Comment by mlyle

Just further evidence of the accelerating returns to capital. It just makes less and less sense for America to be engaged in highly wealth-distributive (i.e. labor intensive) activities, more sense for it to engage in capital-intensive ones which, by definition, accrue further benefit to the owners of that capital. Yikes!

The jobs, and in many cases the expertise held by the people working those jobs.

I think this was the angle epistasis was coming from: not just that chips are physically being formed within the boundaries of the US, but that citizens are involved, being trained and garnering the practical experience that comes with being intimately involved.

So, so much of this sort of experience has been lost over the past few decades, and the fallout is palpable: how many discussions have played out right here surrounding the challenges of manufacturing anything, even trivial bits of plastic, at scale without spending years traveling across the world, dealing with language and cultural mismatches, ensuing mistakes and quality issues?

We're in a weird place now, wrt manufacturing skill - there are still plenty of individual crafters, folks who can make one-off or small runs of high-quality goods... For a pretty high cost per/ea. But scaling is troublesome; to hit that economy of scale requires a lot more people with maybe journeyman-level skill, folks who cut their teeth in a large operation and are looking to specialize - and those large operations aren't here.