The problem is, as is so often the case with our modern companies, the things that got broken were other people's things. The things that were gained were made theirs.
In other words, privatized profits and socialized costs. Again.
What you say is absolutely true, and is a serious problem—but the way our system operates does not allow us to correct for it.
Anyone trying to spin up a competitor to TSMC would have to first overcome a significant financial hurdle: the capital investment to build all the industrial equipment needed for fabrication.
Then they'd have to convince institutions to choose them over TSMC when they're unproven, and likely objectively worse than TSMC, given that they would not have its decades of experience and process optimization.
This would be mitigated somewhat if our institutions had common-sense rules in place requiring multiple vendors for every part of their supply chain—note, not just "multiple bids, leading to picking a single vendor" but "multiple vendors actively supplying them at all times". But our system prioritizes efficiency over resiliency.
A wealthy nation-state with a sufficiently motivated voter base could certainly build up a meaningful competitor to TSMC over the course of, say, a decade or two (or three...). But it would require sustained investment at all levels—and not just investment in the simple financial sense; it requires people investing their time in education and research. Dedicating their lives to making the best chips in the world. And the only reason that would work is that it defies our system, and chooses to invest in plants that won't be finished for years, and then pay for chips that they know are inferior in quality, because they're our chips, and paying for them when they're lower quality is the only way to get them to be the best chips in the world.
> A wealthy nation-state with a sufficiently motivated voter base could certainly build up a meaningful competitor to TSMC over the course of, say, a decade or two (or three...).
The same thing everyone who's paying attention to the real world (and not the financial fantasy world) does: that OpenAI's purchase commitments are wildly unrealistic and unsustainable.
Describing it as "overproduction of academics" is kind of begging the question, though: is it not at least as much "deprioritization of basic research and education"?
It's not like the current demand for scientists is somehow a completely natural value, arrived at objectively and with no human biases involved.
And the private sector is heavily to blame for that. In ways that you even describe, as well as others (as another commenter noted, regulatory capture is one).
The problem is that the Department of Justice is part of the Executive Branch, and due to the burgeoning of the Imperial Presidency over the past several decades, that means that as soon as a new President is voted in, he can order the DoJ to change all their priorities to match his.
Our system doesn't have to be this way, even with the federal/state split; it doesn't even have to be this way with the designation of the DoJ as being within the Executive Branch. It's taken a lot of erosion of norms and flagrant breaking of laws to get to the point the US is at now.
There’s a Civilization-game style “tech tree” for cultural and social development. Some societies are further along in that development than others.
Pakistan faces the same cultural problem as Afghanistan and parts of the middle east: in large parts of the country, extended kinship groups dominate society, precluding the development of civic institutions and functioning government. That’s not true for the whole country. Parts of Pakistan are culturally like India or Bangladesh: it has a long history of governance by central institutions, even if that governance is dysfunctional. Imagine if 50% of the U.S. population was Appalachians. The U.S. would be a much less successful country also.
The opposite is true! You’ll get farther in life when you realize that how groups of people are socialized to behave matters a lot—and that’s true whether you’re talking about corporate culture or a country’s culture.
People whose brains are as soft as their hearts sell false equality, but its harmful. It’s like telling the obese person they’re great and that their problems are due to “bad genetics” or factors outside their control. It’s a polite lie and it is damaging.
Understanding that culture is just a type of technology is how you get miracles like Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20045923. He thought culture was destiny, and he harnessed that realization to make his culture rich.
> And you'll get a lot farther in life if you stop thinking of real people and their development and culture as video game abstractions.
Oh, it’s far too late for that. As the kids say, he’s cooked. He’ll be complaining about hypothetical Appalachians invading New England or New York or the United States (all actual examples, see below) in the nursing home.
I don’t understand. Do you (1) think Appalachia is great, or (2) you agree that Appalachia lags the rest of the U.S., but think that has nothing to do with how Appalachian parents socialize their children to behave what they teach their kids to value?
Pakistan spent quite a bit on education in East Pakistan up until 1971. and I've even pointed you to the article in Prothom Alo where Bangladeshi experts admitted that but you do you. It's not like Ibn Khaldun didn't hit on similar points with asabiyya but saying we have A/B testing here is wild.
No*, but the nuclear waste problem is a problem for 50, 100, 1000 years from now.
Climate change is a problem for 50 years ago. And now. Very, very much now.
Having to, in the worst case, designate some small areas that we choose as uninhabitable "nuclear waste zones" in a few decades is vastly preferable to having to designate entire regions of the world as uninhabitable "too hot to live" zones around the same time. And that's if we don't find some better way to handle the nuclear waste.
* Not in the sense of "a permanent and comprehensive solution". However, the actual spent nuclear fuel can now be reprocessed and reused in newer reactor designs, down to a tiny fraction of what we would have considered "nuclear waste" with the earliest designs in the mid-20th century.
They do the things they think they can do very well.
Why would they try to build electric batteries, wireless modems, electric cars, solar cells, or quantum computers, if their R&D hadn't already determined that they would likely be able to do so Very Well?
It's not like any of those are really in their primary lines of business anyway.
In Upstate New York (from which I have just moved), February is the depths of winter. The temperature there can plunge to -10°F (for the highs) for a week straight. It's not until early April that you're really guaranteed to see things thawing for good. (March can be a crapshoot; sometimes it's looking like spring, with warm breezes and birds returning, and other times you get 4 feet of snow dumped on you. In the same week.)
The maritime climate of the British Isles makes an enormous difference to the climate they experience—certainly as compared to the continental US, and to a lesser degree as compared to continental Europe. It's actually kind of fascinating teasing apart which of our cultural truisms about seasons originated on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, vs which ones were developed once we had colonized the New World.
But it's more than just the temperature, or the day length.
There's a big difference between 40-50°F in November, when the trees are brown and barren, and you're looking ahead to winter, and you swear there's a hint of frost in the air...
...and 40-50°F in April, when the leafbuds are coming out, and the geese are flying back north, and is that a crocus coming up over there?
In other words, privatized profits and socialized costs. Again.
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