Samsung plans $17B chip plant in Taylor, Texas

This is the refrain of those who do not understand reflexivity, and third-order analysis.

This analysis is correct to the first and even second-order effects, but completely misses the importance of slipstreaming floor expertise / experience into design and engineering iterating, or even holistic support. This kind of economic caste system thinking just as surely shackles the US as the Indian social caste system shackles that nation with enormous untapped potential.

I routinely make LinkedIn friends and actively solicit input from the operations people in all of my client organizations, and this has repaid me many times over. Where others within their very own organizations, much less outside consultants, snub these "lower tiered hierarchies", shedding light upon their experiences and expertise has taught me many valuable lessons about software design, debugging, implementation, and product management, among many other areas.

I learned to do this from reading about the nuts and bolts of how Japanese automakers applied Deming's quality principles. IMHO the buried lede in those stories wasn't all the charts and reports artifacts (similar to the Agile artifacts we use in our industry), but to my mind it was the attitudinal changes that flew in the face of common human hierarchical predispositions. Because it is a massive organizational cultural shift often enmeshed in wider prevailing ethnographic contexts, it is one of the most difficult leadership-led transformations to conduct.

One can get away with the hollowing out effect in the beginning, and if there is sufficient "mass" of value to strip in the industry to mask the effect, it can even be carried out through a couple more product and technology cycles to second-order ramifications as various affiliated supply chains are also stripped out. But once it reaches third-order ramifications often loftily projected as, "while we lead the toiling-for-peanuts offshore masses with our brilliant sales/marketing/product/accounting insights, the supercharged stock bonuses will just roll on in!", it is when reality slaps them in the face and they find out that those same "junior", "lower tiered hierarchies" toss aside the "onshore leadership" to cut out the middlemen to the customers.

After one is never too proud nor too lofty to lead from the front, be happily willing to (if even for a moment) do anything one would ask their direct reports or even their recursive direct reports to do, so to speak "sleep on the factory floor" if need be, a torrent of insights that would normally do not occur during design and engineering stages become available.

Your comment is vastly disproportionate, and does not explain what happened.

Your comment suggests the following:

- Hong Kong’s protest was mainly due to sponsorship by the US, that is, it would not happen to this scale without US’s sponsorship (via NED).

- Hong Kong’s protest was mainly undemocratic (using your examples).

When discussing a social movement of this scale (millions went to the street, protests went on for half a year, with aftermath still affecting current events), we must judge whether your examples represent the majority or the extremely rare minority of what happened.

Just like the social movement led by Mahatma Gandhi, the movement led by Martin Luther King, or the recent BLM movement would not change much even if hundreds of protestors did things that go against the main thrust of the movements (which did happen).

To make this concrete: imagine blaming the BLM on CCP because they supported it [1], which is absurd [2].

We know that:

- The pro-democracy group had a landslide victory in the 2019 election (during the protests) [3].

- Many Hong Kongers left Hong Kong after the National Security Law [4][5]: a higher percentage of Hong Kongers left Hong Kong after the NSL than German left East Berlin after the split of Berlin.

Blaming the Hong Kong protests on CIA, NED, and the US does not explain the above events. Just like blaming the BLM on CCP does not explain the trend.

A much simpler explanation is that Hong Kongers do not like CCP rule, and they show it in the protests, in the election (when conducted fairly, without screening of candidates), and in their acts of leaving (when faced with the NSL and screening of candidates in future elections).

I suspect that the popularity rating of CCP, or of Kim’s regime in North Korea, would plummet if people know what is going on (that is, when the state censorship and propaganda are gone) and they are allowed to express themselves (for example, with a fair election). We just see this happened in Hong Kong.

[1]: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2020/07/01/commentary/w...

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/technology/no-a-black-liv...

[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/24/hong-kong-resi...

[4]: https://news.yahoo.com/almost-90-000-people-left-040718900.h...

[5]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/world/asia/hong-kong-popu...

Over half the turbines were completely frozen. Wind typically accounts for ~22% of Texas power supply. Meanwhile, there was a record high spike (nearly double normal loads) in demand for electricity. If not for natural gas, the blackouts would have been even worse, because at least they were able to be ramped up and provide some power via rolling blackouts.