You'd need a very strong, very particular forecast to make such a costly bet. And conversely, it may say something about their internal forecasts that they're not making the bet.
Idk if you can read into it that way.
All these companies have cafeterias but you don't see them investing into farmland so they can get their bananas a few cents cheaper.
But also why bother spending 20B on a fab when you can invest 20B into TSMC and let them build the fab?
I do agree that USA and EU could foot the bill and subsidize a couple billions in such industrial infrastructure, perhaps taking back a cut of the profit rather than privatizing all of it.
But they’re not doing it, or are making pitiful efforts at that
Throwing 20B into a chip fab in the EU would be politically a very unpopular move, if it's done as a public company or worse directly state owned, you'll royally piss of Taiwan, South Korea and China and it's likely they'd retaliate by e.g. subsidising their auto industry more in order to give the death blow to the EU auto industry.
The solution to threats to global economic integration is to address the threats to global economic integration. It's not to cannibalise our own full-employment high value economies, by diverting enormous capital and labour into duplicating vast swathes of lower value jobs we don't actually have the work force for anyway, just so we can pay unaffordable prices for the resulting goods.
We probably both agree it's an absurd fantasy, and the people trying to make stuff like this happen are implementing policies that ensure that it won't, such as putting tariffs on the inputs they need to build out this domestic manufacturing capacity in the first place.
So permanent world peace. That sounds much easier.
Mainland China is one concern.
Another is AI being the commodity compliment to semiconductors.
It says they are no longer worried about being punished for monopolistic behavior and have bet a “ballroom donation” will exempt them from another round of punishment.
I feel like folks around here have already forgotten about the last time the memory suppliers quietly agreed to keep raising prices and stop competing with each other.
None of the economics or supply needs of these things make any sense. The water is generally not there, electric transformers are next to impossible to acquire. I just read about one in Utah that’s supposed to be 2.5x the size of Manhattan?? https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/933687/u...
I could be wrong, but I think a lot of this was planned by software guys who are used to brute-forcing their way through “impossible” problems. But those were software problems, where the limits are mostly theoretical. In the world of atoms, limitations are real.
Transformers aren't so complex that production can't increase. Most water is used for agriculture and right now the data centers can pay more for it.
This is why China is eating the West. Quite easy to start an electronics company when you have such an abundance of suppliers, compare this to America where there is maybe one or two players in the entire nation.
Quite pathetic, but we live in a pathetic world so it tracks.
A great example of this is how they handled digital payments. While Visa and Mastercard maintain a monopoly in the West, China faced a similar situation when private mobile payment systems began dominating the market. In response, the government stepped in and forced the ecosystem to open up to competitors.
The relationship between Tencent/Bytedance/Alibaba is what happens when there are no monopoly laws or they are ineffective: every company fighting tooth and nail to corner every market with a single "super-app". No specialization at all and many races to the bottom, like the recent war between Alibaba, JD and Meituan over instant delivery that made every company involved lose a lot of money.
In China, this kind of corporate driven censorship doesn't happen. Tech corporations like WeChat and Alipay don't control the payment routing that is run by the state's central network. A merchant just needs a bank account and a QR code, and any customer can use it to pay them. The private apps cannot arbitrarily decide to block a legal merchant based on corporate politics or moral stances.
By legal platforms or creators I suppose you mean the dispute between card processors and platforms like steam, pixiv, dslite, etc about nsfw contents like anime child porn? Those stuff are already banned in China long time ago.
To give a real example of how China bans stuff, take ByteDance as an example. It used to run a joke sharing app roughly translates into Subtle Jokes that is on par with TikTok in terms of popularity. Then one day CCP decided it did not like it, then poof it's gone overnight. The founder issued a public apology and promised to almost double their censorship department in the future. Comparing to the TikTok case in the US, we got what? The funny-yet-pathetic legal tic-tac-toeing of Singaporean-not-Chinese nonsense. There is just fundamental difference in the scale and efficiency of censorship.
Major merchants in the US do support UnionPay, even USPS(!) displays its logo. The problem used to be small/local merchants, but with the advent of modern PoS like square/clover it is getting better.
In what same way? Even registering a Wechat account is no trivial task, just look at all those ppl asking help scanning their signup codes. Suppose you did KYC and seasoned the acct enough to get it finally working, it is still limited to business codes (think of bigbox stores), not personal codes (think of farmers market, local mom-and-pop place, etc). The latter actually dominates the daily life in China.
IMO using V/M through wechat/alipay is like in the world you described and I was arguing UnionPay works in the US because ppl can buy gift cards at PO then use them at merchants, which is actually smoother comparing to this w/a business, but at the same time quite ridiculous.
unionpay uses pulse
People all over the world have often revolted to get some enterprises state run (nationalizing) and were often punished or even bombed for it.
All the other services and products I use in my life, from the car I drive to the clothes on my back, the food I eat and the device I write this on are provided by private enterprise and they have become much better and cheaper in my life time.
I don't think that your chance of survival of a heart attack or lymphoma got worse since 2016.
Doesn't matter if the 1% has now access to better versions.
Even Europeans are getting bigger, but America is way, way worse. Seeing those extreme landwhale-type people who cannot even walk around the mall and navigate it using a motorized cart, throwing bulk packages of horrible shitty ultraprocessed food and drinks into said cart, always makes me wonder how the hell is your healthcare system even capable of keeping them alive.
That is nothing short of a miracle, and should be taken into account in all international comparisons.
We're not discussing whether your healthcare system is friendly to the poor; everyone knows that the US is not particularly kind to its poor, in any aspect.
The original topic was if its overall quality declined in the last decade for the average American, who is not poor.
I'll be honest. I really tire of the mental gymnastics people put themselves through to make excuses for the American system. I don't think we have anything more to discuss here.
No, it’s the regulations. In less regulated, freer markets like vision correction eye surgery the costs went down and quality up. Even in health care.
But they're way cheaper than the US in heavily and properly regulated health markets too.
Nothing to do with cheap labour.
What has the US government done for American's lately outside of forcing people to buy healthcare and providing monetary support for families for a small window during covid? All we have is a political class that wants to fuck Americans raw until they pump every cent out of us.
Also the US has one of the most weakened labor classes in the world, come the fuck on. Corporations convinced our governments to sell out labor at every opportunity. You're acting as if it was the 1930s where there was a national strike every month until the Wagner Act.
Before you go there, you should answer: what has the Chinese government done for the Chinese lately? Is everything well in their society, labor and economy wise?
He said the labour cost is neghigible and not qualitatively different to the US. It's the availability of every part and tech you need in nearby supply centers and factories, the huge supply of appropriate resources, including the ability to have tens of thousands of expert workers on command for a fast new production run.
The story is told of when Apple did a last minute design change on the Iphone. As soon as the parts came in, 8000 Chinese workers were immediately called in at midnight to start a 12 hour shift. An Apple executive is quoted as saying that the “speed and flexibility are breathtaking.”
Currently the reality on Chinese assembly lines is those expert workers are working 12 hour shifts for 1 day off every 14 days, and earns about $800-$1,000 a month.
It's a huge problem in China actually, those 996-esque working schedule is everywhere now, normal 955 or even 965 schedule is almost non-existent among domestic private employers. The sad thing is that sometimes some Act (like EU supply chain law) forces factories to 955 schedule but those line workers are not happy, because that means they don't get overtime and are making minimum wages like $300 a month, not even enough to live a life. Chinese got five day work week because of WTO, yet now many have lost it.
But that margin isn't funneled to pay wages and improve living standards.
To say wages don't play a role it's more of a corporate narrative to wash those decisions.
If wages aren't a factor, why don't they raise wages and living standards for those workers?
That seems outlandish. My iPhone isn’t “rent”, neither is an Nvidia GPU, or an Instagram ad.
What if X >> Y? Why should we think otherwise?
What a great economic system with great morals that create moral societies.
Anyway a lot more than 20% of Americans are beneficiaries of some kind of pension or 401k or other source of income that is ultimately funded by the US stock market. And shares of the US stock market going up do not kill people who aren't having part of their income funded primarily by the stock market. People who think this is true and that society is therefore immoral badly misunderstand what the actual problems with producing goods and services for people are, which is the thing that actually matters for human health and flourishing.
I think people are misled by Marx and derivatives, and misdiagnose the problem. I don't think people are upset by the CEO making lots of money as much as they are by the HBS management style of using people as a tool, or even as interchangeable "resources". However, the philosophical materialism of Marx & Co. pretty much makes this inevitable. (The secular view is also materialism, so you get it on both sides.)
How about both? Both are pretty terrible for society IMHO. Some shithead's making 6000x of what average worker at their company because they're on top and they're treating everyone under them as interchangable tools with zero compassion. If they were limited to only making like 3x then they'd be on a much more equitable place with their underlings and might even be more likely to see them as fellow humans instead of disposable work units.
Also Adam Smith implied that unbounded avarice is irrational and disruptive to society.
The assumption is that morality survives grotesque wealth accumulation, we see many examples proving otherwise
Lots of people claim "greed", but the stereotypical Tech billionaire doesn't simply roll around in gold like Scrooge McDuck, doing nothing and demanding more. They invest and reinvest it into new enterprises.
Of all the ways of dealing with massive wealth, this is probably the second least disruptive one. (The first one would be just giving it to honorable causes.)
Ya know, just like the Sacklers and pushing oxycontin.
In 2026, we know that SpaceX is a huge success. In 2002, it was just one of very many space startups, the vast majority of which ended up bankrupt, and before the last Falcon 1 flight, it was already on the brink of bankruptcy. They were incredibly lucky that the last rocket they had money for actually reached orbit.
During the same time, John Carmack invested into Armadillo Aerospace, and lost money.
Was he less "greedy" than Musk only because in retrospect we know that one didn't pan out and the other did? Or were they both simply risk takers in an uncertain field, motivated by a mix of incentives?
This is not a I own stock am I culpable issue, it is a company knowing their product is dangerous and ignoring the issues because it doesn't make them more money.
Same shit as the tobacco industry. People do banally evil shit for money.
I think morality is quite hard to define and any system should take into account unboundedness of some human attributes (being greed, stupidy or other) in some humans.
Notice in my comment I mention nothing about taxes? Maybe people are mislead about neoliberalism? All it has done was sell out American jobs, get civilians addicted to drugs, and manufactured a political class that cares about donations over material needs.
This is an economic system that isn't even 50 years old and you're already going with the Marx scare quotes as if US branded capitalism hasn't already killed 10s of millions of Americans in the pursuit of profit.
Let's not even peel back the founding of this nation, a colonial white slaver state with minority protections baked into the constitution to impede people's chances of progress with every life.
Things that are paid for by economic surpluses. No profits, no investment, no taxes.
It's very much a matter of balance, you're not wrong that those services you mention are vital as are many others generally provided by governments. However it's all funded by a dynamic efficient economy.
The question of private wealth is the hardest, but private wealth by itself isn't a problem. The question there is, who should own and run productive economic activity. If it's not the state, it's private individuals. The wealth of billionaire industrialists doesn't consist of one big pile of money they wallow in, like Scrooge McDuck. It consists of their ownership and control of companies that do things in the economy.
Taking away that wealth means taking away those companies, and doing what with them? if you sell them to other private individuals, now they own and run those companies. If you can just take companies away from people like that, why would anyone build or buy them? If you take the companies into public ownership, now they're run by civil servants and politicians, but you'd have to pay for the companies, right? If you just seize assets, nobody is going to invest in anything that can be seized.
I do think inequality is a growing problem, but there are no easy answers.
You need capital to make pretty much anything. Somebody has to come up with a large amount of resources (money) put upfront into the venture. Capitalism creates the incentive for that - if the gamble pays off, then the investors get more value back. If it doesn't work out, then investors lose money. Most businesses fail early and do not provide a return for the investment.
The point of capitalism is to keep this system running. As a result of it we have made an ungodly amount of technological and quality of life improvements. Some people have become filthy rich from this, but typically they also provided the world with goods or services that people like and use. Tesla made Elon filthy rich, but it also made electric vehicles popular.
Making the rich richer isn't necessarily the point, but it is an unavoidable consequence.
> Capitalism is about producing stuff.
Humans have been producing stuff well before the concept of ownership was invented, and certainly well before the massive wealth accumulation that is the hallmark of capitalism.
If the goal is to reduce poverty, I fail to see how the existence of billionaires is a positive outcome, either now, in the form of Musk and his ilk; in the form of the robber barons of the late 18th century; or in the form of the noble lords of the feudal period to owned a lot but contributed nothing.
Regarding the idea that we can design a system where "no one should be left wanting," that sounds nice. So does big rock candy mountain. There is no such system.
Great, but it doesn't. The gap between the poor and the wealthy has only grown in the US, especially since Reagan's "trickle down" economics.
https://www.statista.com/chart/35953/inequality-wealth-gap-u...
The accusations against the working poor of "envy" are a barbaric slur. People just want to get valued fairly.
We see similar trends around the world. In fact, the countries that have struggled the most with stagnating standards of living are precisely those that have most aggressively imposed redistributionist policies.
Income inequality with rising standards of living for the median is only bad if your politics are driven by envy.
Every feudalist society began with the accumulation of capital. That's what land ownership is. It happened in mainland Europe and Britain, it happened in Russia, it happened in Japan. Any society with land-owning "lords".
How do you think they got to be lords? Hard work?
If the goal is to reduce poverty, the number of billionaire is actually irelevant. How you fund reducing poverty might influence the number of billionaires, but, for me it is more important what each society does for the poor, rather than counting how many are billionaires today.
You're so close. The only missing connection is the realization that billionaires exercise outsize influence, and will affect government policy to help themselves, not the poor. The only way for the poor to not have their voice silenced by the rich is to reduce the rich.
The people making profits are the ones providing food, shelter, and phones to you.
Reality is, those companies don't give anything back, just siphone all profits into tax havens so owners can take as much cash out of it as possible, in one form or another.
Their goal is to provide nothing back as much as they could. Look at their actions, not some empty PR statements.
California, Washington, and New York are about to find out what happens when they drive the wealthy businesses out of the state.
Massachusetts found out a few years ago. They decided they were going to heavily tax yachts that were built by the yacht industry in the state. What happened is the wealthy bought their yachts elsewhere, and the local yacht industry collapsed, and many thousands of skilled craftsmen lost their jobs.
The tax was rescinded.
I'm not worried about the guy making my sandwich at the corner deli. He's entitled to my money because he provides a valuable service.
I am worried about the owner of FoodCo, who plays golf all day while his employees run the company. He provides literally no service to anyone at all, but makes more money than any employee. He then uses his profits to buy homes in the area, so his employees can pay back half of their paycheck to him in the form of rent.
The owner of FoodCo put in a lot of their money upfront to make the company happen in the first place. Your deli guy wouldn't have a job if the FoodCo guy hadn't done what he did.
I know that it's hard for people from rich (and high population) countries to understand, but the high variety of goods and services that exist are a consequence of people investing into businesses. Without them many of these businesses wouldn't exist, because most people are not rich enough to be able to fund a business on their own.
This is blatantly untrue in the face of even a cursory thought. If the deli didn’t exist, that worker would have done any number of other jobs. Subsistence farming, doing deli stuff out of his house, maybe even community funding a coop grocery store.
That was how things worked at many points in human history. Instead of “private citizen makes $thing and collects rent” it was some variety of “municipality funds $thing for the community”. That just doesn’t extrapolate to a global economy well, for better or worse.
If a supermarket cannot be profitable in a small village, an investor isn't going to change that. The investor will invest in businesses that can be profitable.
> Your deli guy wouldn't have a job if the FoodCo guy hadn't done what he did.
People have had jobs since before civilization, and certainly before massive accumulation of wealth became the norm.
Unfortunately, this economic model has been proven to be wrong. If it were true, then we would have seen a decreasing gap between the rich and the poor. We didn't.
https://www.statista.com/chart/35953/inequality-wealth-gap-u...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/09/why-is...
As I've mentioned several times now, the growth of the wealthy in the 19th century corresponded with the movement of the poor into the middle class.
> If it were true, then we would have seen a decreasing gap between the rich and the poor.
What matters is the state of the poor, not the gap between rich and poor. Musk's wealth, for example, has no effect on my standard of living. Or yours.
Yes you keep on mentioning that, but I don't know why. Correlation is not causation. You haven't even proposed a mechanism of causality.
> What matters is the state of the poor, not the gap between rich and poor.
You keep on repeating that, and you keep on being wrong. You are parroting billionaire propaganda in the hopes of making people ignore injustice. In reality, in the US, living standards are falling for most people, while Elon Musk has no rational reason for possessing so much wealth.
> He provides literally no service to anyone at all, but makes more money than any employee. He then uses his profits to buy homes in the area, so his employees can pay back half of their paycheck to him in the form of rent.