TSMC running stateside != "nevermind Taiwanese independence"/"US withdrawing military protection for Taiwan"
For starters, TSMC has opened facilities in Az, but these are still owned and operated from Taiwan and rely significantly on Taiwanese capability for substantial inputs to the development process in both knowledge and operational capacity.
The new wafer capacity is not a replacement for Taiwan based infrastructure, but rather an extension of those operations.
And to be blunt: If amerika were to immediately about-face on 1975's "back-to-basics" math movement and resume math theory based primary education in order to develop the foundational comprehension necessary for the materials science at|in the design level workforce, it would still be at least one generation before homegrown capacity was 'on-par' with the current Taiwanese (and Dutch) resources.
TLDR; not a concern from a rational leadership condition.
However, pretending that one TSMC plant in Az is sufficient reason to TACO and post on social media in saggy golf pants == very much a potential outcome; regardless of the absolute immediate cost in lives and material capability, and the unavoidable long term consequences both within the US and around the world caused by said capricious behaviour.
I really didn't mean to imply that one TSMC plant in AZ could replace Taiwan, nor that we should only care about semiconductor wafer output or worse to discount the desires of the Taiwanese people. Presumably, at least some large fraction of them wish to remain independent from China.
From a US strategic perspective, there are a lot of other things made in Taiwan other than just semiconductors. They make a lot of machine tools, for example, and tend to have better quality than what we can get imported from China directly. The castings are likely made in China mainland but then finished in Taiwan. You can get nearly identical machines from either source but the Taiwan-made version is generally superior.
For those of us in "enterprise" work farms, thin clients never really left. Citrix and related technologies are still massively used within any enterprise that has offshore/outsourced IT and software dev teams. It is still the most cost-optimal way to provide IT environments to vendor/non-FTE resources, and this is not going away any time soon. These devices can be incredibly convenient, it takes away the multiple man-years of effort involved in rolling out remote-access solutions.
Sorry but I've to agree with the other flippant response to this post. The whole idea of SQL is to avoid such imperative thinking, and SQL optimizers are incredibly good in most prominent DB engines. There are ways to hint and influence a certain query plan; but that's not to take away from the incredible convenience that SQL affords for writing adhoc queries.
The ones I’ve used (mainly Microsoft sql server) are not just bad, they’re abysmally bad for any query that’s not extremely trivial. Writing every query with explicit joins is a necessity almost 100% of the time. Maybe you’ve just never tried to do anything tricky with large tables with a lot of data? Query optimizers almost always resort to nested table scans as soon as you do anything even slightly complex.
It's one of those things where you know it when you see it. I got 18 year old CMU students showing up knowing how write x86 SIMD intrinsics or ones with LLVM JIT experience. Dirty.
I feel for the guy referenced in that post, but he shouldn't have gone to work at 4AM "to finish an important analysis", no matter how urgent, especially after a certain age. It can get to you pretty fast, I'm thinking about future health prospects.
reply