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TSMC is having more luck building in Japan than in America
- helsinkiandrew 3y agohttps://archive.ph/PtzWL https://archive.ph/PtzWL
- ngcc_hk 3y ago[flagged]
- chrischen 3y agoThey got the American stuff too. Harder to notice because we're more used to it (McDonalds, KFC, American restaurants and bars, etc). Arguably Taiwan has stronger social and cultural ties to America than Japan since there are probably more Taiwanese Americans than Taiwanese Japanese.
- sgu999 3y ago> Taiwan has stronger social and cultural ties to America than Japan since there are probably more Taiwanese Americans than Taiwanese Japanese That's really not how it feels when you visit or live there. Geographical proximity and the inheritance of a couple decades of Japanese colonisation are likely much stronger factors than the economical and military ties to the US.
- chrischen 3y agoI would say the Japanese influence is in the infrastructure so it's more noticeable. But the American influences may come from the overseas young Chinese that repatriate and start businesses or contribute to the modern day culture.
- idiot-savant 3y ago[flagged]
- tomohawk 3y agoIf it moves, tax it. If it keeps on moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it. - Ronald Reagan
- iamtheworstdev 3y agoholy shit what a misquote. For anyone that wants the whole quote: > Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."
- nox101 3y agoEven that expanded quote doesn't entirely make it clear he was criticizing the government Here's the entire thing https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-state-chairpersons-national-white-house-conference-small-business https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-state-...
- tjpnz 3y agoIt's Ronald Reagan though. Should be clear to most with a very elementary understanding of US politics what he's saying.
- asah 3y agoThe US doesn't want domestic chip production, it wants chip production that's not at risk of the Chinese. As a very reliable partner, Japan works fine for this purpose.
- ksec 3y agoExactly. Along with South Korea. Which is why I find it strange US insist it has to be on US soil. When I dont see how they could compete without at least a yearly $10B subsidies.
- maxglute 3y agoAnything within 30minutes of PRC theatre missile range doesn't add any geopolitical security to US semi supply chain. Further extending semi supply chain to SKR/JP if anything is potentially worse than TW because US provides them with security guarantee, in region where US is weakest relative to PRC, making them even more enticing targets along with US security infra in those countries. The maximally secure supply chain one is on CONUS, and not because it can't be hit, but due to escalation risk of targetting CONUS.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- zbrozek 3y agoThe US doesn't want new domestic anything. We have made it nearly impossible to build housing, transmission lines, power plants, factories, etc. It seems like the only thing we still know how to do and also want to do is roads.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>It seems like the only thing we still know how to do and also want to do is roads. And military equipment.
- 3y ago
- jacknews 3y agoSo TSMC are getting paid by the Japanese government to build the fab, some local big tech-related companies have also invested and partnered, and Japanese workers are less 'truculent' aka more easily coerced, than Americans. I mean, companies should weigh the frictions of doing business in different regions, but it can't be the only consideration when it comes to global policy on where things are made and why.`
- downrightmike 3y agoChina's missiles can Taiwan, they can hit Japan just as easily.
- spywaregorilla 3y agoSome elementary geopolitics may disagree with you.
- weebull 3y agoIf labour relations are a problem in American then there's no way they are expanding into Europe.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoTSMC is already expanding in the EU, specifically in Dresden, Germany. Because EU skilled labor is much cheaper than US skilled labor and in some aspects US unions are more powerful than unions in EU. That's why the EU is already full of semi fabs and other kinds of factories. Worker's rights are not an issue when labor is 30% of what they would have to pay in the US for the same skill/talent. US skilled workers don't have it any worse than EU skilled workers, often way better. This isn't flipping burgers at McD's where you have no bargaining power and need unions and labor regulations to protect you. And you need a lot of skilled people to operate a heavily automated semi fab: PLC programmers, opticians, physicists, material scientists, contractors, HVAC, electricians, plumbers, construction workers, Q/A, etc and irrespectable of workers rights, all those have much lower bargaining power for high wages in the EU than in the US, due to market supply/demand. Otherwise there would be no investments in the EU and nobody would be making stuff here at all.
- kranke155 3y ago30%? You think they pay 30 percent US wages? You might be thinking of two very different things - in the US wages are higher but social benefits that employers pay for are lower. In the EU you might pay a lot more per worker than his wage since you pay much higher taxes.
- pylua 3y agoOver the past 10 years the us dollar has gained in strength a lot compared to other countries. Perhaps if we want to bring this stuff back into the country the currency needs to be devalued. I assume it will be naturally devalued over time, even compared to other countries, considering the national debt.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
- i_love_cookies 3y ago[dead]
- rayiner 3y agoI just got back from vacation in Japan. It’s completely unsurprising that American mid-skill workers are worse at cooperating on delicate large scale manufacturing than Japanese ones. The culture and habits of a country’s population makes a difference, and the coarsening of Americans has been quite apparent to me over the last 30 years. I bet this delta between US and Japanese workers wouldn’t have existed in 1960.
- kranke155 3y agoWhat? Really? You think the gap between 1960s American workers and Japanese workers was smaller?
- electriclove 3y agoIt was still wide then but even wider now.
- appleiigs 3y agoEspecially with the US social media trend of anti-work and quiet-quitting
- dingnuts 3y ago> the coarsening of Americans has been quite apparent to me over the last 30 years sorry, the what of Americans?
- pfisherman 3y agoI know! Who has ever thought of Americans as a particularly refined bunch? I know that we don’t think of ourselves that way.
- rayiner 3y agoHow old are you? When my family came to northern Virginia in 1989, it was quite polished, conformist, and orderly. The George H.W. Bush East-coast WASP culture still dominated. The current generation of “think for yourself” “don’t let anyone tell you what to do” kids was percolating through the education system, but they were not yet running anything. You can still see pockets of this. I was in Salt Lake City a couple of years ago and it was amazing. I was also in Iowa, and the older folks were pretty orderly, but you can see among the younger folks that southern redneck culture has been spreading.
- subtypefiddler 3y agoIt boils down to - Labor relations (unions in Arizona pushed back agains Taiwanese workers build the factory) - Local partners (Denso/Sony and Toyota investing in Japanese project, TSMC on its own in the US) - Subsidies (Japan delivered on promises, US didn't) - Ambition (12nm-28nm in Japan, 4nm in US) It seems the US gov is not very serious about it while Japanese gov surely is. It sounds self-inflicted. (edit: formatting)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- schainks 3y agoThe US government currently is inhabited by one political party whose goal is to hinder US interests in any way possible while complaining that the US doesn’t do enough to bolster said interests. So yes, part of the government is serious, while another part is serious about doing the opposite, which does produce the intended effect: public perception that the US government is not serious about these things. What it will take for all political interests to align for the sake of US interests? Probably turning off financial lobbying from shadow money groups.
- Pigalowda 3y agoSays you! I think it’s important for my political party to only a function when it has majority control over the executive, legislative, and judicial branches as well as majority control over provincial governance. Once we have that we can show our voters how disappointment really feels. It needs to feel so soul crushing we completely implode our party and die out in irrelevance. That’s my thoughts on it anyways.
- throwanem 3y agoHow dare you suggest a political party should offer some material benefit to its supporters in exchange for their effort and partisanship!
- huytersd 3y ago
- renewiltord 3y agoThe US is pretty good for a bunch of stuff. I'm hoping to one day also be a rent extractor. Like, all I have to be is a local organization somewhere and I can pull out some fictional required environmental review studies (waivable if you use our existing studies for $1.5 m) or required local community input (also waivable if you've used our org for outreach) or required hiring from my labour union. The US Gov supplies from a large pool of money. You just need a tiny fraction of that and you can parasitize to great personal wealth. Lots of sucker W-2 employees working while you can be a millionaire off other people's wealth. A startup that industrializes this process could do it to every project in the US and easily become a few billion. The hard part is concealing the relationship between the diverse entities, and watching out for the existing guys pulling this scam.
- selimthegrim 3y agoI have definitely seen an LLM for government grants startup fundraising
- shortsunblack 3y agoThe simple truth is that due to decades of lack of investment, chronic individualism, poor vocational schooling and inflated university degree costs, US workers cannot compete. They are less competent, less disciplined, less skilled. Some of this is due to no fault of their own, while some of this is also due to the culture. This manifests in every facet of American industrial capacity -- from "toothpick and tissue paper" home construction to most basic manufacturing like injection moulding, where moulds are used far past their serviceing periods to churn out margins.
- barry-cotter 3y agoAmericans capable of being productive at TSMC cost too much for TSMC to afford. They can get better paying jobs with better work life balance, easily. Japan has a similarly terrible work culture and is much poorer than the US, like Taiwan, so TSMC has much less cultural mismatch to deal with.
- VirusNewbie 3y agoThis is a great response that sounds convincing. Right now high IQ hard working americans can choose law, finance, medicine or software for a pretty high ROI. I think this is less true in other countries, so those capable folk might be more evenly spread throughout various engineering fields.
- rayiner 3y agoThis is true. My parents wanted a doctor and an engineer. And while my brother and I both got STEM degrees, we ended up in law and finance, because those fields pay way more. I’m convinced that this is bad for your average American. It’s good for the small slice of the population making high salaries at banks, law firms, advertising companies, etc. But that drives financialization of the economy, which is probably worse for the average worker. It might be better for the median American to cut down those industries and shift the economic mix to industries that create more solid middle class jobs.
- neonate 3y agohttp://web.archive.org/web/20240225085540/https://www.economist.com/business/2024/02/22/tsmc-is-having-more-luck-building-in-japan-than-in-america http://web.archive.org/web/20240225085540/https://www.econom...
- Guthur 3y agoKnowing the US modus operandi this was all a ploy to bleed TSMC while their own indigenous fab company (Intel) catches up.
- nebula8804 3y agoThat seems like an incredibly stupid idea if you know that Intel themselves messed up their leadership position in this field and you can't just magically steal the secrets to success here.