that makes sense. i kind of have the same viewpoint as a european, but i think it would be hard to get the average joe to move over if they're similar in data collection policies. i don't know what the average viewpoint is but what i hear often is that people here often think of china and usa as similar "devils" (note: i don't agree with this, i think china is a lot better). people are like "these massive countries are the same shit in a different package. america, china, both bad". so with that said, i think a lot of people would have issues moving over because they're already used to youtube and everyone's there anyway.

Playing both sides? Never! /s

They’re also good for taking down drones. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3357667/china-showcases-portable-laser-weapons-single-soldier-shoot-down-drones

There is no way around needing helium, but China will boost their own production in time and they have access to helium from Russia as well. Meanwhile, the reason they can move so fast is due to having a centrally planned system the west rejects. It's the same reason Russia is now outproducing all of NATO in terms of weapons and ammunition. The west is in no position to recreate the necessary supply chains. Rare earths alone is a perfect example. I wrote about the problem in detail here if you're interested. Even under the most aggressive diversification scenarios, China is expected to retain 80% of global refining capacity by 2040. And that's just one example. The west has very little leverage at this point. Also, as she correctly points out, China doesn't need to get to ASML levels to make these fabs useful. As long as they're better than the current ones, that already means China will be producing better domestic chips. And they're also innovating with architecture as well such as Huawei's tau law design which folds the chip and dramatically improves performance. All these things work together. Finally, China is aggressively pursuing alternative computing substrates and some are already starting to come online. This is a recent example. These kinds of things have the potential to leapfrog silicon chips entirely. There's nothing comparable happening in the west because you can't do these kinds of projects without massive amount of state funding and direction to sustain them until they become profitable on their own.