Semiconductor tariffs

It's genuinely staggering to me how little thought people actually put into things like saying "tariffs are good" and "them banning export of RE materials is good because we can just mine it ourselves". There is zero consideration for the actual reality of the logistics and cost that goes into something like "build an entire rare earths mineral mining and processing infrastructure from the ground up". It's like they just handwave and imagine it'll "just happen" overnight on it's own. And not even considering that most of the actual machinery and tools and materials to DO that have to come from China or somewhere else in the first place because we don't make those either.
Be safe whilst staggering …
 
Yeah, if these guys in Africa can do it, I’m pretty sure we can as well.
But some would like to perpetuate the myth that nothing can be done here and that nobody even wants to.

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Where do you get this?
There is this thing called history, it’s quite fascinating 😉.
Plus my home country lived it when Bolsheviks shipped anyone with high school education or higher to the gulags.

Perhaps you didn’t notice because of my subtle posting style🤣, that I hate communism, but I’m here to assure you that I do.
 
I forgot to retire at 65. But looking to retire in a month or two.

I work on a small team supporting the mainframe. We end up picking up the pieces when the overseas work causes problems.

I have to believe management knows the low quality they often get from overseas work but as you say are sucked in by the low prices.

The latest trend is for a company to rent a floor in one of the buildings at the tech hubs in India and hire FTEs in India. A friend of mine at a company I use to work for said her area was given a 90 day notice to train their Indian replacement and then layoff.
I am training mine............
 
It's genuinely staggering to me how little thought people actually put into things like saying "tariffs are good" and "them banning export of RE materials is good because we can just mine it ourselves". There is zero consideration for the actual reality of the logistics and cost that goes into something like "build an entire rare earths mineral mining and processing infrastructure from the ground up". It's like they just handwave and imagine it'll "just happen" overnight on it's own. And not even considering that most of the actual machinery and tools and materials to DO that have to come from China or somewhere else in the first place because we don't make those either.
Who is saying this?
Zero consideration?
"They"

Whole lota something going on right here.

It's going to be TOUGH. Because the previous idiots allowed us in this position. Free trade, no such animal and China knew that.
 
Anybody remember 10-15 years ago when China was buying up land and governments in Africa and the Middle East for RE materials? Maybe because we were too busy fighting a generational war to realize this but if 18 year old me (at that time) can figure out that China can strangle the market from that, surely other people in power could have figured it out, or maybe they were brib...I mean given donations......to look the other way.
 
Agree on the population numbers difference, but disagree on education.
We need to value education, starting with grade school. That's my opinion.

The 2 most important changes AI will offer is Education and Medicine.
The US education system is failing miserably, and it's not the fault of the favorite boogeymen, it's because we lack teachers (because of low pay) lack of resources (because of lack of funding) and the lack of a coherent, coordinated curriculum. That's why states that have well funded public education systems with a coherent statewide curriculum (such as New York State) have much better education levels and outcomes than states like NC which have none of those. My brother and sister when they moved from NY to NC well over a decade ago now while in high school said they were learning stuff that they'd learned well over a year prior in NY.
 
So just don’t bother changing anything and let China continue taking over anything they want?
Did I say that? No. I'm all for more production in the US (or at least US allies- or who we'd previously call allies but maybe frenemies would be more appropriate now) but that's stuff that takes time. Maybe instead of forcing the US consumer to take the hit in their wallet force American companies to start mining and refining here.
 
Who is saying this?
Zero consideration?
"They"

Whole lota something going on right here.

It's going to be TOUGH. Because the previous idiots allowed us in this position. Free trade, no such animal and China knew that.
So much for lower prices. I don't remember hearing "we're gonna have to face tough times" being in the TV advertisements or rallies.
 
Sure but it won't solve the "I can hire one American engineer or 100 in X country for the same price". My cousin actually said 1,000.
It is never 1:1000. I worked with a few and the realistic number is about 1:3 to 1:5, somewhere in between.

Again, the best one got recruited to the US. My former boss used to work in Beijing and decided to leave his former nation for his kid's future. He said he saved up enough to get into the immigration program in Canada and when he was resigning, the VP got an approval to get him on an L visa because he was a good manager. He now work in the US for a US company making typical US salary. Canada lost a good engineer, and China could have never kept him to begin with.
 
Anybody remember 10-15 years ago when China was buying up land and governments in Africa and the Middle East for RE materials? Maybe because we were too busy fighting a generational war to realize this but if 18 year old me (at that time) can figure out that China can strangle the market from that, surely other people in power could have figured it out, or maybe they were brib...I mean given donations......to look the other way.
European left Africa not because they were forced to but because it was not an economical feasible place to colonize. China is losing their shirt in Africa for all the investment they put in.

Why Africa but not US or Europe? Japan tried it and they lost their shirts in the 90s too. It is not easy to buy something from another country without causing hate (just look at so many people today here hating foreign investors buying homes).

One of the main reasons also is valuation. You will just bump the price of what you want too much if you keep buying it. This is why after 2015 there were so much money pumped into tech startup because there was nothing else not already overvalued to invest, so sovereign funds have to create new things to invest in, like those unicorn startups.
 
The US education system is failing miserably, and it's not the fault of the favorite boogeymen, it's because we lack teachers (because of low pay) lack of resources (because of lack of funding) and the lack of a coherent, coordinated curriculum. That's why states that have well funded public education systems with a coherent statewide curriculum (such as New York State) have much better education levels and outcomes than states like NC which have none of those. My brother and sister when they moved from NY to NC well over a decade ago now while in high school said they were learning stuff that they'd learned well over a year prior in NY.
I don't think US education system is that bad. I'm in a city where the same school district has K12 school that they rotate teachers on, same resource per student, same curriculum, same funding, same everything except the parents sending their kids to the school.

You probably can tell already the ones in 9-10 are the upper middle class parents and the 3-4 are the working class renters in apartments with parents not caring too much.

You can't ask schools to do the jobs parents should do. You can give them opportunities but if they don't take it you can't force them to. In the US we have a very flexible system where in the same grade based on your level you can take pre-algebra all the way to AP calculus. If your kids are motivated to do it they can, but if they want to slack off and focus on sport and the parents allow, they can too. In other countries they also face the same problem except they just drop out when we keep them around at lower level. We are a free country and we don't force people to do things they don't want to.
 
Do you like cars with auto generators and an external pile style regulator? (Alternators use materials we don’t have domestically with a focus on the regulator section being impossible to produce sans specific materials )
Do you like mechanical timing? Modern OBDII2 and o2 sensors can’t be manufactured without specific elements

Do you like not having a 3 way cat?
Only 70’s era 2 way cats can be made domestically without certain elements.

Do you like crt TVs ? (Modern LCDs, processors/junction boards and silicon chips in general require elements we don’t make in significant quantities but we do have the rare earths to make CRTs phosphors )

Do you like cell phones? Many parts, especially 3/4/5g modems require rare earths to transmit.

Do you like asceptic packaging? Many polymers, hydrocarbons (including fuel and oil) and medical chemicals are manufactured with the help of rare earth catalyst.

The reason the above matters is because China is attempting to place an export ban on any product with rare earths going to a country without a license.

It is a long list and I am not going to read through all of that. However I would say from my experience things are not always "you can't do it" but rather "you will lose some efficiency".

You can build hard drives without rare earth magnet. It will just be slower and it may be fine today as most are used for archiving or video recording, etc now that we have SSD. You also don't NEED helium in many of the hard drive today, it is used mainly to reduce air drag and improve energy efficiency, but ok without it. Semiconductor would be a tough one but a lot of the electronics may be slower or going back to an older generation in performance if they don't use it. We can find a way and the economy typically will.

Will we die because of the lack of rare earth? Maybe in the medical field, maybe we can have those excluded with China if we have Red Cross arbitrate with them, they may not want to look bad and waive those. I don't know. I know military use will definitely have some problem and all military need will absolutely need an alternative source regardless.

We just had a great time with easily obtainable rare earth resource that we waste them all along. I love helium ballons but I can see that my grandkids may never get to enjoy them. They already went away in car dealerships as they should have.
 
It is a long list and I am not going to read through all of that. However I would say from my experience things are not always "you can't do it" but rather "you will lose some efficiency".

You can build hard drives without rare earth magnet. It will just be slower and it may be fine today as most are used for archiving or video recording, etc now that we have SSD. You also don't NEED helium in many of the hard drive today, it is used mainly to reduce air drag and improve energy efficiency, but ok without it. Semiconductor would be a tough one but a lot of the electronics may be slower or going back to an older generation in performance if they don't use it. We can find a way and the economy typically will.

Will we die because of the lack of rare earth? Maybe in the medical field, maybe we can have those excluded with China if we have Red Cross arbitrate with them, they may not want to look bad and waive those. I don't know. I know military use will definitely have some problem and all military need will absolutely need an alternative source regardless.

We just had a great time with easily obtainable rare earth resource that we waste them all along. I love helium ballons but I can see that my grandkids may never get to enjoy them. They already went away in car dealerships as they should have.
So now we're expected to go back in time and use inferior technologies here because a bunch of old guys can't agree on things? I don't remember this being in the rallies.
 
So now we're expected to go back in time and use inferior technologies here because a bunch of old guys can't agree on things? I don't remember this being in the rallies.
What do you expect when we have any sort of economic or environmental regulation?

This is not just trade war too. Fuel economy and pollution limit also set technology back like having to add DEF or particulate filter in trucks, small turbo in cars making them less reliable, CVTs that won't last as long, banning lean burn causing direct injection issues, etc.

It is all tradeoffs. We as human can only trade one problem for another but over time we will find solutions, over time.
 
It is never 1:1000. I worked with a few and the realistic number is about 1:3 to 1:5, somewhere in between.

Again, the best one got recruited to the US. My former boss used to work in Beijing and decided to leave his former nation for his kid's future. He said he saved up enough to get into the immigration program in Canada and when he was resigning, the VP got an approval to get him on an L visa because he was a good manager. He now work in the US for a US company making typical US salary. Canada lost a good engineer, and China could have never kept him to begin with.
Well I'm going off what he told me years and years ago. He owns a IT hardware/software company in the Bay Area and we were talking about whether he would hire in China for problem solving.
 
European left Africa not because they were forced to but because it was not an economical feasible place to colonize. China is losing their shirt in Africa for all the investment they put in.

Why Africa but not US or Europe? Japan tried it and they lost their shirts in the 90s too. It is not easy to buy something from another country without causing hate (just look at so many people today here hating foreign investors buying homes).

One of the main reasons also is valuation. You will just bump the price of what you want too much if you keep buying it. This is why after 2015 there were so much money pumped into tech startup because there was nothing else not already overvalued to invest, so sovereign funds have to create new things to invest in, like those unicorn startups.
It's all about buying votes at the UN anyways. ;)
 
Looks like Foxconn is starting to abandon ship and moving out. China is not what many make it out to be and companies will abandon it quickly if it means risking US consumer market share.



Can't blame them. They are just a contract manufacturer who setup factories where their customers want them to. Their middle managements are usually from Taiwan to begin with and can move to Vietnam etc.

Problem is most of their customers also don't know where they want Foxconn etc to move their factories to either. Remember Foxconn is just making 6% above cost, and it is the customers' job to tell them where to setup and build things.
 
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