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Comment by talldayo | Hacker News Reader

> we paid so much into CHIPS to still end up losing the silicon wars to Taiwan/China.

Did you earnestly expect any other outcome? TSMC has the customers, the trained personnel, the connections with ASML and the supply chain worked out. Unless the US airlifted TSMC to American soil, there's no reality where we open a factory and a year later it becomes the best in the world. It's pretty obvious that this investment is a hedged bet in geopolitical tensions going sideways, and being able to recover when it does.

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>Did you earnestly expect any other outcome?

Nope. We already lost the war years ago before it even began, no amount of throwing money at this war was going to snatch victory from the bowels of defeat. CHIPS was a stupid waste of money at the outset and it is still a stupid waste of money after the fact because it arrived too late.

But that doesn't change my sentiment as a tax payer that I want my tax dollars back. Even moreso because Intel is now gutting their R&D when their problem is they are behind in R&D.

Well, I wish you and your fellow taxpayers luck finding a better-suited American chip foundry to invest in.

If the only American one is horrible, we should still subsidize it? Quite the dilemma. I'd be more on board with paying the Taiwanese to move here.

Taiwan isn't going to pack themselves up until it's already too late. Politically and economically they wouldn't agree to leave unless their sovereignty was threatened by China, at which point their fabs and equipment are probably in the process of being destroyed. There is no reality in which you just pay Taiwanese people to move to America any more than you'd pay Americans to move to Taiwan.

The only playbook is to defend Taiwan like they're the last hope for the American economy. Obviously investing in Intel won't go anywhere even in the best-case scenario, so the only logical option is to defend Taiwan and the status-quo.

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