2022 LC Thread—New Year, New Thread

I’d like to think that the world’s richest nation would be dominating in high-tech industries. Only punching 2x above our population share seems weaksauce.

US punches much higher than 10% in chip designs.

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Gave my 2010 Ford Fusion to my wife’s cousin when she went off to college last year, only had 100k miles on it. Wonder if that’s worth anything now, I don’t think it was then.

I like the info about this stuff, as someone who works in a manufacturing capacity I like reading about other parts of the industry. Not sure what goes into chip processing exactly but I could definitely do the PCB type stuff, that is very closely related to my industry.

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Seems there might be a lot more going on in Kazakhstan than protests over fuel prices.

Happy Birthday to the King. Got some examples of songs of his I like, honestly pretty impressive that a minor talent like Elvis managed to record all this:

2:33 in that last video is great, you see Fat Elvis but then he starts grinning and you see 1955 Elvis shining through. RIP to a real one.

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Li was a victim of child trafficking. In 1989, when he was 4 years old, a neighbor lured him away by saying they would go look at cars, which were rare at the time in China’s countryside.

That was the last time Li saw his home, he said. The neighbor took him behind a hill to a road where three bicycles and four other kidnappers were waiting. He cried, but they put him on a bike and rode away.

“I wanted to go home, but they didn’t allow that,” Li said in an interview with the Associated Press. “Two hours later, I knew I wouldn’t be going back home and I must have met bad people.”

He remembers being taken on a train. Eventually he was sold to a family in another province, Henan.

Just a thriving free market in children in action.

i think you are missing a lot of nuance and historical perspective if you just discount TSMC success as the set of circumstances for cheap labor.

That’s true and I’m doing it deliberately. Problems are sometimes easier to understand if you ignore the details at least at first.

there was real risk and foresight when gov’t of Taiwan decided to invest an astronomical sum for a moonshot at an industry dominated by americans in the 80s.

Yes, and it wasn’t certain that it would turn out well. But if Taiwan’s effort had failed, China might have become the big player. Or Korea. Or Vietnam. And the situation now wouldn’t be substantially different.

yeah, most companies are always chasing lower costs, but that’s not what makes them successful.

Well, I don’t know what makes them successful and I don’t think they really know either. People will look back and say with certainty that this was a good decision or that guy, he was a visionary, but I think they’re mostly wrong about that kind of thing.

i’m just saying, don’t write it off as a lesson of greedy capitalism.

Ok, but I see the situation as it was 30 years ago and as it is now and ask how we got from there to here. And my initial maybe not very useful answer is that a group of people made a series of decisions that were heavily influenced by emotion. Greed, but also fear. Expansion in the US was getting more difficult and expensive and existing fabs have a limited lifetime. They had to have looked around and seen the coming competition in Asia and decided they had to participate.

I’m not even saying this was bad compared to alternatives. I don’t know. But the global distribution of facilities, from corporate offices to assembly and packaging, has something to do with the current shortage.

Defense has an outsized influence on the market because they pay for research and are willing to pay more for specialized products like components that are resistant to radiation, operate at a wider range of temperatures, and are generally tougher and more reliable.

May be slightly out of date. Make me an offer.

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This is all true and yet it’s still consumer electronics that drives the industry. The demands of the electric car market vastly outweigh the Pentagon’s need for rad-hard materials for their space shit.

Hmm would be better to have said they have an outsized influence on the technology rather than market.

It’s a funny kind of inversion. In the 60’s NASA was like 90% of the demand for advanced electronics. Now it’s all 99.999% cell phones and Playstations.

Wow that is not the case here. I won’t get mine for a couple months. At my Mazda dealer, which is biggest one in my province, they have literally zero cars. The four inside the showroom are employees cars just so they have something to show people.

Typically they offer in the range of 60-70% of the value they expect to get.

Are Intel’s recent struggles a cause or an effect of these wider changes in the market?

Hey look another high ranking GOP politician riding those family values into power while being a sex criminal.

As someone who thinks about this way too often, since I’ve seen dementia ravage my mom’s and dad’s families, it sure seems like there could be easier ways. Like maybe OD on sleeping pills and have the wife leave a note?

I can’t imagine her wanting to be shot or him wanting to shoot her as a means of assisted suicide. It’s just so messy and there’s always that fear of still being alive in an even worse state. Although I guess that’s true for a lot of methods.

I just know I never want to get to where my uncle is now, in a home with no idea what’s going on or why his family abandoned him. He’s a good guy who doesn’t deserve that. I wish there was a say if I ever need to be admitted to a home for dementia, just kill me. But I can see there are all kinds of problems with that.

He was cognitively, emotionally, and physically exhausted from years of caring for his wife, and she had dementia. Not surprising at all really, just very sad.

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