Prices in many foreign countries are wonky though, because of different cultural & economic systems. You can have a good lunch out (the equivalent of fast-casual; most eateries are like that) in Taiwan for about USD$2-4, and because the expectation is that you live with your parents until you get married, housing expenses are minimal. There's also a big oversupply of 20-30something labor, because the older engineers who built the company (and get paid significantly more) aren't retiring and so those skilled jobs aren't opening up. That's behind both the low prices for food (many young Taiwanese open small restaurants) and for entry-level fab engineer jobs.

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Monthly-Pay/TSMC-Process-Engineer-...

You should just adjust for PPP. The world bank estimates taiwan's GDP (nominal) to be 759M, but adjusted for PPP it's 1,403B. If we do the same adjustment for wages, we get $3165 per month, or $18.19/hr.

source: Parents are from Taiwan, and I have relatives in Taiwan who tell me similar price estimates.

Edit: my source (potus) was mistaken apparently. A better source is below and involves non poaching and different restaurants (not McDonald’s as far as I can tell)

> About 80 percent of fast-food workers are constricted by no-poaching clauses, according to Healey's office. The other fast-food chains targeted by the states' investigation are Arby's, Five Guys, Little Caesars and Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/07/09/11-st...

See:

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/07/bidens-false-claim-about-m...

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jul/28/joe-biden/...

https://focustaiwan.tw/business/202106300017

"The median employee salary at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the world's largest contract chipmaker, reached NT$1.81 million (US$64,874) in 2020, up from NT$1.63 million a year earlier."

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/TSMC-Salaries-E4130.htm

Process engineer is like $73K/yr

So these, very skilled, employees probably get like ~15% less in Taiwan. No idea what Taiwan's employer tax situation looks like.

Sure, we can do small scale cutting edge prototype fabs, but the few production fabs we have here are not TSMC quality (go ask Intel), and they are already fully allocated. Many of those might not exist here in the country at all, if it weren’t for the requirements from the US military and certain other classified customers to have certain types of chips made here domestically.

We used to have a lot more fab engineers here in the US, but we outsourced those jobs and sent them overseas. And the people who used to do that work have moved on to other careers, or retired.

And the reason why Silicon Valley has so many EPA disaster area cleanup sites is because of the fabs(and related businesses) that used to be endemic in that part of the country. Fabs aren’t clean businesses to run. You’re going to have to find a place where you can run those dirty kinds of businesses, and that’s either going to be extraordinarily expensive, or even impossible, due to legal restrictions on the use of toxic chemicals, etc….

There’s a reason why those fabs are overseas. And all those reasons are why it’s going to be extraordinarily hard for us to pull that work back. There’s a reason why Steve Jobs and Tim Cook have both said “those jobs aren’t coming back”.

If staffing costs are 5% of of marginal costs, then making them 10% is fine if your residual income/profit is high enough.

I suspect you put a fab in Asia because you get higher profitability, not necessarily because you wouldn’t make a profit at all in the US.

Can anyone comment on what percentage of costs for say TSMC go on staffing?

Making chips seems to be quite a bit more complicated than making and launching rockets, I don't think even Elon Musk could do it.

Exports won't offset operating costs here in the USA, but perhaps we could apply some ingenuity to that through national research investments and the ensuing startup ecology. The ancillary benefits of funding research and small business infrastructure around the big fabs would be huge.

Sandia national labs has a ~3.5 annual Giga$ budget! That's _entirely_ publicly funded and represents about half of TSMC's operating budget (https://investor.tsmc.com/english/encrypt/files/encrypt_file... , looking at 50% profit yielding ~12 G$)

Tbf, many (most?) government websites are built and maintained by private companies. Remember the ACA website debacle a few years back? The government was mad at the contractor for building a shoddy product. They claimed they would take action against them but I’m not sure anything happened. If the government should be held to task on anything it should be an inability to write good contracts or hold companies feet to the fire. I’ve heard civil servants are unwilling to to the latter because they don’t want to hurt businesses or are afraid of legal protests.

var a = 1; a = 2;

Before I got any further they blurted out “that’s false! The second line is false” and this was someone who had been writing production code for the government for the last five years.

I honestly just felt really bad for them, more than anything.

I’ve seen some orgs rely on rely bad programmers because they were relatively cheap. Programmers who make changes on the fly in meetings to live production systems or say their test plan is to push it to production and just wait for customers to send in work tickets when they encounter a bug. Or blatantly lie about feasibility because they would prefer to work in an antiquated framework rather than learn a new one.

The govt owns some responsibility for lack of technical oversight but I can’t help but think a lot of it is due to business contracting incentives.

America does fab. However not newest nodes at high capacity. It just doesn't take building an identical factory and hiring away engineers. There is a complete supply chain of specialist companies which produce or fix the part the part that goes into a machine that that ... . Not mentioning that those construction costs are at economies of scale of building factories.

Such a thing can't be build in the US as every state needs a piece of the pie. An US run copy will be more expensive even when you ignore wages. Extra spare capacity for emergencies is not sound either.

EU has lately been thinking about localizing chip production here, but they seem to be stuck in the same fallacy: we need a huge, gleaming fab on our soil. No, that is just the tip of the iceberg, unfortunately.

Running such a production is difficult.

But, if we assume they were, just double the cost as a sign-on bonus for all the engineers and poach away.

This is problem that can be solved with money, and not a lot of it in the grand scheme of things.

The US is subsidizing a TSMC plant here, which should help the situation, as it'll give us access to their engineers and cross pollination. But it's still tiny compared to the need if we want to move the majority of our chip imports to domestic.

Another part is lax environmental laws. Hillsboro Oregon is embroiled in a suit with Intel where Intel dumped 100x the fluorine into the air that they claimed when D1X was first pitched. Don't need to worry about that stuff in Asia (for now).

Also, lead time. The x-ray litho machines take years to build and test. There are only two companies that make Intel's testers, and the lead time is years. So a "quick fix" isn't possible.

Speaking opinion: in the long term, it is mostly rich people trying to get richer that caused this. If greedy CEOs and shareholders would just be humans for once and think about the future we wouldn't have this trainwreck. That ain't ever gonna happen.

And the chips in question exist in the first place because...?

It's also 3 years away from opening in AZ (2024). Then they have to fine tune the equipment and processes over x runs. New plants tend to have low yields until those processes are smoothed out and perfected. You don't just set up a plant and start churning out chips with 98% success rate at 5nm once the factory is built. It probably takes 5-6 years from construction start to churning out quality chips in numbers that are actually profitable.

ASML has engineers who go out and spend months or a year or more, just taking various measurements of the location inside the building at the site where the machine will be operating. Then those engineers go back to Eindhoven to oversee the building of that machine from the ground up, and run through proving cycles. Then the whole thing has to be taken apart and shipped and then rebuilt at the site. And then there are months afterwards as the team does further work and testing before they can finally use that machine for production purposes.

The Saturn V rocket was much easier to build and move. Nothing the rocket industry has can compare to the difficulty of building and moving these machines.

Disclaimer: I worked as a consultant at ASML for several months, helping them to rebuild their Unix infrastructure systems that they used to support the engineers who did all that design and build work.

[1]: https://collapseos.org/

Given that they will return

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuW4oGKzVKc

That's what a president sounds like.

Politicians like MTG and Boebert are part of the system just to cheapen it. The crazier they are, the more off-tilt they are, the better the strategy works, the more it weakens the average Americans faith in the system. This strategy started with Trump, but it's started permeating every level of politics. The more wild they act, the more they can insist that the other side is being just as crazy.

But look what he did against racism vs Johnson (not that much compared to J.), and they both still pushed the Vietnam war. Kennedy had to work around the edges on entrenched racism to maintain his Democratic majority with southern votes. At least the parties are more honest about their proclivities today.