Technology

Because Biden did it. That's it. It's a huge thing and it doesn't have Trump's name on it, therefore it's bad and needs to go away.

Like many industry observers accurately stated that the shortages will subside long before any of the CHIPS spending could even possibly make a difference.

If you consider advanced microprocessors a strategic asset, the immediate short-term pinch in supply isn't the problem. Its the long-term overseas outsourcing of production to regions we consider at high risk of foreign conflicts (Taiwan and South Korea). Simply moving finished chips across the Pacific Ocean is its own strategic problem.

One could easily argue that our steadily ratcheted hostilities toward China, Russia, and Iran is the actual root cause of our problems. And we'd do well to in-source production for supply flow reasons, but our real panacea might be to simply stop fucking around at the periphery of a rival imperial power.

But if you consider the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian peoples as inherently adversarial to the American way of life (on account of them hating us for our freedoms), then relying on Samsung and TMSC as your primary supply of chipsets seems imprudent.

Of course, if you wanted to give the economy any hope for viable electronics while also massively screwing over imports, this would have been your shot. So it seems strategically at odds with the whole “make domestic manufucating happen” rhetoric.

A big central problem of the US chips strategy is that we're not building capacity, we're building investment incentives. The goal is to make local manufacturing profitable rather than productive. But that's at the root of the ideological divide between American and the BRICS we're positioning ourselves in opposition to.

We wouldn't be threatening war with these countries if we had a strong global socio-economic consensus.

Brain drain will eventually lead to a rightward shift, since more educated people tend to lean left.

Been happening for a lot longer than we like to admit. Students coming to the US for education and then returning home to work have been the norm since the early '00s, on account of the US higher education system being highly subsidized by the States and Feds. This made US education relatively cheap for its quality, especially at the state university level.

But that was good, actually, because we became a nexus of research and development. Lots of students came, got education, and left. Lots more stayed around, lured by the high paying jobs at domestic firms. A few even joined the education staff of the universities themselves. A bit of brain drain was fine, so long as we produced far more than we lost.

Now we're just hemorrhaging talent and expertise because we no longer value the work product of the professional classes. We're pricing people out of public universities and imposing strict ideological tests on the students we do let in. We're going full eugenics mode on senior staff and administration. And we're turning education more and more into a means of profiting off credentialing than accruing working knowledge or performing independent research.

America is dismantling all of its socialist institutions.

Then reintroduced it as Trump's and add more money to the top 1%

I think you'd be surprised to discover how many people speak English as a second language, thanks to its extensive use in business and law. Even (perhaps especially) in China, where US-Chinese trade relations have been going strong since Nixon shook hands with Mao.

Only in the last ten years has the relationship between Wall Street and Hong Kong/Shanghai degraded and the appeal of English as a business language fallen by the wayside.

A bunch of them are likely Chinese or Taiwanese, the latter might also speak Mandarin.

Furthermore, I work in Estonia and all technical communication is in English. Source code is in English. To my coworkers and our clients I speak in Estonian. I suspect if China is going to be bringing in western engineers to their projects, they'll also accommodate for English speakers.

Can learn

Technical talk is always half english anyway

You'd be surprised how many top level engineers are Chinese; there's a joke about the AI race that it's our Chinese vs their Chinese.

More than half of all new engineers of the world are chinese.

Densely populated isn't a problem for everyone (I like dense), and the pollution isn't as bad as it used to be, right?

The authoritarian part is a major major issue of course, but my layperson perceptions of the material conditions of China is that it's not nearly as bad as it used to be, and is getting better

And another upside, good public transit