Zonkerbl wrote:Popper, why are you reading articles that start "The identity obsessed dogma..." That should be an immediate sign to stop reading. This is a biased source pushing right wing talking parts and is guaranteed to be argued in bad faith with 90% emotional arguments sprinkled in with a few cherry picked, out of context facts. Why not save us the energy and pick apart the weaknesses, fallacies, and outright lies in this article yourself?
Obviously Intel is trying to extort more subsidies out of Ohio and the Fed and these right wing patsies are out on the intertubes doing the dirty work of spreading intel's lies. Why fall for it? You're a smart guy. This is a choice you've made that honestly I don't understand.
You spend five hours a day on the internet "doing your own research" and THIS is the kind of reputable article you think deserves to be shared and nodded over sagely? Have you ever heard the phrase "don't work harder, work smarter"? Maybe less time spent searching for articles that confirm your own bias and more time, like I said earlier, spending time with your family or something. No snark, this stuff is bad for your mental health.
- The article is written by 2 guys who work at Strive, Vivek Ramaswamy's political stunt of creating a hedge fund that, by their own admission: "[Strive] was created in January 2022 to solve a problem that had emerged in the United States over the prior decade: large financial institutions, including the biggest asset managers, were using their clients' money to advance social, cultural, and political agendas in corporate America's boardrooms. Asset managers and for-profit corporations have a fiduciary duty to maximize value, and that duty had been neglected."
This is... not true. In fact, it's completely backwards. Clients were demanding financial products and management that advance social causes like DEI, environmental sustainability, fair trade, human rights, etc. and asset managers were forced to provide those products and services. Asset managers have a fiduciary duty to do as their clients instruct; he conflates the corporate fiduciary duty to maximize value with those of asset managers, something that co-author Chris Nicholson, as a Yale JD, absolutely knows.
- 19 sections on diversity and inclusion! There's like 400 sections in the act. There are like, 22 sections devoted to use of tech for NASA/space exploration. DEI is a footnote of the CHIPS act, and these bozos are acting like it's the driving factor. And I'm not even going to get into the premise of why DEI is good - this post is just me reacting, as someone who thinks DEI is a bit overblown, to this dud of an article.
- The article cites the DEI initiatives such as creating a diversity officer at the NSF, Dept. of Commerce guidance to work with minority-owned businesses, and other factors that are not strings attached to subsidy funding as reasons that Intel and TMSC are balking at taking subsidies, which... why would Intel refuse billions in subsidies because the NSF is hiring a chief diversity officer? It's not a requirement for Intel (even though Intel already has this position, which it created on its own, and predates the legislation).
- The article cites backlash against TMSC for flying in Taiwanese employees instead of hiring locals, and champions TMSC - this entirely misses the point of the subsidies. The act isn't just to have TMSC to have a physical footprint in the US, it's to CREATE JOBS. I honestly don't understand what point the writers think they're making, it's baffling.
- The article then cites TMSC building plants around the world, as some sort of referendum on the US without providing any context as to (a) the amount of subsidies and benefits those other countries are providing; (b) the logistical benefits of having an Asian, European, and American plant, especially with the supply chain lessons learned over the pandemic; or (c) cost of labor in Poland, Germany, Japan, Israel, and the US.
- Stir all the handwavy bullspit and the writer hits us with "In short, the world’s best chipmakers are tired of being pawns in the CHIPS Act’s political games." Like, what? They haven't offered a single piece of concrete evidence of this, and even the circumstantial evidence provided is... nonsensical.
- At the end, we get to some sort of crystallized thought, where it's not just a plain assertion but rather an assertion followed up by an articulated reason: "The CHIPS Act’s current identity as a jobs program for favored minorities means companies are forced to recruit heavily from every population except white and Asian men already trained in the field. It’s like fishing in all the places you aren’t getting bites."
The good thing is that they finally say what they're trying to say. Unfortunately, it's racist bullspit. The DEI requirements to promote diversity is more like fishing in places where you weren't fishing before. The implication that it's fishing where nobody's getting bites is that black and hispanic people either don't want the jobs, or aren't trained for the jobs - but they also cry foul over the CHIPS act providing training for those jobs, so what am I supposed to conclude here? That blacks and hispanics are not smart enough, and will never be smart enough, so we should quit trying? Like, for whatever reason, blacks and hispanics are underrepresented in the industry. Let's try to fix that. I don't know what's so objectionable about that? It seems to be coming from white and asians feeling that they're being disadvantaged, but really it's that whites and asians have been over-advantaged, and a push towards equality, is only disadvantaging on a relative scale?
- This brings me to my [least] favorite line in the article. Libertarians have this compelling need to oversimplify everything to maximize a single metric, and ignore all other metrics. The US HAS to be the absolute best, and do so in the most efficient manner, even if that means trampling over the civil liberties of certain people. We have to make the most chips for the least amount of money, and disregard any deviation from that path, including things like DEI that attempts to correct a separate inefficiency in the socioeconomic fabric of our society. No time and no money for that. And they justify this by stifling the public under a pillow of fear.
This is the stuff declining empires are made of. As America pursues national security by building a diverse workforce, China does it by building warships.
It's just... ::chefs kiss:: no notes. What an incredible blend of eyerolling HS debate-level rhetoric, strawmen, factual error, jingoism, xenophobia; it's really like they lifted this straight from Reddit, except on Reddit, there would be at least 200 comments defending US Naval superiority.
