own strategic autonomy, and is jockeying to build their specific niche.
Relations with the "West" are used as a way to further enhance their own regional autonomy or even graduate to great power status.
Ik on Reddit you guys keep trying to talk about some sort of weird global strategy of a BRICS-West split but it's just utter and complete bullshit, as every member in BRICS, SCO, and other similar organizations are trying to blunt each other due to ambitions.
A "West" versus "Non-west" lens just isn't the primary lens used by decisionmakers in non-Western countries.
>Every country wants their own strategic autonomy, and is jockeying to build their specific niche.
Of course every country acts in its own interests. I didn't say otherwise. I even made mention of this being a reason for why BRIS is likely to fail. That does not mean it shouldn't be tried.
>Relations with the "West" are used as a way to further enhance their own regional autonomy or even graduate to great power status.
Lets be frank, other than maybe China, there isn't any other "great power" than the US. All the other western states are quiet vassals of the US. We saw this most recently with the Netherlands and their blocking of ASML exports to satisfy the US. Ok yes the US help build ASML into what it is but at the same time when the US says jump, the dutch say how high? No one can really tell the US to get lost. Except maybe China one day. And that presents an opportunity for all the smaller nations that are looking for a deal with the US. They can now play the US off with China. Small countries know they will get screwed either way but they can at least get a better deal than they could otherwise. Countries like Iran that are on the wrong side of the US may collapse in the long run because their systems just aren't conducive to long term stability but in the meantime dealing with China might give their people a leg up in terms of economic exchange. Ditto for every other country not aligned with the US.
Again BRICS will likely fail but it existing could be the first step to something different in the future.
As far as Brazil, Bolsonaro is getting a second wind; as far as India, Modi is not exactly a fan of liberal democracy. Both nations exhibit disturbing signs of sliding into autocracy.
I don't think US is genuinely interested in uncoupling with totalitarian regimes. There are many countries like Saudi Arab, UAE, Morocco that have way worse human rights record than China, and the US have no problem with selling even tanks and fighter jets to them. What's in US's real interest is staying more competitive over China and the support for democracy is only a cover story.
It's even worse when looking back in history, Taiwan was totalitarianly ruled before the 90s but US has been backing it ever since world war II.
It's worth remembering that the origin of BRICS was the Goldman Sachs portfolio for emerging markets. For some bizarre reason the term became loved by Western far left and then took a life of its own.
Is BRICS really a thing? As in the CI are local rivals the RC are undeclared local rivals and might rather sooner then later be at war. Authoritarians do not have real allies, just regime-phase temporary companions. Stalin-Hitler were allied once with the Ribbentrop packt. Was SRNG (SovjetRussiaNaziGermany) ever really a threat for the free world or more for each other?
GaN semiconductors are heavily used in military and space applications like Radar, Lasers, and Power ICs.
The US has recently been subsidizing the development of an alternative supply chain for GaN and other similar semiconductor in Japan (eg. the TI announcement), India [0], Phillipines [1], Australia [2], etc
I can't wait for the day that we can get GaN replacement adapters for all of our old vintage electronics. Its such a cool technology. We have SSD replacements for spinning disks, HDMI and OLED mods for video and now the final frontier: old terrible non switch mode (or even early switch mode) PSU replaced with GaN supplies.
Can't we do that now? There's already a cottage industry of replacement power supplies in the vintage computing and video game sphere, I would imagine GaN products will dominate that space eventually.
Seems like there is a lack of power supply design expertise there, maybe due to certification requirements or possibly just the margins on a replacement PSU is much less than something like a flash cart or HDMI solution. I personally wouldn't dare to design a PSU: I would probably burn my house down.
My hope is that certified designs that target various DC voltages will cover a lot of use cases.
EDIT: Oh sorry I misread your comment. You are claiming there is a large selection already? I don't see it as often as I see other 'mods'. Are you speaking about any particular vintage computing/gaming community in particular? For consoles all I see is junk coming out of China. I've been burned too many times by that.
Its not quite turnkey, but USB PD (maybe with PPS, which lets the device specify voltage and current directly instead of simply picking a profile) from a known good manufacturer, and a trigger board (crapshoot there unfortunately) covers 99% of stuff.
Also, You can buy SMPS modules on mouser or digikey now for under $10. Or if you're lucky jameco will have it.
Sometimes even rotten chinese garbage can be useful- I have a portable USB supply for my DSLR that was originaly powered by seriously unsafe means- but the battery drm/sensor fakeout is good, so I just used the 9v USB-PD profile and a linear regulator.
Canon makes one, I seem to recall it was AC only, produced whine in the audio capture in video mode, and was nearly $100.
Yeah we are starting to see them and its awesome. Im seeing some efforts to convert barrel jack connectors of game consoles to have USB PD and then connect that to a simple cell phone adapter. You can then toss those bulky bricks in the trash. But im really referring to redesigned internal PSUs that use GAN for things like old game consoles. But I would take external PSU replacements as well! Oh how I dream of tossing that Xbox 360 PSU in the trash. Like what were they thinking? You can kill someone with that thing!
GaN has been getting HUGE in the audio realm, less so in western companies but in Asia in the PA realm its been the go-to for a few years now.
Admarks AD442(4x4200w @8ohm) and AD60(2x6000w @ 8ohm) are a great example.
1U, Compact and more power than you can poke a stick at and fairly reliable. Also their pricing dumps on the offerings in the west (Both well under $2000 AUD). Just be warned you want MINIMUM 240v 15A or 32A single phase power circuits for these and probably run them at 1/4 or 1/8th rated output for ultra low THD.
Yeah, it's definitely coming via the Chinese companies, and Korean as well (HiFi Rose), and everywhere from budget to expensive. Class D amps have been making headway against traditional scepticism for a while now, and GaN switching performance is pushing that even harder.
Peachtree seem to be one of the US companies pushing GaN in a big way, including their pure-digital amps.
Wild. I recall back in the early 2000's my dad was working at ITT Gilfilan (I think they are defunct now - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITT-Gilfillan) and the latest hotness was Gallium Arsenide radar technology. Pretty quickly it seems we leveled up to Gallium Nitride.
GaN was already becoming popular in the early 2000's for high power RF amplifiers because they operate at higher supply voltages than GaAs. Cree (now Wolfspeed) and Nitronex were big names in GaN back then, with RFMD and TriQuint joining in soon after.
They are more efficient at high switching frequencies, because they have very low switching losses.
When a diode is not switched, or it is switched at very low frequencies, then the losses are given by the voltage drop when the diode is on and by the leakage current when the diode is off.
These 2 parameters cannot be improved simultaneously, so some diodes are better when used at low voltages and high currents and others are better at high voltages and low currents.
However when the switching frequency is increased, which is desirable in power supplies and in amplifiers because it allows the use of smaller inductors and capacitors, reducing the size of the equipment, the switching losses increase proportionally with the frequency and over some frequency they become higher than the static losses.
When such high frequencies are reached, the most efficient diodes become those with the smallest switching losses, which currently are the gallium nitride diodes. The GaN diodes and field-effect transistors have enabled the much smaller chargers that exist now for laptops and smartphones, in comparison with the traditional bricks, which for many small computers were bigger and heavier than the computers.
GaN diodes and transistors are the best for switching power supplies and switching amplifiers with working voltages from about 100 V up to 500 V or 600 V, which is enough for equipment powered by household voltages (the voltage supported by a device in a power supply is significantly higher than the nominal voltages like 120 V or 230 V, because what counts is the peak voltage not the effective voltage and also not the nominal value but the highest value within the permitted tolerances increased by some safety factor; thus a 500 V to 600 V device is needed for 230 V mains electric power).
For the higher voltages that may be needed in industrial and automotive applications, silicon carbide diodes and transistors are the best.
For voltages under 100 V, silicon diodes and transistors remain the best.
The very high electron mobility of GaN material allows devices with very low on-resistance and exceptionally high switching frequencies, which are key advantages in the design of next generation power systems, especially those for electric vehicles and renewable energy applications.
Regarding the band gap[2]:
It has a wide bandgap of 3.4 eV and an electron mobility of 1,700 cm2/Vs. Comparatively, Silicon sits at 1.1 eV and 1,400 cm2/Vs. GaN’s inherent properties thus result in a higher breakdown voltage and lower on-state resistance, which means that the component can more efficiently handle greater loads compared to a similar-sized silicon device, which then leads to a lower bill of materials.
Probably not for the diode properties, but the transistor properties. I'm not an expert in this field, but some quick googling says GaN transistors (compared to silicon) have faster switching speeds and lower on-state resistance. I'm sure there's other tradeoffs, but those are great properties for high power, high frequency circuits.
You aim for no current to ever flow through the diode. Any time current might flow through the diode, you should either switch on the transistor (so the same current flows through the channel), or switch some other transistor in your circuit to block the current (ie. a series transistor with source and drain switched).
Which is great since it's not in China, which the world's democratic countries needs to work on uncoupling from since it's a) a totalitarian regime, b) part of the weird BRICS network. Remember that the R stands for Russia.
We should aim to keep high-tech manufacturing in democratic countries. Automation is typically what makes this possible in new factories.