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Comment by yrgulation | Hacker News Reader

Idk know how to phrase this in a polite and calm manner. What the heck are our politicians in the eu, us and aligned countries. This pandemic and the war revealed that we are extremely vulnerable both in terms of resources and electronics. Why is there no serious change in how we source both. At least for electronics why arent there plans for massive investments? I understand east europe is orders of magnitude more expensive than asia but if cost is a factor the area is still cheaper than western europe or the us. Or why not invest in semiconductor manufacturing in the us and west eu using modern robotics and processes? Do we enjoy being held for ransom?

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From Isaac Asimov's Gods Themselves:

“PRACTICAL POLITICS”—AND THE DEATH OF A WORLD

“Let me give you a lesson in practical politics.” Senator Burt looked at his wristwatch, leaned back and smiled. “It is a mistake,” he said, “to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort.

“Now then, young man, don’t ask me to stop the Pumping. The economy and comfort of the entire planet depend on it. Tell me, instead, how to keep the Pumping from exploding the Sun.”

Lamont said, “There is no way, Senator. We are dealing with something here that is so basic, we can’t play with it. We must stop it.”

“Ah, and you can suggest only that we go back to matters as they were before Pumping.”

“We must.”

“In that case, you will need hard and fast proof that you are right.”

“The best proof,” Lamont said stiffly, “is to have the Sun explode.”

Micron and GlobalFoundries are both building new fabs in New York. GF is looking at a new fab in an existing facility at around $1.5 billion. Micron is building a whole new facility for DRAM production, around $100 billion. Micron is also building a $15 billion plant in Idaho.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/globalfoundries-pla...

https://blocksandfiles.com/2022/10/05/fabulous-new-york-stat...

TI just bought $1.5 billion worth of old fab capacity from Micron, too. In other TI news, they're ramping up production in a new 300mm wafer fab now, with the first wafers coming just last month. They're also building four new fabs at Richardson, Texas. https://news.ti.com/blog/2022/09/29/tis-new-300-millimeter-w...

Samsung is looking to have a new fab near Austin by late 2023, at about $17 billion.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16483/samsung-in-the-usa-a-17...

The US government passed the CHIPS Act that invests government money heavily in securing new domestic semiconductor investment. The state of New York and Onondaga County are investing heavily, too. The county is putting $10 million into Syracuse University and $5 million into its community college for research and education around semiconductors.

Why is New York a good location for this? Isn’t it very expensive there compared to the rest of the USA?

Upstate? I'm not sure it's all that more expensive. IBM is in Armonk. Buffalo used to (and may still) have GM warehouses, with many of their cars made not far away in St. Catherines, ON.

I don't think anyone would put a new industrial facility in Kings County.

Until a very short time ago there was a widespread idea belief mutual trade stabilizes relationships in addition to all kind of other nice stuff. Now, that belief has shattered, and it seems to apply only when the participants of the trade have somewhat similar attitudes regarding e.g. democracy. Of course, it takes a while to leave your old loved ideas, but I think that here in the developed countries it would be time to start a real and serious discussion regarding trade policies with countries that are not happy to pursue democratic governance. (Yep, China is the big elephant in this room)

Mutual trade absolutely prevents outright war, as evidenced by the fact that the US rapidly trying to become less reliant on china in case of such a war. It doesn't do anything other than that - it has nothing to do with whether china has a democratic government or not, it has nothing to do with whether or not the countries we trade with make policies favorable to our ideology, it just keeps everyone involved from launching missiles because the rational actors on both sides realize that it would be economic suicide, even if they would win the military engagement.

> Mutual trade absolutely prevents outright war

This was literally the theory that guided European (and particularly German) relations with Russia for the past couple decades. It was disastrously wrong.

Russia knew that the consequence of launching a war would be the evaporation of trade with Europe, and they still did it. They won't attack NATO because it's NATO, with overwhelming nuclear and conventional military forces, it has nothing to do with trade.

That theory also guided the development of the EU, which has arguably been a significant source of peace and stability for the past 70 years, leading to great prosperity. This is only the second war we are seeing on the European continent in all that time. Compared with the previous 70 years it's quite an achievement.

It's a fallacy to focus on the one failure of the policy and ignore the other cases when it was working.

As for NATO its expansion all the way to the borders of Russia didn't prevent the war either, and it remains to be seen whether we won't end up with a war between Russia and NATO.

In times of war it's tempting but dangerous to feel like militarisation of the world is the solution. History doesn't show that to be the case in general.

It's not fallacy to note that the theory has worked between democratic countries remarkably well, but failed between democratic and not so democratic countries. Thus my call to re-evaluate trade relationships with not so democratic countries.

Ok, maybe 'absolutely prevents' should be 'mostly prevents' - the key part is the rational actor bit. If the guy at the steering wheel cares less about the prosperity of his country and his personal wellbeing than he does about fulfilling a czarist power fantasy before he croaks the system is less effective. But I suppose there are very few disincentives to war that would help in that situation.

Well, it did stop Europe from retaliating against Russia with full power, and slowed then down until the actions became extreme.

The mistake is on believing that the effect was symmetric. Russia benefited very little from the trade (yes, for internal reasons), so they made no effort to preserve it.

Indeed, as Erdogan, Orban, and Trump have shown, the path from democracy to autocracy is very short, disturbingly so. What's needed is a treaty organization that promises to invade and restore democracy in the case certain conditions are not met. A sort of inverse Nato if you will.

South Korea, Japan and Taiwan are combined 50%+ of semiconductor production and have wages similar to Western Europe, their factories are already heavily automated and well run. These are not sweatshops with people running around hammering transistors with chisels.

So if they can so can we. Bring back high tech manufacturing.

Do we have the workforce? Working reliable supply chains, and the willingness to make it all work?

Based on the difficulty that Tesla had with setting up model 3 production, no. What they did it in house is because they had to, there were no supply chains.

We can automate things even further. We are far from automation at its full potential. But we lack the will.

Is it worth it? Globalization means that everybody tries to be a leader in their markets. If you focus on one market, you have to neglect another.

Becoming a leader in high tech manufacturing means giving up other leading positions.

I dont think it works that way. Being good at one thing as a country you dont need to neglect others. A country is not a person. The EU, US and allies can simultaneously be good at high tech agriculture, high tech manufacturing, fin tech, space tech, and services. We just need to approach things differently.

In which way should things be approached differently? A country it not one person, but it's still many persons. How do you remain the best in all areas if you don't have the manpower to keep up with the development of knowledge in all areas?

Two things cross my mind. One is that there are millions lacking access to education thus missing all the knowledge needed to grow. If those millions were a country what would that country need to do ensure their growth? Second is that since we lack manpower we either need to look into why is it such an issue having children, despite economic development, or we need to look into even more automation in manufacturing. We need government funded research of the kind that made the atomic bomb or the internet. We also need to look at the economics of it so we dont end up putting more people into poverty because we replaced them with bots.

Did you miss the CHIPS act, and the other US and EU actions I can't remember the names of?

The west does not, generally speaking, support government industrial policy. That is, neither the US and EU political sphere thinks that guiding industrial activity (setting priorities, etc) is a good use of government power. Instead, our political philosophy is that "the market" is the best mechanism to sort such things out.

This is, of course, a gross generalization with lots of exceptions. Especially in the realm of "defense" technologies. But given this philosophical trust in markets to determine the whos, whats, whens, wheres and hows for industries, they tend to intervene late or weakly even when the public clamors for action.

Also... this philosophy has created the wealthiest societies in the history of humanity. And while past performance is not necessarily indicative of future performance... it's certainly something.

While there's no denying our current wealth as a society, there are enough variables that it's impossible to say that's actually the reason for the prosperity. We could very well just look at the history of war throughout the ages and observe how the victor gets the spoils of conquest prolonged the Roman empire's economy, why would that not also simply true for Pax Americana? The age of prosperity was especially true immediately after WWII and the military industrial complex has been humming along nicely.

The west generated wealthy societies because it constantly transformed itself into something better. With the risk of sounding too pessimistic, right now all i see is a lack of leadership and direction, i see a west increasingly fractured, ridden with debt and populism. At most we are in maintenance mode putting out fires as they come, we are reactive. Even if there is some growth its nowhere near the spectacular growth we saw with the industrial revolution, invention of the internet or the advancement of knowledge in physics and chemistry. Iterating iphones, creating new ubers and facebooks or new programming languages isnt growth. I think we can do better.

> Do we enjoy being held for ransom?

Yes, one of the main goals of the world bank and western global economic policy after world war 2 is to create an interconnected world where countries like Germany are dependant on Russia in the hopes that this forces peace talks by making war more costly. The idea is that they are also dependent on us and we can sanction countries like Russia or Iran or North Korea into working with us instead of fighting us.

The issue with this policy is that we need to make the first move in good faith but if countries don't return honestly then our sanctions remove luxury goods like McDonalds while their counter sanctions remove necessities like heating. The second part of the issue is that once sanctions have been applied there no second step and the sanctioned country will just ally itself with other sanctioned countries as a matter of necessity thus pushing them further away from us and closer to all out war.

To protect our selves we need to be self sufficient in these matters which makes the whole thing not work as we will have no leverage other than war.

I think our politicians are busy thinking how we will not freeze and starve.

Building a fab in close proximity of russia or other unstable areas is probably not a priority right now.

Russia is quite close to japan and Korea

Russia is close to every country in the Northern hemisphere.

It's become, at the very least, politically risky to suggest that the tendency of major industries over the past several decades to optimize away everything that doesn't maximize profit could be anything but the Most Holy And True Way, All Hail The Almighty Dollar(/Pound/Euro).

But it's also become painfully clear over the past few years that this tendency is deeply harmful not only to society as a whole, but also to that very industry when any kind of shock to the system occurs, because all redundancy and resiliency to shocks has been optimized away as "wasteful". This includes having more than 1 employee in any given role for far too many companies (see "lean staffing"), which means that if that 1 employee gets COVID, or gets hit by a bus, or quits, or (horror of horrors) even goes on vacation, suddenly there's no one who can do that work at all, and potentially no one who even knows how it's been done.

We desperately need to realign our industries around a) what supports human beings and their needs, b) what ensures continuity of business, and c) what ensures redundancy in the entire system, including the supply chain, so that we can avoid these kinds of utterly foreseeable difficulties. But proposing anything other than what makes the already-wealthy shareholders' currency-denominated high scores go up as much as inhumanly possible is, if it is considered at all, seen as effectively political suicide for anyone not already as openly left-wing as, say, Bernie Sanders.

If we, the people, want this kind of change, we need to signal it by saying so openly, and by voting out the politicians at all levels and in all countries who prioritize business profits over humanity and common sense.

I agree with every point. What i dont understand tho is why is this treated as left wing concept? Investing in a society is as capitalistic as possible. You cant have capitalism without an economically healthy society. Is the plan to keep subsidising corporations by cheap debt? Once a society is impoverished then who will buy all the products made? Aliens? I think for capitalism to function it needs investments in society. This is not a left or right issue, its common sense. Blocking money in the hands of the few is like politburos controlling everything in communism. Money needs to flow and trickle up not down.

Frankly, it's because whatever the theoretical definitions, the actual right wing, at least in America and the UK, has come to stand for short-term profit for the very wealthy over all other considerations (except, perhaps, white supremacy and maintaining the power of right-wing politicians).

But aside from the very small number actively benefiting from this shift, too few people are willing to admit—or even understand—that it has taken place. They're just too invested in the Red vs Blue football game to be willing to do anything but blindly support "Their Side".

I can’t speak for the EU, but the USA passed a bill earlier this year directing almost 300 billion towards growing chip production in the USA.

To make general electronics (as opposed to semi) supply chain issues worse, we just did a major hit on Chinese semiconductor industry. My impression is that they are not taking it well. Supplying the rest of the world with cheap electronics might not be their highest priority at this point. And it will be hard to produce a price-competitive (obviously US can manufacture anything at high price) alternatives because China has 20-30% (?) lower energy costs and much lower labor and regulatory costs. I guess the idea is to move manufacturing into other Asian countries. But other Asian countries are either China-friendly, or they will have the same higher energy costs as the rest of the world.

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