8 ms·

It wasn't just intel, it was every semi-conductor manufacturer in the valley (hence the inability to find other work). They closed because it was cheaper to bu

• gentleman11 3y ago
  How long until all those new workers are laid off again as intel goes back to overseas fabs?
  • speed_spread 3y ago
    Add the numbers get bigger and the risks increase, the number of "cheap labor" countries where investments in large tech infrastructure are safe is shrinking every year. Maybe South America? Intel has (had?) a fab in Costa Rica...
    • golergka 3y ago
      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. The only thing the region lacks is investment and ecosystem to attract and protect it.
      • ethbr1 3y ago
        Venezuela's perpetual political/economic fuck-ups (going on 125 years at this point? [0]), Argentina's recurring currency fuck-ups, some really nasty left-wing vs right-wing spats between countries, and a generally weak rule of law / judiciary (in comparison with executive branches) deserve mentioning too. South America could stand to learn a LOT from ASEAN -- stability = international investment = economic growth = happy people = stability. In contrast, in South America inveterate bickering about politics dominates and you end up with something like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Supranational_American_bodies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Supranational_Ameri... I hope it sorts itself out! And I know Columbia and Brazil are developing some impressive technical industries, especially since they share North America timezones. But it should be honest about the headwinds. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_crisis_(disambiguation) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_crisis_(disambigu...
        • truculent 3y ago
          The problem is that the “stability” and invesment interventions from the USA has typically come with some rather unpleasant strings attached. I think it’s either patronising or ignorant to suggest that various Latin American countries policy decisions weren’t made with that in mind.
          • ethbr1 3y ago
            It doesn't have to be US investment!
• WWLink 3y ago
  Honestly it blows my mind they were able to give control of one of the most important industries in the world over to a foreign country like that.
  • whimsicalism 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • TuringNYC 3y ago
      >> i find this rise in nativistic and jingoistic sentiment weird. comparative advantage exists for a reason - we are not going to be the best at every single step of every single industry. There are more considerations than just profits. Consider how domestic PPE plants closed down in the US because even US gov institutions wanted the cheapest product, and went overseas. Then when COVID hit, we had no local supplier for PPE.
    • xcv123 3y ago
      This is common sense and has nothing to do with nativism or jingoism. The offshoring was an action of pure selfish greed at the expense of the working class people who built the industry.
  • chpatrick 3y ago
    Brain drain is a bitch
  • TuringNYC 3y ago
    >> Honestly it blows my mind they were able to give control of one of the most important industries in the world over to a foreign country like that. The engines of capitalism only look 1 quarter ahead. And the politicians who support them only look up to the next election. Unless you are majority or largely controlled by your founders, who care about building a good legacy.
    • shiroiushi 3y ago
      Exactly. It's why authoritarian and/or single-party nations have so much more potential to succeed. It's why China did so well for a while. However, in practice, as we've seen with China and others, authoritarianism only works well when the people at the top are really smart and don't have some major character flaws (i.e., the "benevolent dictator"). Eventually, you get a dictator who's a narcissist or moron or fruitcake and it all falls apart. In that case, the best case is that the inner circle will murder him in his bathtub and select a better leader before he ruins everything.
• postpawl 3y ago
  > nice job, if you can get it TSMC is paying around $23/hour to manufacturing technicians in Arizona. They’re also sending people to Taiwan to get trained and apparently it’s brutal enough that most people drop out of the program. Asianometry did a video on this recently: https://youtu.be/Nk-lBok9_TU https://youtu.be/Nk-lBok9_TU
  • rayiner 3y ago
    Yikes. I think my local Dunkin’ Donuts is paying $16+.
  • ruined 3y ago
    i've done better than $23/h making pizza
    • TomK32 3y ago
      I just hope you don't loose your love for pizza.
      • ufocia 3y ago
        Or lose your pizza making wages to wafer makers applying their wafer making skills to pizza making.
        • ruined 3y ago
          they already have that, it's called dominoes. there's still a market for tattooed freaks with culinary opinions throwing dough and poking a fire with a stick
      • ruined 3y ago
        my love for pizza is surprisingly resilient, and the job was athletic enough to generate a healthy appetite. but yeah, most of my coworkers had a hard time doing it sober
    • ufocia 3y ago
• typ 3y ago
  It's wasn't just the semi-conductor manufacturers either. The PRC had the supply chain from the bottom up (to some extent funded by the western consumers and corporations), whereas the US is trying to get reindustrializd from the top down, without first building a solid fundamental. To make the tough jobs easy, you must have the easy jobs done well first.
  • coliveira 3y ago
    Exactly. That's why this has everything to go wrong. You cannot create the talent and the supply chain needed for this with $8B. The US needs to solve much more fundamental things like their schools and the local supply chain to even have a shot of creating a successful chip business again.
    • rhelz 3y ago
      Recall, it takes years to build these fabs. Fortunately, people will be more likely to spend years in grad school training for these jobs, if they know that when they graduate there will be fabs to hire them. Rebuilding is a chicken and egg problem, but it’s not as hard as defeating the axis powers in WWII. If this country has the Will to do something, it’s gunna get done.
      • roenxi 3y ago
        This is harder than defeating an enemy militarily. Defeating someone militarily is relatively simple to do; and every country figures it out from necessity. It is an expensive process, but ultimately mainly about deciding that the high price is worth it (and if the country can afford it/has the industrial base to sustain the effort, but neither of those things can be changed in a conflict). Building a profitable industrial chain is significantly harder to do and much rarer to achieve. The US certainly has the people to do it, but it isn't clear that the political trade-offs will be acceptable.
        • coliveira 3y ago
          Also remember that the US was at the top of its industrial power during second WW. This time has passed long since. Nowadays it would have a hard time outproducing China and Russia, so I don't think that even a world war would be a solution (not considering the fact that a new WW could be the end of the world itself).
• anonuser123456 3y ago
  >They closed because it was cheaper to build in other countries, or to outsource from contractors who build in other countries (where organized labor doesn't exist). The U.S. lost thousands of high-paying (and tax-paying) labor positions and atrophied the skills that went with them. Intel profited from it. How about asking the workers in other countries who benefitted from this transaction if they were happy with the arrangement? Or do only Americans matter? Maybe you think foreigners are fit only to till dirt fields as subsistence farmers?
  • democracy 3y ago
    In many of the countries with cheap labor the ones who profit the most are not the workers as you try to imagine this nice idea )))
  • brvsft 3y ago
    There's a certain irony in the point being made by that person because they think it means organized labor is good, and lack of it is cheap and bad. Those workers could get the job done just the same without the overhead of labor unions, and this person still thinks that the 'cheapness' means that organized labor is magically better. You won't get an earnest answer though. Perhaps some nonsense about how these workers would be even better off with organized labor (until their jobs move to the next, cheaper bidder, of course).
  • gen220 3y ago
    > How about asking the workers in other countries who benefitted from this transaction if they were happy with the arrangement? I'm sure they were happy with the arrangement, they benefitted from it in the short-term. You should speak with Foxconn workers today, though. The story is more nuanced. > Do only Americans matter? This is a weird claim to bestow on my original post. Labor conditions matter. The balance of power of power and profits between labor and capital matters. I promise you, semiconductors did not move production to ${foreign_country} out of the goodness of their hearts, to better the living conditions of ${foreign_country}'s impoverished underclasses. They did it because the balance of power (and profits) had shifted towards labor in this country in the 40s, 50s and 60s, and the population of ${foreign_country} was cheaper to exploit. It's also worth pointing out (again) that a disproportionate of people in manufacturing in California semiconductor industry were 0th or 1st generation immigrants (from the Philippines, Mexico, China and so on) or internal refugees from the Jim Crow South who migrated to California for military work during WW II. These were people who were literally at most 1 generation removed from subsistence farming. > Maybe you think foreigners are fit only to till dirt fields as subsistence farmers? Again, a weird claim to stick me with. Humans working in manufacturing should be free to negotiate living wages, safe and healthy working conditions, reasonable time off and retirement policies, illness/disability insurance, and so on. The reason U.S. companies prefer "foreigners" (domestically and abroad) is not because foreigners don't deserve these things as much as any other person, it's because they know they can get away with exploiting them for a few decades before they develop class consciousness. In the last few years, workers in China have been striking to demand what workers in California fought hard for 70-80 years ago. Entirely coincidentally, Foxconn began "diversifying" its manufacturing capacity into India and other countries. Do you think it's because they want to help uplift people from subsistence farming? :)
• creato 3y ago
  > They closed because it was cheaper to build in other countries, or to outsource from contractors who build in other countries (where organized labor doesn't exist). The U.S. lost thousands of high-paying (and tax-paying) labor positions and atrophied the skills that went with them. Intel profited from it. This doesn't make sense, Intel did and still does most of its manufacturing in the US, didn't it? (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_sites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si...) I assume the thing that changed if there was a major loss of jobs was automation, not outsourcing. It's a lot easier to keep a clean room clean if you don't need to let people (with their hair and dead skin particles) in.
  • gen220 3y ago
    Their DoD and Dod-adjacent business (read: high-nanometer) processes are largely in the U.S. Their consumer and server business (read: low-nm) processes are largely international. The wikipedia page you linked evinces this statement. The phrase "most of its manufacturing" is a Simpson's Paradox statement. It's true, but not in a way that's interesting. High-nanometer processes are easier to automate.
    • creato 3y ago
      All of the "low-nm" process fabs on that wiki page are in the US (with one in Ireland).
      • gen220 3y ago
        I went down a bit of a rabbit hole to try and find manufacturing stats per fab, and it's pretty difficult to find. First, it's worth noting that most of the <300nm fabs in the U.S. are really new. The Oregon facility was historically the most relevant fab, Arizona seems to be (potentially?) supplanting it from a design and capacity POV. But the Israeli fab really shouldn't be discounted, they employ 12k people in Israel. I can't find numbers on production output, but that headcount is a similar OOM to the Oregon plant. Most of their successful, recent designs came from Israel, too. The Ireland fab employs 4.5k people. There's 22k in Oregon, unclear on the breakdown of manufacturing and R&D/non-manufacturing roles. As I understand it from said rabbit hole, they do a lot of design and "proofing" manufacturing of low-nm processes in Oregon, but rely on Ireland and Israel to scale-up. It seems that the recent (i.e. post-9/11) Arizona plants are more geared towards high-volume production. Regardless of what calculations went into those decisions, they're a hedge against political instability in Israel.
• _heimdall 3y ago
  > Now, the taxpayer has to pay Intel $8.5B to bring back manufacturing capacity to the U.S The tax payer had nothing to do with it. This is yet another example of the government taking our money (or borrowing our future money) and spending it in ways that we never agreed to and had no input on.
  • ethbr1 3y ago
    > in ways that we never agreed to and had no input on. You don't vote in local, congressional, and presidential elections?
    • mcbuilder 3y ago
      If this is Biden's initiative, then the alternative is Trump? I'm sure there could be a technocratic rational non-idealogical third party that would get a bunch of HN voters but does any viable third party actually exist? Fixing our education system is a lot bigger problem then we've ever been able to tackle as a country by popular initiatives.
      • _heimdall 3y ago
        The fact that Trump and Biden are the two candidates we've been offered is a sign of a much more fundamental, and disappointing, problem. I don't think anyone would agree that those two are the best candidates this country has to offer, and most people I've talked to about the election feel stuck picking between which one is less bad.
    • _heimdall 3y ago
      Find me a candidate that had any input on this Intel investment that campaigned on giving billions to Intel to onshore chip manufacturing. Maybe they do exist, but I don't remember it coming up. Also to clarify, local elections wouldn't have helped here. Congressional and presidential elections are a different beast, The Machine (reference to the University of Alabama) heavily influences elections and elected officials. I do vote, but I have little faith that such a massive and heavily funded political system allows my vote to count for more than winning a seat. I've been regularly disappointed by those I've voted for when they inevitably ignore or break promises they campaigned on and make decisions that often fly in the face of the very principles they originally claimed to stand for.