American CHIPS Act

Lots of ink being spilled about the CHIPS act and how instead of bringing semiconductor manufacturing to America all it'll do is create more sinecures for niggers and fat women, because of course.

Hacker News has a thread on the topic and at first I was thinking how you gotta be careful with subsidies at scale. China has sent billions to semiconductor manufacturing but also lost a whole lot to scammers who then just go bankrupt and run out of the country. Only now it seems China is getting places with SMIC after decades trying.

The thread is hilarious tho. First post is some bizarre rant about genius black women

I actually knew one of these people who were fired: She was our housecleaner. And--like the supper-smart garbage man of the Dilbert Cartoons, she was very smart. Smarter than me. I know because she helped me solve some problems I couldn't solve on my own.

Why was she cleaning houses? Tragic story. No doubt she could have gotten a Ph.D., but she was older, had some health problems which wouldn't let her work 60-80 hours a week. And she was black, perhaps discrimination was a factor too.

Rrrrright. Cool story bro.

Some dude plugging South America (remember this is a post about chip manufacturing)

South America is very underrated. People still think about the region in 20-30 year old stereotypes, but most countries have gotten much more stable, economics have improved drastically. Workforce is highly educated, different countries share a very similar culture and mostly speak the same language, which means that a lot of things can be scaled much easier. Of course, there's also Portuguese, which is still somewhat similar, and Quechuan languages speakers who learn Spanish as a second language, but this doesn't change the equation much.

Highly educated! Quechuan speakers gonna make your next Apple Silicon bro. Trust me bro.

Anyway, seems TSMC was offering USD23/h to engineers at the Arizona plant and is having trouble recruiting. Lol. Lmao. Pretty sure they're doing that on purpose. I really doubt their Taiwan engineers are getting that little. Sure, they're not paid American salaries, but who is? You need that amount of money to isolate yourself from niggers and methheads; that's not an issue in Taiwan.

In my field, call it X, you can say the “black Xer” and everyone knows whom you mean, because there is only one. But there is now a slow trickle of genuinely good people from Latin America, though usually of pretty obvious Southern or Eastern European extraction (with an Italian or Slavic surname, for example).

Well yeah there's a trickle because every South American with a brain has been getting the fuck out. What's remaining there is gonna look very, very bad in short notice.

I've never been to South America, but I gather that objectively it improves from a low base, while America objectively degrades. The question is whether at some point North America and South America will converge to one big brown puddle.

The CEO seems like a pragmatic guy:

Read ~300 HN comments. All factual claims except a couple trivialities were completely incorrect.

Intel was going to build what it is building CHIPS act or not. The difference is speed of construction. Even the communitay education/training projects were already happening. I suspect the CHIPS act is the warm-up for what I suspect is Gelsinger's long term plan; make Intel the dominant player in a computing MIC analogue.

Further evidence not widely discussed

Where, South of Austin, is there a power grid capable of sustaining these factories? The slightest sag in external power delivery causes $$$$$$$ in losses from partial processing and knocks out lithography for ~week.

Russia lacks the scale to build special fabs for secure uses. Instead, they design their own chips, make small batches for testing, sends the final design to China or Taiwan for production, then does random testing on the result to look for any compromises. I don't know how risky that is.