Just a note for those interested in the current state of things, this bill is currently in conference between the House and Senate to marry the bills to one another as the initial versions in each was significantly different. Likely in the coming weeks we'll see an announcement of a new final bill from the conferees (think leadership of each party and the influential congresspeople) and then the new bill will be voted on quicklyish barring some unexpected political event that takes precedent. But they will need to do it soon as there are not that many days left on the legislative calendar. For those interested in staying up to date, I recommend Punchbowl news highly, they had a newsletter a few weeks ago with a good amount of info. https://punchbowl.news/archive/4-25-22-punchbowl-news-am/
I think that's an oversimplification. Do stakeholders have lots of input? I'm sure, after all, I also wouldn't build a product without asking potential end users what they really wanted. But with something this high profile (and with an actual chance of passing, unlike most bills in Congress), I'd guess that Congresspeople are actually personally invested in their priorities that are in the bill (maybe those are partially written by industry, maybe not).
While more R&D is good, if their intent is to stabilize the production markets other changes are likely required.
It must be at least moderately profitable to build and run _new_ fabs that produce the simple 'jelly bean' components that have been in dire shortage.
Inventories, both of sellable common 'ingredients' and also of shelf stable commonly desirable outputs should probably be reflected differently on asset books. Cutting buffers to the bone should not be good accounting practice as that encourages vulnerability. Laws need to change how that accounting is performed.
This article[1] says that in some states it's included in what you have to pay property tax on. That seems like it would push businesses to keep less than would otherwise be optimal.
Yes, and no. Profit is profit and is taxed. After making a profit companies have the option of what to do with their profit.
They can dividend it, use it as capital, or use it to increase working capital (like stock.) Some tax environments tax dividends further, thus making it attractive (or cheaper, depending on you pov) to reinvest the profit in the business.
Of course working capital (stock on hand) can also be increased by other means - for example a loan or a capital injection.
Lastly, raw stock (pile of chips) is easy to value for stock-taking purposes (usually cost basis.) partially, or in some cases completely, finished goods is trickier. They could be valued at cost, at zero (a half finished controller is worth, what?)
Generally companies keep as much as they need, ideally no more. But the right number can be a moving target. We've been erring on the high side for a while now.
Companies should not spend billions on stock buybacks instead of keeping their factories in running order but the recent baby food issues in the US show that isn't always the case.
It's not one or the other, they can do both. You think that a company would rather do a stock buyback and NOT keep their factories in running order so their stock will tank right after they buy back their stock at a higher price?
Just keep the MBAs with their Midas touch away from basic tech. Engineers are good enough at math to balance the books, it's not really harder than balancing a checkbook. I had better finances as a high school student than most Wall Streeters at the peak of their career. Got alpha they didn't, accounting for real is just mathematical horse sense.
One of the big problems in the US is accounting for inventory. If you're buying "tax-free" from a supplier, that part goes "onto your books" when it goes into your inventory. If you don't put that part into a product and sell it relatively quickly, you owe tax on that part as it sits on your shelf.
There are some other issues with inventory taxation like how fast you can depreciate it (ie. for tax purposes, chips are treated like mechnical inputs even though chips depreciate MUCH faster).
This all strongly discourages holding inventory.
And even engineers running companies will come to that conclusion.
> If you're buying "tax-free" from a supplier, that part goes "onto your books" when it goes into your inventory. If you don't put that part into a product and sell it relatively quickly, you owe tax on that part as it sits on your shelf.
I admit to not being a CPA, but that... doesn't make a ton of sense to me. What sort of tax do you pay on inventory?
My understanding is that it's not tax that's the issue, but the tying-up of capital in inventory that's generally being minimized. If interest rates are 3% and you have $1M in inventory, that's $30k per year in interest you're paying in order to hold that inventory, plus the physical costs of warehousing it.
And the MBAs naturally look at cutting costs as the fastest and most direct route to improving profitability.
Can't you sell it next year? And you know what? At some point somebody has to lose money to the tax collector. You can't deduct everything, can't shunt it all onto the customer (typically a leaf-node employee, someone at the bottom of an org chart). The business has to be profitable by enough that it can eat some taxation. Or what, you expect the orphan to do it instead?
Has to push through friction for others. And plus, cost of goods of unsold inventory isn't that painful if you actually are making huge margins on it, like you ideally should, because you built a better mousetrap that was that much better that you could protect it from copycats with patents and therefore let everyone benefit enormously from it.
In the end, the businessman must be creative. Must be an inventor, basically. Or a leader. And so in order to overcome that friction for the sake of the orphanage, the businessman must resolve friction in nature, some inefficiency of some sort, something that could be much better than it is. Something ineffective that could be effective. Plant a seed and reap two.
Suck up those taxes! Suck them up! Just pay them! Subordinate yourself to the authority of the State that governs the place you do business, it's the least you can do.
Don't cheat the orphanage! Push through the friction!
The State of California gave me a huge break that I would have never gotten on my own. I did the math and the taxes I pay turn into that help at a 1/1000000 (one millionth) efficiency rate. That's awesome, that may be a high hurdle for everyone else but for me it's a great deal, because I can get speedups as great or greater, with just that help they gave me. So in fact a 1000000000x (one billion times) speedup was possible directly due to this break they gave me, so the ROI is already 1000x (a thousand times). And once they unlock that, hey that's just the beginning, sky's the limit! That 1Bx speedup (1 billion times) is actually an undersell, I could have kept going and gotten a 1000000000000x speedup (trillion times) and kept going and going beyond that, literally ad nauseam (numbers that would sicken you by looking at them, literally that). It's just a trillion-x speedup is too big, people get dizzy, there's no metaphors, people distrust the problem you're solving if you get that speedup, it's better to say a billion. There's metaphors for that (difference between wheelbarrow of dirt and a mountain, two seconds and the human lifetime, jumping a foot off the ground and going to the Moon). It's the biggest number that really fits in people's heads.
But they're both still big speedups that vastly overcome the meaningless 1000000x hurdle that taxation and redistribution impose.
Advice: value the taxes you pay at more than 0%. Fine, not 100% or more, but not 0% or less. Say 20%, to start with. Start by reducing what you deduct from your taxes, limit that to the things the State really doesn't want you paying taxes for. But on business lunches! Dude cough it up completely!
And in the process get rid of the tax lawyers and accountants who tell you to do contortions for tax reasons. Then you'll see your business with clarity.
If you get 1 trillion x anything taxes won't be a factor in your ability to get money. At that multiplier my pocket change becomes the entire world economy.
So I wonder if anybody here could compare what Phoenix has vs Hsinchu in Taiwan. It seems like the closest the US has to what Taiwan has.. (Intel, new TSMC, various other fabs are there).. so making Phoenix the Mecca of semiconductor jobs in the US seems like a pretty smart goal .. while the federal govt loves to spread money around it seems wise to just say let’s be real folks, it’s way easier / efficient to pour gas on an existing fire than to build totally greenfield.. like pump tons of cash into the AZ universities for semiconductor work. But I wonder if people have some history / perspective on why people don’t say “oh you want to work in semi area? Go to Phoenix..”..
Seems a bit strange that Phoenix would be a desirable place to build a fab, given how water-intensive most processes are. Yes, the water can and should be recycled... but it just seems weird to build a plant like that in one of the parts of the country that will probably never have enough fresh water, compared to other areas where they can't get it out of the way fast enough.
Is it the labor pool there that makes it attractive? Energy costs? Something about state/local subsidies?
The reason I heard is that Phoenix is seismically stabile, and weather stabile. Both of those things can cause power outages which are incredibly expensive at a fab.
Quakes and flooding can kill generators. You can be smart and build them on elevated earthworks, but if the event is severe enough something will fail.
Rather feasible with a set of natural gas turbine plants. Pipelines and local storage would be expensive but doable - depending on the economic damage of the plant going offline. Cost share it with a data centre facility to reduce the per megawatt cost even further.
I mean, so too is a genset a powerplant. It's really just a question of scale and generation capacity. Imagine we're talking about a cell versus a battery. Same thing really.
Phoenix is geologically dead, no seismic disruptions to mess up any of the lithographic processes. Also the region is a desert (Arizona seems like a clever way to say the science fiction sounding “Arid Zone,” doesn’t it?) so it shouldn’t be prone to flooding, though lots of potential for static electricity, iirc, but I guess these companies have some way of easily preventing that?
Ironically the new TSMC plant is being built down the street from a place that uses dynamite for its rock quarry. I live about the same distance from the quarry as TSMC is and I can sometimes feel/hear them when they use explosives. I wonder if they know yet, lol.
Doesn't a fab need to consume tons of water? That whole southwest are of the US is entering longer and longer periods of drought. Seems like setting up shop further north into a water-rich area would be better.
,, Despite new U.S. fab initiatives announced by Intel, Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., each has said those investments require tax breaks and other incentives beyond what states have offered''
Tax breaks sound much more reasonable way to improve onshore manufacturing if that would be the real goal.
I think the issue here is figuring out how to make sure the tax breaks and other stimulus/incentives are "let's put some temporary fuel on this fire until it becomes self-sustaining" vs how it's seemingly gone for most other industries (ag, resources, banking, etc) where it becomes a long-term dependency and every new shakedown is anchored in a combination of emotional arguments and sunk cost fallacy.
Chip technology looks like a critical long term dependency for all nations, and I don't think China will shy away from providing practically infinite incentives for it happening there.
There can be no race to the bottom simply because China has cheaper labor and fewer regulations which mean that they are able to produce components, for profit, at a cost below what it would take for us to even produce those same components, let alone show a profit margin on them.
The more predictable outcome would be once domestic chips are being manufactured in sufficient quantity, foreign chips are either banned because "national security", or large tariffs are imposed on them. In either case you effectively create an uncompetitive oligopoly within the country in a field with tremendous barriers to entry. I'm sure that'd never be abused.
isn't that the whole point of globalization anyways? We wanted super cheap fabs, we got super cheap fabs. The problem is that the cheapest way to get something done may or may not be the most strategic move from a governance standpoint when you don't have a great relationship with the country who is responsible for all of your fabrication.
While it's good that the CHIPS act is being passed, it's far too modest of a bill considering how important semiconductors are to the US. Just compare it to the South Korean $450Bn bill[1]. In the 80's enormous foreign subsidization of commercial ship building by South Korea, Japan, and others, saw the near total loss of that key industry in America. Semiconductors must not be allowed to suffer a similar fate.
Agreed. If you consider chips to be a strategic resource - like the food supply - then the government will need to step in and set a subsidy / price floor to ensure over production.
Fyi, the US government subsidizes the overproduction of food so that we do not experience famine in the event that a significant portion of the food supply gets taken out (e.g. bad harvest, drought, etc).
> the US government subsidizes the overproduction of food so that we do not experience famine in the event that a significant portion of the food supply gets taken out (e.g. bad harvest, drought, etc).
That's the first time I've heard that reasoning, and not that the farm lobby had enough power to obtain subsidies. What evidence is there that the subsidies (from taxpayers to the farms, many run by large companies) are driven by some kind of famine protection?
The loss of commercial ship building in the US is something I want to learn more about. Did it happen simply because other countries subsidized their own industries and the US couldn’t compete? Would love a long form history of that industry going back a few centuries.
Im sure environmental aspects play a role - the shipyards in asia are unbelievably huge.
Plus the chinese shipyards build literal battleships/aircraft-carriers and cruise ships and cargo ships sitting right next to eachother - and its said they steal/share technologies from the various contracts/products.
US consumers got a lot of cheap chips from their subsidy. US businesses had to close because they couldn't compete but US consumers still won in the end. I wondering if the US government will have to subsidize this industry in perpetuity if the subsidized fabs can't become competitive.
Sure, but the point is that an entire industry which added employment and other positives to the economy evaporated.
By saying "customers won, because they could still buy stuff through sending money to companies and industry in other countries" -- could be argued as a loss.
The US is so myopically built around consumption its sickening.
> an entire industry which added employment and other positives to the economy evaporated.
Unemployment is at record lows. Uncompetitive companies and industries fail by design - it's essential to the free market. Then resources can be shifted to something that's productive.
> The US is so myopically built around consumption its sickening.
What's sickening to me is this growing trend for advocating corporate welfare - we can't provide healthcare to poor people, but we can take money out of my pocket and give it to Intel.
YAY - Look at how many absolutely fucking terrible, useless, non-growth, subsistence level jobs with zero healthcare, no protections, shitty wages, union busting, oligarch politicians telling people to shut the fuck up and we cant afford healthcare, college, living wages. We are "fighting" for you! Dont you get how hard it is for us to develop agreements that are for the benefit of such a diverse... wait.... Hang on a sec - Ukraine is on the phone, hes an important war buddy of mine...
Your argument falls under the lump of labour fallacy, a lot of new jobs were created when we had cheaper chips. If it was a loss then it wouldn't have been an economic loss :)
Sure, but unless we didnt actually move those industries/services/jobs off-shore - we would never truly know what would have resulted.
We can only look at the outcome as being satisfactory to the statistics of politicians and economists - rather than the effect upon the actual families, towns, and cottage support undustries around those enterprises which left the USA... Good to see that "well, it looks good on paper" -- because the labour fallacy also suffers from thinking that all the new shit we do in the US would not have happened.
Further - the new jobs that have been created (aside from the tech industry are things like massive fastfood, and consuption-capital-growth...
If I an wrong, I would like to learn... but this appears to be the emgergent reality of the US, as evidenced by the ridiculous situation this country is in economically.
(No, Oligarch level wealth creation and stock market actions for the 1% and corporate/hedge funds profits are not the indicators of a truly strong economy: The health, happiness, prosperity of the populous and the quality of both the countries infrastructure and of life is.
And in these regard, imo, USA is flailing horrifically.
---
Also, and when we look at the strength of the pretty much every industry in the US, such as tech, pharma, healthcare, finance, etc... Every single one of them is 100% dependent on the brain-importation from other countries.
Yet, we can't even service the needs of the overall citizenry.
> We can only look at the outcome as being satisfactory to the statistics of politicians and economists - rather than the effect upon the actual families, towns, and cottage support undustries around those enterprises
Where do you think the chip industry and every other industry came from, but from resources freed up when other industries and companies failed. Look at the composition of economic output 50 and 100 years ago and now - most of that is gone and less productive than what we do now.
Certainly having government driven by lobbyists to pick the 'winners', rather than the marketplace, isn't going to help our economy. It will temporarily help the lobbyists' clients.
To focus on social welfare for a moment, we don't do enough to offset the effects of a major industry leaving a town. Many people don't relocate to continue to be productive and so we end up with large amounts of poverty in those areas. I think relocation benefits should be part of the social safety net in the US, as areas see more loss of industry from competition. Wage increases are also causing industries to leave as competition heats up which is in a large part caused by our disastrous housing and healthcare situation driving up the cost of living.
>Many people don't relocate to continue to be productive
Many people can't relocate to continue to be productive ; due to the cost of living, the substance living that the current system provides to 90% of the population.
If you look at vast swaths of jobs, they are 100% barely substance (work to ensure you dont die, only)
> Efforts aimed at reviving U.S. semiconductor manufacturing and strengthening technology supply chains advanced this week with the introduction of a catch-all bill that funds “surge production” of U.S.-made chips while investing in broad-based technology R&D.
There's a ton of Superfund[0] sites in Silicon Valley[1]. What's the current situation re. semiconductor manufacturing and toxic waste?
Manufacturing is generally pretty messy. But green tech has come a long way in identifying effective alternatives to toxic chemicals, as well as effective management and disposal techniques for what is toxic.
Odds are good that re-shored manufacturing will be cleaner than older plants built in regions with lower environmental regulation.
From my understanding the chemicals haven't changed, and can't really be changed. As far as i understand we will always need these crazy bad chemicals to make chips.
What has, hopefully, changed is we aren't allowing companies to store it in leaking underground tanks, etc. All these superfund sites aren't a result if business as usual, in each case there is some major, systemic, intentional oversight and frankly corruption.
Source - I've worked some in that industry designing automation for asml, applied, etc.
Not in the semiconductor industry but a good example of the kind of thing that results in a super fund site is Rocky Flats in Colorado. There is a now famous news broadcast where the representative from the department of energy is saying "there is no fire" and a big fire can be clearly seen behind them.
They were machining plutonium and uranium nuclear bomb triggers on lathes in special glove boxes with particle capture and ventilation systems that were supposed to scrub the air before venting it to atmosphere. These systems weren't properly maintained and they got clogged up with radioactive dust and caught fire. It was later found that they were dumping radioactive dust into the air, and had hundreds of barrels of radioactive waste in steel barrels that were rusted through leaking into the ground for decades. It's the only time one federal agency (the FBI) raided a facility of another federal agency (DOE).
Yeah but lots of the super terrible stuff is in the surface prep and etching chemicals. All those crazy acids and bases that eat through everything, are highly toxic, and deadly in tiny quantities.
My understanding is that photoresists are actually some of the most toxic chemicals in the process, and their heating/irradiation makes them especially dangerous.
The context of my comment was in response to the parent saying they've phased out/changed many of the worst stuff in the photo resist side and so I said there is still pretty bad stuff on the etch side and then you commented that there are worse chemicals on the photo resist side. We're in a weird circular argument.
Point is - there are lots of bad chemicals used in semiconductor manufacturing, even today.
Eh, I’m relatively in favor of limiting government agencies effectively making law up all by themselves. That is not the correct fix for a dysfunctional legislature.
If you think Congress is dysfunctional now, wait until you require congress to individually specify safety limits for each compound, etc. You'll have congresspeople grandstanding about how restricting X chemical is killing hardworking small businesses in their state, etc.
Which the court knows damn well will be the outcome - that's the goal. Keep anything from being done.
That kind of thinking leads to “the only way we’ll get anything done is with a dictator” and it’s not like that is an unprecedented outcome for a country. Fix what’s broken, don’t use authoritarianism as a patch for dysfunction.
I don't understand why it's "authoritarianism" for elected representatives to say "we want to protect X, within the following parameters, and we delegate the job of making specific rules to this agency". You can vote out the legislator if you disagree with the parameters they agreed upon, and you can vote out the executive branch that appointed the leaders of the agency.
We already complain all the time that legislators don't understand the stuff they pass laws about. Delegation is not authoritarianism. You haven't actually said how you'd "fix what's broken". Do you have any specific ideas?
It's authoritarian because it allows the legislature to offload its job to the executive branch and the directions given to these agencies isn't specific at all, and this is what it seems the court is deciding: if vague instructions to the various agencies matches the constitutional intent of the duties of legislative and executive branches.
We don't want to have one set of regulations for each party which change with the president, (we also don't want to delude ourselves into thinking our preferred party will keep winning).
You're assuming that there are "parameters" given to agencies to create regulation with the force of law and the case seems to be about the circumstances where these are not nearly direct enough.
I don't want the president to be able to run the country with executive actions, this has very much gotten out of hand.
Specific ideas involve people not watching news paid for with advertisements, changes to election funding which should be obvious (removing the idea that unlimited political contributions are "free speech"), killing the filibuster, fixing gerrymandered districts, alternatives to first-past-the-post voting, someone going out and trying to inform the electorate in a way that encourages independent thought and not just cheer-leading for ones own side, re-enforced and expanded limits on corporate media/news ownership.
Ultimately though, the electorate just has to demand it instead of letting itself get whipped up into an emotional frenzy with the ever-present latest manufactured crisis.
I was with you until the manufactured crisis part, I think you just want the electorate to care about a different set of issues and so you downplay them as not important in general when really they’re just not important to you. The most recent media spirals are another school shooting refueling the gun control fight, overturning Roe, and the Don’t Say Gay bill all of which have real life impact on people’s lives.
Like what do you think the “demanding” is going to look like if not an emotional frenzy and protests?
The reason Roe v Wade is being pushed is that a small number of people in power see who don't care about it one way or the other push/pushed opposition to it because getting that base emotionally charged gets people more engaged with the party. It is entirely opportunistically taking advantage of an issue to drive the conversation away from other issues. It's not that abortion is unimportant, it's that without certain politics motivations, it would just be solved and generally allowed and not particularly large on anybody's mind.
You find this all over and have to question about each issue that is emotionally charged... how does fanning the flames help certain parties and politicians? Likewise for news sources.
There's an incentive partially intentional by those pulling the strings and partially emergent (or a stand-alone complex for Ghost in the Shell fans) phenomenon where by in a intentional/emergent collusion between parties, politicians, media, and individuals... the most emotionally charged issues dominate the political landscape these days because from somebody seeking out the emotional rush of a like to a politician winning elections to corporate news advertisement sales there are benefits everywhere to make people frenzy about something, and whatever is most apt for it gets it, regardless if rationally it's a solved issue that only a few hangers on really want to fight about any more.
>Like what do you think the “demanding” is going to look like if not an emotional frenzy and protests?
There's a real core of the problem, inability to imagine what meaningful political discourse would look like without an emotional frenzy.
I feel like this is a really cynical take for “the issues that dominate the news cycle are ones where there is roughly even political power backing a given position and so small perturbations in territory result in large policy swings.” It became a wedge issue and you’re right politicians are absolutely taking advantage but people do genuinely seem to care a whole heck of a lot about the outcome. I don’t think people are as disinterested as you think. Like literally every woman I know, myself included, is at most 1 Bacon distance from someone who had an abortion.
> it would just be solved
You can’t say “god why are we still taking about this, can’t we just do the_thing_i_want and call it a day?” Because obviously there would be a lot less political strife if we all just agreed or put up with outcomes we don’t like.
Because it breaks separation of powers, and this distinction was actually made in the opinions we’ve seen — Congress can’t delegate “uniquely legislative powers.” Like if the EPA can effectively write laws and is run by the executive branch then the executive branch can write laws. That seems bad if you believe that the whole point of the branches of government is to prevent exactly this situation.
It's not less chemical intensive at all. Some aqueous processes have replaced more toxic ones. But dissolved copper and solvent waste makes up the majority of ever fabs waste stream. TSMC/Intel etc have made pretty big strides in zero landfill hazardous waste. It just gets recycled and used in other processes internally or by other companies.
I don't know what the Chinese fabs do, so I have no idea if pump their waste out into the environment.
You would think that dissolved copper would have some recovery value, given the price of copper.
I am reminded of the waste from silver halide photographic processing, which at one point was just dumped into rivers (an unfortunate amount went into the Great Lakes); when the price of silver increased, suddenly it became worthwhile to recover the silver rather than let it go down the literal drain.
between spelling nazis and reflexive downvoters .. who are entitled their respective actions.. what I am looking for is, how is the whole Quartz to Wafers process has become green and what kind of reduction and/or elimination of toxic materials has been achieved.
A good proper justification of the claim from the claimant or supporters of that argument is useful.
In this case the spelling nazis had rightfully pointed to the correct spelling, because the wrong spelling is not a problem of style or preferences, but it causes a confusion between two different chemical substances, with very different properties and applications.
"silicon" is the chemical element number 14, and this name, which is used in the English-speaking countries, was coined by someone who believed that it is a good idea for it to rhyme with "carbon" (actually a bad idea in my opinion)
"silicone" is the generic name for a class of plastics, i.e. the polymers with a poly-siloxane structure. This name was coined by someone who believed that it is a good idea for it to rhyme with "acetone", because he erroneously believed that these polymers have a structure similar to ketones.
I don’t have exact details but I did work in an civil/environment consulting companies (we worked remediating the GE silicone waste site in Upstate NY .. ) which might be why people are senesitive to the spelling.[1]
But generally those chemical engineers are pretty good at cleaning up the processes (it cheaper, also cheaper to ship manufacturing overseas…)
So, I haven't worked in semiconductors since the mid-noughties, so keep that in mind. However, essentially every company in semiconductors in the 60's and 70's ended up with a Superfund site in Silicon Valley (back when the "Silicon" referred to actual chip manufacturing, not software). Fabs built in the 80's and 90's were much different in regards to how toxic chemicals were handled, and I believe have continued to improve.
Some of this improvement came naturally, as the requirement for cleaner and cleaner manufacturing environment for the wafers themselves (to keep particulate contamination from lowering yield) meant that the chemicals were kept in enclosed systems, thus easier to keep from leaking out.
Some of this came about because, from what I was told by "old timers", in the 60's and 70's part of the problem was that fabs were not thought of as being very dangerous. This sounds incredible now, but the risks people thought of from manufacturing then were those present in steel mills, coal mines, auto factories, etc. Big heavy things and molten steel and roofs that can collapse on you; physically obvious risks. It took some time to realize that semiconductor fabs were just as dangerous; no doubt longer than it should have, but the realization did arrive in time.
I left the semiconductor industry because it was outsourcing, not because of concerns for my safety; in new fabs, there was a great emphasis on safety and the environmental impact (which no doubt raised costs relative to some of the other places that manufacturing shifted to).
Glad to see the US subsidizing chips for the entire world market. It's about time we pay our fair share to give back to the subsidizes that asian countries have been putting in.
I dont understand how the government actually follows all these rules (to the extent that they do). Imagine if your job requirements and duties was spread out in single paragraphs in thousands of hundred page long documents
Given the lead time of building a fab and producing components, trying to incentivize the production of specific devices that happen to be in short supply right now is probably not a great plan.
The market does a pretty good job of sending demand signals to producers, faster than the government can generally create and pass incentivizing legislation.
But if you don't have the production capacity in the first place, encouraging that to be built out (which is a long-term process) does seem like something where government can meaningfully intervene.
R&D usually gets siphoned to other countries at the expense of American taxpayers. I think we need to place safeguards in place before we start ramping up spending.
That's what I wonder too, if a big chunk of this money goes to intel then a bunch of smaller boutique fabs that are integral for some of the other stated areas like quantum computing will be impacted. How is the money going to trickle down through the sector?
