111–120 of 453 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In particular, all of Seoul is in artillery range of the north
Rusty dusty equipment that probably won't even fire.. that offensive line is hardly a major threat
Here's a massive artillery drill they held just a few days ago.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-07/north-kor...
within ten years, the I35 corridor will be the most intensive economic region in North America
After the TX grid failure last winter, it's probably not a coincidence that Samsung's new facility will be near ERCOT's operation center in Taylor, which manages the TX grid, and will likely be the last load to shed when the grid's stressed. Used to work in the Austin fab, and the amount of money lost per minute in a power failure is mind boggling. The tax breaks Taylor offered ($314m) are not that different from wha…
tangentially related bit of trivium... when i was house hunting a looked at a house across from a fire station, and upon doing research about what it's like to live across from one, found that a.) they tend not to blast sirens upon exiting the station, in contrast to living near a hospital with an ED, and b.) the power grid segments that fire stations are on have priority and are less likely to lose power during blac…
I am still amazed by the shortsightedness of how these critical and strategic goods are off-shore. No wonder why the supply chains are fragile and not robust. It should be illegal for strategic goods and components such as chips and semiconductors to be produced offshore. Yes, it will raise prices in the short and medium-term, but it will make the domestic economy and manufacturing sector more robust, resilient to su…
The blame for this is purely on the shoulders of business leaders coming out of MBA programs across the US. It seems the only thing those places are teaching is how to join a company, strip it to the bone, hype up the short-term 5% growth, and get millions of dollars in raises.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
China can manage with loss of most or all access to American/NATO IP. America/NATO can't really manage without Chinese imports.
That's not accurate today. It might be different in 10 years, depending on how successful China is at becoming self-sufficient in semiconductor design and manufacturing. Global companies didn't just outsource all the work to China. Even in the 90s, they were aware of the risk/reward, and specifically retained high-value, low-headcount/capital work outside of China. As a result, China makes most of a device, but many…
So everyone is on the "Let's build a Fab in the USA" train, will that eventually bring down the chip production costs? (not an expert in the field, so asking naively)
This is more about national security and business continuity than cost. Costs matter most when things are running smoothly. However, COVID has taught us a hard lesson. When SHTF, you better have a back up plan. Making money on IP alone while someone else handles all of the manufacturing and integration work looks great on a spreadsheet. Then some state actor cuts off the supply chain (or a virus) and your genius MBAs…
‘Impossible':TSMC founder Morris Chang on US dreams for onshoring chip supply chain https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4327937 Morris Chang spent 25 years (1958–1983) at Texas Instruments.He knows US very well.
> a full chip supply chain in the country
(emphasis mine)
TSMC is, after all, ALSO building a fab in the country, so it's not like TSMC doesn't believe in onshoring chips to the US. The fabs are {high capital expense/high recurring expense/high skilled labor} operations so the US is very competitive due to the labor value-add. Not every part of the full supply chain is like that.
To serve (aka reduce risk to) US supply chain interests in the short term, you also don't need access to the full stack domestically. You could potentially send a lot of activites that need low-skilled-labor to, say, Mexico, which is a much lower supply chain risk that Asia (aka thailand, vietnam, china). National security onshoring, which possibly has less tolerance for even outsourcing to Mexico, is likely a different story and more aligns with Morris' statement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it increases the security and continuity of our civilization when China invades Taiwan.
Well, there's a huge benefit of COVID. The related chip shortage finally woke up the US gov on supply chains. My question is why did it take this long? I have been worried about this for nearly a decade. My next question is how many mask factories have we built in the US since we realized that was important?
Look at the billions the US spends on military, all of it domestic. In US, the masks are simply less important than all that, as is healthcare in general.
it makes perfect sense to have a factory right on your most critical client, even leaving the typically american grandiose fantasies of apocalyptic destruction aside. It even nets them a cool 3 billion dollars to do so, which I'm fairly sure is very welcome given Samsung's history of reinvesting this kinds of money for political gain. I do wonder why this isn't more common though, pretty much every gigantic company a…
When it is an incredibly expensive factory, requiring an incredible level of technical expertise to operate, and air freight from anywhere on earth to your biggest client is scarcely a rounding error in the price of the finished products - then NO, it makes no sense to put the factory next to the client.
On the other, do you happen to have sources for all that? Specifically,
- That the cost of this plant is going to be in any way excessive/odd compared to, say, TSMC's plant basically next door
- That the level of technical expertise required is inordinately hard to train in the US
- That the air freight from (also, why air freight specifically?) prices to and from there are a constant, easily disregardable thing and will continue to be so
Would help a lot to ground the conversation in reality a little bit more.
Seems strange to build a chip plant in a place that can’t even provide power to its citizens in winter.