Tell that to the industrial midwest. If you look at statistics of # factories in the US over time, in every size category, the number of factories is going down.
Chip manufacturing is a special case as well. China is using massive state spending to build a competitive infrastructure in its country. Intel is the only competetive industrial chip fabrication presence in the US and should receive a similar focus from our leadership if we don't want to fully hollow-out the US' production capacity.
Samsung and Globalfoundires have fabs in the US that are close to leading edge. There are other fabs that are leading edge for other types of chips e.g. Texas Instruments
The fact is that the capital expenditure costs to create a leading edge Fab are insane, and economies of scale form a big moat. The economics do not really support more than a few leading edge fabs, and now that Intel has had internal issues they are behind. Maybe they will catch up- however throwing money at the problem does not seem likely to me to fix the problem. Moore's law is ending and the difference between die shrinks isn't as dramatic as it used to be. It remains to be seen if electron tunnelling can be easily be dealt with... However fabs are sexy and people will chase the money until the process breaks down.
Do you mean throwing public money at a private company? How is that even doable in a capitalist country and why are Intel shareholders the ones blessed to receive free capital influx?
Like I said, the US is unique in its mass deindustrialization. Somehow Germany, Japan, and South Korea have avoided it. Last I checked, they are capitalist countries as well.
Directly throwing money at a company isn't the only way for the state to support an industry. I'm not a policy wonk, but there are other ways to do it, and I think the US would be making a mistake if they let this chip fabrication capacity disappear.
Intel's problem isn't with money. Intel is a hugely profitable company last time I checked. And It definitely has a lot more money than its challengers, receiving government fund or not. It's quite funny we are so used to this kind of capitalist view that thinks money solves all our issue.
That's the very problem. It is not lack of money that is making Intel to lose ground, it is simply too easy for them to send checks to their investors and give millionaire bonuses to their executives. They're following the footsteps of IBM, GE, and Oracle.
> Somehow Germany, Japan, and South Korea have avoided it. Last I checked, they are capitalist countries as well.
Japan and South Korea are not really; their economies are largely organised by conglomerates with strong political ties (and often significant nationalistic tendencies). There is capitalism in Germany but it's kept on a much tighter leash than the US in terms of labour laws.
This is accurate. SK has Chaebol and Japan has Keiretsu which has revolving doors to technocrat bureaucracies and governments where jobs, power and money are free flowing between these entities.
South Korea is very reliant on China for manufacturing, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's even more than the US considering the close proximity of China and the lack of natural resources in Korea. It's generally acknowledged by Koreans that the most abundant resource in Korea is human brain power, especially with the high college graduation rate (50%+, versus 30%+ in the US). The stigma of manual labor jobs such as manufacturing and agriculture are very strong, leading to a rapidly aging workforce in those sectors, and this trend, like in many other post-industrial nations, continues to increase.
The US does plenty of throwing public money at private companies. Certain industries (banking, airlines, energy, agriculture) seem to show up at the trough on a fairly regular basis for their turn to be bailed out.
Every single human that spends a single dollar is directly and demonstrably connected to systems that are rapidly (in historical proportions) destroying almost everything that humans of past eras considered wealth and value.
Mother earth.
Downvote this, but let it sink in.
There are humans on this planet that are not fueling these consumptive mechanisms. I hope.
How can we detach ourselves from these systems as we build out alternative systems?
If we reframe the problem as:
How do we run an economy not based around GDP growth, ie. Not based around birthing more people to increase labour?
Japan is ahead of the curve here in that it has an ageing population, they appear to have placed their bet on robotics.
Fundamentally this is an energy issue, with enough free energy everyone can have a high standard of living ie. BI becomes possible, we can automate away most mundane jobs with cheap robots (BOM goes down with cheap energy).
With a good standard of living, births drop- viz population charts globally except Africa, thus we get into a virtuous cycle.
The only issue is the environmental impact of lots of energy in the ecosystem, I'm not sure how that would pan out.
20 lanes of stop-and-go SUV's all single driver traveling over an hour to jobs that they hate. Terrajules of energy to create a single piece of electronics designed to break in less than 2 years. Massive manufacturing of throw away disposable items. The list goes on.
This is Hacker news. Que's Computer Users Dictionary 5th edition defines hack:
"An inordinately clever rearrangement of existing system resources that results, as if by magic, in a stunning improvement in system performance - or an equally stunning prank."
Build another one, then the story goes that you have to build weapons to defend it against "the old systems", as now the cake is all divided and such, and there is no new world to discover on earth but in space.
That is basically what happened in the 1980s in the US with SEMATECH. I remember a computer tv show in the 80s talking about government participation. I didn’t hear qualms about it then.
I think it was fear of lost of the memory business to Japanese companies. It worked out for the US in that Intel switch to and dominated the CPU business and you had the rise of fabless.
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That would likely make matters worse, not better. Placing tariffs on goods from SE Asian countries (including, but not limited to, China) would increase the cost of manufacturing many products in the US which rely on materials from those countries, making those products less competitive in foreign markets.
Would you open a manufacturing plant in a location where people don't agree to anything, not even wearing a mask that is in their own best interest? I would not.
Chip manufacturing is a special case as well. China is using massive state spending to build a competitive infrastructure in its country. Intel is the only competetive industrial chip fabrication presence in the US and should receive a similar focus from our leadership if we don't want to fully hollow-out the US' production capacity.