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> [...] we moved because it cost less with no labor or environmental protections and we could work the shit out of people. TSMC was never in North America, it

by wheels 5y ago

> [...] we moved because it cost less with no labor or environmental protections and we could work the shit out of people. TSMC was never in North America, it was always a Taiwanese company. It's literally an Asian company moving production to the US. Taiwan isn't some rando poor Asian country; it's a rich democracy. The work culture is no doubt different (as it is, say, in Japan or South Korea), but to pretend that it has no labor or environmental laws is somewhere between racist and naive.

Tostino 5y ago
I didn't read that comment in relation to TSMC, but as a rebuttal to the GP's assertion that it was "people" who drove US production over seas over the past 40 years.
- asiachick 5y ago
  it was people who drove US production over seas. Consumers were always free to choose locally made products. They didn't, they chose cheap.
  - grogenaut 5y ago
    In this specific situation that's glossing things over as well. I would have chosen locally made except intel completely stalled their progress for years. In my recent upgrade I went with a TSMC (I believe) made AMD chip because it had better access to SSDs and PCI bus and cores that I couldn't get in an intel chip AND better prices. It's hard to buy local if local companies in fast evolving products are going to sit on their laurels.
  - 6510 5y ago
    I can only think of lame examples I'm sorry but there is this silly trend where careful expert design is replaced with letting the end user decide. To me this is just a sign of incompetence. The expert needs to carefully craft into the product what the user wants but only after careful examination. The lame examples would be to let the driver design the car, the passenger the aircraft or the patient the surgery room etc The story as told above on how production moved to cheap labor countries, jobs were lost as well as purchase power has a weird continuation where the decline of purchase power scales down production and makes life harder for the cheap laborer therefore more fragile. We shift from [the absurd] putting the consumer in charge of the economic decisions to having the "choices" made by (or more like making the results depend on-) people all the way at the bottom of the food chain. We are pretty much left collectively hoping that they can keep up with our unreasonably demanding demands. I'm not even complaining that we are squeezing people to hard. I have issues with a system that can just abruptly stop - entirely! Sure, I want cheaper products but I have no idea what kind of risks we are taking. I should not be the one to decide. I would rather have a large group of highly trained professionals calculate the risks and present them in a way we might understand. Make me a map of the [proverbial] meteor strikes and the global economic consequences. What parts of the show can go on if ingredient X is taken out of the soup? (edit: Ofc there is more than cheap labor pushing localized specializations which increase efficiency and decrease resilience)
Server6 5y ago
TSMC's largest customers are American though. Apple, Nvidia, and AMD. These companies sourced their chips internationally to TSMC for cost reasons, related mainly to labor. They're to blame. There's a compounding effect too. They could've purchased American chips and subsidized American foundries. They didn't and instead American foundries have fallen behind.
- wheels 5y ago
  The GDP per capita of Taiwan is higher than France. It's not the place you move jobs to to optimize for labor costs. Again, there's a pretty racist subtext here that because it's in Asia, you assume that must be cheap labor, not innovation. Would you have the same argument if the fabs were in France or Spain, both of which have lower GDPs per capita than Taiwan?
  - Scalestein 5y ago
    Calling this racist seems applicable but quite a stretch to me. From the article is seems workers in Taiwan work 12 hour days as normal. Couple that with the fact that manufacturing used by primarily US being done outside US borders is generally some for cost saving reasons and it seems to make sense to assume that Taiwan IS doing this cheaper somehow. If it were a matter of innovation wouldn't the same innovation hold in their new plant in Arizona?
    - wheels 5y ago
      The article is about engineers, not factory workers. Are you really telling me there's no culture of overworking for engineers in Silicon Valley? It's contrasting Arizona with Taiwan; I don't think this same article would be written about Silicon Valley vs. Taiwan. There's also a difference between what you're saying and what the great-grandparent said: being cheaper can be because they have better processes or are more innovative, or have shorter supply lines, or better access to mainland China or whatever. But the great-grandparent both (a) assumed that tech fundamentally belongs to the US, and if it's being done somewhere else, it's in service to the US, and (b) that the primary reason someone would produce things outside of the US is labor costs. Labor costs are no longer the primary reason things are produced outside of the US. At this point, it's primarily industrial capacity and know-how.
acoard 5y ago
As per the article: > Americans workers at TSMC’s Arizona fab may chafe at becoming the humble students of their mentors in Taiwan, who nearly 50 years ago transferred semiconductor technology from RCA of the U.S. It was more geostrategic rather than capitalist outsourcing that lead to the knowledge transfer, but after that transfer was complete, the economic factors mentioned by the person you're responding to would fully be in effect. A nontrivial part of Taiwan's economic success has been that knowledge transfer that enabled the creation of TSMC.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> TSMC was never in North America, it was always a Taiwanese company. This isn't about a particular company, it's an industry-wide trend. Semiconductor manufacturing was predominantly in the US, then it wasn't. > The work culture is no doubt different (as it is, say, in Japan or South Korea), but to pretend that it has no labor or environmental laws is somewhere between racist and naive. This is actually the root of the problem. The problem isn't the existence of labor or environmental laws, it's that many labor and environmental laws exist in the US that can't survive a cost benefit analysis, so the US loses manufacturing to countries with a more efficient regulatory environment. People act like regulation is some binary thing where the only choices are "on" or "off" when the reality is that the details are what matter.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  The article is about a specific company. People are commenting with generalizations that don't apply to TSMC and so it is rather unclear how these comments are on topic. The comments also don't acknowledge that they don't apply to the specific context of the article which makes them misleading and in need of correction.
- kixiQu 5y ago
  It is not necessary for the labor and environmental laws to be such that they "can't survive a cost benefit analysis" for them to create a force pushing manufacturing towards places without those laws. Any regulation will have this effect, and the details you speak of determine the degree.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    > Any regulation will have this effect, and the details you speak of determine the degree. There's more to it than that. The ban on leaded gasoline makes gasoline somewhat more expensive. If you multiply that by all the unleaded gasoline everybody has bought since the 1970s, that's a lot of money! But lead is really, really, really bad. That ban is cost effective even if it costs billions of dollars. Which it does, but the alternative is much worse. There are other regulations that cost just as much and provide nowhere near the same benefit. The deterrent effect on doing business in the US of both regulations is the same, but the benefit we receive isn't. And the deterrent is cumulative. There are advantages to doing business in the US. An educated workforce and a stable government etc. Companies move out when the cumulative regulatory deterrent exceeds the advantages. Which means you can have a ban on leaded gasoline without anyone leaving, because the cost of that doesn't exceed the other advantages of the US. Which means that anyone trying to repeal the ban on leaded gasoline is doing it wrong. But if you have a ban on leaded gasoline and 250,000 other regulations that each cost just as much but are barely breakeven if that on the benefit side, you exceed the threshold and lose the jobs. To get the jobs back, you have to get rid of some of the regulations. We need to get rid of the ones with a poor cost benefit ratio, not the ones with a great cost benefit ratio. Which is, to be honest, most of them -- but it's still really important that it be the right ones.
majormajor 5y ago
Painting it as a single company moving back and forth is an oversimplification but in a open market it's pretty close to "company located in US loses business to company located in less expensive country." Taiwan is hardly cheap but local labor-dependent stuff in Taipei seemed cheaper than the US when I visited - unlike Europe, say. Similarly, fewer workers seem to leave the US for better-paying jobs in Taiwan then vice versa. Googling salary estimates for EE jobs in Taiwan gives me ranges of up to 2.5M NT annual (90K USD) or 80K NT per month ($2900 USD). TSMC was also founded in 1987, Taiwan has changed a lot over the decades and at a certain point inertia works for a lot even as costs may even out compared to in the past. What were those salaries in 2000?
phkahler 5y ago
>> TSMC was never in North America... No, but their biggest customers were making chips in NA - Apple (via Motorola or Intel) and AMD.
namelessoracle 5y ago
Honestly reading the article Taiwan might have MORE labor protection laws.

by wheels 5y ago

Tostino 5y ago

I didn't read that comment in relation to TSMC, but as a rebuttal to the GP's assertion that it was "people" who drove US production over seas over the past 40 years.

asiachick 5y ago
it was people who drove US production over seas. Consumers were always free to choose locally made products. They didn't, they chose cheap.
- grogenaut 5y ago
  In this specific situation that's glossing things over as well. I would have chosen locally made except intel completely stalled their progress for years. In my recent upgrade I went with a TSMC (I believe) made AMD chip because it had better access to SSDs and PCI bus and cores that I couldn't get in an intel chip AND better prices. It's hard to buy local if local companies in fast evolving products are going to sit on their laurels.
- 6510 5y ago
  I can only think of lame examples I'm sorry but there is this silly trend where careful expert design is replaced with letting the end user decide. To me this is just a sign of incompetence. The expert needs to carefully craft into the product what the user wants but only after careful examination. The lame examples would be to let the driver design the car, the passenger the aircraft or the patient the surgery room etc The story as told above on how production moved to cheap labor countries, jobs were lost as well as purchase power has a weird continuation where the decline of purchase power scales down production and makes life harder for the cheap laborer therefore more fragile. We shift from [the absurd] putting the consumer in charge of the economic decisions to having the "choices" made by (or more like making the results depend on-) people all the way at the bottom of the food chain. We are pretty much left collectively hoping that they can keep up with our unreasonably demanding demands. I'm not even complaining that we are squeezing people to hard. I have issues with a system that can just abruptly stop - entirely! Sure, I want cheaper products but I have no idea what kind of risks we are taking. I should not be the one to decide. I would rather have a large group of highly trained professionals calculate the risks and present them in a way we might understand. Make me a map of the [proverbial] meteor strikes and the global economic consequences. What parts of the show can go on if ingredient X is taken out of the soup? (edit: Ofc there is more than cheap labor pushing localized specializations which increase efficiency and decrease resilience)

Server6 5y ago

TSMC's largest customers are American though. Apple, Nvidia, and AMD. These companies sourced their chips internationally to TSMC for cost reasons, related mainly to labor. They're to blame. There's a compounding effect too. They could've purchased American chips and subsidized American foundries. They didn't and instead American foundries have fallen behind.

wheels 5y ago
The GDP per capita of Taiwan is higher than France. It's not the place you move jobs to to optimize for labor costs. Again, there's a pretty racist subtext here that because it's in Asia, you assume that must be cheap labor, not innovation. Would you have the same argument if the fabs were in France or Spain, both of which have lower GDPs per capita than Taiwan?
- Scalestein 5y ago
  Calling this racist seems applicable but quite a stretch to me. From the article is seems workers in Taiwan work 12 hour days as normal. Couple that with the fact that manufacturing used by primarily US being done outside US borders is generally some for cost saving reasons and it seems to make sense to assume that Taiwan IS doing this cheaper somehow. If it were a matter of innovation wouldn't the same innovation hold in their new plant in Arizona?
  - wheels 5y ago
    The article is about engineers, not factory workers. Are you really telling me there's no culture of overworking for engineers in Silicon Valley? It's contrasting Arizona with Taiwan; I don't think this same article would be written about Silicon Valley vs. Taiwan. There's also a difference between what you're saying and what the great-grandparent said: being cheaper can be because they have better processes or are more innovative, or have shorter supply lines, or better access to mainland China or whatever. But the great-grandparent both (a) assumed that tech fundamentally belongs to the US, and if it's being done somewhere else, it's in service to the US, and (b) that the primary reason someone would produce things outside of the US is labor costs. Labor costs are no longer the primary reason things are produced outside of the US. At this point, it's primarily industrial capacity and know-how.

acoard 5y ago

As per the article: > Americans workers at TSMC’s Arizona fab may chafe at becoming the humble students of their mentors in Taiwan, who nearly 50 years ago transferred semiconductor technology from RCA of the U.S. It was more geostrategic rather than capitalist outsourcing that lead to the knowledge transfer, but after that transfer was complete, the economic factors mentioned by the person you're responding to would fully be in effect. A nontrivial part of Taiwan's economic success has been that knowledge transfer that enabled the creation of TSMC.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

> TSMC was never in North America, it was always a Taiwanese company. This isn't about a particular company, it's an industry-wide trend. Semiconductor manufacturing was predominantly in the US, then it wasn't. > The work culture is no doubt different (as it is, say, in Japan or South Korea), but to pretend that it has no labor or environmental laws is somewhere between racist and naive. This is actually the root of the problem. The problem isn't the existence of labor or environmental laws, it's that many labor and environmental laws exist in the US that can't survive a cost benefit analysis, so the US loses manufacturing to countries with a more efficient regulatory environment. People act like regulation is some binary thing where the only choices are "on" or "off" when the reality is that the details are what matter.

shkkmo 5y ago
The article is about a specific company. People are commenting with generalizations that don't apply to TSMC and so it is rather unclear how these comments are on topic. The comments also don't acknowledge that they don't apply to the specific context of the article which makes them misleading and in need of correction.
kixiQu 5y ago
It is not necessary for the labor and environmental laws to be such that they "can't survive a cost benefit analysis" for them to create a force pushing manufacturing towards places without those laws. Any regulation will have this effect, and the details you speak of determine the degree.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > Any regulation will have this effect, and the details you speak of determine the degree. There's more to it than that. The ban on leaded gasoline makes gasoline somewhat more expensive. If you multiply that by all the unleaded gasoline everybody has bought since the 1970s, that's a lot of money! But lead is really, really, really bad. That ban is cost effective even if it costs billions of dollars. Which it does, but the alternative is much worse. There are other regulations that cost just as much and provide nowhere near the same benefit. The deterrent effect on doing business in the US of both regulations is the same, but the benefit we receive isn't. And the deterrent is cumulative. There are advantages to doing business in the US. An educated workforce and a stable government etc. Companies move out when the cumulative regulatory deterrent exceeds the advantages. Which means you can have a ban on leaded gasoline without anyone leaving, because the cost of that doesn't exceed the other advantages of the US. Which means that anyone trying to repeal the ban on leaded gasoline is doing it wrong. But if you have a ban on leaded gasoline and 250,000 other regulations that each cost just as much but are barely breakeven if that on the benefit side, you exceed the threshold and lose the jobs. To get the jobs back, you have to get rid of some of the regulations. We need to get rid of the ones with a poor cost benefit ratio, not the ones with a great cost benefit ratio. Which is, to be honest, most of them -- but it's still really important that it be the right ones.

majormajor 5y ago

Painting it as a single company moving back and forth is an oversimplification but in a open market it's pretty close to "company located in US loses business to company located in less expensive country." Taiwan is hardly cheap but local labor-dependent stuff in Taipei seemed cheaper than the US when I visited - unlike Europe, say. Similarly, fewer workers seem to leave the US for better-paying jobs in Taiwan then vice versa. Googling salary estimates for EE jobs in Taiwan gives me ranges of up to 2.5M NT annual (90K USD) or 80K NT per month ($2900 USD). TSMC was also founded in 1987, Taiwan has changed a lot over the decades and at a certain point inertia works for a lot even as costs may even out compared to in the past. What were those salaries in 2000?

phkahler 5y ago

>> TSMC was never in North America... No, but their biggest customers were making chips in NA - Apple (via Motorola or Intel) and AMD.

namelessoracle 5y ago

Honestly reading the article Taiwan might have MORE labor protection laws.