Initiateofthevoid

I don't know if you know how education works, but it takes time lol. But more importantly, they're beating countries that do invest much more heavily in education. They're beating everyone.

Like, sure. Yes. We agree. We should invest more in education for a lot of reasons... but guess what? Chip fabrication on their level isn't a college course, it's cutting edge institutional knowledge. They are the best of the best in chip fabrication right now. And if you want to provide Americans with the best education, you bring over the best of the best in the field, no?

Lmfao what is this conversation? Seriously, what is this with calling me a eugenicist? You really need to go actually learn about the topic at hand. The "chance and circumstance" isn't birth or genetics lol it's, like, the chance of Einstein being bored at the patent office.

Chip fabrication is literally the place where global market forces are actively working to cut corners on the fundamental structure of reality. These people shave off nanometers between semiconductors while stopping electrons from hopping the gap between one atom to another. You can't just "hard work" past them. They're not like "naturally" better, they're just currently winning a very challenging race, and it will take time for anyone else to catch up.

Eugenics themed? Lmfao what?

I'm not saying they're naturally smarter than other people lol. It has nothing to do with genetics. The answer to "why are they winning the race" isn't simple, and the answer to "how can the US surpass them" could fill a novel and still not provide a clear answer. They're beating everyone, not just America, and a lot of it comes down to chance and circumstance.

For the same reason the world believes it - because its true. They are the cutting edge. Other engineers can take over in the same way that other scientists could have taken over the Apollo program. It's possible, but it takes time, money, effort, and luck, and in the meantime the other nation(s) will land on the moon first.

All of the other companies are actively trying to beat TSMC and losing. Computer chips are the rocket engines of the digital age.

Nah. I get it, but no.

We have people here who can do this work

This is the one thing you keep missing. We don't have people here who can do the work. Straight up. All the big players send their engineers to learn from TSMC for a reason. Of all the labor, of all the capital, these people are the exceptions to every rule.

Capitalists went to extreme lengths to win the nuclear arms race. They will go to the same lengths to keep winning the digital arms race too. These engineers will never be billionaires on their brains alone - because you're right, they do not own the capital - but they do have a significantly higher value than any other laborers in the eyes of capitalists and therefore will never be deported to a rival.

Lol again, they're not labor. They don't have anything to do with the traditional capitalist-labor relationships. I am well aware of the reality you describe and I can still tell you, it doesn't apply here. Cutting edge chipmakers are the golden goose of the digital age. For best reference, see anything about the US' extreme efforts in collecting rocket scientists after world war 2. Capitalists know a golden goose when they see one.

... You really do not understand the nature of the game that's being played here, and that's okay. Feel free to keep thinking of world-class scientists as nothing more than indentured servants. Again, extremely xenophobic to dismiss their intelligence and personal volition, as if they're just slaves waiting for america to import them.

So many issues here. I'm sorry but you deeply misunderstand a lot of things about chip manufacturing.

These really, really, really are not laborers. They have nothing to do with labor. These engineers are effectively the same level of cutting edge as the scientists the US picked up after WW2. They are literally national resources - valuable pieces on the international game board.

No, they don't get deported to economic rivals. Ever. They are not cheap labor. They are line-item assets in the military-industrial complex.

H1B recipients are horribly abused, true. But that's because they're used the way capitalism uses everyone it considers replaceable - grind them down and move onto the next. Doesn't apply to - again - the literally best-on-the-planet engineers. They're not coding for Xitter, they can walk at any time and find employment and visas elsewhere.

cheap indentured labor from Taiwan

The extremely well-paid and literally best-on-the-planet chip manufacturers? The highly skilled engineers with years of education and expertise, who continuously outpace the achievements of much larger companies and nations? The ones who work in a narrow field that doesn't actually matter for jobs reports, because they're such a small group of experts and the real gain in jobs for the economy would be the labor involved in building the fabs for them?

Calling them "cheap indentured labor" is just casual xenophobia.

The buck doesn't start and stop inside the treasury. Most of this money was going somewhere, and people can fact check things like the actual terms of government contracts, past expenditures, congressional budgets, etc.

The real problem - as is always the case in this Age of Disinformation - is that the process of verifying facts takes time, while the process of producing lies is instant and constant.

They also intentionally frame a really bad thing as a "good" thing. The situation here is not that the "rich" run the economy - it's that everyone else is being priced out of the economy by wage stagnation and rising costs of living.

The alternate headline here is "wealth inequality surges, 90% of Americans now account for only 50% of consumer spending"

Or

"1 in 10 Americans spending as much as the other 9 combined, while 3 of them live paycheck to paycheck"

People earning 6 digits a year are still one bad accident or diagnosis away from losing their jobs and living in poverty. They're not the root problem or the solution to the economy, and this article is trying to paint them as both.

Instead we need to acknowledge that the people "earning" 8-10 digits per year are extracting and hoarding that money away from the 90% of Americans who would otherwise be spending it in ways that would actually improve the economy.