At 756 pages, this looks to be longer than many textbooks.
> Microelectronics power all AI, and the United States no longer manufactures the world’s most sophisticated chips. We do not want to overstate the precariousness of our position, but given that the vast majority of cutting-edge chips are produced at a single plant separated by just 110 miles of water from our principal strategic competitor, we must reevaluate the meaning of supply chain resilience and security.
It really is a concern just how dependent the entire world is on TSMC.
"The best human operator cannot defend against multiple machines making thousands of maneuvers per second potentially moving at hypersonic speeds and orchestrated by AI across domains."
Attacks by drone swarms are already here. The first one was Syria vs. Russia in 2018.[1] There was an attack on Saudi oil facilities in 2019.[2]
Much of this has little to do with AI. It's more about the US falling further behind in manufacturing.
I mean it’s not like intel and their fans are utterly worthless, they may not be on par with TSMC 5nm yet, but in the end given a strong strategic need, I don’t think we’d be without advanced chips for very long if TSMC is overtaken by China.
There’s also the fact that a war between China and Taiwan is almost certainly going to go hot with the USA too, possibly leading to nuclear exchanges…
It’s much more likely that China eventually starts producing their own state of the art silicon before going to war with Taiwan.
Say what you (or Kubrick) will about mutually assured destruction, it sure does seem to have prevented a lot of violence, despite also seeming totally insane.
I never got that logic—the US has been in armed conflict in various forms since the end of WWII, whether directly or through the CIA. It seems more like nukes enable violence from my perspective.
> The world was a much more violent place before pax americana.
Europe, for sure is a lot less violent, as for the rest of the world? I won't believe that on face value; south America specifically got more violent, and I suspect everywhere else is a wash (or is not attributable to American force projection). I attribute the peace in Europe to the EU rather than pax Americana.
A company named "Apple, Inc." didn't exist prior to 2007 either - that's just splitting hairs, IMO, a rose by any other name &tc, &tc. I assumed anyone who has passing familiarity with Europe's history and WWII knew exactly what I meant by "EU" - you may read it as "the European project", if that dunks your crumpet.
Food for thought: The Wars in the Congo are a counter example. 2nd Congo War is thought to have caused 5.4 million deaths and officially ended in 2003, just 18 years ago.
Arguably that's the exception that proves the rule. Note how none of the great powers were really that involved (outside of the US providing "advisors").
That is one heck of an understatement.[0] The global economic benefit of the stability brought by the US military being top-dog is vast, and appears to benefit many countries including China. There are plenty of valid criticisms of Pax Americana, but the global economic benefit, not so much imho.
The existence of the US hegemony is no secret. The only debate surrounds its longevity. The accepted tipping point is when its massive salaries start to even out with the rest of the world, with COVID-19 acting as a catalyst.
Why would US salaries start to even out with the rest of the world? On a per capita basis, our GDP is still massively higher than every other large country.
> Why would US salaries start to even out with the rest of the world? On a per capita basis, our GDP is still massively higher than every other large country.
The hypothesis is that if most high compensation workers are remote, it opens up those labor markets to more competition from lower cost regions.
IOW, as Covid-19 forces organizations to become remote-first, they perforce also become more outsourcing-friendly, or at least outsourcing-capable.
I don't believe it. People predicted the same thing would happen due to technology enabling outsourcing in the 90s. The only success was at the lower-end of the information economy.
Also, while COVID is going to accelerate the shift to remote work in the US, the vast majority will be <100% truly async remote. It's the 1-20% of edge case requirements that are really hard to mitigate. The ability to answer a phone call at 2pm Eastern Time and hop on a plane to Chicago is way different for someone from Manila than it is for someone from Cleveland, even if they only do it occasionally.
> People predicted the same thing would happen due to technology enabling outsourcing in the 90s. The only success was at the lower-end of the information economy.
I agree, for a variety of reasons, but there is a joker in the deck: will the distribution of required skill change over time? IOW, should we expect demand to grow faster at the low end of the information economy, in the middle, or at the top? I don't think it is too reasonable to expect the distribution to remain fixed over time.
Right now, we've been seeing a lot of growth in demand at the top end, but that was true for the 'service economy' at the start too. The irony of the scenario where increasing automation depresses the wages of the lowest skill jobs because they can most easily be filled with fungible human labor while expanding the demand for workers to fill them due to Jevon's Paradox should not be lost on us.
It is entirely possible that entry-level software work will become as much of a dead-end job as being a customer service representative.
Maybe China could go for a double tap - limited flagged strikes with the calculation that the USA would refrain from involvement or 1-1 retaliate (which China could eat). Wait 18 mths for the chip shortage to erode capability and then really go for it.
> There’s also the fact that a war between China and Taiwan is almost certainly going to go hot with the USA too, possibly leading to nuclear exchanges…
There was an article in The Economist a couple of weeks ago saying that that may no longer be the case, I mean the US automatically siding with Taiwan in case of China's aggression. Take that as you will, I looked at it as an establishment mouthpiece airing valid concerns that some members of said establishment have regarding US's "seriousness" in the region.
Seems to me it's concerned about "America’s ability to deter an invasion over Taiwan", not about it "showing resolve when talking about China and Taiwan".
I think looking at it as the USA 'falling behind in manufacturing' isn't quite the right lens to use when looking at the strategic issues here. I'm not saying you're wrong, I just want to tease out some of the issues and assumptions.
The strategic concern they are raising is not economic, it's a security issue and the two are quite different. From the strategic security view it doesn't matter so much who makes these products, what matters is ensuring continuity of availability on the one hand and excluding interference or compromises of the integrity of the supply chain on the other. The latter is to do with things like an opponent interfering in the quality of parts, introducing backdoors and such.
In these two views of course on shore manufacturing is easier to secure in both senses, but that's a side effect not an absolute. For example if the USA had sovereign territory next to China, a fab there would still be highly vulnerable to interference in the physical supply while a fab in Canada next to the US border would be much more physically secure from Chinese or Russian interference. From a security perspective there's nothing magical about being on US territory.
A lot of these debates seem to very rapidly pivot into discussions about on shore US manufacturing and falling behind technologically, where what they're really talking about is skills and economic benefits. Those are a very different issue though.
Even looking just at the technology it's not a simple calculation either. The best lithography systems are manufactured in Holland, any fab anywhere wanting to use the best processes is dependent on them and these are the most critical parts of the process. The location of the fab is just one part of the puzzle. In today's highly integrated world no one country can even hope to own all the essential elements in high tech supply, chain. The common simplistic view of iPhone manufacturing is another example of this. The majority of the most advanced components in an iPhone to this day aren't made in China. The camera module in Japanese, the CPUs come from Taiwan, flash memory and batteries mostly from South Korea and Japan I think, Gorilla glass I'm not sure about now, it used to be made in the US. Only final assembly and some low value components are Chinese, and yet iPhones are 'Made in China'. Would moving low value, low skilled final assembly really benefit the USA all that much? That's a more extreme example, but from a supply chain and technology point of view it's the same (to a much lesser extent to be sure) with chip fabs. Critical components come from all sorts of different countries and companies.
So ok building more advanced fabs in the US is a sensible move on a whole variety of axes, but it doesn't solve all of the problems and even when it does, it's not always for the most obvious reasons.
I really like your response and cant really argue with your points. I just want to add another aspect that I think you missed, the cultural mindset of the US.
Pre ww2 the US was pretty isolationist. A very, "Sounds like a whole lot of your problem and not mine" kind of country. The foot dragging for both world wars is pretty evident. I've read and personally do believe it's attributed by the fact we are a melting pot of people. That's important for the distinction of, "I left xyz country for a reason and came to this country to get away from their bullshit." That's a very toned down version of what my own dad told me on my 18th birthday when he gave me the full story of leaving soviet occupied Poland. I'm pretty sure theres a lot of grand amd great grand folks with similar sentiments when they left the old country in the late 1800s and early 1900s. People didnt uproot and enter a foreign land with no support just because they bored and doing well in their home country. This, I believe, leads to a self reliance mindset since there's a... disdain... for the rest of the world.
So the security aspect, absolutely. I think the want for all manufacturing in general stems from the self reliance, isolationist desire with security as a very good, logical excuse. However, even in bizarro world if a security argument wasn't good enough alone, this anti-global-reliance wouldn't go away.
Falling behind in manufacturing seems to include the entire supply chain, not just fabs. Global supply chains are fragile, so we’d do well to build as much physical infrastructure and expertise on shore as possible. This is a policy problem more than anything else.
The problem of US-based or ally-based technology companies that fall behind competitively or economically and then are allowed to fail inescapably ensures US dependence for essential/secure tech supplies on others, some with motives contrary to our well-being. This chink in our commercial, military, and security armor should wake the US government to the necessity of underwriting some essential industries, products, or services -- as China famously does.
The US gov't has underwritten a few niche industries for decades such as supercomputing (e.g. Cray and TMC) and crypto. But for some reason they've been reluctant to do this more broadly for other essential industries like microelectronics, telecom, battery tech, and more. Clearly the potential repercussions of such oversights should compel this laissez-faire policy to be reconsidered.
Well as a citizen of a US ally (UK), that's all very well but I don't think the world works like that. Europe, Japan and other US allies are collectively huge pools of talent and capital. How much would the US government have to spend to guarantee than nothing thought up or developed in any of those countries ever exceeds anything developed in the US? Is that really a feasible objective?
Nobody in the US decided to let Holland develop more advanced lithographic systems for chip manufacturing, or to let ARM in the UK come up with a more efficient processor architecture.
They fund the universities through debt in the form of student loans. The schools then funnel indebted graduates desperate for financial security into various industries where their human capital is securitized. You can call that laissez-faire, but I see a lot of similarities with China’s top down system and predict those similarities to increase as we are forced to compete with China more directly.
Isn't Samsung nearly on par with them? (Not that two is a much better situation.)
It (perhaps naively) seems like most applications could theoretically make due with older processes, but I have difficulty imagining supply chains successfully coping with such a switch (not that I know anything about it).
Anandtech's Snapdragon 888 review compares vs 865. The article indicates that Samsung 5nm is a bit better or worse (vary on what to compare) than TSMC 7nm (non-EUV).
If we sort-of mush the Democrats and Republicans together; the US Economic Strategy for the last however many decades has been to import stuff from overseas and beef up on services. The result has been titans like Apple (best of breed at outsourcing manufacturing to China), Amazon (best of breed logistics, very strong at importing from China) and Google (amazing service).
Is there any reason to be surprised that the US no longer manufactures the world's most sophisticated chips? Is there any political will to change strategy?
This arises naturally from the US having been the global reserve currency for so long. Other countries' debts are denominated is dollars, so they seek dollars via mercantilism. This has absolutely cannibalized our manufacturing base. There is a case for a weaker dollar and to rebuild our exports.
I share your frustration. But that's really not how elected reps work. Those particularly interested, or with relevant committee appointments, may read the executive summary.
800 pages of report go up, not down. But not all the way up.
Governments? I wonder why Apple is not losing sleep over this...
It's a major geopolitical risk and they're sitting right on top of it. Like thinking a landmine only hurts enemy combatants and not children playing soccer.
The US is facing the realities caused by somewhere in the order of 50 years of incompetence in government at nearly every level. This isn’t going to change any time soon.
While we have been busy de-educating our new generations and worshiping idiots like Bernie and AOC, the Chinese worked hard and went from an agricultural society to the second economy in the world.
> While we have been busy de-educating our new generations and worshiping idiots like Bernie and AOC, the Chinese worked hard and went from an agricultural society to the second economy in the world.
It's pretty funny to blame AOC and Bernie, neither who have controlled more than a portion of a state government, for China's rise in relative power over the last 50 years. Additionally what is the supposed enemy here? Leftist socialism, like China has?
Not blaming them. Please quote where I blamed them.
They are emblematic of just how wrong things have gone in this country. We live in a time where our young are being indoctrinated into socialism and Marxism by our schools. These are philosophies that have caused until pain and suffering in nearly all corners of this world. We actively have people escaping various veins of these ideologies to come to the US. Once here, they can't comprehend how our young are being sold such nonsense. Pure indoctrination.
My own son was nearly forced to take a class on Marxism at one of the top tech schools in the US as a condition for graduation with an engineering degree. I say "nearly" because the way they did it was "soft". He had to take a humanity and the only class available for a year and a half was "Young Karl Marx". So, go to Marxism class or graduate a year and a half later. Disgusting.
Anyone who thinks these ideas are, in any way, good, has not lived under them. I have. Most of my family has. Friends have. Neighbors have. To call Socialism and Marxism "dangerous bullshit" is to be kind. The problem is the US has no clue what they are walking into. And so people like Bernie, AOC and others are idolized and supported instead of being laughed out of every possible corner of influence in this country.
The average high school graduate in the US is barely good enough to stack boxes in a warehouse or, maybe, make coffee. No financial education. No understanding of business. No marketable skills at all. That's what we are producing by the millions every year. Imagine what we could do if we graduated kids with solid financial, entrepreneurial, business and other chops. It would be absolutely amazing.
> My own son was nearly forced to take a class on Marxism at one of the top tech schools in the US as a condition for graduation with an engineering degree. I say "nearly" because the way they did it was "soft". He had to take a humanity and the only class available for a year and a half was "Young Karl Marx". So, go to Marxism class or graduate a year and a half later. Disgusting.
A class on Marxism is hardly a bad thing. Learn what it is, and what it is not. Judge it for ones-self. Restriction on education is what the communist regimes did, not the free world.
> Anyone who thinks these ideas are, in any way, good, has not lived under them. I have. Most of my family has. Friends have. Neighbors have. To call Socialism and Marxism "dangerous bullshit" is to be kind. The problem is the US has no clue what they are walking into. And so people like Bernie, AOC and others are idolized and supported instead of being laughed out of every possible corner of influence in this country.
The good news is that neither AOC nor Bernie Sanders are Marxists, they're Leftists. The difference is that human rights matter to them as opposed to what happened in the hardline Marxist/communist governments where ideology trumped humanity. There's no Leftist call for the destruction of non-Leftist art, non-Leftist science, non-Leftist political parties, or any of that. It's just another way of structuring taxes and social services.
> The average high school graduate in the US is barely good enough to stack boxes in a warehouse or, maybe, make coffee. No financial education. No understanding of business. No marketable skills at all. That's what we are producing by the millions every year. Imagine what we could do if we graduated kids with solid financial, entrepreneurial, business and other chops. It would be absolutely amazing.
The schools are still stuck in the model of making good little factory/office workers, it's true, but that's no more a fault of the Marxists than it is the Capitalists trying to keep labor cheap, although they've found outsourcing to countries with lower regard for human rights to be far superior.
Also, hoping for high-school graduates to have business acumen and marketable skills is pretty optimistic. I'd expect 18-25 to be the years where people develop those highly valuable skills; not everyone can be an entrepreneur and definitely not at 18. Maybe if we hit full automation we can start to expect high-school students to immediately start robotic businesses but realistically it takes a lot of years of practice to be good at business and finance.
A class on Marxism that distorts the reality of what it is and paints it as a good idea full of promise IS a bad thing. That's exactly what this class did. My son shared course materials with me.
> Learn what it is, and what it is not.
That is exactly what they did not do. The number of young people who actually think this shit is worth consideration is scary.
I see learning about Marxism exactly as I see learning about genocides. It is important to understand why it happened, how, and what and then understand just how horrible these things have been for humanity and why we never again want to repeat these mistakes. The equivalent of how they handle teaching Marxism in the US would be to speak of genocide as a good thing and have kids graduate believing that nonsense.
> Restriction on education is what the communist regimes did, not the free world.
Nobody is talking about restricting education. It's about telling the truth. The problem is in our educational institutions turning into ideological indoctrination machines. Seriously, the prevalence of socialist, leftist, Marxist thinking and teaching at our universities should make everyone take pause. A simple example of this is the violently militant culture at places like Berkeley, where they have, quite literally, violently prevented non-complying opinions to be voiced. That is not to say I agree with these views. I am simply saying that they are acting in a manner no different to the way you characterized communist regimes. Try to go to a university and have an open discussion about anything right of center and, today, you better have bodyguards. How isn't everyone horrified about this?
There's another element to this: What do we need more of for a prosperous future, young people educated on finance, entrepreneurship, business management, etc. or Marxism? Which of the two approaches improves society for all? I would much rather have students come out of schools and universities with both valuable knowledge and skills. Yes, teach history, don't lie about it, but focus on what actually matters and don't waste their time with nonsense. Forcing a class on Marxism as a graduation requirement for an engineering is criminal.
> neither AOC nor Bernie Sanders are Marxists, they're Leftists.
Probably not true at the core. They know --particularly AOC-- that if they come out with what they really think they will spook millions. They have to inch into their ideologies, shift the nation slowly. That's exactly how most atrocities happened in most parts of the world. You have to look back to where the ideologies come from. In AOC's case she was indoctrinated by our universities. That's how you can get a sense of what she thinks. Some of the stuff she says is so insanely out there it is impossible to understand how someone can think that way other than pure indoctrination.
> There's no Leftist call for the destruction of non-Leftist art, non-Leftist science, non-Leftist political parties, or any of that. It's just another way of structuring taxes and social services.
You are kidding, right? They have literally cancelled people and businesses and destroyed all manner of national historical monuments. They literally actively exclude non-leftists from university and business. I know people who, today, in the US, are afraid of voicing their opinion for fear of their lives, families and careers being destroyed. By the left. People are living in real fear of this truly evil phase of leftism in the US. American conservatives don't do anything of the sort.
> The schools are still stuck in the model of making good little factory/office workers
Not true. They graduate people devoid of marketable skills. And now we have to pay them $15 per hour, which they are not worth by a longshot (the inquiries for our robotic systems are going off the charts as companies are getting ready to eliminate people who are simply not worth this ridiculous hike in minimum wage).
Seriously, list what the average US high school graduate is good for and see what you come up with. The definition of this would be that they would be able to perform the work with no or minimal (a couple of weeks?) training.
Let me put it this way: The kids I mentored at the local robotics club came out 10 times more capable to add value to an organization than their peers.
I recognized this problem early on and made it a point to teach my kids useful skills. My oldest, about to graduate from university, left home with full intermediate level software development skills, knowing how to weld, manual and CNC machining, woodworking and more. On top of that, I devoted a few months to teaching him about finances, the stock market, showed him the value of not spending money on stupid things and the power of intelligent savings with equally careful and intelligent investment. He is graduating university having saved a large pile of cash from the well paying jobs he was able to get from day one (because he added real value). And, due to the financial education he got from me, he has savings and investments most adults would dream of having.
That's the power of an education that creates useful 18 year olds. It would be amazing if we adopted such concepts at a national level. And, no, not everyone needs to learn calculus or coding, that's stupid. My daughter has love for other things and that is what I am focusing on with her. Finding ways to ensure she comes out of high school with actual marketable skills someone would be willing to pay for.
> hoping for high-school graduates to have business acumen and marketable skills is pretty optimistic
I disagree. If I can do it with my kids the school system can do it with all kids. You have to have teachers who can teach that stuff, which also means we have to free the teaching profession from unions who do nothing to avance education (they advance union matters, not education).
This could be a good conversation over a cup of coffee. Look, I understand that fixing the world is a pointless pursuit, but one ought to be able to look at some of these things and call bullshit when warranted. I know I am a bit of a hard-liner when it comes to these issues. My grandparents survived a genocide and taught me values through their hard work and resilience. They worked very hard. They were useful to society. They did not bitch, complain, become victims, ask for handouts or equality of outcomes. They saw things that would make most people projectile vomit, and yet nobody would know it if they didn't open up about it. I want to be like them. I want my kids to be like them.
You think? While UK was busy banning Huawei for spycraft, Macron was signing a partnership to install Huawei factories in France. I guess “when you can’t beat spies, invite them to your own territory and pay them”, or something like that, I don’t know I’m not a politician.
> Macron was signing a partnership to install Huawei factories in France.
So he is doing exactly what China did - Making sure production is happening in his country, regardless of who nominally owns the factory. A step in the right direction.
I don't have any ill-feelings towards China other than some of their political and social proclivities. In the realm of business, they deserve full recognition and respect for what they have achieved. While the developed nations of the world got busy with nonsense and political infighting the Chinese quietly put one foot in front of the other, worked hard and lifted an agrarian economy to become the second economy of the world. Truly amazing.
The next couple of centuries will likely belong to China.
I can't think of a single thing anyone can do to affect change that took fifty years and an immense amount of hard work.
For one thing, people in Europe and the US would have to undergo a massive cultural shift. Entire nations would have to be more entrepreneurial and hard working than China. Politicians would have to actually do what's best for the people of their nations. Universities and schools would have to stop teaching bullshit ideologies and start producing capable and useful adults with financial and entrepreneurial chops (the average US high school graduate is basically only useful for stacking boxes at a warehouse and, maybe, making coffee).
These things are not going to happen. Or, put a different way: If, by some miracle, these things did happen, it would take at least 25 years to equalize the world. It would be a monumental effort most western societies are simply not capable of or not interested in embarking on...because, among other things, it will not be comfortable. And, BTW, that assumes China just sits there allowing the world to turn back the clock.
Sorry for the pessimism, but someone has yet to explain how we magically wake up one day and magically reverse a fifty year monumental effort by the Chinese people by teaching kids about Karl Marx and fighting about politics day and night. I can only imagine how stupid funny this must look from the Chinese perspective.
> While we have been busy de-educating our new generations and worshiping idiots like Bernie and AOC, the Chinese worked hard and went from an agricultural society to the second economy in the world.
It is exactly people like Bernie and AOC who are likely to bring manufacturing back to the USA, instead of letting corporations continue to outsource every last job they can to save a dollar on labor.
The current predicament is the fault of capitalism and so called free trade agreements, which have greatly hurt global trade in goods in favor of financial fictions. Instead of US companies having to buy goods from foreign companies, they can just buy the factories and manufacture their own goods with foreign labor. Instead of a free international market for goods, this created a free international market for labor, and a global distributed planned economy, dominated by behemoths that at least nominally own much of their entire supply chain, across many countries.
This hurts workers (i.e. the majority of the population) in most countries, but it benefitted the rich investors, especially in the USA. Far from incompetent governance, this has been very competent in achieving the wrong goals. Capitalism working as advertised: prioritizing the needs of capital today over everything else: workers, national security, even capital tomorrow.
>>> Instead of US companies having to buy goods from foreign companies, they can just buy the factories and manufacture their own goods with foreign labor. Instead of a free international market for goods, this created a free international market for labor, and a global distributed planned economy
I have never thought of the analysis like that. Things like Ricardos law assume countries are independent agents intermediating with trade. it obviously that ... fascinating
This has also exacerbated the wealth gap. Wealth flows to capital, not labor. When you open your labor pool to hyper competition (global) wages go down for the same labor supply. We need to make our society more people centric.
> Offshoring was almost always about labor. Wall Street wanted higher returns, so the jobs went to cheaper labor pools.
Absolutely, 100%, without a doubt, wrong as can be. A complete and utter distortion of the realities that drive and have driven what has been an evolving landscape for decades.
At first, when we were making forks, plates and linen abroad, sure. This has not been the case for a very long time. I would say thirty years, if not forty.
What, then, is the reality of modern offshore manufacturing?
The most important thing the Chinese have done is to build a FULLY INTEGRATED AND SHORT SUPPLY PIPELINE. Period.
Next, they have a massive well-trained and capable technical workforce at every level. From assembly to technicians and engineers. While we were wasting time teaching our kids about Marxism they were educating technicians, engineers and scientists by the millions, as fast as they could. Many of them were educated in US and European universities and went on to spearhead industry efforts and education in China.
After that, once again, while we were indoctrinating our kids on the virtues of Socialism and Marxism, they turned their country into one of the most entrepreneurial forces on earth. The drive you see out of China to just "get shit down" has to be experienced to be believed. It's incredible.
I'll give you a simple example: Say I need to manufacture a part. I send out for quotes to 50 US-based companies and 50 Chinese companies (if I can even find 50 companies in the US). I will likely have more than 50 quotes from the Chines companies OVERNIGHT! More than 50 because some factories will likely connect you with others. The US-based companies? You are lucky if you get five quotes in four weeks. It's that bad. Actually, it's worse than that.
There are other factors, of course. Cost of labor is likely almost dead last in the list of advantages they have.
Why is the supply chain so important? Why are brains so important?
Well, you saw it during this pandemic. The US could not make fucking N95 masks to, quite literally, save our lives. Why? Because we don't even make the cloth, elastic, thread and machines here. Everything is in China. And so, even if money was not important we could not make masks. Such a simple product and we simply could not make them. Still can't, not at scale.
Say you want to make a relatively simple electronic device. Let's assume labor costs you zero in the US due to some amazing automation. You still can't compete with China.
Why?
Because the supply chain isn't here. It's in China. Which means every chip, wire, resistor, screw, sensor, piece of plastic, paper, packaging, box, manufacturing tools and equipment, test equipment, molds, etc. will have to come from China. Which, in turn, means your cost basis increased significantly. If you insist on doing a few things here (like molds and CNC machined parts) you will pay through your teeth, because our wages, taxes, regulatory and other factors cost too much.
This is where the whole discussion about minimum wage starts to come in. If you are forced to pay someone a minimum of $15 per hour, pack it up and ship the work to China, because, whether you know it or not, your business is dead.
In China there are towns that have evolved in order to optimize for certain product classes. Want to make microwave ovens and refrigerators? There's a town where your entire supply chain is within a one hour truck ride from your factory. The same business in the US would have to wait WEEKS TO MONTHS for parts and the supply lines would be nowhere near wherever they might care to locate within the US. Not any more.
I realize that most people are not in manufacturing and simply don't have a clue. I get it. It is too easy to reduce reality to a single variable (labor) and ignore the fact that nothing in life is driven by a single variable. In fact, there are dozens, hundreds of variables that drive different realities.
Companies don't offshore because they are greedy. They offshore because, if they don't, they cease to exist. We have reached a moment in time where, but for a few select market segments, the options have been reduced to one: China.
The fact that our kids don't leave high school and college with a solid financial and entrepreneurial education predicts our future. What we are doing to our kids in our educational institutions (K-12-University) is simply criminal.
> Companies don't offshore because they are greedy. They offshore because, if they don't, they cease to exist. We have reached a moment in time where, but for a few select market segments, the options have been reduced to one: China.
You're completely ignoring the base reason: why did China do this and the US didn't? Because it was cheaper for US companies to invest nothing and move production to China instead of doing it in the US. Because the US government, unlike the Chinese one, is not allowed to directly invest and create these sorts of supply chains itself, because companies start complaining (read: lobbying against it) that it's out competing them (muh free market!).
In fact, the US did have all of this. After the war, US manufacturing was second to none in the world, and no one except maybe the USSR came even close. But US workers are expensive: cost of living is high, workers demand a work/life balance, regulations don't allow you to risk them losing hands for a slightly faster product.
Along came China, which had far too many people to know what to do with. Cost of living was low, they were more than willing to force people to work as long as necessary, and if they collapse from exhaustion or lose a hand here and there, no problem, there's a billion more who can take their place. And so, even while they were still learning and had little know-how, it was so much cheaper to offshore things to China than to manufacture them locally, even with much worse yields and QA at that time, that companies started moving in droves.
Now, if the US had not been run by capitalists, the US government could have easily stopped this. They could have eaisly prevented this from happening by disallowing companies to buy these factories abroad, or they could have bought and run any local factories that were getting shut down, and out-competed many companies on quality and branding.
Instead, the US government, run by and for corporations, embraced this whole-heartedly, creating international treaties to facilitate the flight of manufacturing from the US, sometimes even enforcing cheap labor availability if countries tried getting out of line with pesky workers rights that would cut into US corporation bottom lines
One thing they didn't count on though was that China did not intend to simply become a US colony, providing cheap labor to fuel US profits. They used this as an engine for their economy, investing in education and ever more efficient production as you pout out. Crucially, they also completely disregarded international IP laws designed to allow US companies to produce high-tech goods in other countries while not giving up the know-how. Instead, the Chinese government essentially applied an IP tax for all of this production and used the accumulated IP to start competing with the US on end products, not just manufacturing.
Now, this is becoming unacceptable, since they are starting to actually eat into those profits, and even more frighteningly, to come up with their own technology that rivals US efforts. This is the culmination of the Chinese plan, and the side effect of US profit seeking and short-term thinking.
Fortunately, this is starting to align US external policy goals more with US workers, even if US companies would still rather benefit from Chinese manufacturing. This will probably mean renewed investment in US manufacturing, incentives for US-built goods, and a resurrection of US engineering culture. But it may also mean a weakening of worker's rights if unions are not careful.
So yes, you are right about the current state of Chinese manufacturing and their advantages, but you are completely ignoring US capitalists role in how we got from Mao to here. Your weird tangent about teaching children marxism or socialism in the most economically right-wing country on earth, I will just ignore.
> Now, if the US had not been run by capitalists, the US government could have easily stopped this.
Yes, because the USSR did it right. You know, since capitalism is at fault...
I don't know if you were educated and live in the US or not. This "capitalism is evil" meme is yet another reduction of the realities of the world to a single variable. And it is simply silly. Sorry.
I look around my home, desk, driveway, even what I am wearing and the medicine I take and NONE of it would have existed without capitalism. In fact, China would still be an agrarian society without capitalism.
Please stop reducing reality from the complex multivariate problem it actually is to a single variable. "Capitalism = Bad" is a truly lousy explanation of how the world works.
As I said before, I have been in manufacturing for decades, nearly four decades actually. I have gone from being able to make just about anything I wanted in the US to only being able to make a small subset of non-trivial products in the US. And NONE OF IT has to do with capitalism.
Capitalism isn't the cause of these problems. It's a complex game of chess involving many variables, where wages represent one lower-level variable in the equation. If wages were the single variable that could fix this we could automate the heck out of everything and regain supremacy. Sadly, as I said before, and I will say it again, reality responds to dozens of variables and wages, as it turns out to be, while important, are not the cause of our (and Europe's) current predicaments.
Not sure how else to say it: We are at a moment in time when we, quite literally, simply cannot manufacture hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of basic materials, components and products in the US and Europe. The entire supply chain is in China. Period. Which means that anyone wanting to manufacture anything that doesn't fall under certain categories (like ITAR) has no choice but to go make whatever they make in China. Capitalism has nothing to do with it. They are more capitalistic than almost any nation in the world.
Why it happened is also a multivariate problem. Two of those variables are bad policies and mismanagement on the part of our politicians and the initial allure of cost reductions (of which, yes, 50 years ago, wages were an important factor). Once the chain reaction started the end result was almost inevitable.
Say you, me and one other person manufactured drinking glasses in the US or Europe back 50 years ago. We each have about 1/3 of the market for drinking glasses.
I decide I am going to be smart, manufacture my glasses in China, drop the prices and grab half the market for myself. I quietly make that move and show up in the market with glasses for 25% less. You and the other competitor drop your profit margins, optimize like hell and do your best to keep manufacturing your products in the US and Europe to compete with me.
You can't. You realize your choices have narrowed to two: Go to China or shut the doors.
You go to China.
Now you match my pricing and regain some market share. Eventually the third participant is forced to do exactly the same thing.
We have now all moved our manufacturing to China, dropped our prices, reduced our net profits and go back to a 1/3 share of the market each. Except, in doing this we lost our ability to manufacture locally. We also likely killed-off local suppliers of some of the items, tools, systems and services we employed at our factories. And, of course, thousands of people lost their jobs.
Ten years pass and our Chinese suppliers --having learned to make our products-- are now private labelling the same products to dozens of companies around the world. We go from having 1/3 market share to 1/10 and some of us simply go out of business.
Another ten years go by and the Chinese manufacturers come directly into our markets and sell the products they now manufacture exquisitely at even lower prices. Places like Walmart make deals with them to private label direct to consumers and bypass the "manufacturer" middle-men. We are now out of business, with, perhaps, only a couple remaining, who undoubtedly private label from the same manufacturers and become marketing brands --far removed from their manufacturing origins.
As this continues, industry after industry, baseline suppliers of raw components disappear. Very soon you can't even buy screws and wires made in the US and Europe, much less chips, displays, cloth, tools and machinery.
This is how we get to a situation where, in a pandemic, we can't make masks because we don't own the supply chain or the equipment suppliers. We can't even make the thread and the cloth we need to make masks.
This last part is what highlights that wages or capitalism are not the problem at all. You could have thrown billions of dollars at the problem (maybe they did, don't know) and you still would not be able to manufacture N95 masks at scale for probably a year or more.
Ventilators? Forget it. The whole thing was a sad joke. If that didn't teach everyone just how wrong we've been and how badly we mismanaged our industrial base, I don't know what will.
The one example I like to use about political mismanagement is the treaty signed in the late 1800's that effectively gives China free or nearly free shipping across the US. It costs me more to ship something from Los Angeles to New York than it costs a Chinese company to get a product from Beijing to New York.
That is insane. Even if I could manufacture the exact same product at the exact same cost (which is impossible given supply chain realities) I would lose on shipping. My Chinese competitors would be able to offer free shipping anywhere in the US. I would have to take a loss on every sale to be able to match that.
One treaty did that. And our politicians have done nothing about it for 150 years. Nothing to do with capitalism. Everything to do with incompetence and mismanagement.
Please, don't misunderstand, I get it, people who are not in manufacturing are not equipped to understand these realities. It's like trying to understand how a bird feels while flying without being a bird. A bit of an extreme analogy but the idea is what counts. There's a reason for which my favorite saying, attributed to Mark Twain, is: "A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way". It's true.
You can either accept what I am saying, go do some digging and understand it, or reject it. The sad part is that this will not change reality.
The story you tell about China's rise is exactly the same story I told, I believe. It started with low wages and short-term thinking by rich owners and politicians all too happy to take their bribes, but over time it has turned in a complete inability to compete with China on manufacturing. But one thing is certain: this policy was never a popular demand, American workers have not been happy to let this happen, and American politicians did not do it to appease their voters. It has been a move by and for investors, with American politicians supporting it for their donors. Co-ops rarely move their operations off-shore.
The same thing might have happened with IT and India and Easter Europe, except that IT people are easy to move around and the actual IT drivers have been careful to move the main talent back to the US, even while outsourcing huge amounts of work to those places (I am a Romanian programmer working for an American company). Also, the US has been effective in Eastern Europe (and I believe in India as well) in doing what it couldn't do in China: it has retained all of its IP while doing this, at least for now. Even while Eastern Europe and India have more programmers than the US and EU combined, there are basically 0 software companies creating their own products in these places. When our government needs an OS, it buys Windows from MS. When it needs city planning software, it pays most of the money to Oracle to build a system on it. People are buying games made by French or American companies, quite likely with local programmers.
And one of the major reasons for which the India and Eastern Europe have not been able to profit from IT the way China has from manufacturing is that India and Eastern Europe have bought much more into capitalist ideals. Speaking from mine and my parents' experience in Romania, the joy with which we the Russian and later Chinese-inspired "socialist" dictatorship's end was celebrated was hard to imagine. The hopes for a brighter capitalist future like we'd only seen in brief trips and old movies were high. Everyone was excited about the prospect of private investors taking old, inefficient communist-era factories and running them with modern equipment and modern management practices - Privatization was the word of the day. The state, under IMF and World Bank and US guidance, was to quickly get out of the way, institute free market policies, and watch the money pour in.
The actual result was that corrupt politicians sold those factories to corrupt investors for negligible amounts, investment in modernizing factories was negligible, they were quickly out-competed on the free market by cheap goods from China and Turkey, and were soon closed down and most people laid off. Just like in the US, countries that had had engineers, production line designers, chemists and so on; and manufacturing capacity that had been able to at least half-supply the country with half-decent (only half, mind you) goods locally became entirely dependent on imports. Any strategic and long-term goals for having these industries preserved were sacrificed on the altar of free markets and private rights.
And I do agree: attributing all of these problems entirely to Capitalism is too simplistic - there are other factors, such as globalization, corruption, the culture war which has become a major motivation for many people beyond anything else, demographic shifts and so on. However, the basic problem of the rich controlling the entire economy and putting their own profits before almost any other consideration is a major driver of all of these problems, and a major driver of their continued existence.
For example, you complain that the US was unable to produce N95 masks for the pandemic, and you are absolutely right. But do you believe that the people who designed the policies that led to this situation are surprised? Do you believe the companies that moved their textile and other production to China regretted it when they saw they couldn't produce these masks? Do you think they would choose differently today, had they known?
Even the pandemic itself has only really affected working people. Stocks have been booming, CEOs quickly moved to work from home, they were comfortable in knowing they will be able to afford any medical expenses needed to care for them, they had access to any PPE they required, and had plenty of room to have any kind of private parties they wished to assume the risks for. I don't believe that we will see any major shifts from the top because of Covid19: the system worked perfectly for those for which it was designed.
And yes, policy blunders like the 1800s treaty you mention do happen, and the political gridlock in the USA is unlikely to fix it any time soon. I'm not even sure it was so much of a blunder since, until relatively recently, most of the shipping from China to the US was actually from US companies' factories to US companies' warehouses or more complex factories. Now as Huawei and Alibaba and myriad others are starting to sell their wares directly to US consumers and competing with Apple or Amazon, the act is becoming far more troublesome. But I would not be surprised to hear that there are major lobbyists for other industries explaining how much money they would lose if shipping from China becomes more expensive.
And to be clear, the USSR or China are not socialist by any stretch of the imagination, even less so than being democratic. The USSR and its many sattellites were state capitalist systems, with the exact same profit motives as any capitalist system, just working for the dictator class on top instead of the more vague class of investors, and of course with even more direct control of the population and resources than a democratic capitalist society. China is a more complex mix between state and free trade capitalism, with all of its enclaves where private property is supported.
I agree with much of what you say. The only issue I have is that you can't ascribe any results (good or bad) to a single variable, or even two, like "wages" and "capitalism". Life just doesn't work like that, nothing does.
> my parents' experience in Romania
> The actual result was that corrupt politicians sold those factories to corrupt investor
One of my neighbors is from Romania. I've had many very interesting conversations with her. She can't comprehend how it is that US youth are so in love with socialism and, some, Marxism. She says the same thing every time "if they only knew".
Another neighbor was from Czechoslovakia. Sadly passed away a number of years ago. I have a huge collection of old European and Eastern European stamps because of him. We also had lots of interesting conversations about life in the old country. Same kind of reaction to what has been evolving with US youth, disbelief.
A few friends are from a couple of former USSR republics. Once again, they say the equivalent of "if they only knew" and "we came here to escape what US kids and politicians are asking for".
My family travelled and lived extensively through Latin America, including living in Argentina before, during and after the military regime.
The problems you are talking about are not due to capitalism. They have to do with deeply entrenched cultures of corruption. Once they become "democratic" it takes decades, perhaps a generation or two, for people and politicians to think and behave as those in mature western democracies. I mean, in the USSR people had to cheat, lie and steal to live. As they migrated to other nations it was very common to see enclaves of ex-USSR residents continue to game the system and take advantage of everything, just as they had to back home. One of the most commonly known problems in the US was entire families taking advantage of our welfare system, even going as far as not declaring when family members died in order to continue to receive payments. They also worked for cash in order to appear unemployed and keep their benefits.
I go back to the same thing: Not a single variable problem.
Yes, capitalism has problems, nothing is perfect. We do need controls and rules in certain domains. While not perfect, we tend to do OK over time.
At some level it is very simple: Make a list of nations that elevated the standard of living of their population and how they did it. Create columns for any category you can think of: Capitalism, Socialism, Marxism, Dictatorship, etc. Now give us a list of nations that succeeded without capitalism. You can't. Capitalism has, quite literally, elevated billions of people from dirt-poor agrarian societies to the point of almost everyone in the US being able to walk around with a smart phone, have a smart TV, etc., etc., etc.. The first step is to be truly honest about what we are talking about. Nobody has found any alternatives that work better. Maybe one day someone will.
The thing about Marxism and socialism as understood by people who've lived through the Soviet Union or the satellite states is that they've been exposed to just as much propaganda about their states being examples of Socialism and Marxism as the West has. It's just as wrong. They were also exposed to propaganda claiming that the state was democratic, but none of them believe that because they understand the word and know how different it was. But Socialism and Marxism had no pre-existing meaning for many people in Eastern Europe (pre-WW2, communism and socialism were prohibited from being openly preached in Romania, for example, under penalty of jail). They had no idea what these terms were supposed to mean, so they did believe that their states were failed socialist states, instead of realizing that not a single socialist ideal had ever been attempted, at least once Lenin took power.
And so yes, to people like my parents the very word brings to mind images of their experience in the 'Socialist Republic of Romania', and of professors and newspapers trying to sell them on how good it was.
They know far less of the history of socialist worker's unions that fought and won for the right to the 40 hour work week or for the right to strike and protest.
Related to examples of successful socialist states, I can't give any. However, rather than debating the reasons for that, I will say that worker's cooperatives are a proven business model all over the world, so I don't see why it's impossible to imagine a successful economy based on co-ops instead of corporation. After all, at one point there were no successful modern democracies or capitalist states in the world, and the very idea seemed preposterous to many lovers of king and country.
Anyway, I want to say that I have greatly enjoyed this thread of conversation!
> It is exactly people like Bernie and AOC who are likely to bring manufacturing back to the USA, instead of letting corporations continue to outsource every last job they can to save a dollar on labor.
This has nothing to do with governments, but is the logical consequence of capitalism - export to the cheapest labour force. And exporting to your national rival to the point of being a national security issue even goes back to the 1600s with the wool and linen industry.
Simple example: Did you know the US and Europe have a treaty with China (and other nations) that was signed in 1874 (yes nearly 150 years ago!) that gives China FREE SHIPPING WITHIN THE US?
As a manufacturer, it is actually more expensive to ship something from Los Angeles to New York than from China to anywhere in the US. Why? This treaty subsidizes shipping from China. American tax payers pick-up the bill. US manufacturers can't even compete.
Why was this gift granted? Because back then the intent was to help developing nations. China is now the second largest economy in the world and US taxpayer are still subsidizing every single postal package shipped from China today.
This is but one of the atrocities committed by our incompetent politicians that have caused US industry to steadily lose the ability to compete. This has nothing whatsoever to do with greedy capitalism, that's preposterous.
As usual, people think they know how things work because they reduce reality to a single variable problem. I have been in manufacturing for decades. I can't even count how many variables drive reality, but I can tell you it isn't as simple as casual observers like to think. The usual "greedy corporations" trope is the first thing that reveals someone not having clue. And, to be fair, sometimes the only way to understand it is to be in it up to your neck. Or to listen to those who have first hand experience. That does not include college professors and politicians who have never built anything in their entire lives. Sorry.
China has been posturing itself to seize Taiwan by military force. [1] I am less than optimistic that our current government will prevent that from happening.
" A recent chip shortage for auto manufacturing cost an American car company an estimated $2.5 billion. A strategic blockage would cost far more and put our security at risk."
I'm not sure how you could come to that conclusion based on my questions. China's place on the world stage is largely dependent on having customers. If there is no where for them to sell their manufactured goods, then they are not in a position of power.
Selling goods does not rely solely on competitive prices. It may also reflect the lack of alternative vendors, or the negative repercussions of defying political pressure -- as eastern European countries who rely on Russia for gas and oil to heat their houses have discovered, and near neighbors to China whos's fishing vessels now routinely cross into their waters have discovered.
Often the ability to sell is motivated by more than just economics.
You are making a common mistake of assuming rational behavior of a nation when it is controlled by consolidated power of one person. Their agenda may be driven by grandeur, or miscalculated attempt to eschew local optimum for global, or personal phobias and aspirations.
US accounts for 16% of Chinese exports. 84% is the rest of the world.
So while it's the biggest trade partner, it's not the end all and be all. It's about as important as what the UK was to Ireland before Brexit. Stopping trade isn't helpful, but it's not a showstopper either.
> First, U.S. courts have severely restricted what types of computer-implemented and biotech-related inventions can be protected under U.S. patent law.6 Critical AI and biotech-related inventions have been denied patent protection since 2010.7 Facing uncertainty in obtaining and retaining patent protection, inventors pursue trade secret protection. Trade secrets do not readily promote innovation markets, because trade secrets, unlike patents, do not contribute to accessible technical knowledge in the public domain.8 While these impacts might not be immediate, the long-term effects on AI and other emerging technology developments and competitiveness are concerning.9
Looks like it's coming out solidly in the pro-software-patent camp.
In its present state the patent/license system does more to gum up innovation than it does to help inventors. This is due to the extreme asymmetry between individual inventors (who have almost no power to enforce IP against big companies) and big companies (who have a virtually unlimited war chest of liberally granted patents that are mainly used to squash competition from smaller businesses.)
The options for fixing it are A. Reform the entire judicial system so that one guy can take on a foreign multinational and win if he's right, and also get the patent office to stop granting trivial or overly broad patents to protect small businesses from abusers, or B. Weaken IP law so that we get fewer of the abuses, under the theory that we aren't getting the benefits now anyways. (If a system promises benefits but delivers abuses, it can be advantageous and much more practical to get rid of the system, even if reforming it would be better.)
Google has a significant patent attorney preparation and prosecution team on its payroll, and they can afford to draft patent applications which have all the enablement and "possession of the invention" text in their patent applications. At the intersection of biotech and AI, this is a significant hurdle to overcome for the solo or bootstrap inventor/innovator.
Applying algorithms to a variety of biotech platforms (genetics, genomics, bioinformatics, single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), mutation, etc.) is a real challenge for a number of reasons. First, the difference amongst us human beings (a difference in phenotype) is a real challenge for algos to train on, and is dependent upon the underlying datasets or combination of datasets. Second, it's difficult to integrate the algos into existing Hospital Information Systems (HIS).
You can check out these following links for some explanation on this technology convergence and patent prosecution strategy:
Google has solved some of these problems, whether from its dominant capital position or deep patent prep/pros team, so can successfully obtain granted patents in this technical field.
Most destinations permit you to enter nitty gritty notes about your rivals directly on the screen, where you can get to it with the snap of a mouse. https://qqpokerraja.org/ Numerous destinations will give you point by point insights, for example, how frequently you see the failure, turn and waterway, and how regularly you win when the hand goes to a confrontation. This can be priceless data while dissecting your game to attempt to improve.
Off topic - if I wanted to write a report like that with those cool templates and graphics - what did they use ? I don’t think google docs can do that :)
From experience, Microsoft Office (Word plus PowerPoint for diagrams) is capable of doing approximately all of what you see there.
I'm not sure what the current state of LibreOffice is when it comes to advanced typesetting, but I expect it could easily do everything in that report.
LaTeX is in a class of it's own, practically the space shuttle compared to a Cessna. Unfortunately, the learning curve is a seemingly endless source of ¡fun! for beginners.
Don't use bare LaTeX. Use Lyx or another frontend for it. Much more like Office, though it works a bit different - Lyx is not WYSIWYG, it's more "what you ask for is what you get", which takes a little bit of getting used to. Still, it's the space shuttle without all those years of astronaut training.
LaTeX frontends tend to be slow, because LaTeX is not designed for realtime recompilation or layout. I prefer editors with quick but not realtime updating, where I can write the code and see the document change.
Can latex produce this level - I have only ever got to the basic level and realised that getting something at the "simple MS Office" level is a vast climb.
Any templates that are beyond "maths paper in arxiv" level I should look again at?
It can be quite a bit of work configuring custom templates though and any one off deviations are likely to require significant effort as well. There are specific use cases (for example publications with lots of mathematical notation, or the periodic regeneration of tables and charts by a small script) where it can be quite useful.
Most people would probably be better served by a standard office software suite though. Even something as simple as Google Docs is sufficient for the vast majority of documents.
It can but I'm not sure the effort is really worth it. I went through a period of my life where I was using LaTeX for literally every document I produced. Presentations, all kinds of charts and cheatsheets with diagrams and illustrations through TikZ. They looked beautiful in the end but nobody who consumes them appreciates the massive effort. People assume you are just slightly better at Word rather than really good at LaTeX. Not that the only point of learning things is to impress others, but it's pretty demoralizing.
At the time I thought 'just learn one tool well and use it forever', but now I feel more like 'just use the best tool for the job'. In this case I would say that's InDesign and a few hours of tutorials, mostly. The illustrations you can choose another tool if appropriate.
Could someone please help me understand why chip manufacturing is so hard? Like why hasn't China already figured out how to do it? It's obviously a huge strategic priority for them, yet it seems like they don't have the requisite expertise to do it themselves. Other bleeding edge tech they are fully on top of (the software side of AI for example). Why is that?
Why is there a "Final Report"? Surely, because of the scope and ever-changing landscape, there should be a standing commission on AI and national security, right?
Heh, I read the title as "(National Security Commission) on (Artificial Intelligence's Final Report)" and was very confused, only when I looked at the domain name I realized it was "(National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence)'s (Final Report)" ...
Great. During the Hk 47 court case, I hope the world is getting more aware some partners they have are totalitarian countries. Check it out. It is like nuclear bomb technology.
> Microelectronics power all AI, and the United States no longer manufactures the world’s most sophisticated chips. We do not want to overstate the precariousness of our position, but given that the vast majority of cutting-edge chips are produced at a single plant separated by just 110 miles of water from our principal strategic competitor, we must reevaluate the meaning of supply chain resilience and security.