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Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

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Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#341
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the proximity to money, it's the real estate tied to doing that job. If you want to be the receptionist at Goldman Sachs at their headquarters at 200 West Street, New York, NY 10282, then you're looking at paying $616,250 for a 556 sq. ft. studio apartment. And that's just the housing. If you want to live within 30 minutes of work, you can get that number down to $400,000, but that's also a studio apartment.…

Sure, but real estate is expensive in those places for a reason - it being typically because a sufficient number of people with lots of money want to buy it.

There is only a weak correlation between local income and housing costs, and most of that is that it's hard to get extreme housing prices in areas with low income, rather than that housing in high income areas is inherently required to be expensive.

For example, Boston has a higher per-capita income than NYC but somewhat lower housing costs, and Austin has around the same per-capita income as Los Angeles but significantly lower housing costs. Because it's a lot easier to build housing in Texas than in California.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even brain drain, America's dominance came from the fact that for nearly a century the brightest people in the world were willing to give up everything to come here. That is no longer the case. Today's Einstein probably isn't going to immigrate here.

> That is no longer the case. For all I shit relentlessly on this country and its culture, it's still an extremely attractive place to live if you're well-situated to make money. (Most people are not—hence my contempt for how the society functions. This presumably DOES apply to an "Einstein", if indeed this Einstein wants money.) China still has a way to go in catering to and granting citizenship (or some amenable eq…

Going through the _legal_ immigration in the US is hell. Even if you're immigrating through a "talent" visa. Never mind regular work visa/GC.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even brain drain, America's dominance came from the fact that for nearly a century the brightest people in the world were willing to give up everything to come here. That is no longer the case. Today's Einstein probably isn't going to immigrate here.

The US didn't win World War 2, break the sound barrier, or put a man on the Moon only or primarily due to immigrant workers. We scoured the country's public school system for the sharpest young minds, sent them to institutions of higher learning with rigorous curricula, and found them positions in industry, government, or the military which made good use of their talent. Fetishizing the "nation of immigrants" narrati…

We literally put a man on the moon because we acquired Werner Von Braun and used his plans... I mean, we probably would have eventually done it, but the timeline likely would have been different and the soviets might have beaten us to the moon, but the time line we are in, we had a space program as successful as it was because we acquired German scientists who were already thinking about these problems a even a decade or so before we started to invest into it.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#344
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re the first point: Why do you think it is so difficult to transfer chip production off Taiwan? I don’t think this is about salaries. Nor is this about facilities. This is about process know-how. And it’s currently not available outside of Taiwan. I’m glad we’re finally starting to transfer knowledge. It will take a couple more years.

How do we know there is knowledge transfer? If I were Taiwan/TSMC, I would protect my trade secrets as if my life depended on it (which may actually be true).

We don’t. We expect some, but you’re right it won’t be transferred easily.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you think America can't compete with China, for example, over the long term? Not saying I necessarily disagree with you, but just to give an example, the US has considerably better labor practices and labor laws than China. It's not perfect but there are protections about making sure people are paid what they're owed, how much you are allowed to work someone, safety protocols, etc. All of those things could,…

Foxconn is a Taiwanese company. China's revolution is about delivering for workers. I don't get where ppl are coming up with "slave labor" when it is American allies possibly operating in China's SEZ that are doing the bad stuff. It's also simultaneously sanctimonious sounding when development is very difficult and America sacrificed three generations to industrial capitalism, stole half a continent of land, and used…

Slavery was wrong even in the 1700s and and 1800s. I wish it hadn't happened, but until we have a time machine there's not a lot we can do about it.

Just because the US has committed major sins in the past doesn't mean we should be slap-happy about other countries repeating those sins.

It might be "sanctimonious", but I don't think "I'm against slave labor everywhere" is an especially brave take.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US didn't win World War 2, break the sound barrier, or put a man on the Moon only or primarily due to immigrant workers. We scoured the country's public school system for the sharpest young minds, sent them to institutions of higher learning with rigorous curricula, and found them positions in industry, government, or the military which made good use of their talent. Fetishizing the "nation of immigrants" narrati…

We literally put a man on the moon because we acquired Werner Von Braun and used his plans... I mean, we probably would have eventually done it, but the timeline likely would have been different and the soviets might have beaten us to the moon, but the time line we are in, we had a space program as successful as it was because we acquired German scientists who were already thinking about these problems a even a decad…

That team was one of three that was developing rockets. The others were air force and navy.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe it's not that simple. But few chip companies have to compete against startups for workers. And that probably won't change. It seems like what EE needs is something similar to open source, so that does happen. The way things like Google or AWS got started is they started with Linux and built something on top of it, so it could be a startup because they don't first have to build the world in order to make a con…

I believe you’ve just described the RISC-V project, though I could be mistaken.

RISC-V is the ISA, which is a solid first step. What you need is a production-ready fully open source whole device, so that someone who wants to fork it only has to change the parts they need to be different instead of having to also re-engineer the missing components.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#348
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless your ancestors crossed the Bering Strait ten thousand years ago, calling yourself "native born" doesn't mean a thing.

It is kind of disingenuous and dishonest to say that there is no value or meaning on those Americans born in American soil, a nation should prioritize the people that live on it or well at least care for them and make them useful for nation building in the future. Canada has proven that importing punjabis for almost two decades and ignoring the local people is not effective. So yeah there is a meaningful difference a…

>Canada has proven that importing punjabis for almost two decades and ignoring the local people is not effective.

Curious, that's what Americans once said about the Irish and the Italians and the Germans and the French and the Poles and the Chinese and Jews and Catholics and Muslims and so on and on ad nauseum.

It's just a generational crab mentality born from xenophobia. Every new wave of immigrants decides they're "native" as soon as the next wave shows up. None of them are any more native than the others.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#349
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless your ancestors crossed the Bering Strait ten thousand years ago, calling yourself "native born" doesn't mean a thing.

What’s magic about the Bering strait?

It's always a treat knowing every comment you get is going to either be triggered or purposely obtuse.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.).

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.

> The way it was described to me is that every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it...

did they mean that literally or just that an expert was assigned to it? What kind of PhD would even be relevant to maintaining machinery on an assembly line? Perhaps a PhD on the operations of that specific machine but even then, the person's knowledge would be so focused on whatever physics/chemistry/science is being used that i find it hard to believe a PhD would know what to do when something broke without tons of specific training on the hardware.

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