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Comment by edgyquant | Hacker News Reader

The US has multiple fabs and has multiple more being built right now. This is just the propaganda of the elite class who sold off our industrial base and you’re repeating it verbatim

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This is exactly right. Onshoring fabs back to the US is part of a long term political and economic strategic plan to counter China called The Clean Network / The "5G trifecta" — TSMC's new fab in Arizona will be the largest onshoring in American history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clean_Network#The_%225G_tr...

https://keithkrach.com/article/tsmc-12b-chip-plant-in-arizon...

Every year it becomes harder to justify hiring a Westerner from a business perspective. America in 50 years will look like Argentina, full of mediocre workers that demand empire era wages. If we wanna change that, we need to work on developing global monopolies and crushing our enemies. Won't happen though, we'll just wither away wondering why our economy is wasting away.

Why didn't this happen in Germany and Japan? Both were born as manuf'ing giants and remain as giants. Compared to many neighboring countries, their labour costs are very high. Yet, they continue to manuf a huge amount of good for domestic consumption and international export. And both countries have very strong labour laws. To an American, it appears almost impossible to fire people in Japan and Germany.

I’ll take this bet and see you in 50 years. The US has surged ahead of the rest of the world in recent years and it’s only just starting to put itself first again.

How? Our industries are being hollowed out. More and more engineering jobs will go to China, Taiwan, Ukraine, Poland, etc. where they are paid half of a westnern's salary and perform nearly as well if not better. This trend will only continue until the U.S is cut out of the equation entirely. Sure we're doing better than Canada, but Canada is the prime example of a country in decline. They won't need to wait 50 years to be Argentina. Same with many other Western countries.

One of them is about five miles from me in Phoenix and it's going poorly. My read is that there are some legitimate labor concerns, some mismanagement, but also a lot of special interest strong arming in things like not bringing in enough Taiwanese workers.

I'm unaware of how automatable fabs are. If the workers are high-cost then the machines need to do more or the government needs to subsidize production.

> This is just the propaganda of the elite class who sold off our industrial base and you’re repeating it verbatim

They’re socializing Americans to get used to a future where their kids have to go to the Middle East and China in search of upwards mobility. (Of course those societies will never be as accommodating of Americans as America has been of Chinese and middle Easterners.)

> a future where their kids have to go to the Middle East

Where? UAE? Israel? Anywhere else? Both are still far less prosperous for the middle class than the US.

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