Shipping the chips back to Taiwan to be packaged so they can then be shipped back to the United States for sale is a positive? What are you talking about?
You can't go all the way in one step. Having built domestic chip capacity is positive for the US, even if domestic packaging capacity isn't there yet. It's obviously not a desirable situation long term.
What’s positive is that we have state of the art domestic manufacturing with potential to onshore more and more of the required supply chains, building/educating local expertise, etc etc.
Ocean shipping is very very cheap. Less cost in money and energy to ship a chip across the ocean than for you to drive to best buy to buy the phone its in.
There are moves being made to test ships with modern "sails". Here's a paper published about a cargo ship fitted with 4 sails in 2010. The findings are interesting with it achieving up to 25% better fuel efficiency when using the sails.
No, much less pollution. It costs less carbon emissions to ship from Shanghai to California and back then for one person to drive 10 minutes to the store in their personal car.
then 5 pounds of chips on the way back is worth millions of dollars so it can be flown on a passenger jet or fedex jet that is already going here. or a boat and take up 3% of a container
