191–200 of 221 posts
Who cares if it’s not profitable? Who’s trying to onshore chips because it’s cheaper? We’re bringing chips back home for security and resiliency reasons.
"Capitalism" enters the chat.
> We’re bringing chips back home for security and resiliency reasons.
The chips will close down by themselves if they're insanely non-profitable and a resource sink.
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Then shouldn't the government be involved in ensuring we have what's necessary? Seems like strategic reserves are in order here.
They are, and TSMC and Samsung aren't happy about it (nevermind that both Samsung and TSMC are de-facto quasi-state enterprises themselves[0]). "Hmm, I wonder who that sign is for..." https://archive.ph/kvlnp / https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-28/tsmc-sams... It started with getting TSMC to build a fab in Arizona, but to be fair it's a small fab (25k wafers/month) and 5nm will not be leading-edge by th…
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The lithography machines and factories are prohibitively expensive, it can take years of production to break even, if you over build you may just end up in the red. Additionally the fabs have a limited lifespan when they are cutting edge and able to produce premium chips.
Premium fabs, premium chips, and shortages of everything, from modern ("premium") graphics, to shitty DIP AVRs (relatively old tech). New fabs can still produce old chips when needed, and we need all of the chips now, and a bunch of the "new tech" chips, will still be needed in 20+ years, so that fab line can still operate then.
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> How useful are anti-ship missiles in Ishigaki Island (Japan), Batanes (Philippines), etc.? Better than nothing, but the Chinese mainland has literal highways and railroads to deliver more-and-more missiles. When all else is equal, the winner is decided by logistics. Who can "deliver" more missiles to a location first? I'm willing to bet that Chinese highways and Chinese railroads have superior logistics / delivery…
> When all else is equal, the winner is decided by logistics. Who can "deliver" more missiles to a location first? I'm willing to bet that Chinese highways and Chinese railroads have superior logistics / delivery than Ishigaki Island or the Batanes. That's an interesting point. One on hand, rail/highways are superior to anything ocean-going for transport, and cargo ships are easily taken out and would need extremely…
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> it’s not like we can just sit with old tech and say “nah, that’s good enough.” But, why not?
Remember when someone famously said 640kb of memory ought to be enough for anybody? Imagine if video games' audio/video just stopped improving past the SNES. Imagine if we decided that 56k dialup was good enough. Imagine if we stopped improving cell phone cameras past the iPhone 3G. These things seem pretty low quality now because we've incrementally built so many better things in the interim. The unleaded gasoline o…
As someone whose daily drivers consist of decade-old flagship hardware, I don't need to. Outside software support, the main downside of my phone is battery. Maybe I should get a new one - it's from an era where these were still user-replaceable.
My similarly aged laptop? Same thing. I could upgrade the hardware; the small increase in compute power isn't worth the reduction in connectivity (ports) though.
Sure, some will have specific needs. But for the vast majority that doesn't need a 96 GB desktop or a 10K screen, flagship HW from 10 years ago is more than good enough. Just as for your examples where we need better chips: that was true 30 years ago. Nowadays, a smaller nanometer scale than the last 2 cycles probably matters far less than a better chip design for most use cases.
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I suspect that outside of... 'mainland China' (I'll phrase it for clarity) and the island just off the coast of 'mainland China'; the rest of the world really just wants stability in the region and no further conflict. Generally the status quo is OK for the rest of the planet, and the other nations would be happy to call 'mainland China' China and the island off of that recognized as the sovereign nation of 'Taiwan'…
>> grow up enough as a species to cease having countries and instead have a united single government like Star Trek. This would require everyone to think very alike which we will never be. there's simply too much diversity. why not aim for more of a everyone have it their own way kind of model where more of the power is sent to local governments? this way there would be less conflict and more happy people, rather tha…
A single governing body is the only chance at equal justice and opportunity for all; assuming it isn't corrupt, but with that assumption failed there is no justice anyway.
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Then shouldn't the government be involved in ensuring we have what's necessary? Seems like strategic reserves are in order here.
It's not unprecedented -- during the cold war, the US Air Force spent $279M (~$3B in today's money) on building some of the largest presses in the world specifically to enhance the capabilities around building complex and strong aircraft parts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/F15_bulk...
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In practical terms the government is intentionally hamstrung to appear incompetent: https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/annual-reports/... With a vote Congress destroys budgets and the narrative is the PO sucks. Government incompetence is private interest driven propaganda
But Congress is part of the government. So it's hamstringing itself. It's the same line of thought when some large dinosaur of a company purchases a startup. "Welp, startup is going to suck in 2 years." It's not the startup's fault, but to the consumer it's still going to suck. It doesn't really matter why.
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Morris Chang's point is that TSMC is able to draw upon Taiwan's very best talent, as the country's most attractive employer. Likewise, Samsung is among the most prestigious Korean employers. In contrast, where does Intel rank among US employers?
Except that we had articles like this one, telling us about severe and not easily solved problems at Samsung: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31064080
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But Congress is part of the government. So it's hamstringing itself. It's the same line of thought when some large dinosaur of a company purchases a startup. "Welp, startup is going to suck in 2 years." It's not the startup's fault, but to the consumer it's still going to suck. It doesn't really matter why.
No. Congress is not "part of the government". Sure, they get government paychecks, but they're the legislature not the executive. They don't "do" anything, just direct that it be done. All but a few are millionaires who make more income from non-government sources than that paycheck. By virtue of their office, they're also well connected: able to get lucrative board memberships for their kids in Ukraine, or Arkansas.…
Thanks for letting me know I can ignore everything you wrote after that idiotic statement.
