| Whether we like it or not, China and its 1.4 billion people and near millions of trained engineers is crucial to development, manufacture, and consumption of most advanced technologies. Most companies that fail to participate in the China market will lose market share, scale, scope, and profits and slip back into less contested niches. Some — such as Google, Amazon and Facebook — are dominant enough for exclusion not to be a critical peril. In any case, China is banning these US information companies chiefly because of their failure to adapt to Chinese anti-free speech rules. Although a conservative like me balks to recognize it, the fact is that China is rapidly growing more powerful in both economics and technology than the locked-down and climate-change demented United States. Although still harboring the world’s most pullulating entrepreneurial economy, China lamentably remains under the control of the Communist party. So, companies that want to enter its market have to recognize that anti-communist political interference is unacceptable. The chief threat to America’s high-tech giants is stupid efforts by officious politicians in the US and Europe to make these companies liable for every errant post on their vast networks. This principle provides an obvious precedent for similar Chinese interference. Moreover, policing fake news and hate speech is simply impossible without bias, lawsuits, and constant controversy that will end up seriously degrading these sites and undermining these companies. Political dominance of our social networks is rendering them hardly more useful than their Chinese rivals. Chinese companies such as Alibaba and Tencent are increasingly well integrated and efficient for anything except attacking the Chinese government and are better for conducting transactions. Also jeopardizing leading edge US technology is the pathetic failure the US Supreme Court to police the runaway US system of litigation against any deep pocket. Such necessary defense of the Constitution cannot come from a Congress full of lawyers. But the most-dire threat to US technology leadership is political interference in semiconductor capital equipment. The US government, is attempting to stop US suppliers of chip gear from selling their tools to any company that supplies chips to China. As a result, imperiled today is a half-century of arduous and ingenious US leadership in many key areas of semiconductor capital equipment. But chip gear is inexorably a global web, from Tel Aviv and Palo Alto to Frankfort, Singapore and Shanghai. Today’s Prophecy The critical semiconductor fabrication technology is photolithography, which determines the size of the smallest geometries that can be imprinted on chips. With the loss of GCA and eclipse of Ultratech, arguably as a result of previous US government interference, the US contribution in photolithography for chips has diminished to a few mostly foreign owned redoubts of optics. Notable are San Diego’s Cymer Laser, owned by the world’s dominant photolithography company ASM of the Netherlands, and Access Laser Company of Everett, WA, now owned by Trumpf of Germany, an ASM supplier. These companies all have offices or research centers in China and are unlikely to prevail in the future if they are banned from China. US-leaders such as Applied Materials, Lam Research, Teradyne, and KLA continue to prevail in their specialties. These companies also all maintain deep relations with China and Taiwan. Located in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai are such technical stars in chip equipment as ASM Pacific Technologies and AMEC (which performs Molecular Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition and etch). Trump’s effort to use US participation in the global microchip supply chain as a way to force China to its knees in trade negotiations is a deadly threat to the entire US semiconductor industry, which in turn is crucial to US security. We should stop this technological suicide immediately. Regards, 
George Gilder
Editor, Gilder's Daily Prophecy P.S. One of my colleagues made a discovery a while back, one that I'm calling an “outsider trading” scandal. It's a “glitch” caused by Wall Street’s machines and algorithms, and once you exploit these “glitches” you could have the potential to see gains of $1,458, $5,000, and even $6,475. Some in as little as a week’s time... Sometimes in as little as a day. I recorded a special message to talk more about it. Click here to learn more about what I call the “outsider trading” scandal. | 
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