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Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production

reuters.com

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Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production

#191

Post by jvanderbot »

fsn4dN69ey wrote: post #185
jvanderbot wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant that "A US-led TSMC-like foundry (since we're talking about funding a US chip production facility) would be a good source of tax income that might justify a federal startup investment."

Ahhhh, makes sense. Also, after reading further, it appears I was wrong - TSMC has some operations in the US including some in Arizona - plus their interest in maintaining friendly terms with the US in order to preserve the existence of Taiwan is also an angle. What still worries me is that ramp up time for fabs like these are on the scale of years - if we assume a fab started right now, we'll be making semiconductor…

Well, we dumped a lot of money into the F-35 to fill a perceived strategic gap in fighter jets that had not yet arrived. This was many years before we actually received such a jet. This kind of long-term investment of lots of money for (arguably) public good is what federal governments are _for_, in my mind.

A 250M$ - 1G$ investment / year is big, but if it's self-sustaining in a couple years, that's a huge win.

Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production

#192

Post by dang »

lvs wrote: post #171
dang wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What "flash flood of angry-predictable-obvious comments" are you talking about? They're collapsed at the bottom of the page now. Before that, they were the page. Downweighting low-quality generic subthreads is one of the key things moderators do here to try to improve the quality of the threads—which unfortunately tends to go to the lowest common denominator by default. p.s. "@dang" is a no-op. I only saw your ques…

Hm, it certainly looks a lot like "improve the quality of the threads" == suppress industry critique.

"Industry critique" fills virtually every HN thread. With suppression like that, who needs amplifiers?

Most people who see a moderation decision they dislike leap straight to the idea that the moderators secretly hold $VIEW, ignoring (or not noticing) all the moderation decisions going the opposite way. In reality, we just don't care— I don't have words to describe how profoundly we don't care about commenter opinions. All that was sandblasted out of my brain years ago. The weariness that arises at the thought of caring about commenter opinions is enough to make me want to lie on the floor for a week.

The only thing I care about is trying to prevent this place from plunging to the bottom of the internet barrel, and that only because it's my job. That's the true answer, by the way, to all the accusations of $BIAS that people fire from all directions every day: existential weariness has destroyed the ability to care. It turns out that's a decent proxy for neutrality. Not perfect, of course, but enough as a first pass filter.

Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production

#193

Post by tpmx »

markkat wrote: post #95

These industries squeezed the blood out of US suppliers to compete on cost. I don't think a correct solution is the government building capacity and supply chains. IMHO a more sustainable strategy is the government taxing the environmental and human rights externalities of off-shore production.

1. I suspect that you don't realize that Taiwan is a (to many) surprisingly first-world place. "environmental and human rights externalities" is not a very large issue in this context. It's not like mainland China/PRC.

2. I think both e.g. US and EU should have their own chip-manufacturing infrastructure. We need more robustness at a global scale in this area.

3. Taiwan needs (and deserves) US/EU support. TSMC has turned into a geopolitical play - it seems like Taiwan feels like they need it to avoid a PRC invasion.

Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production

#194

Post by eecc »

ohashi wrote: post #99

If the US tax payer gets a significant stake in the chip fab venture, I would be OK with this. We want to secure national security via chip manufacturing and you want billions of dollars? Give us some upside. I don't want to hear it creates jobs, it generates blah blah blah, a real equity stake and possibly repayment of the capital. Creating jobs should be a happy by-product of subsidizing an industry that is probabl…

Good point, see: https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-entrepreneurial-state

Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production

#195

Post by Dah00n »

azinman2 wrote: post #158
ohashi wrote: post #99

If the US tax payer gets a significant stake in the chip fab venture, I would be OK with this. We want to secure national security via chip manufacturing and you want billions of dollars? Give us some upside. I don't want to hear it creates jobs, it generates blah blah blah, a real equity stake and possibly repayment of the capital. Creating jobs should be a happy by-product of subsidizing an industry that is probabl…

Government subsidies protecting industries rarely pay off in a peaceful world to the entire country. I personally get nothing out of Chevron getting tax breaks. However, if those incentives meant supply was harder to disrupt, and in a war time the country has better access to fuel, then it does seem like a worthwhile trade off. In this case, the risk is that China literally takes over (one way or another) the vast ma…

In a war scenario with China it doesn't matter since no chips produced under the war will be used.

Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production

#196

Post by WillPostForFood »

Dah00n wrote: post #195
azinman2 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government subsidies protecting industries rarely pay off in a peaceful world to the entire country. I personally get nothing out of Chevron getting tax breaks. However, if those incentives meant supply was harder to disrupt, and in a war time the country has better access to fuel, then it does seem like a worthwhile trade off. In this case, the risk is that China literally takes over (one way or another) the vast ma…

In a war scenario with China it doesn't matter since no chips produced under the war will be used.

The risk isn’t war between China and the US, but China and Taiwan, which China has 100% chance of winning. That then makes the the US extremely dependent on China for semiconductor supply.

Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production

#197

Post by Dah00n »

tpmx wrote: post #193
markkat wrote: post #95

These industries squeezed the blood out of US suppliers to compete on cost. I don't think a correct solution is the government building capacity and supply chains. IMHO a more sustainable strategy is the government taxing the environmental and human rights externalities of off-shore production.

1. I suspect that you don't realize that Taiwan is a (to many) surprisingly first-world place. "environmental and human rights externalities" is not a very large issue in this context. It's not like mainland China/PRC. 2. I think both e.g. US and EU should have their own chip-manufacturing infrastructure. We need more robustness at a global scale in this area. 3. Taiwan needs (and deserves) US/EU support. TSMC has tu…

Taiwan needs support yes, but the US isn't helping. Poking China by sending warships to patrol its borders makes us the bad guys. If China did what we do we would have WW3 instantly.

Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production

#198

Post by paganel »

sofixa wrote: post #182
paganel wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same discourse was made before WW1, and we all know how that turned out. As far as I could tell the world was even more globalised back then, at least for the elites.

> As far as I could tell the world was even more globalised back then It was not. How could it be? Cheap and fast long range transportation, the Internet, mass consumerism,interconnected financial systems... What could possibly make you think the world was more globalised in the 1910s than 2020s? And yes, many people said a war is impossible due to the globalisation. I guess what they missed was telling it to the peo…

> What could possibly make you think the world was more globalised in the 1910s than 2020s?

For example borders were a lot more porous in the late 1800s - early 1900s compared to the 2020s, Ellis Island could have never happened today, when you have children from El Salvador or Guatemala kept in cages for basically doing the same thing that children from Calabria or Sicily were doing back then.

Re: Tech giants join call for funding U.S. chip production

#200

Post by dang »

qntty wrote: post #117
dang wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This crosses into nationalistic flamewar. We don't want that on HN, regardless of $nation. It leads to predictable, nasty discussion that kills the curious conversation which this site is supposed to be for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The demand to always be curious and never angry is itself a limitation on the natural unfolding of curiosity. Sometimes the most interesting questions can only be asked by people who are aware of their own anger and the mutual anger of others around them.

I might question that a bit, but it's an empirical question that one could talk about. I don't think we've ever asked people not to get angry, though - that would be not to be human. The request is to not allow it to drive one into internet comments in a predictable way. That's also a lot to ask, but at least it's doable.

Can anger lead one to explore and learn things that wouldn't have happened without the anger? Sure it can, and comments coming from that place are more likely to be on topic here. But that's already a later stage of a pretty complex process. I'm talking about the split-second moment that we all experience when a flash of anger first arises, where we're reacting adversely to something we've heard before and are propelled to respond immediately with something we've said before. A lot of internet comments, including HN comments, are generated in that state, and they aren't distinguished by curiosity.

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