I find the focus on chips bewildering, since there are so many more critical issues like 'how do we prevent a stock market run and the crash of every company which outsourced manufacturing to China?' or (if you live in China) 'where do I get a food ration card?', if this gets real bad. Semis are merely an annoyance.

Do we have the technological capability to recycle old semis to work with current systems to keep things running? Do enough people have this skillset? I'm sure we figureit out, but I doubt it there are enough people to really get it moving. With a severe lack of chips we'll see systems falter or all out crash as components wear out and can't be easily replaced. I think you're underestimating how much runs on what Taiwan produces and I don't think "economics" can bring more production online in a meaningful time frame.

It's understandable HN community would focus on semis, but compared to 'financial crash worse than 2008' and 'Would all people be able to get food next month?' semis aren't that important. Semi production would be a slow long-term crisis we would be able to adjust to if we could handle effectively the initial very big short-term crises resulting from a massive war.

As Keynes put it: "In the long run we're all dead". If we couldn't handle the initial short-term economic crises we'll have bigger problems than long-term semi production adjustment. If we can, we could handle adjusting semi production and use. It's not that it isn't an issue, it's just way less important and less difficult than the other issues.