- We don't open more chip factories here, because labor/regulation/land/etc is too expensive
- We don't have enough logistics workers (docks, truks, etc) because it doesn't pay enough.
Right? Am I seeing this wrong? Because what I keep reading is that we have ships just waiting in California to be unloaded but not enough dock workers to unload them and truck drivers to move the goods out?
So I think it’s not true to say that US had completely lost its edge with semiconductors, nor that the US moved all its manufacturing capacity to Asia. The US has been and is still competing to be one of the largest players in the semiconductor industry, even if it might not be first place anymore.
And I think it’s fair to question whether the US needs to be in absolute first place. Asian countries have significantly more population and therefore need for semiconductors compared to the US, so it makes sense that eventually, manufacturing capacity would be more relative to local population levels.
- 0: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/semiconductor-fabs-dot..., https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/Intel-b...
- 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...
- 2: https://www.semiconductors.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/20...
That is unless you’re wiling to pay 10-100x more for them, through contracts that require you exclusively make and supply them here in the US, much like the US military does for chips that they really care about.
But then it would take years for those kinds of contracts to make their way through all the various intermediaries, and third, fourth, and fifth parties, etc….
There’s lots of problems inside this “Perfect Global Multi-Year Hurricane” of supply chains.
Surely whatever a driver transports is worth much more than the paycheck they get?
B) are there bottlenecks at the ports that prevent more trucks?
C) can rail be used to move boxes?
D) who is making money by things NOT moving?
- physical layout only allows for so much throughput at a time. The bigger the jam, the longer it'll take to clear
- yes and no. Rail doesn't (directly) go to most places, and those that it could, often don't have distribution logistics in place from the customers since they already have their chain configured for trucks
- it is a net loss all around for everyone. Any higher prices on goods are offsetting losses from reduction in volume. Theres no evil fairy tale villain to blame.
First, California passed a law that trucks had to be newer than 10 years, or else face an expensive refit for pollution control. (At least, I think it was pollution control.) Point is, the average truck was 14 years old. The obvious-in-retrospect consequence is a shortage of trucks that can legally work in California.
Second, there was this recent law that required Uber to treat drivers as employees, not contractors. Well, a lot of the truck drivers are owner-operators, and they fell under that law. The consequence: You can't just contract with an owner-operator to move your container.
As I said, I don't know any of this first-hand, so take with some salt.
Do our representatives not realize literally EVERYTHING we have access to depends on trucking?
When the pandemic was going on and everything was shut down many of the older staff decided to just retire. You cannot quickly spawn up new pilots or ATCs. Some small percentage of workers are facing a medical mandate they may be unwilling to comply with and so are using any sick days that they may lose after being fired when the mandate hits. The ones that remain are so overworked they are exhausted and unable to work more and/or are getting sick due to stress and exhaustion.
One day he overhears that there is an evening school and every worker who will attend will receive 10% bonus, so he signs up for it. First day in this evening school, very first class is math. But they have such a trivial topics that professor became bored and reads newspaper under the table. Teacher notices it and call him up to calculate the area of a circle.
Professor is so surprised that he suddenly can't remember the formula, so he converts it in his head to polar coordinates and uses integral to calculate the area, and then write the formula on the table:
S = -PI * r * r
Then he scratches his head and start thinking where the minus came from when suddenly someone shouts from the back row: "flip the interval of integration, colleague!".
Which apparently isn't anything new (2015): https://archive.kpcc.org/news/2015/06/02/52126/for-truck-dri...
Like in the article, did the guy say the appointments were going unfilled after they raised the pay a bunch and made it easy for the driver, or did he just say they were going unfilled?
Trucking pays pretty well, too, but comes with a different set of challenges. You have to be willing to live on the road, sleeping at truck stops or in your own cabin, never seeing your family if you even have one, sitting for 8-12 hours a day and destroying your spine orthopedically. It takes a special kind of person to want that job no matter how well it pays.
The truth is that Bitcoin was actually one of the few Industries that was spurring on chip manufacturing in the US, Butterfly labs was one of the few that could challenge Bitman in the early day but had to give it up due to increasing regulatory red-tape and an ever greater monopoly in Schenzen.
As both a former SCM and a Bitcoiner I think that the US had to go through the shock doctrine before it realized it was playing Russian Roulette with it's Supply Chain, and it's Value Chain for decades as every CEO and exec with an MBA from an Ivy League decided to gut the manufacturing Industry.
This allowed for Amazon's rise in dominance, and has pretty much disrupted the traditional fulfillment, and distribution system and made it entirely it's own: every business I've interviewed for since COVID now follows freight, air routes that were optimized by Amazon.
It's personally appalling that a company that makes nothing has been able to supplant SC and Logistics to this degree, but it's firther proof that Big Tech [Software] has in fact eaten the World.
As for the low pay, I think what also needs to be noted is how damaging it is to do warehouse work, working injured is the norm not the exception, couple that with many weeks without breaks and swing shifts (now also the norm, not the exception due to all of these delays) no amount of money is enough to get me back. I had an interview in Supply Chain Management that was teasing high 5 figures, to low 6 figures but was very upfront that I'd have to commit to 70+ hour work weeks, swing shifts, and 40-50 days without a day off.
You can rise fast if you're competent, and even faster if you have a background in tech but the truth is I'm over that phase in my Life and SCM as a job is never ending so I decided to just focus on the Software side of things and focus on using ML and AI in Logistics and Supply Chain and went back to school for a degree in CompSci after a career in fintech and a short-stint at IBM where I was trying to resolve this issue within the Ag/Food Industry;s logistics and Supply Chain without much success.
It's sad we had so much interest from Megacorps and IBm could have been a leader in this space, instead it has been broken up and remains a shell of it's former self that played a critical role in the Apollo Missions.
0: https://www.gizchina.com/2021/10/07/samsung-delayed-the-impl...
https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/23/6833047/bitcoin-conspirac...
And you don't think Bitmain did the same thing?
Again, I'm not advocating the business models of either corp, and to be honest I think open-hardware is where we should be focusing on our collective attention during this supply chain disruption in order to make some actual progress.
But it's still worth noting that ASIC development was concentrated in Shenzhen with no competitors to speak of prior to Butterfly labs. Still, this is all to say we have don ea poor job despite all the red flags until it all came crashing down and now Mega corps are likely to cash in on this and the infrastructure bill to 're-shore' the same manufacturing they and their predecessors fought like hell to offshore in the 80-90s.
Ergo, it must really be difficult.