Monday, February 20, 2023

Pelosi and Chang


Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.~Admiral Hyman Rickover
He knew he was talking about people, right?

***


In polling conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) last September, 68 percent of Ukrainians answered yes to the question “Do you consider yourself a happy person?” compared with just 53 percent in 2017.
Purpose makes up for a lot.


***

A recent interview focused on the rise of American-Asian gun ownership had an Asian man say the expansion was evidence of 'diversity and inclusion.'

***


Pelosi and Chang

Politico ran a piece recently on Pelosi's trip to Taiwan titled "Taiwan’s Tech King to Nancy Pelosi: U.S. Is in Over Its Head." It raises some serious concerns about the semiconductor industry specifically but also about the general direction of the U.S.

Morris Chang, the 91-year-old founder of the chipmaking goliath TSMC, used a luncheon at Taiwan’s presidential palace to deliver a biting soliloquy to Pelosi and other visiting American lawmakers about the new industrial policy emerging in the United States. (He was so relentless, his wife intervened.)

Taiwanese executives present voiced hesitation, with some questioning whether American environmental and labor laws were consistent with the goal of nurturing a sophisticated industry.

Over lunch, Chang warned that it was terribly naïve of the United States to think that it could rapidly spend its way into one of the most complex electronics-manufacturing markets in the world. The task of making semiconductor chips was almost impossibly complicated, he said, demanding Herculean labor merely to obtain the raw materials involved and requiring microscopic precision in the construction of fabrication plants and then in the assembly of the chips themselves.

Chang has questioned in other settings whether the United States is a suitable environment for semiconductor manufacturing, pointing to gaps in the workforce and defects in the business culture. On a podcast hosted by the Brookings Institution last year, Chang lamented what he called a lack of “manufacturing talents” in the United States, owing to generations of ambitious Americans flocking to finance and internet companies instead. “I don’t really think it’s a bad thing for the United States, actually,” he said, “but it’s a bad thing for trying to do semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S.”

No comments: