I actually knew one of these people who were fired: She was our housecleaner. And--like the supper-smart garbage man of the Dilbert Cartoons, she was very smart. Smarter than me. I know because she helped me solve some problems I couldn't solve on my own.

Why was she cleaning houses? Tragic story. No doubt she could have gotten a Ph.D., but she was older, had some health problems which wouldn't let her work 60-80 hours a week. And she was black, perhaps discrimination was a factor too.

I'd hate to even think of how smart you have to be to work in FABs today, but let me tell you, not even $8.5 billion is going to create more of these people. Best you can hope for is you can pay them enough to get them to work for you.

They closed because it was cheaper to build in other countries, or to outsource from contractors who build in other countries (where organized labor doesn't exist). The U.S. lost thousands of high-paying (and tax-paying) labor positions and atrophied the skills that went with them. Intel profited from it.

These people were disproportionately minorities, disproportionately well-represented by unions, and had made a lot of progress in improving their working conditions re: use of terribly corrosive chemicals. All of that backslid when labor went off-shore.

Now, the taxpayer has to pay Intel $8.5B to bring back manufacturing capacity to the U.S.; nice job, if you can get it. It'll be really interesting to see who takes these jobs, and how quickly we can rebuild the muscles that Intel shareholders profited from decomposing.

TSMC is paying around $23/hour to manufacturing technicians in Arizona. They’re also sending people to Taiwan to get trained and apparently it’s brutal enough that most people drop out of the program.

Asianometry did a video on this recently: https://youtu.be/Nk-lBok9_TU

That’s wild. For something that requires a trip to Taiwan for training, which I imagine makes it not an easy job, why does it pay so little? I’d think retention would be important if the training is that intensive.

Ha, ha, ha. No.

Let's see, from Wikipedia. 2022 data:

- Number of employees: 73,090

- Net income: US$27.67 billion

Which gives us: 27.67e9/73090 = 369,407.57

So, just looking at their net income (which already takes into account the salary costs of said employees), they could afford to pay every employee US $370,000 a year before being unprofitable.

Between US $50,000 and US $370,000 there is quite some margin for improvement. And clearly, the low wages they pay have nothing to do with the risk of being unprofitable.

You've presented historical data to counter the of argument that wage/salary growth MAY lead to potential unprofitability solely on the basis of one year's profit numbers. That's literally driving forward looking in the rearview mirror because it says very little about how profitable the company would be if it raised wages/salaries. At best it may be a first order approximation of how profitable the company would have been in 2022, if it paid people more then. However, even for 2022 the calculation isn't as simple as dividing the profit by the number of employees and keeping the company profitable.

A one year point is a crude approximation, but it does illustrate the order of magnitude mismatch between what they could pay their employees vs what they actually pay them, which was the short point being made.

More broadly, TSMC had no problem shelling out $9.9 billion to shareholders that same year (or $123,000+ per employee). So the argument of saving every penny because of the "capital intensive" nature of their business is also out the door.

And complaining about a single year estimate in the case of TSMC is barking up the wrong tree. They've had net incomes in the billions at least since the beginning of the 2000s.

So no, in the case of TSMC, they have no reason to pay wages below what is considered a "living wage" in Phoenix, Arizona.

https://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/38060

Also I wonder what the excuses will be once all the underdeveloped nations do what China did and actually develop. We have a finite number of exploitable countries on the planet with workers willing to work for pennies to assemble products. At SOME POINT this party is going to end, it has to.

A trailing fab has very few people running the operation. This will be a trailing fab.

Don't get me wrong, I wish companies were incentivized to do right by their employees. That's just not how the world works, companies only need to do the bare minimum to get the job done and leave as much profit on the table as possible.

- what if the EU writes a rule and then fines you for breaking it as a percentage of revenue? You can't have no money available for the future. You need a huge amount of money available for the future, as otherwise a company that pays its workers less (but still retains them) will beat you eventually

- why would anyone invest in you for the chance of no return? It's a high risk strategy to put $1m on a number in roulette for the chance of making a fortune; it's a ridiculous one to put $1m on a number in roulette for the chance of getting your money back

Plus, they can only eat so much pizza. Having more of them switching to pizza making would not necessarily raise their wages, i.e. a glut of pizza makers should depress pizza making wages.

but yeah, most of my coworkers had a hard time doing it sober

The PRC had the supply chain from the bottom up (to some extent funded by the western consumers and corporations), whereas the US is trying to get reindustrializd from the top down, without first building a solid fundamental. To make the tough jobs easy, you must have the easy jobs done well first.

Rebuilding is a chicken and egg problem, but it’s not as hard as defeating the axis powers in WWII. If this country has the Will to do something, it’s gunna get done.

Building a profitable industrial chain is significantly harder to do and much rarer to achieve. The US certainly has the people to do it, but it isn't clear that the political trade-offs will be acceptable.

This doesn't make sense, Intel did and still does most of its manufacturing in the US, didn't it? (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si...) I assume the thing that changed if there was a major loss of jobs was automation, not outsourcing. It's a lot easier to keep a clean room clean if you don't need to let people (with their hair and dead skin particles) in.

Their consumer and server business (read: low-nm) processes are largely international.

The wikipedia page you linked evinces this statement.

The phrase "most of its manufacturing" is a Simpson's Paradox statement. It's true, but not in a way that's interesting. High-nanometer processes are easier to automate.

First, it's worth noting that most of the

But the Israeli fab really shouldn't be discounted, they employ 12k people in Israel. I can't find numbers on production output, but that headcount is a similar OOM to the Oregon plant. Most of their successful, recent designs came from Israel, too. The Ireland fab employs 4.5k people. There's 22k in Oregon, unclear on the breakdown of manufacturing and R&D/non-manufacturing roles.

As I understand it from said rabbit hole, they do a lot of design and "proofing" manufacturing of low-nm processes in Oregon, but rely on Ireland and Israel to scale-up.

It seems that the recent (i.e. post-9/11) Arizona plants are more geared towards high-volume production. Regardless of what calculations went into those decisions, they're a hedge against political instability in Israel.

The only thing the region lacks is investment and ecosystem to attract and protect it.

South America could stand to learn a LOT from ASEAN -- stability = international investment = economic growth = happy people = stability.

In contrast, in South America inveterate bickering about politics dominates and you end up with something like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Supranational_Ameri...

I hope it sorts itself out! And I know Columbia and Brazil are developing some impressive technical industries, especially since they share North America timezones. But it should be honest about the headwinds.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_crisis_(disambigu...

How about asking the workers in other countries who benefitted from this transaction if they were happy with the arrangement? Or do only Americans matter? Maybe you think foreigners are fit only to till dirt fields as subsistence farmers?

I'm sure they were happy with the arrangement, they benefitted from it in the short-term. You should speak with Foxconn workers today, though. The story is more nuanced.

> Do only Americans matter?

This is a weird claim to bestow on my original post.

Labor conditions matter. The balance of power of power and profits between labor and capital matters.

I promise you, semiconductors did not move production to ${foreign_country} out of the goodness of their hearts, to better the living conditions of ${foreign_country}'s impoverished underclasses.

They did it because the balance of power (and profits) had shifted towards labor in this country in the 40s, 50s and 60s, and the population of ${foreign_country} was cheaper to exploit.

It's also worth pointing out (again) that a disproportionate of people in manufacturing in California semiconductor industry were 0th or 1st generation immigrants (from the Philippines, Mexico, China and so on) or internal refugees from the Jim Crow South who migrated to California for military work during WW II. These were people who were literally at most 1 generation removed from subsistence farming.

> Maybe you think foreigners are fit only to till dirt fields as subsistence farmers?

Again, a weird claim to stick me with.

Humans working in manufacturing should be free to negotiate living wages, safe and healthy working conditions, reasonable time off and retirement policies, illness/disability insurance, and so on.

The reason U.S. companies prefer "foreigners" (domestically and abroad) is not because foreigners don't deserve these things as much as any other person, it's because they know they can get away with exploiting them for a few decades before they develop class consciousness.

In the last few years, workers in China have been striking to demand what workers in California fought hard for 70-80 years ago.

Entirely coincidentally, Foxconn began "diversifying" its manufacturing capacity into India and other countries. Do you think it's because they want to help uplift people from subsistence farming? :)

This is the same tired argument that was made when the US pushed these jobs off the continent - if the very low wage jobs are allowed exist; eventually enough wealth will be generated that nobody needs to do them. Those sweatshops are in fact a path to prosperity. In some sense it is a cosmic win that all the capital was developed in Asia because they needed it more, but that probably wasn't the sort of charity that policymakers intended at the time.

I think you may be undermining what slavery was .

I have met folks who work in workshops in India that export stuff to USA and other developed nations. Those workers make a whole lot more money than their neighbors who produce for the domestic market and they have better working conditions. Their overall quality of life, while nowhere close to G8 standards, is so much better. And their community benefits from their increased wages.

Which is coincidentally quite similar to the treatment of North Korean and Chinese penal workers. Russian labor camps are pretty far up there too.

Many Foxconn factories have armed guards, but it's not to keep people out...

The engines of capitalism only look 1 quarter ahead. And the politicians who support them only look up to the next election. Unless you are majority or largely controlled by your founders, who care about building a good legacy.

That is, if your industry is tuned in to the investment climate, the things being pursued match the things that people are saying "will make the country great", and are backed up by legislation and financing deals.

In the previous era, the US was focused on a deindustrializing narrative: the things that made America great were "clean, high-tech" industry, high graduation rates and four-year degrees, and an outsourced empire that brought sprawling supply chains together "just in time".

The new model has brought back the industry, so it needs an emphasis on concrete job skills, versus academic credentialing. It's in-sourced so the supply chain has started in on a radical shift. It emphasizes new energy sources with few foreign dependencies, moving the geopolitical stance towards isolation. The approach to the national balance sheet also has to change, but precisely how lacks for consensus.

Like with the previous shifts there were some reasons to take the narrative in a certain direction: late 60's America had many environmental concerns, and fell into an energy crunch in the next decade. "Smart bombing" the Middle East to secure oil supplies brought together the national industries towards a common goal, and the money supply got a reset early on with the end of Bretton-Woods, that helped propel the Boomer generation towards homes-and-families participation within the system.

Today we're still putting together the pieces of that narrative, but it's central to the political climate: the old two-party system is focused on exhausted narratives that don't actually excite ordinary people to vote. Therefore the candidates are rushing to put together platforms that rewrite the script and mobilize new demographics.

There have been many historical examples of benevolent dictators. I can't think of any in modern history. Xi certainly isn't, and never was.

Democracy can avoid the problem of dictatorial systems by allowing the people the ability to get rid of bad rulers, at the expense of usually getting crappy rulers who only focus on the next election cycle, and frequently getting sociopathic narcissists in power.

The problem wasn't these rulers, it was what happened after they got old and died and their shitty kids replaced them.

There are more considerations than just profits. Consider how domestic PPE plants closed down in the US because even US gov institutions wanted the cheapest product, and went overseas. Then when COVID hit, we had no local supplier for PPE.

The tax payer had nothing to do with it. This is yet another example of the government taking our money (or borrowing our future money) and spending it in ways that we never agreed to and had no input on.

You don't vote in local, congressional, and presidential elections?

Maybe they do exist, but I don't remember it coming up.

Also to clarify, local elections wouldn't have helped here. Congressional and presidential elections are a different beast, The Machine (reference to the University of Alabama) heavily influences elections and elected officials. I do vote, but I have little faith that such a massive and heavily funded political system allows my vote to count for more than winning a seat. I've been regularly disappointed by those I've voted for when they inevitably ignore or break promises they campaigned on and make decisions that often fly in the face of the very principles they originally claimed to stand for.

Fixing our education system is a lot bigger problem then we've ever been able to tackle as a country by popular initiatives.

That said, my point was that the tax payer isn't really paying for it when the tax payer has no say in what is being paid for. If the taxes are collected either under false pretense, or no pretense at all, for what the money will be spent on then the citizen is only responsible for paying the tax bill. The money is the government's at that point, and responsibility for how it is spent at that point stops at their desks.

If the tax payer were truly the one paying for this, we would at minimum have a voice in the program. At best, the government would propose the plan and leave it up to the tax payers to fund it in almost a kick starter type of approach. A simple vote would make more sense IMO, but if we are to pay for it with tax dollars and the government refuses to run a surplus, tax payers (should) have to kick in more money to pay for it.

However, eventually, the buck stops at the taxpayer.

Yes, the federal gov't issues bonds to finance their activities (i.e. deficit spending), but the creditworthiness of the U.S. is intrinsically supported by the federal government's capacity to collect taxes from its citizens.

Eventually, "we the people" foots the bill. It might be amortized over decades and deferred more years still, but it's still a debit to "we the people" of $8.5B in the ledger.

I'm no sure what would happen economically if we paid off federal debt in any meaningful amount. I'd be really curious if you have any insights into what that would look like.

This about supply chain security and national defense. So many of our components are made overseas and under governments who are not close allies. This is in order to operate things in our country.

When you have the FABs in the US and under US control you can handle international foreign policy and the security of the nation differently.

The mining industry needed those money not Intel. It's the mining industry that's been neglected the last 20 years or so.

It will take at least 10 years to get anything resembling chinese supply chain in place.

These are still being created today, not just as a practice from the 1800's.

It is the price of technology, better to address these as we progress rather than pushing them out of mind and sight and kicking the can down the road for future generations.

Some of the silane and polysilicon companies are US owned, but I don't think that any of the wafer makers are US headquartered anymore.

It's the purest source, but lots of cheap PV poly is made from other stuff.

Chips are produced in Taiwan, in Korea, in Japan. In that order. Which of those governments is not allied with the US of A?

Obviously Mexico is also a close ally.

If (when?) Taiwan gets China'd, that by itself cannot serve as a casus belli for Japan.

I have no intimate knowledge with regards to South Korea's laws and will thus refrain from commenting there.

Japan can change this on a whim with one meeting of the legislature. You think Japan can't change its own laws?

>If (when?) Taiwan gets China'd, that by itself cannot serve as a casus belli for Japan.

Wrong. I don't know that they would, but Taiwan is a huge trading partner and great friend of Japan, in fact Japan's closest friend in the whole region. It's quite conceivable that Japan would get involved.

They literally cannot.

> You think Japan can't change its own laws?

It can't amend the Constitution just with a vote in the Diet; it requires a supermajority in both Houses followed by a popular referendum.

It is very common for Constitutional laws to be suspended in the event of war. Even without suspension, all it takes is a leader with enough support to ignore the law.

Which is to say, no: No Japanese leader has had the kind of support necessary to ignore the law.

Can you think of a scenario in which China would attempt the worlds all-time largest amphibious invasion of Taiwan and then let the US just fly missions and drop in supplies or attack Chinese assets and not respond to the bases themselves? It seems incredibly unlikely to me.

There aren't any nukes that need to be involved here. Certainly there are potential scenarios in which those do get used, but neither the Chinese nor Americans have any strong desire to escalate a conventional war into a nuclear war. The scenario you are assuming would also include China and the US nuking each other and so that scenario itself is a bit silly whereas China attacking US air bases in the lead up to or during an invasion of Taiwan without escalating to nuclear weapons is a pretty serious scenario.

I get your point about Japan not being able to change their constitution so quickly and I don't disagree, but I think any scenario in which Taiwan is invaded and the US comes to its defense will drag Japan in to the war sufficiently enough that it will justify whatever it needs to do.

Such use of American forces based in Japan would require consent from the latter, which is not a given.

>Article 4 suggests that the United States will consult with Japan in some manner on how it uses the U.S. troops based in Japan.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Mutual_Cooperation_a...

I think it’s a much more probably scenario (however extremely unlikely) that the US would fail to engage if the invasion occurred.

Please have some clue about what you're talking about first:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Japan#Amendmen...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_96_of_the_Japanese_Con...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_9_of_the_Japanese_Cons...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Mutual_Cooperation_a...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Japanese_military_legisla...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.%E2%80%93Japan_Alliance

What exactly do you think is the punitive remedy for Japan breaking clauses in thosd documents in that political scenario?

Again, have some clue about what you're talking about first. You are embarrassing yourself.

The precarious position of Taiwan is the main reason for this.

https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11480/china-launches-inv...

And now the taxpayer is on the hook for $8.5B and growing?

There's a certain smell to all this.

By not pursuing protectionist public policies.

> the taxpayer is on the hook for $8.5B

$8.5B is a big price tag, but whether the government should spend it or not depends on whether or not the investment pays off.

Intel at the time wasn't interested in fabing ARM chips, and the rest is history.

Intel and American fabs fell behind for a number of reasons. Some of it is tied to our education system and the kinds of people we are training. Some of it is probably related to Intel turning their nose up at the iPhone chip making, losing billions upon billions of money they could have put into R&D. Some of it is a story of American corporate culture not innovating enough.

Fun fact, in the late 90's, Intel was the biggest manufacturer of ARM chips. I was there at the time, and I wrote lots of software to aid in their design.

What happened to Intel was twofold: The first problem was that Robert Noyce, Andy Grove, And Gordon Moore died. Each one was a once-in-century intellect, and it took Intel a while to be able to find somebody who could remotely fill those shoes.

The second problem was Intel was making so much money on x86 chips, that dedicating any fab capacity to anything else--including chips for Apple's iPhone, would for years have had such a huge opportunity cost, that the shareholders would have sued, and with cause. Because literally (not metaphorically) anything they would have manufactured instead would have had a drastically lower profit margin, and the stock would have tanked.

I suspect that the only reason Intel made a foray into ARM chips in the first place was to head off anti-trust accusations, and once the political heat was off, they dropped them like they were hot.

By the time the market shifted, almost a generation of mediocre management had left Intel less paranoid, and therefore, less likely to survive.

I've been considering the Intel issue (had family there) and the other post in the thread mention the decade of misses.

This actually seems like one of the most reasonable rationales that I don't hear mentioned very often. You might want to do something, yet your hands our tied, because the investors will sue for poor leadership.

The problem looks like they went down the typical dinosaurification route that their vanquished high end competitors the likes of DEC, Sun, HP, SGI, IBM, etc., which was to switch from manufacturing as much as possible, to protecting high margin x86 parts. Their x86 PC and server organization out-muscled their manufacturing organization (either that or finance did), and so the ended up being very reluctant to adopt GPGPUs or ARM mobile because those were a threat to x86. By the time they realized they'd missed the boat in those markets, they put out these ridiculous x86 mobile cores and x86 GPGPUs that were costly failures.

This pattern of protecting profit margins on high end products while fixed costs every generation increase and performance increases so low end grows up and erodes high end, causing further retreat and protectionism, is exactly what happened with those aforementioned big iron companies. When the bean counters look at the state of things without an understanding of the technology trends, that's the logical thing to do, but they paint themselves into this corner.

Intel might have just been saved by the bell with Dennard scaling breaking down around the time they were losing their manufacturing advantage. That meant that instead of competitors on a generation or two process lead wiping the floor with them as they did to the minicomputers, it was a much smaller disadvantage and they've been able to somewhat hold on.

That's my non-insider take on it anyway.

- They missed the mobile market

- They missed the gaming market

- They missed the AI/ML market

- They got multiple generations behind TSMC and Samsung in the fab business

- They lost a whole bunch of market share to AMD, including datacenter

The NY Times article is paywalled, so I can't read it, but I have to wonder what kind of fabs they are meant to be building for our (taxpayers) $8.5B ? I wouldn't have any faith in them building a SOTA fab at this point.

Also, by gaming do you mean gaming consoles or gaming PCs? Because Intel is popular in gaming PCs also.

Is the problem that Intel saw themselves too narrowly as in the CPU business rather than as in the compute business? I've no idea - it'd be interesting to hear the inside story of how all these missed opportunities went down.

Which is exactly how they missed out on AI/ML. CPU is irrelevant in that market.

> Because Intel is popular in gaming PCs

All gaming consoles use AMD or Nvidia hardware.

Gaming PCs use AMD or Nvidia GPUs.

Any Steam hardware survey (the most relevant for gaming PC contexts) will show Intel handily beating AMD at around 66% to 33% for CPU[1], so your claim that Intel is somehow not popular is bunk.

[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/processormfg/

Note the "G" followed by PU

Graphics Processing Unit

None of those are GPUs

Steam survey PC video card stats show 76.92% Nvidia, 15.09% AMD, and 7.59% Intel (graphics unit integrated with CPU)

I never said that Intel CPUs are not popular on gaming PCs. But Intel used to have 99% of that Market.

That is my point. Emphasizing the earlier statement: "They missed the gaming market".

How is this so difficult to understand? It is very simple, not obtuse, unless you are autistic.

Nvidia market cap is $2.26 Trillion.

AMD market cap is $290 Billion.

Intel market cap is $178 Billion.

AMD and Nvidia used to be a tiny fraction of Intel.

You guys are getting autistically stuck on this irrelevant detail about CPU popularity in gaming PCs and missing the bigger topic of the discussion. But even in that niche, Intel has lost significant market share to AMD.

Are we back in kindergarten, with name calling?

1. All those happened after Andy Grove's time.

2. And when Andy Grove was at the helm, Intel did not miss opportunities like that. E.g. when Intel's memory chip business started losing market share to the Japanese (who were at the time a low-wage country), they were able to transition to CPUs in time.

If you are in the business of making CPUs, and obviously aware of how fast things move in the tech world, then how can you not be aware of industry trends going on like smart phones, gaming and AI? If you are somehow late to see the trend then double down and catch up. What about getting behind on process nodes/generations? This used to be one of Intel's core strengths, and you'd have thought they'd have institutionalized the things you do and don't take on in a new process to keep the change manageable.

So, I wouldn't say it just a matter of not having Andy Grove - it seems like a matter of having incompetence at many levels.

(ie, not investing in EUV, assuming SAQP would work forever, ignoring the consequences of everything being power-limited...)

This kind of decision is hard, because it's a technical-economic tradeoff, and the latter is more voodoo than math. And that's not even addressing whether you get surprised by things like the LLM boom...

> It's also interesting that Intel made some specific bad technical choices.

That's like saying Saudi Arabia made some bad policy decisions. If you are in Saudi Arabia, nothing has a higher return on investment than petroleum. If you invest in anything else, you are leaving money---A LOT of money--on the table.

The result is that capital is drained out of any other business, and the country gets so dependent on just one industry that when the oil runs out, it is a major crisis.

Put yourself in the place of an Intel CEO. You've just invested $4 Billion in a fab. People will by absolutely every single x86 chip that fab will make ~$40 billion over the course of the technology node's life time.

Or, you could make chips for the iPhone, which maybe, perhaps would be a hit? And even if Apple's wildest projections come true, you'll make $8 billion instead of $40 billion, because Apple is not going to pay for Intel to pocket a 90% profit margin, when it could just go to TSMC.

So you are a CEO, and wondering how on the next earnings call you are going to justify turning an asset worth $40 Billion into one worth $8 billion....

It might be hard to remember now, but Intel was in the position NVIDIA is today: they could sell absolutely every x86 processor they could make, at pretty much any price they cared to name.

So even if Intel could have built another fab (which, btw, it couldn't, the world only graduates so many solid-state physics Ph.D.'s per year) but even if they could, they would STILL have used it to make x86 chips. Literally (not metaphorically or hyperbolically) nothing else they could manufacture would have as high a return on investment as making x86 chips did.

Good thing we aren’t even slightly close to ever running out.

I was a physics student who took a nanofab class, fell in love, and desperately wanted to go down this path... until I learned about how complete and utter dogshit the wages were. I kept in touch with two classmates who stuck with it a bit longer. The free market had to beat them over the head a bit longer to get them to let go, but it eventually succeeded. Intel was absolutely printing money for investors the whole time, of course, and now that the material consequences of their poor management have come home to roost they are getting bailouts. Yay, capitalism!

Our education system over-produces qualified scientists, but if semiconductors are a road to not having a house or family and if it pays 5x better to sell ads or stocks... you get what you pay for.

I hope this has changed but I wouldn't bet on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale#Sale_of_PXA_processor_l...

Perhaps. But the more likely correct answer is: The MIC doesn't make chips. They couldn't and wouldn't push for something that didn't deepen their pockets.

Texas Instruments didn't give guys like Morris Chang enough opportunities to advance.

That's why TSMC was founded.

I could be wrong about how fabs work, of course, and would love to learn more.

Assembling a motherboard is to semiconductor fabs as flying a toy drone is to landing a Boeing 747. One you can learn in an afternoon; the other takes years to learn.

I disagree. I live next to a fab and have coworkers that have worked the fabs.

Humans in fabs are taken out of the loop as much as possible. That's because when dealing with nanoscale structures, human error is simply too common.

One of my coworkers worked at the fab during a period where they had humans running the forklift that moved the wafers from one stage to the next. That was cut out because the tiny bumps caused by a human operating the controls caused imperfections in the chips that decreased yield (the metric that matters most for a fab). They ultimately removed that work and job and replaced it with robots to carefully move the wafers.

What's complex about a fab ends up being not the frontline work, but rather the layer or 2 in the back (like designing the lithography filter for a given chip). That stuff happen outside the actual plant.

This. We are talking about Atom scale here. I have as much admiration for skilled mechanics as the next guy. I heard about a lathe operator at Patek Phillip who could turn an arbor to within 1 micron precision, just by listening to the pitch the cutting tool made when trimming it down.

And when chip features were on the micron scale, humans in the loop made sense. But chip feature are ten thousand times smaller than that now--4 orders of magnitude. Anything that doesn't need a Ph.D. in solid state physics to do is going to be automated.

They ended up installing shock absorbers everywhere to counteract this problem.

Im not saying its as simple as CNC. I am saying that I doubt you need an IQ of 130 or a PHD. Start investing in the people whose labor were undercut. In fact a skilled machinist or technician seems like a much closer match (in terms of skill and willingness to do the job) than some with an electrical engineering PHD or something.

Don't confuse that with the workers not being skilled - many are, but just like good software, you want your designs to run well even when executed by the worst hardware.

I worked in an R&D fab (albeit, as an intern, many years ago) with an abnormal number of PhDs around (the fab was essentially a small scale test bed for new products and processes - everything tested there first before scaling up overseas). I think we had a 5:1 ratio of techs to engineers. This was in a fab that basically did nothing but R&D and low volume manufacturing for defense.

It's comparable to any kind of high-tech manufacturing where you have engineers designing/testing stuff (and designing the tools to make and test the stuff in the first place) while there have to be techs/mechanics/machine shop workers to actually do the work of making it. It's inefficient and expensive to put the engineers on that task, while they'll still need to do it from time to time.

But still - a lot easier than semiconductors

The hard one to learn is flying a drone, right?

A 747 can pretty much land itself on autopilot.

The only hard part is contacting ground control in the first place. Radio frequencies change all the time.

WaPo tried it out last year and only the fellow who was used to WW2 plane simulators was successful at a probably didn't die landing.

Alternative theory: Protectionism industrializes and trade liberalization deindustrializes. Alexander Hamilton's protectionist policies weren't just successful at industrializing the USA, he and his successors were correct as to why they were successful. The relatively recent shift to trade liberalization, by contrast, had the generally accepted effect of such policies on the industrial base. Of course, assets got pumped along the way and that's what really mattered to the people in charge.

The not promoting is a problem but it isn't the cause of decline.

Unions were gutted because the labor market grew beyond international borders, but the labor movement didn't (thanks to western capitalists making war on socialists.)

Personally, I think America's reliance on cars and its suburban layout is a big part of this. Workers in Taipei don't need to own a car to get to work, and the overall infrastructure cost per capita is much lower.

Small anecdote: pat gelsinger, intel ceo, started as a technician at intel (iirc) at like years old or something like that.

That entry level job paid enough that he could have a roof on his head and i guess covered his university tuition?

I’m not making this up: it’s all in his book he wrote about his life (not sure I recommend the book)

However, just from his public persona of wildly optimistic sales/marketing pitches and showmanship, while outsourcing their own manufacturing to TSMC, I have a very bad impression.

Then his claims of Intel zettaflop machines by 2027 honestly make me think he is totally delusional, but maybe that does not matter.

Just trying to understand your point of view.

I worked at a non-semiconductor tenant company in a semiconductor research campus/facility.

Parking lots tell the story. There was a pecking order for the lots, which made it easy to classify. The best off working people were the trades guys. The plumbers and electricians were high-skilled and well paid. Like guys commuting 2,000 miles and buying a second $90k F-250 to drive around town in.

The bigshots were Teslas, BMWs, big SUVs. There were a few corvettes and a Ferrari.

The Fab engineers and workers were all driving old Hondas and Hyundais.

One of my good friends from high school was a mechanical engineer at IBM and a master at some super-critical process for mainframes. They moved to a different architecture and his entire team was just nuked from orbit before they even knew what was happening. He was selling real estate for awhile and eventually got back into engineering.

And of course ymmv between companies, regions, facilities or projects. There are software people trapped maintaining stupid legacy insurance code and similar dreck too.

That is clearly not the reality: according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si..., 16 of 23 of Intel's fabs are in the US and 6 of the other 7 are in close allies (Ireland, Israel, Germany).

There may be something to be said about what's happened to the rest of the US fab industry, though.

Many processes do not scale just because a money spigot turned on. What most often does scale as quickly as monetary availability is fraud, waste and abuse.

Of course if they were somehow disproportionately forced to only ever work on chip fabs for the rest of their lives, then that would create huge waste, but this doesn’t seem likely.

Why did Intel HAVE to fire most line workers and hire Ph.Ds?

If manufacturing cars is so complex you can't train monkeys, or build robots, to do it, how much harder must it be to make chips?

Making things that small, that precisely, repeatably, profitably, by the millions and billions, is spectacularly complex. And with each process node, the complexity grows even faster than Moore's law does.

Eventually, it gets to the point that even to tell somebody how to do something, you need to do it using the language of advanced physics, the kind of physics which requires you to spend studying 60-80 hours a week, for 5-7 years in grad school to learn. As the gen-X proverb goes, reality bites.

Mind citing your anecdote? I realize I wasn't in every fab, but it's not rocket science, even on 300mm and beyond.

But, I mean when you say:

> clean room alarms went bananas when he lit up

you might have answered your own question...that stuff may have flied when we were at 180 nanometers, but lets face it, there's only so far down the road of Moore's law you can travel with people who smoke in a clean room...

Globalization is breaking down quickly. Chips are crucial to national security and our economy. The supply chain for advanced chips is heavily dependent on East Asia which is a geopolitical powder keg and a demographic time bomb. The only thing more expensive than whatever we end up with is chips unavailable at any price because East Asia devolves into a war stricken basket case. We needed to have been starting this panic training/building 10 years ago but better late than never!

The past decade of American media has been promoting this new cold war narrative as if there is inevitably going to be a major war with China.

If there is war in East Asia then the whole international economic system will collapse, people will be starving in the streets. That's if it's not a nuclear Armageddon and we're left to rubbing two sticks together. Nobody will care about chips if there is a war. That will be really far down the list of actual concerns

The world is so interconnected and everyone depends on everyone so much that there is basically no point in planning for this scenario

There's always a point in planning for a scenario if you think the risk is high enough and there is something you can do to better prepare for it.

In this scenario, the ones most impacted immediately will be the ones most dependent of the global economy. If you can't get the basics like food, water, and shelter if war with China breaks out then sure you'll be in a bad spot. But is it really an impossible task to prepare at all?

Even in the most benign case, if China is for whatever reason peacefully cut off from the global economy and we haven't been nukes into the stone age - having to move back to 22nm chips is going to be the least of our problems. To put it in perspective.. this is going to be a world where we no longer have cellphones and toiletpaper (b/c those are all made in China) and most equipment/machinery/refrigerators/washing-machines/cars/trains will overnight become at least in part unrepairable. Basically ever sector of the economy depends at least in some small part on the Chinese supply chain.

We put chips in almost everything today. If we can live without chips them so be it, but assuming we'd rather not feel the full impact of have zero chips for whatever reason we'd be smart to start building some level of manufacturing capability at home.

We already saw toilet paper supply chains crumble and all it took was a (potentially over-) reaction to a potential global pandemic. It wasn't a war with China that made it clear we really could do some good with a simplified toilet paper supply chain, it was scientific concern amplified but scared/concerned politicians and herd mentality when the public realized they weren't prepared for such a possible future.

But even in this horror parallel reality of yours, cutting edge chips would still be very far down the list of things that are important. Can you provide basic sanitation without anything made in China? Transport? Medical care? Can you feed your nation? Can you maintain your nations basic infrastructure?

Having to go back a few generations in chips is just irrelevant at the scale of disaster you're envisioning

If you are going government intervention, they could reach for tariffs and import taxes rather than subsidies. Forcing prices high enough for domestic production is painful at first but would eventually work all the same.

I fully agree with you that too much of our current infrastructure is dependent on China and other countries. It isn't really a problem if we aren't concerned with major shocks though. It sounds like the difference is that I see the risks high enough to invest in domestic production if possible, you see that solution as unrealistic and that we're better off avoiding/preventing all shocks.

Imagine how much more expensive everything would be, and now imagine the cumulative amount of money that represents. Money that could be used to fund education or improve people's lives, or even build armaments if you really are worried about the commies. You're in effect paying an huge "tax"/premium indefinitely for a threat that's very theoretical. In so doing youre seriously slowing down the rate of progress and prosperity

But that goes a bit away from the original point. That even if you want to have a self reliant north Korean model for the economy, chips are not a sensible place to start. You'd probably want your local hospital to be able to run without anything made in China. Going back to 22nm (circa 2014 tech) would be a minor annoyance.

This sentiment was very prevalent right before WWI.

- The US has almost everything it needs in North America to be self-sufficient. Food, energy, natural resources, manufacturing, trade.

- The US is tired of being involved in the Middle East.

- The US is tired of protecting the oceans and trade for everyone else.

- The US is tired of China stealing its tech, being protectionist, becoming an adversary, not being friendly to US companies, meddling in US trade, etc.

- The US is tired of NATO not stepping up to the plate. It won't back out, of course, but would love for Europe to care more about its own security.

There are so many reasons the US is pulling back. Both the Trump and Biden presidencies are completely on board with it. It's fully bipartisan, and it's going to accelerate.

The US is going to near-shore, friend-shore, and to every extent possible, onshore what it needs.

Personally I am embarrassed that we were ever involved in the middle east, am willing to see our resources spent protecting natural resources if we can afford it, want a stronger NATO and only see that happening by us leaning further in, and think the only thing bipartisan about our two presidential candidates is that there is no way they are our two best candidates for the job.