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I can scarcely put into words my profound disappointment and heartbreak learning that the CHIPs act was killed by DEI bullshit.
I've been banging on for years now about the risk of Taiwan being invaded, or blockaded and smothered, by China. That the risk of TSMC being nationalized by China is so existential that it should be our number one priority. That we cannot possibly prevent China from eventually "unifying" with Taiwan, and the only possible solution is to do whatever it takes to have, preferably domestic, alternatives. I've thrown oodles of money into Intel due to this thesis, and plan on throwing oodles more. I might be talking out my ass, but I've put my money where my mouth is.
I honestly believed our government was taking this shit seriously with the CHIPs act. It was practically the singular glimmer of hope I had that the current administration wasn't content to just let people suffer and die en masse if it at least meant they weren't acting racist. I should have fucking known better. I really fucking should have.
God damnit.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-12/pentagon-scraps-plan-to-spend-2-5-billion-on-intel-chip-grant
Intel's been truly cucked by NVIDIA on the gains front. It's down over the last 5 years. Then again, my Lockheed Martin shares aren't doing so great either. I assumed the US would start making big munitions orders as the world heated up, they were my war hedge. But no...
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God damn it, indeed.
Even if I take your phrasing with a shaker of salt, I’m still disappointed in the politics being played.
From Wikipedia:
The whole wiki section on criticisms, of course, spends more time quoting the one commentator who didn’t think CHIPS favored unions enough.
It borders on parody. What can a man even do about this?
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@DaseindustriesLtd disproven again, there are no traces of any secret cabal keeping things under control. "Von Neumanns" are not in politics (and if they are, they are busy maneuvering to climb as high as possible and divert as much money and resources for themselves as possible).
As said Dominic Mckenzie Cummings, someone with extensive experience in government:
No God, no Caesar, no hero is going to save us, we are on our own.
Oh come on, this is more American whining. Muh deaths of overdoses, muh Russian election meddling, little old us assaulted on all fronts, won't somebody please spare a thought for the poor hegemon.
The CHIPS act has been about pork and the usual fighting over the spoils from the beginning, its success or failure is of no consequence. China was summarily cut off from modern semiconductor manufacturing and falls behind, new fabs in safe allied countries are being completed, Taiwan is getting reinforced, and AGI seems to be on schedule within 5 years. Yes, could have been done better. But it has gone well enough that advancing petty political agendas took precedence. If there ever is any plausible risk of the US losing control over the global high-end manufacturing chain, I am sure you'll see it going differently.
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The problem with Cummings was that he was the archetypal example of the stupid and ill-informed public school to Oxbridge humanities pipeline graduate who runs the British civil service, he just thought he could do a better job than his contemporaries after he failed to make money in 1990s Russia (itself a damning indictment given he was a moderately well-connected Englishman while the state was being comprehensively pillaged by many of his peers). Most of his ideas were the kind of ill-informed contrarianism that belongs at the Oxford Union, except that Cummings was so linked by his class hatred of men from better families who went to better or more reputable schools that he decided he would tear everything down to be replaced by his version of the same system that ruined everything.
His veneration is ridiculous. All of his good ideas were because he occasionally read a couple of good pieces in the SSC/rat/LWverse and possibly read some Moldbug (although clearly, clearly not enough). Cummings failed to understand that the problem was not that the people in charge were uniquely incompetent but that their incentives were mismatched with the improvement of the nation, and that he would have acted exactly the same if he had been in power (and indeed largely did when he was, as evidenced by his chaotic flipping on COVID and his ultra-pro-lockdown position contra Boris’ libertarianism, which was worse for the country than the decisions of the vast majority of Whitehall civil servants he so decried.
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