161–170 of 499 posts
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Because is fucking undproductive, useless and detrimental to society. Advertising is a cancer, an immoral activity.
I disagree There is good and bad advertising. I'd want to receive ads for things that I'm really interested in.
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Also a lot of US STEM grads have their skills wasted in unproductive fields, like the ad business.
the internet ad industry is raking billions from all over the world into the USA, how can you call that unproductive.
Imo, profits != productive or to a benefit of society.
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the internet ad industry is raking billions from all over the world into the USA, how can you call that unproductive.
Because is fucking undproductive, useless and detrimental to society. Advertising is a cancer, an immoral activity.
Aka does advertising as a whole increase total consumption or is it a zero sum game (aka send bigger slice of the same pie to a competitor)
From what I know advertising does increase total demand aka more things/services need to be produced and sold on aggregate.
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It's also highly-skilled, yet very boring work. The way it was described to me is that every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it and their job is basically to babysit the machine and troubleshoot when things go wrong. US PhDs typically have other options and would consider this sort of work a waste of their time.
There are loads of highly qualified US engineers who would love to babysit enormously complicated industrial equipment for a living. But not for 50k, lol.
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I spoke to a Taiwanese person and apparently the salaries there are actually quite good, even by western standards (normal ones; not SF). The downside is they have very very long hours (996, barely any holiday, etc.).
996..? doesn't fit into weeks, months or years
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what is involved in the packaging process ? I believe they don't ship fully assembled chips to Taiwan only to be put in a pretty box ?
"Packaging" in this context means taking the wafer of compute die (made in Arizona), dicing it up into individual die, mounting it onto a silicon interposer (an even bigger die, no idea where that's made, but probably taiwan) along with a bunch of HBM die, then mounting that Si interposer on a somewhat larger, very fine-pitched circuit board ('substrate') that is essentially a breakout for power and high-speed I/O fr…
Like, scaling wafer (die?) production to insanely low costs makes intuitive sense. The input is sand, the process itself is just easily-parallellizable chemistry and optics, and the output is a tiny little piece of material.
But packaging sounds as though it requires intricate mechanical work to be done to every single output chip, and I just can't wrap my head around how you scale that to the point where they cost a few cents...
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If you owned a small business you'd be singing a very different tune.
Hi. I own a business. I still find ads to be cancer.
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I read the main problem with hiring chip factory workers in Arizona was the factory just didnt pay enough for the long hours demanded. I looked up the median salary and its only 50k so I'm assuming it's not crazy skilled labor (e.g. brain drain). Taiwanese workers just seem more willing to do it.
...just seem more willing to do it That's why manufacturing offshored in the first place, companies feel they're receiving better value for money on wages elsewhere for this kind of work (and these days not to mention more & larger facilities, proximity to component sources, and a strong ecosystem of supporting and complimentary facilities).
It would be interesting to see how much of the economic advantage of off-shoring is due to lower wages due intrinsic to lower cost of living vs stuff like ignoring/bribing foreign officials or non-existent environmenta/safety standards that objectively should exist.
- Over 50% of the workers flew in from Taiwan to work on this plant and make these chips. - The chips still need to fly back to Taiwan to be packaged as there are no facilities here with such a capability. Made in america is a hard sell. But at least showing the glaring STEM field gap in the U.S. is a start to finally addressing the brain drain.
* updated to reflect newer article that Amkor's facility is delayed beyond late-2025