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TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

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Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#361

Post by dirtyid »

paulmd wrote: post #285
odiroot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be as harsh, but indeed that decision is a bit weird. They cannot really count on cheap labour, or "friendly" economic incentives. And seeing the case of Tesla factory, it's not so easy and fast. One great thing about Germany is the central location within EU with good logistics overall. Not sure it matters for semiconductor manufacturing.

Taiwan as a country was not allowed to buy vaccines (since China views them as an administrative sub-unit, Taiwan should not be engaging in international relationships from their perspective) and are still getting hit hard by COVID. At one point recently TSMC itself was negotiating with an EU pharma company for vaccines (to be purchased through a Chinese intermediary) as a proxy for the national government (due to th…

> done anything particularly special for Taiwan lately in return

Hinted they might come to TW aid in event of invasion.

> some pretty good trades

Or coercion. Subsidies and vaccine diplomacy are good carrots, but TSMC is wholey dependant on US/EU tech and JP supply chains. Push comes to shove, US/EU and even JP will get their fabs. Only US has enough leverage to get the crown jewels. Even US weapons sales aren't scheduled to be delivered after fab completion. Though one has to wonder if these expansions are serious, whether TSMC/TW will try to delay/undermine for national security.

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#362

Post by bialpio »

adventured wrote: post #337
jandrewrogers wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans have a government-provided pension (Social Security) that pays about the same as the German one, paid for by employment taxes.

US employees also commonly have health insurance, typically covered by the employer in the tech field (or any median+ full-time job). Somehow foreign posters on HN constantly fail to recognize this fact. One would think after more than a decade of it commonly popping up here, the false narrative would stop (and it's corrected in every thread where it comes up). It usually goes like this: US tech salaries are great, b…

> When the reality is: if you work in tech you're likely receiving good health insurance coverage from your employer, and you're simultaneously paying lower taxes than in Germany.

Just the fact that you need to add the "in tech" to me suggests that US system isn't that great. It's pretty good, assuming you're in tech. The other problem is that when you look at your W-2, you can see how much your employer pays for your health insurance - this is the amount that you should also treat like a tax, even if you do want to add it to the total comp (it's money your employer spends on you that you don't get to see). The fair way to compare wages & tax rates would be to look at the total cost of employing a person vs how much of that money this person actually gets. And even then there's VAT & sales tax that needs to be taken into account...

Are there any sites that attempt to do those kinds of analyses / comparisons?

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#364

Post by vkou »

suction wrote: post #221
steffen84 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right except the german pensions they are a ponzi scheme and will fail in the future.

This applies to all public pension systems, not only the German one.

This also applies to private retirement investments. My comfort in retirement is contingent on the economy, and hence, the stock market, growing. If the 'ponzi scheme' of limitless growth collapses, I'm not going to be any better off than the pensioner.

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#365

Post by bialpio »

kaba0 wrote: post #238
jcfrei wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A well-working system? Germany only has an income tax but no wealth tax, unsurprisingly there's a huge inequality in wealth. If you earn your living in Germany through work you are basically a sucker: You have to hand on average 38.9% to the state. Taxation on capital gains, interest and dividends is 25%. This difference is compounding every year so the net effect over a lifetime is huge.

Is the wealth inequality larger in Germany than in the US? Also, you still end up paying for all those things. And private health insurance will simply always be more expensive

According to World Bank, wealth inequality is lower in Germany compared to the US. See Gini coefficient column: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_...

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#366

Post by shakezula »

noisy_boy wrote: post #165
MarcusE1W wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s probably true that the net salary is lower than some other comparable countries, although Denmark for example has also a quite low net salary. I feel the important bit is what you get for the net salary deduction. In Germany you have: - Free Education including University - A decent mostly free health system, health care insurance - unemployment insurance so your life does not completely unravel if you are made…

I would be _ecstatic_ to give up half of my salary for such a system which assures that irrespective of my employment/financial status, age or health, I'll get the care I need, until I die.

Same. For me in the states, the argument is an easy one, because the plan in the states is pretty much "sell your house to afford your medical bills even after insurance and hope you don't run out of cash before you die". Our cultural attitudes towards elder care are most glaringly obvious in our healthcare system.

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#367

Post by geff82 »

cbmuser wrote: post #363

Germany has the highest electricity prices worldwide. I wouldn’t build any larger factory there these days: > https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price...

Energy hungry industries don't have to pay all the energy taxes+fees. For them, Germany is a rather cheap place to be.

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#368

Post by _ph_ »

stingraycharles wrote: post #307
_ph_ wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Tesla story is widely exaggerated. So far they have gotten basically every approval they asked for quite quickly. Local politics is quite supportive of the project, because it brings a lot of jobs in an industrial-weak region. It is also not clear that the project has actually suffered any significant delays beyond some of the time plans being overly optimistic. There has been some attempts to block this project…

> There has been some attempts to block this project from some environmental groups and some groups posing as environmental, but their their injunctions have been quickly cast away by the courts. Tangent: how can environmental groups be against an electric car manufacturer? You would think they’re somewhat fighting the same fight?

Quite a few environmental groups have explicitly expressed support for the Tesla plant, as they see it as a net win for the environment. Those groups which are protesting seem to have very one sided view. They oppose any change of state, even if the trees that Tesla did cut down for the buildings were scheduled to be cut down for wood in a few years anyway. And Tesla financed planting of new, more varied trees in other areas. And some groups definitely are just pretending to be environmental while driving a political agenda.

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#369

Post by Animats »

grlass wrote: post #27
ipnon wrote: post #5

TSMC is really the keystone for everything else done that ends up getting talked about on this website. They are constantly at the bleeding edge of computer manufacture and pushing it further still. We should feel some sense of amazement to be alive still in the middle of the computer revolution.

Not to mention the people who design many of the machines that TSMC use in their plants: ASML. "The mirrors guiding this light, made of sandwiched layers of silicon and molybdenum, are ground so precisely that, if scaled to the size of Germany, they would have no bumps bigger than a millimetre" https://www.economist.com/business/2020/02/29/how-asml-becam... >

Nobody has yet come up with a better approach to generating focused soft X-rays than that tin plasma nightmare. The "light source" today is the size of a 3-story house to get 250W on target. One of the main reasons wafer fabs now cost so much.

There must be a better way.

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#370

Post by sgift »

adventured wrote: post #337
jandrewrogers wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans have a government-provided pension (Social Security) that pays about the same as the German one, paid for by employment taxes.

US employees also commonly have health insurance, typically covered by the employer in the tech field (or any median+ full-time job). Somehow foreign posters on HN constantly fail to recognize this fact. One would think after more than a decade of it commonly popping up here, the false narrative would stop (and it's corrected in every thread where it comes up). It usually goes like this: US tech salaries are great, b…

> When the reality is: if you work in tech you're likely receiving good health insurance coverage from your employer, and you're simultaneously paying lower taxes than in Germany.

As long as you don't get fired and as long as you don't get sick. But yeah. If you are young, healthy and in tech you have good health insurance in the US. Congratulations.

So, maybe, when we foreigners talk about this aspect of the US healthcare system we understand completely how it works and just don't see it as equivalent.

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