About all the semiconductor talk, unsurprisingly I think you people have it wrong. Semiconductor manufacturing is unlikely to 'return' to America for several reasons, and TSMC itself is certainly not happy or optimistic about the entire situation:
https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/10/24/tsmc-says-efforts-to-rebuild-us-semiconductor-industry-are-doomed-to-failOther factors:
* 52 billion dollars over 5 years is not much money when it comes to this stuff. TSMC spends 11 billion annually on R&D, Samsung has spent over 13 billion dollars on R&D in just the first three quarters of this year.
* Semicon companies have noted for a long time that American workers simply don't have it in them. People who work the floor in these plants put in long hours, long weeks, are always on call at all hours of the day. You need this constant presense from a limited pool of talent to keep efficiency high. The margins are thin.
* The latest sanctions hurt major chip producers bottom lines, all of them have protested what amounts to a destruction of their largest single sales market. This fall in future profits comes at the same time they're being coerced into spending many billions of dollars to expand production in an non-ideal locale. Capital isn't patriotic, you can be certain boards are trying to figure out a way to keep out of American reach.
And besides all this, the recent sanctions have political consequences. Everyone can see that these are aimed directly at China's consumer-level industries, and this fact has led to even milquetoast ABC commentators who almost always err on the side of their shit liberal predilections wake up and say "oh, this is a war." The conversation inside China is even more alarmed, and this serves to aid Xi in one of their biggest goals - to rebuild the Party from the decades of liberalization, reinvigorate political education and try to root out people who don't take their external threats seriously. So thanks for helping the quiet purge of the CPC, America. On the Taiwan province side of things, as the article notes, this is an attack on Taiwan's so-called "silicon shield". Tsai thought she could hide behind that forever because, like any reddit-tier shitlib, she didn't understand the nature of America. She and most of the DPP are too rigid and proud to recalibrate ofc, but surely at the back of their minds they are looking at the used condoms that are the HK protestors and thinking "us too?"
Yes, idiots, you too.
Edit: Further, this all takes places as America has been prosecuting and destroying the lives of totally innocent Chinese-born people, and investigating totally innocent ethnic Chinese born in America, for espionage under the China Initiative. It's all coming as hate crimes against Asian people has skyrocketed over the course of the pandemic and ramping up of the propaganda against China. You really think you're gonna get all the Chinese-speaking engineers of TSMC to head to America in these conditions? Some, sure. But millions of Taiwanese work and study in the mainland, it's not gonna break in America's favour in the end.
This post was edited by kusotarre1 on Nov 10 2022 08:10pm