Comment by FirmwareBurner
12 days ago
> The kind of slow and steady protection and promotion of home-grown industry that China and most of Asia so successfully used to grow their economies was completely absent as even a talking point
The slow and steady way that post-WW2 Korea and Japan did needs a unanimously agreed 10-20 year long game plan between industry and government, which is incompatible with democracies who change colors and strategies every 4 years where the new administration begins to tear down everything the previous administration did because they serve different voter bases and corporate lobby groups.
It is also incompatible with the US since a lot of corporations made bank due to offshoring and will fight it every way they can since they don't want to deal with costly US labor who can unionize or sue you for millions if they break a finger at work. Even TSMC Arizona had to bring half the workers from Taiwan, and it's not like they're making tchotchkes.
They were brought from Taiwan due to their expertise and familiarity with TSMC processes. America doesn’t have a glut of people with EUV fab experience — they all already work for Intel.
Sure, but it's not like they're paying them super competitive wages. Some people on HN said the Taiwanese TSMC Arizona workers already started applying at Intel.
If you want to kick-start manufacturing, you're gonna have to attract people somehow initially, either through more money, or free education/training, etc
>The slow and steady way that post-WW2 Korea and Japan did needs a unanimously agreed 10-20 year long game plan between industry and government, which is incompatible with democracies who change colors and strategies every 4 years where the new administration begins to tear down everything the previous administration did because they serve different voter bases and corporate lobby groups.
The message of "we're gonna find some way to undo some of the damage of off shoring and find some way to put heavy industry back to work" has been included in one way or another in every presidential candidates platform at least as far back as Obama's first term.
The specifics change from party to party and candidate to candidate but this isn't a new thing. The common man has been clamoring for some sort of change from the status quo for the better part of a generation now. It's only recently that the situation has become such a priority that elections are won or lost on it.
I fully expect that whatever administration comes next will continue on the path of on-shoring, if perhaps in a more reasonable way.
>It is also incompatible with the US since a lot of corporations made bank due to offshoring and will fight it every way they can since they don't want to deal with costly US labor who can unionize or sue you for millions if they break a finger at work
The people who actually run manufacturing and heavy industry really resent the current off-shoring status quo. They only do it because the sum total of other policy pushed by short sighted wall street financiers and/or environmental/labor advocates makes it the only viable option. I think they'd be happy to come back if doing so was financially viable, they just want it to be predictable (something current policy making surely isn't, lol) so they can plan around it because investments in those industries are made on decades long timelines.
I think we're at the point now where there's the political will to let the punch press eat some fingers to keep the factory open.
There's various forms of democracy and many are not as chaotic as the US kind in regards to long term plans.
A good example is the general global approach to Net Zero. It's slow, methodical, science based, negotiated.
But if anyone brings up planning for 2050 it's usually in the context of "It's all bullshit, politicians are crap, they're just lying to you and kicking the can down the road till they retire" (and if you scratch the surface you'll have even chance that the person saying that has been radicalised into not even believing there's a problem to be solved).
But only the US is in and out of the Paris agreement etc.
What makes the US more chaotic (and UK to some extent and probably more) is the political system first-past-the-post which does nothing to promote collaboration. Quite the contrary the winner does its best to crush every sprout of the loser to make his future win more likely. Now if you had a few parties which would be forced to forge alliances to govern, they would probably govern in alliances in the following terms as well so some of the politics for sure get carried over. But, such ideas help now nobody, the current system is how it is.
Countries change policies all the time based on the whishes of industry lobby groups or voters, not just the US. People focusing exclusively on what Trump is doing are myopic or arguing in bad faith.
And the global approach to net zero is not global, nor is it binding, it's more of a gentlemen's agreement bet which is basically worthless. Ideologically it sounds good, the issues are always when the tires hit the road, and then some spanners get thrown in on top: wars, pandemics, revolutions, natural disasters, political feuds, etc.
So yeah, outside of bubbles of privileged mid-upper class people in safe rich countries, nobody gives a crap about what's gonna happen in 2050 when they can't pay next month's rent/mortgage or their car doesn't start and their bank balance is red.
Capitalism got us chasing next quarter returns at the expense of what's gonna happen in 2050, so we'll be kicking the can down the road until everything falls apart, first very slowly, and then very suddenly.
> Countries change policies all the time based on the whishes of industry lobby groups or voters, not just the US.
It is irrelevant what other countries do.
What matters is whether or not other countries and industries trust that a country has sufficient stability to do business in and with. If there are actual or perceived signals that suggest chaos, rational people will not be interested to be tethered to that dispensation.