Chip manufacturing is a special case as well. China is using massive state spending to build a competitive infrastructure in its country. Intel is the only competetive industrial chip fabrication presence in the US and should receive a similar focus from our leadership if we don't want to fully hollow-out the US' production capacity.
Samsung and Globalfoundires have fabs in the US that are close to leading edge. There are other fabs that are leading edge for other types of chips e.g. Texas Instruments
The fact is that the capital expenditure costs to create a leading edge Fab are insane, and economies of scale form a big moat. The economics do not really support more than a few leading edge fabs, and now that Intel has had internal issues they are behind. Maybe they will catch up- however throwing money at the problem does not seem likely to me to fix the problem. Moore's law is ending and the difference between die shrinks isn't as dramatic as it used to be. It remains to be seen if electron tunnelling can be easily be dealt with... However fabs are sexy and people will chase the money until the process breaks down.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_equipment_sale...
That would actually be an anti consumer move.
Every single human that spends a single dollar is directly and demonstrably connected to systems that are rapidly (in historical proportions) destroying almost everything that humans of past eras considered wealth and value.
Mother earth.
Downvote this, but let it sink in.
There are humans on this planet that are not fueling these consumptive mechanisms. I hope.
How can we detach ourselves from these systems as we build out alternative systems?
Fundamentally this is an energy issue, with enough free energy everyone can have a high standard of living ie. BI becomes possible, we can automate away most mundane jobs with cheap robots (BOM goes down with cheap energy).
With a good standard of living, births drop- viz population charts globally except Africa, thus we get into a virtuous cycle.
The only issue is the environmental impact of lots of energy in the ecosystem, I'm not sure how that would pan out.
We are wasting massive amounts of energy.
20 lanes of stop-and-go SUV's all single driver traveling over an hour to jobs that they hate. Terrajules of energy to create a single piece of electronics designed to break in less than 2 years. Massive manufacturing of throw away disposable items. The list goes on.
This is Hacker news. Que's Computer Users Dictionary 5th edition defines hack:
"An inordinately clever rearrangement of existing system resources that results, as if by magic, in a stunning improvement in system performance - or an equally stunning prank."
We need to wisely use what we already have.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Chapter_11_reor...
Directly throwing money at a company isn't the only way for the state to support an industry. I'm not a policy wonk, but there are other ways to do it, and I think the US would be making a mistake if they let this chip fabrication capacity disappear.
Japan and South Korea are not really; their economies are largely organised by conglomerates with strong political ties (and often significant nationalistic tendencies). There is capitalism in Germany but it's kept on a much tighter leash than the US in terms of labour laws.
This is historical fact, not a theory.
This is silly. No one thinks that. You're just not telling the difference between "necessary" and "sufficient".
Lockheed Martin. Boeing. Raytheon. General Dynamics. Northrop Grumman. Huntington Ingalls. United Technologies.
I think it was fear of lost of the memory business to Japanese companies. It worked out for the US in that Intel switch to and dominated the CPU business and you had the rise of fabless. .
See https://issues.org/van_atta/
The article is very interesting in describing the origin of EUV and the company making it and the source of the research.