[1] Edit to add: This was/is poorly worded - I mean that the US will only guarantee that you remain an ally while they are in some sense dependent on you, and while doing so they may work to break that dependence, which you may interpret as them trying to abandon you.
Right now there is a very large Canadian boycott of US products, services and tourism. I also had to explain to a client this week that because of the import tariffs on Chinese goods to the US the US assembled products are now no longer competitive with alternatives. The fact you were seemingly unaware of this kind of demonstrates the level of effect of it.
We import tons of food and energy from them and have no alternative on time scales or 10 years
If we imported chips from Canada, that supply chain would be safe for at least 50 years, probably hundreds
> We import tons of food and energy from them and have no alternative on time scales or 10 years
More importantly for Canadians that food or energy has no alternative competing market to sell into. Consequently the Canadians are totally dependent on the US market to even set the price of it. This applies to many other sectors as well.
Canada is currently having a huge desperate push to export to non US markets because of the levels of uncertainty that have been created. And I say this as someone not totally dismissive of the US position, but they need to do a far better job of bringing their allies into the tent with them.
That's hubris. Although the US does indulge elective wars, one does not always get to choose with whom one will war.
And we haven't had any serious threats from Canada since 1812. I think the most reasonable estimate is 100-200 years
I could also take the example of world wars, in France ww1 was deemed "la der des ders", which meant "the very last war" or "the war to end all wars", well 20 years later we were at it again
Or simply look at China, you don't even have to go back 100 years in the past to see drastic changes.
I'm not claiming nobody will invade France or Taiwan in the next 100 years, I'm claiming that the US is special. We haven't been invaded since 1812 and haven't really been attacked since 1941. It's reasonable to predict we won't be invaded or go to war with our neighbors for 100 years since it hasn't happened for 213 years
My own death has not yet been a problem for me, but I can safely assume it will be.
It won't be war. It'll be one-sided trade deals [1,2], and a slow erosion of economic and political sovereignty, culminating in a puppet state.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada-China_Promotion_and_Rec...
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/fipa-agreement-with-china-wha...
There is plenty of risk that our neighbors stop importing and almost no risk they stop exporting
Meanwhile cutting off your markets and wasting hundreds of billions on a long term bet with a small probability that another global war will happen is pretty dumb financial thinking.
Tariffs and corporate welfare will actively make a country poorer and create unproductive zombie markets while raising taxes on everyone. Not to mention diverting budgets and new revenue away from actual national security investment.
Those foundries didn't go away, they're still manufacturing with the same capabilities they used to (and they're much cheaper now since they're competing with the better ones in Taiwan.)
It's good to hear TI hasn't given up on high performance SOCs as it was beginning to look like they had. But most of this stuff is still here. Freescale and many other American companies are still making the same (better even) chips they always have which is more than enough for cruise missiles (more than enough for decent PDAs and smartphones really) even without "stockpiling."
Not to mention China (and/or Taiwan) is still going to want to sell to someone to survive, and those countries can smuggle them into America - just like Russia does for it's drone industry and oil. America is much more capable in that regards with NATO and it's huge purchasing power.
I still think TI and Apple should be investing in foundries and domestically. It should just make sense as a business otherwise it's going to be a very expensive embarrassment.
Even that isn't a given, because unless you have amassed a certain amount of technocratic and governmental competency chances are it can't compete even with government support and you just produce crony dysfunctional companies.
And of course there's economic trade offs. If you're politically ordering your economy to make chips, it doesn't make something else, and whatever it was making and trading for chips it was better at, and so you get fewer chips, that's comparative advantage. Industrial policy (and tariffs) do not increase aggregate production, they reduce it. And given that the circle of items you "can't do without" seems to be a bit of a moving target these days, at some point you're actually more brittle because you've replaced large chunks of the market with state production.
USPS is a great example of an organization that's managed to largely avoid this. Whenever you mention that people crawl out of the woodwork to complain about the 7 different times they lost their package, but their logistics at scale is still unmatched by the private sector, while also not completely negating the value of private sector alternatives (which so often is argued would happen if the government actively started doing anything new).
However making everything domestically just isn’t really viable for any country any more. The scale of our technological civilization and the diversity of goods and materials it depends on is more that any one continent can support, let alone one country.
It would be possible to collapse that down to one continent if absolutely necessary, but it would be incredibly economically painful and the US would need to give up on a lot of non-essentials and other priorities to devote resources to duplicating capacity that already exists elsewhere.
Chip manufacturing factories are traditionally called fabs, short for that.
bix6•3h ago
So how much ownership is the US gov gonna get in this one?
readthenotes1•3h ago
lokar•3h ago
givemeethekeys•1h ago
Spivak•1h ago
givemeethekeys•1h ago
dmix•1h ago
America is the last place that is short of capital for industry investments where it requires gov taxes going to it, they have a huge domestic financial market and tons of foreign investment (but those require legitimate plans, not national security woo woo). This is just propping up weak megacorp industry like they did with Boeing, instead of fostering real progress.
Spivak•48m ago
* The state can't risk taxpayer money on ventures that might not pay off or lose them money. How the state "gets around this" is by issuing zero recourse loans. The advantage is that when economic development money is handed out there's not an asset on the balance sheet. It's treated like it was spent. The value the state gets from spending the money has to be independently worth it for taxpayer without considering financial returns.
* It eliminates a whole category of conflicts of interests where the government will get squeamish regulating or punishing bad behavior because it would hurt the taxpayers' investment.
* It also eliminates vectors for corruption as well as the negative effects of the government having direct influence over specific businesses. No backdoor regulations from the state's ownership stake that don't go through the legislature.
So I'm very heavily in the camp that government shouldn't ever be allowed to have stake in any private company. The line between government and private enterprise should be the wall this admin likes to talk about. I certainly didn't expect it would be republicans I would be trying to convince that state ownership of business is a bad thing.
OhMeadhbh•2h ago
And this comes from a place of love... My family's been invested in GSI for almost 100 years
dkdcio•2h ago
calculators have consistently been a minor percentage of TI’s business (~5% of profits per source below). I doubt MSP430s in particular amount to a huge percentage either
one random source: https://www.meta-calculator.com/blog/ti-graphing-calculator-... (this is pretty easy info to find)
OhMeadhbh•1h ago
Kirby64•1h ago
OhMeadhbh•1h ago
Also... revenue, profit and margin are all different things.
vel0city•58m ago
OhMeadhbh•39m ago
dkdcio•19m ago
the person above made an analogy —- they didn’t claim TI loses money per calculator
vel0city•2h ago
They make important chips and many top of the line products of their segments but they're not things like server grade CPUs or GPUs.
OhMeadhbh•1h ago
But... everyone seems to think TI will be competing with TSMC's and Samsung's small-node parts. And they probably could, but they would need to a) build a fab that can make 5 or 3nm parts and b) build a sales channel for new parts. I was alive in the 2000s so remember TI doing an exceptionally poor job of step b.
vel0city•1h ago
It's a better story than your misleading statements acting like TI only makes calculators and old microprocessors and flat out inaccurate ones about profit margins.
OhMeadhbh•26m ago
EFreethought•2h ago
OhMeadhbh•1h ago
Uvix•1h ago