[flagged]
This stuff is all blood, sweat and tears to get it done, and to be honest a culture.
You can't just buy it off the shelf. If that was possible everyone would have gone paid for it like an Ikea product years ago.
The inability to cope with failure is a culture that is common in Europe. Failure is so personally devastating, so destructive to social and cultural standing that not only must you not take risks but other people must be actively prevented from taking risk.
Maybe the US investment doesn't work, but the US will have tried at least. Taiwan is, ironically, the perfect example of where the initial impetus came from the government because there was no culture of risk-taking. Parts of Europe have a savings culture that is very similar to Taiwan and led to very poor growth and very high inequality.
If the US keeps trying, they will succeed. On here, the view was that China could never build out this capacity, they did. The only way to guarantee failure is to never try.
Older article, but seems like things are going pretty ok?
The Taiwanese are doing a lot to try get it up but all the reports on the ground level are rough.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ts...
USA passed the CHIPS Act and is spending close to a trillion dollars to strategically re-home all of TSMC's most advanced fab technology to Arizona as a matter of national security. Monetary losses don't matter when the point is to not be reliant or China in the event of South China Sea conflict.
I think the point of this article, and the warnings from ASML, is that Europe is not making the same effort.
Like are you really going to buy a chip that costs 70% more out of national pride? Might work on some but think that very few else will sign up for that.
You'll do that because of national adversity?
People really don't understand how this stuff is borderline magic turning silicon into these things. There's so much that can go wrong at every step, it's the most advanced manufacturing process on Earth.
Once upon a time chips went down in value but I don't think that's happening anymore, lot of other people seem aware of that. Not to mention the semiconductor talent is getting eaten up like pancakes everywhere.
And that's largely because the average Brit has terrible beliefs that actively make them poorer. A shockingly high percentage of people believe that building more houses won't lower costs.
I make average US wages, have my entire adult life. I cannot afford a house in my city unless I buy a literal ruin in the ghetto. The suburbs are far more expensive, and that's where the McMansion complexes are. I don't know who's buying them, but it isn't me and likely never will be.
Very disingenuous counterpoint.
Also corner shops should be allowed everywhere.
People should be able to build where they want.
We can have reasonable restrictions around noise and pollution, but not on the land use itself.
Scotland is a good example: every government since the mid-2010s has been elected on the explicit promise to build more houses, they cannot do so because of the electoral consequences so they attempt to build council houses, it is impossible for the government to build enough council houses to make up for multiple decades of underbuilding (this problem has accelerated significantly whilst they have been promising to build housing, had explicit targets, etc.), but at the next election they make the same promises (and people vote for them because there is no alternative).
The really strange thing is that people also see the massive growth in student housing in Scotland. Again, very good for politicians: more conservative foreign students can't vote, domestic students will vote left-wing.
The politics of this topic are very strange. The public is still at the stage where they think in vague terms that the problem is a lack of housing.
I believe the problem is worse in Scotland because the growth in council housing in the 60/70s was organised in order to create this permanent bloc vote. The same has happened in London where you have whole constituencies where 70% of the effective vote is void.
This doesn’t add up. Promising to get more housing built is getting these people elected, but they can’t make good on this promise because then they will lose their election?
Politicians continue with the lie that they will build council houses. Voters continue with the lie that voting will change the outcome.
That's a conspiracy theory and a half!
A lot of the new student accommodation being built is privately owned. They're chasing the (pre-Brexit/pandemic) overheating market for student accommodation that resulted from the universities targeting international students for the inflated tuition fees they can charge, and in some cases have features explicitly advertised to international students as positives (e.g. some of the ones in Nottingham have built in rice cookers as standard).
However, some of the properties are at risk of becoming unviable (i.e., lying empty or having to be turned over to housing non students [0]) because of a combination of Brexit and tightened immigration rules reducing international student numbers.
If they're being built as some kind of social engineering it would be a really convoluted way of going about it.