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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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Yeah the casino bit is the most important part for sure. In light of how financialized everything is, huge costs, massively inflated financial asset & real estate prices etc, labor costs, it's more likely for Detroit to spring back into being an industrial hub.
We focus all of our political energy on monopolizing the top of the value chain TSMC is a part of and we can't replace it with our own production bc it's so crucial for cutting costs down. They can't even expand the production for lower end chips (ROI isn't there) now so Russia and China are gonna scoop up orders from expansion in the many industries that use them (low end chips were like 20% of TSMC's revenue recently, iirc). Which will help them develop their higher end foundries which they definitely can make I mean Rosatom produces super high quality Xray mirrors and the Chinese govt won't balk at industrial investment or high tech training programs.
ASML's whole position in this convoluted supply chain means they only make those shipping container sized thingies with the rube goldberg machine of mirrors hooked up to a gallium plasma light thingy, and that ultimately limits the minimum nanometer size of the circuits made in the fabrication units they ship out. If I'm getting that right 🤪. This is really futuristic stuff I'm talking about now but the next-next gen fabrication units beyond Russia and China catching up could even be hooked up to a particle accelerator. That's pretty hard to export in the same way.
I just don't see how we can politically or financially solve these problems in the US or EU lol. We're kind of caught by the balls as workers no?
You don't need to fab chips to have a job. Let the Taiwanese have their speciality you have yours what's wrong with that.
Also TSMC's company culture is excessively Confucian you probably wouldn't want to work there anyway. It's not just the company and culture that makes the company but also things like Taiwanese universities churning out masses of highly-skilled electrical engineers, basically the only reason TSMC even agreed to that European joint-venture is because Dresden's universities have been focussed on that exact field for decades, even before reunification. For a similar reason you couldn't just take Zeiss and move it out of Jena: They need the local university to funnel students into their workforce. There's no better place to study optics in the world than Jena.
Which actually brings me to another point: All these are labour aristocracy jobs, not just trained but highly educated, comparable to a doctor at a hospital. They have a lobby, they have a good bargaining position. Worrying about them won't do anything for the burger flipper at your local fast-food joint who tends to have neither. It also won't really do much for the injection moulding machine operator producing tea sieves (sorry I was just admiring one it has stainless steel mesh embedded in it, not easy to produce, made in Germany, not cheap but oh gods is that thing worth the extra three bucks (it was five)).
sure, they're labor aristocracy jobs bc they're at the tip top of the global supply chain, but most people do not partake in that at all, or management etc, or legal/medical/whatever other high end shit, and 50% of the US is in crappy service work like mcdonalds literally.
no matter what industry you work in you can only be pessimistic here lmao unless you're like in finance or useless c suite shit
i'm not crying for the TSMC foundry or trying to work there. i hope the NATO+ intelligence services edge from high end chip production being under our control is unseated, it would be good for all of us
what's going on with TSMC is indicative of wider issues with all kinds of US industries I'm in solar and frankly I plan to gtfo in the long term to a more interesting area of development. I don't expect it to make my life easier per se but there are a lot of reasons.
Aaaaaa once upon a time Germany was world leader in solar. Then a conservative government came along and slashed subsidies in ways that noone could adopt to (mostly because suddenly, against everyone's expectations, and without tapering) and now the US of all places has more of a market share, though the bulk of course is Chinese -- who bought German tech for cheap at bankruptcy auctions.
All that is certainly annoying, OTOH you gotta admit that keeping walking after shotgunning your own feet several times in a row does mean that you have some rather solid feet.
Solar here makes me so pissed since you know Texas could be a magnificent location but instead it's such a libertarian shithole lmao