371–380 of 450 posts
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Because while TSMC is production, the innovation happens mostly with those companies.
TSMC's innovation on production is impressive as well like the on chip water cooling. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/324625-tsmc-mulls-on-c...
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It’s probably true that the net salary is lower than some other comparable countries, although Denmark for example has also a quite low net salary. I feel the important bit is what you get for the net salary deduction. In Germany you have: - Free Education including University - A decent mostly free health system, health care insurance - unemployment insurance so your life does not completely unravel if you are made…
I would be _ecstatic_ to give up half of my salary for such a system which assures that irrespective of my employment/financial status, age or health, I'll get the care I need, until I die.
For example you can find German news articles about how public insurance doesn't cover some tests that confirm/deny if you have some life threatning condition or not, even if you have all the symptoms and the doctors says that's the next step - while private insurance does cover additional tests.
And private health insurance is only available to individuals earning well above the average German salary.
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The UK did NOT have vaccine export bans in place. Why is this a recurring meme on HN? Or, more pointedly - why are some people so eager to gleefully regurgitate such misinformation?
It's not misinformation at all. The UK was just clever enough to hide the export ban in their contracts with AZ (unlike the US which did it more bluntly). The first xx million doses of vaccines manufactured in Oxford/Keele had to be supplied to the UK. Which is an export ban in all but name. But it gave the UK government the opportunity to claim that there was no export ban in place (even though nothing was exported…
I don't disagree that to country B waiting on doses, the outcome is the same whether or not the cause is country A implementing an export ban or country A having bought up all the doses by having signed the contract first. But there is a difference.
(The US never had an export ban, either. The US did the same thing as the UK; insist that they (which the US signed ahead of everyone else) would be fulfilled in the order they were signed.)
If i were TCMS, i would not invest in Germany. But as a german, living in Germany, i am happy that they consider an investment in Germany.
Germany is a great place to invest. So is most of Western Europe. The #1 thing you are looking for is _stability_ and a good engineering job market. Both is available. For this kind of automated high-tech manufacturing, nobody cares about salaries. They are <<1% of the cost.
Now, this may be a complete misconception, but that's what my perception of doing business in Germany is.
If you consider GlobalFoundries to be a valid competitor, then that move would make a lot of sense. Infineon and AMD used to do a lot of research and production in Dresden. The AMD fab has since become a part of GlobalFoundries. But there's still a healthy ecosystem of university research and medium-sized software companies. Or at least there was, when I visited GlobalFoundries in 2014. Also, there has been a growing…
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That's what Elon Musk said too about the Brandenburg Facory ("Doesn't look like a desert so it must be ok") But environment groups are saying that ground water levels have been decreasing for years and the factory would demand too much from the water network. So who is in the right here?
I assume Tesla was just trying to be cheap. As soon as the water supplier said Teslas expected demand (372 m³ per hour) wouldn't be possible, the demand suddenly shrank to 243 m³ per hour. So my guess is that Tesla tried to reduce capex by employing more wasteful water usage but now has to work more efficiently. https://www.quarks.de/umwelt/wie-problematisch-ist-der-bau-v...
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Might be true, but in Germany, the salary you pay to your employee is also about 1% of all the labor cost for him or her. Which is hyperbole, of course, but Germany is one of those countries where the actual net payout is usually significantly less than 50% of the salary the company provides. I'm not criticising it as I think Germany is a good example of a well-working system but net salaries are low for most.
Eh the salaries are alright. It seems to me like the salaries are higher in America, while in Germany they're lower but include things American end up paying for: pensions, insurance, and education. If I were American, a part of my net income would still end up going to health insurance, student loans and other things. My employer might pay less benefits, but pay a higher salary to compensate for those costs. I think…
While that's true, above-average earners like engineers/doctors/laywers definitely come on top in the US. Also for most of these people health insurance is paid for by the company.
The trade-off is for everyone else basically, who get a much shittier deal in the US compared to what they would get in any EU country.
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Not to mention the people who design many of the machines that TSMC use in their plants: ASML. "The mirrors guiding this light, made of sandwiched layers of silicon and molybdenum, are ground so precisely that, if scaled to the size of Germany, they would have no bumps bigger than a millimetre" https://www.economist.com/business/2020/02/29/how-asml-becam... >
Nobody has yet come up with a better approach to generating focused soft X-rays than that tin plasma nightmare. The "light source" today is the size of a 3-story house to get 250W on target. One of the main reasons wafer fabs now cost so much. There must be a better way.
Yes, EUV machines are said to increase fab electricity consumption few times over, over regular UV steppers.
> There must be a better way.
The better way may well be worse. The alternative proposal is to build the whole fab around a synchrotron.
Europe has so many great countries. Street reading the comments about Germany and it's internal policies, why not choose elsewhere? Finland, Sweden, Poland, etc etc etc