Real inflation is running about 20%, Kamala parties like it’s 1971, the New York Times is shocked, shocked to discover Hunter Biden asking for state favors for foreign cronies, gold hits new highs, laughing at an old SNL skit is now a thoughtcrime, and an update on Intel’s woes.
The New York Times reports that the federal government is accelerating the naturalization of immigrants in America as part of a process of “reshaping the electorate, merely months before a pivotal election,” according to one observer quoted in the piece.
“The federal government is processing citizenship requests at the fastest clip in a decade, moving rapidly through a backlog that built up during the Trump administration and the coronavirus pandemic,” reports the newspaper.
One Honduran woman marveled at the fact that authorities were able to process and approve her application in as little as six months.
The story highlights how many of these new citizens will immediately become eligible to vote in key battleground states, including Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
The piece includes a very revealing quote from Xiao Wang, chief executive of Boundless, a data analysis company.
“The surge in naturalization efficiency isn’t just about clearing backlogs; it’s potentially reshaping the electorate, merely months before a pivotal election,” said Wang.
“Every citizenship application could be a vote that decides Senate seats or even the presidency,” he added.
In other words, knowing that immigrants are far likelier to vote Democrat, the Biden administration is importing them at breakneck speed in order to tip the scales for Kamala Harris.
3.3 million immigrants have become citizens during Biden’s time in office, with data showing that more will vote Democrat than Republican.
This has partly driven the Trump campaign’s efforts to appeal more to “Jamal” and “Enrique,” and not so much “Karen,” although the strategy has caused division amongst Trump’s base.
The legacy media has consistently denounced the idea of mass migration being a deliberate ploy to increase the voter base for Democrats as part of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, while simultaneously admitting it’s happening.
Democrats have declared that they have no confidence in the electorate and must create a new one…
Restaurant owner says that the real inflation rate is closer to 20% over six months:
The owner of four restaurants made this video when inflation was at 3.5%. Today, we’re told that inflation is at 2.9%. He looked at the prices of some products and concluded that the government’s inflation numbers don’t make sense. Since February, food prices have increased:
How does Kamala Harris plan to combat inflation? By channeling Richard Nixon from 1971 and imposing wage and price controls.
After the unoriginal Vice President Kamala Harris stole former President Trump’s proposed ‘no tax on tips’ policy, she’s at it again with yet another recycled idea. This time, she’s echoing President Biden’s actions and rhetoric to crack down on sky-high food prices by proposing the first-ever federal ban on “corporate price-gouging in the food and grocery industries”—a move that reeks of socialism.
“There’s a big difference between fair pricing in competitive markets, and excessive prices unrelated to the costs of doing business,” the Harris campaign wrote in a statement, adding, “Americans can see that difference in their grocery bills.”
The Harris campaign said the vice president will unveil the new federal proposed ban on Friday at a campaign rally in the battleground state of North Carolina as part of a broader economic policy platform. The proposal will ensure food companies can’t exploit consumers to increase profits, according to CBS News, citing Harris-Walz campaign officials.
Harris’ policy speech will also call on the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys to examine corporations violating price-fixing rules. Her remarks are expected to echo Biden’s actions and rhetoric, especially with his war against meat processing companies that he alleges are responsible for higher burger prices at the supermarket.
VP Harris’ campaign argues that lowering Americans’ costs is a function of socialist-style price controls. Yet this is the quickest way to understand that Harris’ economic team has no actual understanding of inflation.
Heritage Foundation’s EJ Antoni explained, “Here’s your “price gouging” narrative: average costs paid by businesses have risen just as much as costs charged to consumers – if businesses are being “greedy,” they’re doing it all wrong…”
Instead of curbing out-of-control government spending, which debt rises $1 trillion every 100 days, and understanding that monetary inflation driven by the Federal Reserve’s money creation is the root cause of inflation, Harris deflects the actual problem: The Fed. She instead goes after big corporations for ‘illegal price gouging.’
Thus unable to understand the disasterous economic policies of the past are doomed to repeat it…
“Conversation Between Musk And Trump Generates Over A Billion Views.” You can see a transcript of the interview here.
In a post last month (“How The Democrats Los Silicon Valley”), I mentioned that top Silicon Valley venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz had endorsed Trump.
Ben Horowitz, in particular, seemed like an unusual Trump supporter, coming from a liberal Jewish background. Now it looks like Trump has another, thanks to his X space with Elon Musk last night: Zynga founder Mark Pincus. During the first Trump administration, Pincus opposed Trump’s “Muslim ban”, but after the leftist celebrations following October 7th last year, he seemed to have some second thoughts about that.
Despite corporate media’s unabashed u-turn to support Kamala Harris, her campaign has been busted creating made-up headlines next to the names of real news outlets to trick people into thinking they’ve stumbled upon the real thing, Axios reports.
Upon hearing the news, The Guardian lost their shit, telling Axios: “While we understand why an organization might wish to align itself with the Guardian’s trusted brand, we need to ensure it is being used appropriately and with our permission. We’ll be reaching out to Google for more information about this practice.”
The ads include links to real articles from the outlets, however the headlines and supporting text were altered.
“Democratic California State Lawmaker Switches To Republican Party…State Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil, who represents the state’s fourth Senate district, said she joined the Senate Republican Caucus and party after deep reflection and to help ‘in their fight to fix California.'”
While Joe Biden was vice president, his son Hunter attempted to obtain State Department assistance in securing a deal for Ukrainian gas company Burisma, of which Hunter was a highly-compensated board member despite having no experience in its industry, the New York Times reported on Tuesday. The revelation of the 2016 episode underscores allegations that Hunter sought to enrich himself by trading on his father’s influence.
The Times report draws on newly-released government records pertaining to Hunter’s pushing of a Burisma deal in Italy. The Biden White House had resisted releasing the files for years, only to relent soon after Biden was pressured into abandoning his reelection bid.
One wonders how long the New York Times would have waited to report this if Biden were still seeking reelection? My guess is never.
Go figure. It’s amazing what some actual reporting — and a withdrawal from a presidential election — can shake loose, no?
Just four short years ago, we were all assured by the Protection Racket Media that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, and that allegations of influence-peddling by the Bidens were just political dirty tricks, right? Right? Wrong. The New York Times’ Ken Vogel reports that Hunter’s efforts to sell influence within the administration were well known during Joe Biden’s term as Vice President. It’s even about Burisma, the company that we were told paid Hunter a lot of money for his energy-industry expertise.
Oh, and the records of it got “withheld” by the Biden administration for “years,” too:
Hunter Biden sought assistance from the U.S. government for a potentially lucrative energy project in Italy while his father was vice president, according to newly released records and interviews.
The records, which the Biden administration had withheld for years, indicate that Hunter Biden wrote at least one letter to the U.S. ambassador to Italy in 2016 seeking assistance for the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where he was a board member.
Well, we did have records in October 2020. Hunter Biden kept records of these dealings on his laptop, which he abandoned in a repair shop. When the New York Post reported on the contents of the laptop, including a number of emails that made clear he leveraged his fathers office to sell influence at Burisma and elsewhere, the media ignored it — even though one of Hunter’s partners (Tony Bobulinski) publicly authenticated the messages when asked.
Nearly four years later, the NYT gets around to the truth. And if you’re questioning the timing, you have good company, because Vogel appears to be somewhat curious about it as well:
The department’s release of documents to The New York Times came shortly after President Biden dropped out of the presidential race, and as his son prepares to stand trial next month on charges of evading taxes on millions of dollars in income from Burisma and other foreign businesses.
Go figure again! It’s as if the cover-up extended as long as Joe Biden had electoral interests to protect. Now that Biden has pulled out of the race, there’s no need to keep covering up for Biden Inc.
“California Sheriff Blasts Harris For Using His Image In “Misleading” Campaign Ad, Says He Supports Trump.” “In light of a recent political ad put out by Kamala Harris featuring Sheriff [Mike] Boudreaux, as well as other local law enforcement, the Sheriff wants to make it abundantly clear that his image is being used without his permission, and he does NOT endorse Harris for President or any other political office.”
The same Jew-haters who drove Columbia University’s president Minouche Shafik off are now coming for Kamala Harris.
Only a short week ago, Harris was heckled by pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protesters, like those who has spilled out from college campuses after October 7. Protesters screamed out at her as she stood on stage repeating her stump speech. As they yelled, Harris tried to shame them. “I’m speaking,” she said, hearkening back to her VP debate against Mike Pence in 2020. “I’m speaking” in context means several things, including an attempt to grab control based on her identity factors: black, female. By identitarian logic, the vice president is oppressed, and by the logic of progressive discourse, that means that she gets to speak first, and that what she has to say carries all that much more weight. An event simply in favor of her candidacy was crashed in New York City on Wednesday night where agitators set off smoke bombs and held up signs saying “No Votes for Bombala’s Genocide.” 14 of them were arrested.
The agitators wanted some kind of response, some kind of indication of what Harris’ policy on Israel and Gaza might be if she gets voted into the White House. And they haven’t gotten it. Meanwhile, there are clearly massive anti-Israel events planned for the Democratic National Convention next week. While Kamala is trying to keep the euphoria going, attempting to dance and sing her way into the White House, her base will be out in the street demanding answers. Will she be lenient like Magill? Bend over backwards like Gay? Or call in a bigger force, like Shafik, because she doesn’t know how to handle it on her own?
The far left of Harris’ party hates Israel. They love Palestinians not for their culture or policies–which include anti-LGBTQ and anti-female regulations as in other strict, Muslim countries–but simply because they are “oppressed.” And Harris can’t handle them. Even at her speech, rarefied identity wasn’t enough to keep them in their place. The campus riots will likely start up again. As soon as the college-bound finish their orientations, they’ll be picking up their marching orders and protest signs to join their comrades on the quad.
There is already noise that Harris would like to throw Israel under the bus, to eradicate funding and arms shipments. The same woman that waved the flag of Ukraine in Congress as she promised to send him endless weapons and aid, may think the aid packages and arms sales to Israel go too far. Harris may sympathize with the protesters.
before his honeymoon [in Communist China in 1994], Walz launched a company called Educational Travel Adventures, which specialized in bringing American students to China. An article in the local Chinese media reported that he and his bride brought 50 students from America. The company continued to send students to China until 2003. It is important to note that operating a business in China requires all kinds of permits—both official and unofficial—from Chinese authorities at the local, provincial, and central levels. These permits were typically obtained either by paying bribes or by securing endorsements, whether tacit or open, from government officials.
Professional atheist Richard Dawkins posts that men and women are different and male boxers shouldn’t be competing with female boxers. Result: Facebook nuked his account.
So what do you do when your software problem brings a customers operations down hard? Well, if you’re Crowdstrike and the customer is Delta airlines, then you slam Delta for not recovering fast enough.
Python Development Foundation suspends developer for enjoying old “Jane, you ignorant slut” skit. I can only imagine the snowflake reactions to the Chevy Chase/Richard Pryor word association skit…
Flock of self-driving Waymo cars in San Francisco honk all night in their parking lot. As you might be able to guess, nearby residents are just thrilled at this development…
Speaking of electric cars, there’s concerning over letting them park in parking garages because of the possibility of them catching fire and the difficulty of extinguishing same.
Remember how Intel said the problem with their chips was microcode? Yeah. That may not be the case (or at least not the whole case), and it may actually be a process problem involving oxidation of vias (i.e., the connection between two metal layers).
The assassination attempt against President Donald Trump was less than a week ago and a ton of news has come down the pike since. Biden replacement rumors fly hot and heavy, Trump secures renomination, Windows machines across the globe are down thanks to CrowdStrike, a League of Assholes rises in Africa, Chuy’s gets sold, and we say goodbye to a comedy legend. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The 81-year-old president repeatedly lost his train of thought on the call and was dismissive of the Democrats’ concerns about his 2024 re-election campaign following his train-wreck debate performance last month, Puck reported Wednesday, citing multiple sources…
‘The call was even worse than the debate. He was rambling; he’d start an answer then lose his train of thought, then would just say “whatever.” He really couldn’t complete an answer. I lost a ton of respect for him,’ one person on the call said.
‘The president was rambling, dismissive of concerns, unable or unprepared to present a campaign strategy,’ added a second source, who is a member of Congress.
Joe Biden’s escalating dementia and the long media-political conspiracy to hide his senility from the public are the least of the Democrats’ current problems.
Biden’s track record as president may be more concerning than his cognitive decline. He has literally destroyed the U.S. border, deliberately allowing the entry of more than 10 million illegal aliens. His callous handlers’ agenda was to import abjectly poor constituencies in need of vast government services without regard for the current struggles of a battered American middle class and poor.
The widespread poverty of a vast new cohort of illegal immigrants could serve as indictments of a “racist,” “unequal,” and “unfair” America—as if the residents of East Palestine, Ohio or inner-city Chicago had anything to do with the centuries-long corruption and oppression of Mexico and Latin America that daily drives thousands of their own poorest citizens northwards to a society founded on very different ideas than those of their homelands.
Note that the left, neither in Mexico nor in America, never asks why millions of these impoverished people prefer to break into a supposedly racist America. Much less do they even distinguish those principles and values that once made America prosperous, free, and secure from their antitheses that have sadly made much of Latin America mostly poor, without freedom, and insecure.
Biden inherited near-zero real interest rates and inflation at 1.4 percent. Almost immediately, in nihilistic fashion, Biden did to a sound economy what he had done to a secure border. So, he recklessly printed money at a time of spiraling, quarantine-ending demand and supply chain disruption. Middle-class wages never caught up with Biden’s inflation, as prices for key staples are nearly 30 percent higher than when he took office.
The cost of servicing the ballooning national debt at high interest is now nearly $1 trillion per year. The world abroad is aflame, lit by Biden’s inexplicable withdrawal from Kabul, his mixed signals to Vladimir Putin on the eve of his invasion of Ukraine, his deliberate alienation of Israel, his appeasement of Iran and China, and his cuts in the defense budget, coupled with his woke war on mythical “racists” in the military.
Energy prices soared, even as Biden’s green agenda proved unworkable and prompted draining the strategic petroleum reserve and begging foreign oil despots before key elections. The “unifier” Biden by design needlessly alienated nearly half the country, and in his debate, he reiterated why Trump supporters do not deserve his concern. And more ominously and recently, Biden grossly told hundreds of his donors that “it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye”—just days before the attempt on Trump’s life.
The greatest absurdity of the Biden White House is the gaslighting talk of Biden’s “achievements.” Biden’s actions over the last four years are not offsets for his senility that warrant his continuance in office, but again, sadly, they serve as force multipliers, furthering claims of his dementia and for his removal.
I’ve been saying for a month or so now that I’m really impressed with the way that Trump has been conducting himself in this campaign. Yes, I was a fan before, but he’s really been hitting all the right notes this year, especially given the pressure of the the Democrats’ un-American lawfare assault on him.
The Donald J. Trump who took the stage in Milwaukee last night was a reflective, determined elder statesman and it was glorious. This is what my ultra mega super MAGA friend Kevin wrote about it:
Trump took to the stage with a bandage covering the wound left by the would-be assassin’s bullet. He kicked off his mesmerizing speech by thanking the GOP for the nomination and promising to stand for all Americans, stating: “We rise together or we fall apart.”
Trump’s speech was unlike any of his others. It lacked the bombast and sarcasm of earlier speeches, which I find entertaining. Instead, it focused on unity.
Trump’s sotto voce, conversational tone was perfect, and a counter to the angry maniac that the commies in the mainstream media like to portray him as. He was the adult in the room at a time when the Republic desperately needs that. His recounting of the assassination attempt provided yet another deeply emotional moment at this convention.
I’ve only briefly glimpsed some of the MSM hacks’ response to the speech, and it’s mostly been awful and not reality-based. They’re desperate and losing and their opinion doesn’t matter.
The man who accepted the Republican nomination last night is the man who this country needs to right the wrongs of the Biden administration’s wrecking ball reign of error.
Borepatch sees a preference cascade for Trump that may have the effect of minimizing cheating. “It’s one thing to stuff ballot boxes when you think that everyone on your side is on board and your guy is going to win – and any potential investigation will be done in the most slipshod manner. It’s quite a different thing when you wonder just how many of the guys on your side are actually going to go through with this, and if the other guy wins will you be facing 20 years in Club Fed.”
New York jury convicted Senator Bob Menendez (D., N.J.) on 16 felony charges on Tuesday, including obstruction of justice, acting as a foreign agent, bribery, extortion and honest services wire fraud.
Over the course of a two-month trial, prosecutors accused the three-term senator and his wife, Nadine Arslanian Menendez, of accepting bribes — including hundreds of thousands of dollars, gold bars, and a Mercedes-Benz convertible — from three New Jersey businessmen in exchange for help with a number of legal issues. Menendez was also accused of accepting bribes to work as a foreign agent on behalf of Qatar and Egypt while he served as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Shortly after the verdict was handed down on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) urged Menendez to “do what is right for his constituents, the Senate, and our country, and resign.”
You know it’s been a pretty news-packed week when the conviction of a Democratic senator on bribery charges is this far down the LinkSwarm…
Kamala Harris has the same approval rating among Black women as President Biden, according to a new poll, which must come as a blow to the Vice President as Biden’s electoral fortunes falter.
And it comes as a surprise, as Black women have been pivotal for securing Harris her spot on the ticket.
The poll, conducted by Split Ticket between July 12 and 14, asked Black voters in battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin about their opinions on Harris, as well as Biden and Donald Trump.
According to the poll, if the 2024 election was a toss up between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, 76 percent of Black voters would vote for Biden, compared to 17 percent for Trump. The gender split was 72 per cent of male voters and 79 percent of females backing Biden.
In contrast, 12 percent of Black women and 23 percent of Black men said they would vote Trump.
But if the election were a toss up between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the results were virtually the same, with an equal proportion of voters opting for Harris over Trump, and a split of 79 percent of Black women and 73 percent of Black men preferring the Vice President.
You know who else doesn’t want to vote for Democrats any more? Young male voters.
A years-long collapse in support for Democrats among young Gen Z “Zoomer” males accelerated to a dizzying speed during the Presidentish Joe Biden administration — and that’s before Donald Trump’s display of sheer damn manliness in the moments after Saturday’s assassination attempt.
The collapse began in 2016, the same year Donald Trump was elected to his first term in office — and, looking back, it seems almost inevitable. That was the year the American Left went from merely unhinged to flying off the rails like Doc Brown and Clara Clayton at the very end of “Back to the Future Part III.”
Daniel Cox — aka The Liberal Patriot — wrote Monday, “A mounting number of polls suggest that young voters are shedding their Democratic attachments” and that “the way young people relate to the two major political parties is undergoing a momentous change.”
A recent Pew study found that “young Americans are evenly divided between the parties: 47 percent lean towards or identify as Republicans and 46 percent identify as Democrats.”
Look at these other numbers from Gallup. They’re unsustainable for the so-called Party of Youth.
Democratic support among young men (18-29) collapsing
Federal appeals court blocks all of Biden student debt relief plan. “The St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a request, by seven Republican-led states to put on hold parts of the U.S. Department of Education’s debt relief plan that had not already been blocked by a lower-court judge.” Good. I don’t see how the Constitution allows the President to simply declare billions of dollars of subsidies to favored classes of individuals absent congressional approval. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Remember CrowdStrike, the company that helped wipe Hillary’s equipment? An update to their security product Falcon is blue-screening Windows machines across the world today. “The U.S. Emergency Alerts System said 911 lines in multiple states were down.”
Biden can’t remember the name of his own Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and calls him “The Black Man.” We all know this would be career-ending for a Republican, yet it’s just another expected “senior moment” for Slow Joe…
Here’s some news I missed a while back: China expelled a bunch of defense chiefs from the Communist Party in a “corruption crackdown.” “The moves against Li Shangfu and his predecessor, Wei Fenghe, follow a series of shake-ups at the top of the world’s largest military — Li was ousted from the role last year after disappearing without explanation.” Actual corruption, or simply suspicion of disloyalty to Xi?
Barry Diller has lost $9 million propping up The Daily Beast. I know a lot of political publications lose money, but I’m pretty sure you could prop up a leftist website for less than 1/10th that…
Welcome to Africa’s League of Assholes. “The military regimes of Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso marked their divorce from the rest of West Africa Saturday as they signed a treaty setting up a confederation between them….All three have expelled anti-jihadi French troops and turned instead toward what they call their ‘sincere partners’ — Russia, Turkey and Iran.” More.
“Newly selected Austin City Manager T.C. Broadnax has presented his proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2025 that totals $5.9 billion — a record for the city.” You can look at the entire 1,162 page document here. Of course there’s plenty of line items for “equity” and “homeless.” That’s where some of the graft is…
Terry and her husband Max Boot, a Washington Post national security columnist, put up their tony Upper West Side apartment as collateral for her $500,000 personal recognizance bond as a condition of her release before trial.
The six-room, $1.8 million turn-of-the-century home features lavish wood paneling, built-in bookcase, stained glass windows and airy 10-foot ceilings, according to its StreetEasy listing.
The taste for such luxury is what allegedly drove Terry — a native of Seoul who formerly worked as a CIA analyst before becoming a prominent policy expert linked to several think tanks — to disclose US secret to South Korean spies, Manhattan federal prosecutors said.
Terry traded her access to information from top US officials, including US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, in exchange for luxury goodies such as a $3,450 Louis Vuitton handbag and a $2,845 Dolce & Gabbana coat, prosecutors said.
“Democratic Socialists Of America Withdraws Endorsement Of AOC.” Because she’s just not anti-Israel enough. Which has jack all to do with democracy or socialism. This is just another sign that victimhood identity politics has eaten the far left whole.
The US Army is seeking a wheeled, self-propelled 155mm cannon-based air defense system capable of firing cheaper hypervelocity rounds.
A cost-effective alternative to current capabilities based on surface-to-air missiles is being sought, particularly in expeditionary scenarios against the rising threat of cruise missiles.
Projectiles fired by the Multi-Domain Artillery Cannon (MDAC) will be guided by offboard sensors, eliminating the cost of onboard sensors in current rounds.
“Current air and missile defense munitions require onboard guidance and targeting components that drive high munition procurement costs,” a service request for information explains.
“In contrast, the MDAC seeks to significantly reduce munition costs and enhance expeditionary utility by developing a 155mm artillery cannon-based air defense system capable of firing Hypervelocity projectiles, integrated into a wheeled platform.”
Additionally, the system will be linked with an external Command and Control Battle Manager and the Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System.
A prototype contract award is expected in the third quarter of 2025, with deliveries by the last quarter of fiscal 2027 and demonstration in fiscal 2028.
This is another case of “everything old is new again,” as Germany’s 88mm and 128mm flak cannons were generally considered very effective anti-aircraft weapons in World War II, and I bet 155mm is more than capable of putting a hurt on drones.
Ukrainian sniper takes record for world’s longest sniper shot, using a 12.7x114mm cartridge at 4,155 yards. (Hat tip: Reader John Zoch.)
Local TexMex chain Chuy’s is being bought by Darden Restaurants for $605 million. I didn’t know they actually had more than 100 locations. The food is good, but here in Austin they’ve been in the “no one goes there anymore, they’re too crowded” category for a while. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Generation Kill author Evan Wright RIP. That was a very solid book following a Marine recon unit into Iraq in 2003, and is well worth reading if you haven’t already.
Comedy legend Bob Newhart, RIP. I’m sure everyone and their dog will be posting the justly famous Newhart finale, but we’re going to kick it old school with a selection from his comedy albums.
Brits visit an HEB+. They’re astounded at the size and blown away by Blue Bell. They’re also amazed that a plain, fresh-baked tortilla can taste so good…
Numerous commentators—especially those defending President Biden’s economic record—have puzzled over why Americans are sour about the state of the U.S. economy. Unemployment rates have returned to pre-pandemic lows, commentators correctly point out, and the official rate of inflation is declining. So why are Americans ignoring the view of many experts that the economy is doing well?
According to a striking new paper by a group of economists from Harvard and the International Monetary Fund, headlined by former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, the answer is that Americans have figured out something that the experts have ignored: that rising interest rates are as much a part of inflation as the rising price of ordinary goods. “Concerns over borrowing costs, which have historically tracked the cost of money, are at their highest levels” since the early 1980s, they write. “Alternative measures of inflation that include borrowing costs” account for most of the gap between the experts’ rosy pictures and Americans’ skeptical assessment.
“Backlash Is Real‘: DEI Exodus Gains Steam Across Corporate America.”
The unraveling of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives was seen on the state level, as Red states rushed to ban DEI programs in 2023. Google, Facebook, and other tech companies slashed DEI staff by late last year. Early this year, universities began rolling back diversity programs, while Harvard President Claudine Gay was demoted.
DEI was doomed to fail, and corporations have been quickly scrambling to abandon mindless and profitless diversity programs with Marxist roots. The latest earnings call data shows that “DEI” mentions have collapsed from their peak in 2021, according to Axios, citing data from AlphaSense.
In January, Johnny Taylor, president of the Society for Human Resource Management, told Axios that corporate executives are fed up with DEI.
“The backlash is real. And I mean, in ways that I’ve actually never seen it before,” Taylor said, adding, “CEOs are literally putting the brakes on this DE&I work that was running strong” since George Floyd’s murder in early 2020.
Kevin Clayton, senior vice president and head of social impact and equity for the Cleveland Cavaliers, said the chief diversity officer role was all the rage across corporate America after Floyd’s murder. He said companies filled these positions “out of gilt,” and hiring wasn’t the best.
Axios noted, “Some businesses are cutting back funding, trimming DEI staff — and even considering pulling back on things like employee resource groups comprised of workers of various races, ethnicities or interests.”
The pushback on DEI is finding momentum across corporations and universities. Subha Barry, former head of diversity at Merrill Lynch, told Bloomberg last month: “We’re past the peak.”
Let’s hope so.
No one at the wheel: “Biden Reportedly Has No Idea He Issued ‘Trans Day Of Visibility’ Proclamation.”
Gen Z hates the lousy Biden economy and favors Trump over Biden. Though a word to those Gen Z sorts who complain about a 9-5 schedule being “unnatural”: A “natural” schedule is performing backbreaking hunter/gatherer or subsistence agriculture work from dawn to dusk 6-7 days a week and dropping dead before you turn 40…
Ukrainian drones hit a Russia drone production facility at Yelabuga, Tatarstan, which is almost 1,000 miles inside Russia, using a drone that looks a whole lot like a light aircraft.
Ukraine hits another Russian airbase with over 40 drones, and presumably took out even more Su-34s.
Whoops, make that three Russian airbases hit. including reports of three Tupolev Tu-95 “Bear” bombers damaged. (Yes, Russia still has a propeller-driven bomber in service. It can carry nuclear weapons and launch cruise missiles.)
Gun crimes evidently mean being released without bail if the perp is an illegal alien.
“Cost estimates more than double to replace failing Austin arts center building.” Note the “Extended community engagement: $1 million” which is code for “Payoffs to leftwing activists.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“Paxton Seeks to Investigate Boeing Parts Supplier, DEI Initiatives. Attorney General Ken Paxton is seeking to investigate Spirit AeroSystsems after public outrage involving Boeing’s aircraft manufacturing issues.”
Boeing stated in 2022 that “for the first time in our company’s history, we tied incentive compensation to inclusion.”
Boeing’s 2023 Global Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion report explains that “diversity must be at the table for every important decision our company makes – every challenge we face, every innovation we design. Equity, diversity and inclusion are core values because they make Boeing — and each of us individually — better.”
According to the report, racial and ethnic minorities now hold 41.4 percent of jobs in the U.S. Boeing Commercial Airplanes Unit, and 28.3 percent in the U.S. Boeing Defense, Space, and Security. In 2022, U.S. racial and ethnic minorities made up 47.5 percent of new hires at Boeing.
You know what I want at the table for every important Boeing decision? Planes not falling out of the sky.
Intel lost $7 billion last year. Intel has a technology roadmap to get its process tech back on track, but failure to execute on previous nodes is what got them into this mess.
In addition to having fingers in the pie in Syria and Yemen in addition to their proxy war with Israel, Iran also has to deal with Sunni Baluch separatist organization Jaish al-Adl (“Army of Justice”) on their own territory, where they killed at least 11 Iranian security force members.
“Belew, Vai, Levin and Carey Play 80’s King Crimson.” Sign me up. Edited to Add: Crap, tickets went on sale for the Austin show in September TODAY. I was just barely able to snag two tickets in nosebleed…
DEI — the identity-obsessed dogma that goes by “diversity, equity, and inclusion” — has now trained Google’s new AI to refuse to draw white people. What’s even more alarming is that it’s also infected the supply chain that makes the chips powering everything from AI to missiles, endangering national security.
The Biden administration recently promised it will finally loosen the purse strings on $39 billion of CHIPS Act grants to encourage semiconductor fabrication in the U.S. But less than a week later, Intel announced that it’s putting the brakes on its Columbus factory. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has pushed back production at its second Arizona foundry. The remaining major chipmaker, Samsung, just delayed its first Texas fab.
This is not the way companies typically respond to multi-billion-dollar subsidies. So what explains chipmakers’ apparent ingratitude? In large part, frustration with DEI requirements embedded in the CHIPS Act.
Commentators have noted that CHIPS and Science Act money has been sluggish. What they haven’t noticed is that it’s because the CHIPS Act is so loaded with DEI pork that it can’t move.
The law contains 19 sections aimed at helping minority groups, including one creating a Chief Diversity Officer at the National Science Foundation, and several prioritizing scientific cooperation with what it calls “minority-serving institutions.” A section called “Opportunity and Inclusion” instructs the Department of Commerce to work with minority-owned businesses and make sure chipmakers “increase the participation of economically disadvantaged individuals in the semiconductor workforce.”
The department interprets that as license to diversify. Its factsheet asserts that diversity is “critical to strengthening the U.S. semiconductor ecosystem,” adding, “Critically, this must include significant investments to create opportunities for Americans from historically underserved communities.”
The department does not call speed critical, even though the impetus for the CHIPS Act is that 90 percent of the world’s advanced microchips are made in Taiwan, which China is preparing to annex by 2027, maybe even 2025.
Handouts abound. There’s plenty for the left—requirements that chipmakers submit detailed plans to educate, employ, and train lots of women and people of color, as well as “justice-involved individuals,” more commonly known as ex-cons. There’s plenty for the right—veterans and members of rural communities find their way into the typical DEI definition of minorities. There’s even plenty for the planet: Arizona Democrats just bragged they’ve won $15 million in CHIPS funding for an ASU project fighting climate change.
That project is going better for Arizona than the actual chips part of the CHIPS Act. Because equity is so critical, the makers of humanity’s most complex technology must rely on local labor and apprentices from all those underrepresented groups, as TSMC discovered to its dismay.
Tired of delays at its first fab, the company flew in 500 employees from Taiwan. This angered local workers, since the implication was that they weren’t skilled enough. With CHIPS grants at risk, TSMC caved in December, agreeing to rely on those workers and invest more in training them. A month later, it postponed its second Arizona fab.
Now TSMC has revealed plans to build a second fab in Japan. Its first, which broke ground in 2021, is about to begin production. TSMC has learned that when the Japanese promise money, they actually give it, and they allow it to use competent workers. TSMC is also sampling Germany’s chip subsidies, as is Intel.
Intel is also building fabs in Poland and Israel, which means it would rather risk Russian aggression and Hamas rockets over dealing with America’s DEI regime. Samsung is pivoting toward making its South Korean homeland the semiconductor superpower after Taiwan falls.
To be fair, Intel has had fabs in Israel since since 1996, and Tower Semiconductor has had fabs in Israel since the 1980s. Poland, to the best of my knowledge, has never had a fab.
In short, the world’s best chipmakers are tired of being pawns in the CHIPS Act’s political games. They’ve quietly given up on America. Intel must know the coming grants are election-year stunts — mere statements of intent that will not be followed up. Even after due diligence and final agreements, the funds will only be released in dribs and drabs as recipients prove they’re jumping through the appropriate hoops.
So in the name of embedding the racist poison of social justice, the CHIPS Act, ostensibly designed to increase America’s share of cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing, is actually driving new fab construction out of America.
India has been trying to get into semiconductor fabrication for a while now, and after announcing a $10 billion investment fund, and with China locked out of so much semiconductor technology, there have been a lot of news bubbling up, but I want to focus on the Foxconn/Vedanta fab project.
The Economic Times is reporting that Foxconn and Vedanta are seeking to bring in European chipmaker STMicroelectronics as their technology partner in their proposed India manufacturing unit. The two companies announced their joint venture February 2021, with Foxconn as lead partner. Vedanta are reportedly seeking to onboard a CXO to head their semiconductor business.
Snip.
Vedanta-Foxconn are set to finalize a location for their facility in the next few weeks. The consortium are reportedly seeking a 800-1000 acre land parcel that is also well connected with Ahmedabad. The Gujarat government, as of media reports on September 16, showing sites at Sanand and Mandal-Becharaji in Ahmedabad district, two locations near Vadodara in central Gujarat, Dholera, Himmatnagar, Jamnagar, and Kutch. The plant has to be located at a distance from national and state highways so to cut off any vibration from heavy traffic movement. Further, no other major industry should be located in its vicinity.
Vedanta and Foxconn, in a 60-40 joint venture, will be setting up India’s first semiconductor production plant, a display fab unit, and a semiconductor assembling and testing unit over 1000 acres in Ahmedabad, state of Gujarat. The plant will begin production in two years as Foxconn plays the role of technical partner while Vedanta provides financial backing. The investment is worth over INR 1.54 trillion (approx. US$20 billion) and semiconductor manufacturing will be carried out by the holding company, Volcan Investments Limited.
Foxconn is a serious tech player that has serious mastery over the value-added chain. $20 billion, assuming it actually materializes, is real money, even in semiconductors. It’s right around the threshold to build a state of the art sub-10nm fab, even though it’s apparent that that’s not what they’re aiming for.
Vedanta, on the other hand, is another matter. They’re “a globally diversified natural resources company. We extract and process minerals, oil and gas.” Yeah, a natural resources company generally isn’t who you want running your fabs. Another strike is their talking about “Net Zero Carbon by 2050,” which suggests they may have their fingers in political scam pies.
STMicroelectronics is a real chipmaker that runs real fabs, but not the first company I would turn toward to purchase cutting edge process technology from, nor even the tenth. The fact that STM has already announced plans to team up with Global Foundries to build a new 300mm fab next to their existing fab line in Crolles, France in June 2022 makes me even more suspicious. Information on that existing 300mm Crolles fab is sketchy, and I know that for a long time it was a pilot rather than a production line, and I can see no evidence that it was ever expanded to volume production.
The fact that they plan to set set up a fab, a display fab, and a slice-and-dice packaging facility suggest a certain lack of focus. Flat Panel Display (FPD) fabs use familiar semiconductor steps, but the machines are very different because the substrates are different, and Samsung has huge dedicated display fabs. It’s setting up a modern chip fabrication plant that’s the difficult part, and while this combination could probably put together a solid trailing edge fab, like Bosch’s new 65nm fab. But that only cost $1.2B. Maybe they plan to build something in the 20-10nm range.
“The plant will begin production in two years.” Yeah, that’s not happening. Even giant players like TSMC and Intel generally take 2.5-3 years to stand up a new fab from breaking ground to starting up the line.
This could still happen, but the details are very sketchy. The slice and dice operation could be set up without too much difficulty, but it’s a low volume, low tech spinoff operation. A display fab would be more difficult, but it’s doable, though again, probably not in two years. But a real 300mm wafer, sub-65mn node microchip fabrication plant in India? I don’t see this set of players carrying that off well in three years. Five sounds more realistic, and that’s assuming the deal doesn’t fall apart.
Taiwan’s TSMC is also looking to set up a chip-fabricating factory in India, and is currently speaking to various government agencies to check the viability of setting up factory in India. TSMC already has one of its largest offices outside of Taiwan in India in Bengaluru, Karnataka, from where it provides support to its’ existing customers in Asia, Europe and North America and supports and encourages fabless companies in India in design and growth.
Ever since news N Chandrasekaran – chairman of the Tata group, announced that Tata Electronics (TEPL) will set up an Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test (OSAT) facility in India, there has a been a lot of speculation, according to which, TSMC and Tata may enter into a partnership.
Besides TSMC, Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, a Taiwanese chipmaker, is also in exploratory negotiations with several Indian companies to help establish new chip operations in the country, as per a report by Taipei Times. According to the newspaper, the memory chip maker’s announcement put an end to six months of speculation that it was planning to invest in India to diversify its operations despite Taiwan’s rising geopolitical tensions.
“Speaking to,” “exploring plans,” etc. These are very wishy-washy terms. Powerchip is a memory manufacturer that’s hardly flush with cash. I’m sure TSMC is talking to a lot of countries about fabs, but their newest one is under construction in Arizona.
International Semiconductor Consortium (ISMC), a joint venture between UAE’s Next Orbit Ventures and Israel’s Tower Semiconductor, was supposed to spend $3 billion to get started on a 40-65nm analog fab right about now, but I don’t see signs that’s actually happened. Tower is a real foundry, and the $3 billion pricetag and 4-5 year timeline seems realistic, but I’m not 100% sure they’re still interested in the project after Intel announced plans to buy them about a year ago. And having to bring in Arab petrostate funding for your venture is seldom a sign of strong financial viability.
There’s no reason you can’t build one or more modern fabs in India, but so far no major chip manufacturer has chosen to do so, despite the supposed availability of $10 billion in government subsidies.
The talks between the US, Japan, and the Netherlands over wider bans on exports of semiconductor technology to China have reportedly seen the three agree to concerted action.
As The Register has often chronicled, the US has restricted exports of critical chipmaking and silicon technologies to China, hoping to prevent its economic and strategic rival from developing military technologies – and to protest human rights abuses.
While the Home of the Brave has spawned many of Earth’s most significant chipmakers and designers – Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and many others have headquarters stateside – other nations also export semiconductor tech to China. The Land of the Free would rather put a stop to that if possible.
The Biden Administration also recognizes that its bans could be seen as creating an opportunity for other nations to cash in on the absence of US vendors in the Chinese market. The three-nation talks therefore have the extra dimension of making sure America’s policies have their desired effect against China and don’t harm the home team.
Those twin desires saw Japan and the Netherlands in talks with the US last week, and according to numerous reports the meetings produced a unified approach to restrict semiconductor exports to China.
Without equipment from the US, Japan and The Netherlands, you can’t equip and run a modern semiconductor fabrication plant.
Peter Zeihan (him again), who has evidently lost a bet requiring him to dress as Gimli, discusses the ramifications.
This is one case where Zeihan gets the generalities right, but is wrong on some specifics.
Right: The idea that China can just forge a complete “alternative” semiconductor supply chain out of thin air to replace western alternatives is indeed “hideously wrong.” “The nature of the semiconductor industry is more of an ecosystem. There are there’s very few places that without, significant industrial build out, could even pretend to do more than two or three steps of it, much less than a dozen or so steps that are necessary.”
However, in conflating semiconductor manufacturing and semiconductor equipment manufacturing (possibly to avoid contracting hypothermia) he’s muddied things up a bit. There are five essential semiconductor equipment manufacturers:
Applied Materials (USA)
ASML (The Netherlands)
KLA (USA)
LAM Research (USA)
Tokyo Electron (Japan)
If you’re building a modern, sub-10nm fab, chances are pretty good you need all five. You have to have an ASML EUV stepper, or else you have to go with trailing-edge machines from Canon and Nikon and deal with the computational pain and complexity of self-aligned quadruple patterning. You need KLA inspection tools to raise and maintain yields, and you need, at the very least, one of AMAT, LAM or TEL to provide the rest. Take away all three and you can’t equip a fab, period.
“We now have an agreement, and very soon the Dutch will formally be joining the sanction system against the Chinese.”
“The best [chips], these are 10 nanometer and smaller. This is typically what’s in your cell phone or in your high-end computers and servers those about 80% percent of them are actually fabricated in Taiwan, with another 20% in South Korea.” No. Although TSMC and Samsung are indeed leaders in this space, Intel has had 10nm processes running in their advanced fabs is Hillsboro and Chandler for a while, even though they’ve suffered yield problems.
His assertion that only China does legacy 90nm and above processes is false, as a look at this list of wafer fabs will attest, as there are a lot of companies (TI, TowerJazz, Oki, Mitsubishi, etc.) still profitably running older nodes, though many are comparatively funky technologies like BiCMOS, Analog, GaAs, etc.
Some quibbles about the details, but he gets the big picture right.
As for his suggestion that companies stick to over 10nm nodes, well, I don’t think much of it. Those that can do >10nm nodes will and push the technology forward, and those that can’t afford to won’t…
Democrats enabling sexual predators (yet again), more tanks for Ukraine information, and the unexpected return of Storm Drain Woman. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Published in November of 2022, the story indicated “thousands of child molesters are being let out after just a few months, despite sentencing guidelines.”
The story reported that more than 7,000 inmates convicted of “lewd or lascivious acts with a child under 14 years of age” were released from prison the same year they were incarcerated.
The Daily Mail’s analysis was conducted using a database—created in 1994 after the federal Megan’s Law was passed—requiring law enforcement to make public information regarding registered sex offenders. The news organization examined data in California through July of 2019.
“Everyone should be really upset and frightened by this,” Dordulian said.
According to Dordulian, child molesters are the least likely of criminals to be rehabilitated and are four times more likely to commit the same crime again.
“Once they’re out,” he said, “they are going to re-offend and there’s going to be another child that is victimized by these people.”
Senate Bill 357. Signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in July, the measure decriminalized loitering with the intent to engage in prostitution. The bill did not officially take effect until January 1 of this year; but, from the moment it became law back in July, these women say, the on-the-ground reality changed. “The minute the governor signed it, you started seeing an uptick on the streets,” Powell said. “And on social media, the pimps were saying: ‘You better get out there and work because the streets are ours.’”
The pimps were right: police stopped making arrests for crimes that would no longer be charged. The anti-loitering statute had provided the grounds for officers to question women and children whom they suspected might be trapped in a prostitution ring. “As a police officer, you need probable cause to stop and investigate,” Powell explained. “So if I have a law that says you can’t loiter in this area, with pasties and a G-string, flagging down cars, I could stop you for that because you’re loitering. But if I just say I’m stopping you because you look kind of young, that’s a little weak. So, it takes away a tool.” Without the statute, police hands were suddenly tied. Henceforth, questioning the girls—and potentially provoking a violent confrontation with pimps—came to seem a Pyrrhic gamble, one that California’s police officers would now avoid.
The films, which include “Miss Representation,” “The Mask You Live In,” “The Great American Lie” and “Fair Play,” are licensed to taxpayer-funded schools across every state and sometimes contain sexually explicit imagery and push students to feel “shame and sorrow” about American society split by privilege and oppression. They are paired with curricula that include discussion on Gov. Newsom’s comments within the films, urging them to gather their friends and vote for aligned politicians that support a “care economy” that “embraces universal human values.”
“Former Arlington teachers union president charged with embezzlement. A former president of the Arlington teachers union, who was ousted last spring, has been charged with embezzling more than $400,000 from the organization. Ingrid Gant, 54, of Woodbridge, was arrested yesterday (Monday) in Prince William County on four counts of embezzlement.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
“Thirty years ago, Guan County, Shandong Province launched the ‘Hundred Childless Days‘ campaign under the aegis of national family planning, known in the West as the ‘one-child policy.’ The birthplace of the “Boxers” was deemed to have too high a birth rate by the provincial government. County officials sought to correct this by ensuring that not a single baby was born between May 1 and August 10, 1991.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
North says they do not feel safe anymore, and she believes it all ties back to the large homeless encampment located only feet away from the salon.
“Our safety started to become a big issue. We suffered from multiple break-ins. We’ve had our cars broken into. We clean up feces and needles on a weekly basis. It increased from that to, you know, people approaching us and threatening us with weapons, threatening rape, murder, all of those things,” said North.
The salon has been up and running just off Ben White Blvd. for four years now. North says she has seen an uptick in crime for a while now, but the dangerous behavior from people living in this encampment picked up recently.
“In the past year, it’s gotten increasingly worse and, in the past couple of weeks, it’s gotten to the point where I actually finally felt like this might shut my business down,” said North.
Erin Mutschler, another co-owner of the salon, says they have called the police every time they have dealt with a situation like the one caught on video, but she says police often take 45 minutes to an hour for anyone to show up.
The mayorship of Steve Adler is the gift that just keeps giving, even with him out of office… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Follow-up: Democratic State Rep. Harold Dutton: “Don’t Blame Abbott, Houston ISD Takeover Plan Was My Idea.” (Previously.)
A Florida woman was pulled from a storm drain for the third time in two years. Maybe she was looking for David Icke’s lizard people. Also, she sounds like a real winner: “Police said her license had been suspended 17 times from 2007 to 2020.” (Previously.) (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Jay Leno broke his collarbone, several ribs and both kneecaps in a motorcycle accident. But it sounds like a freak accident: “So I turned down a side street and cut through a parking lot, and unbeknownst to me, some guy had a wire strung across the parking lot but with no flag hanging from it…I didn’t see it until it was too late. It just clothesline me and, boom, knocked me off the bike.” (There’s no evidence the line was strung there by Conan O’Brien.) “But I’m OK!…I’m working this weekend.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
The House on Thursday passed the bipartisan Chips and Science Act, which aims to increase domestic production of computer chips to allow the U.S. to become more competitive against China in the global technology market.
The bill passed the House in a 243-187 vote one day after passing the Senate in a 64-33 vote. The legislation now heads to the desk of President Joe Biden.
Biden called the passage of the bill on Thursday “exactly what we need to be doing to grow our economy right now.”
“Today, the House passed a bill that will make cars cheaper, appliances cheaper, and computers cheaper,” Biden said. “It will lower the costs of every day goods. And, it will create high-paying manufacturing jobs across the country and strengthen U.S. leadership in the industries of the future at the same time.”
Twenty-four Republicans voted to pass the measure, despite Republican leadership making a last minute push to discourage GOP lawmakers from supporting the bill. GOP leaders sought to keep the bill from passing after news broke on Wednesday that Senator Joe Manchin (D., W. Va.) had reached a deal with Democratic leaders on a nearly half-a-trillion dollar spending package targeting energy and climate, health care, and increased taxes on the wealthy.
Snip.
The measure includes $39 billion to “build, expand, or modernize domestic facilities and equipment” for semiconductors, $2 billion to specifically manufacture semiconductors and $11 billion for Department of Commerce research and development.
“Research and development” is no doubt going to be a rich conduit of graft to Democratic Party cronies having nothing to do with semiconductors.
For reference, $29 billion is probably just enough to build two state-of-the-art 300mm chip fabrication plants.
As I’ve argued before, the reasoning behind the bill is specious and it won’t result in a single new chip being fabbed in the next two years.
The most recent stats I can find show that the United States has some 47% of the semiconductor market. We (and Taiwan, and South Korea) are kicking China’s ass in semiconductors.
The chips China make are generally either: A.) Cheap, or B.) intended for their internal market. No one sends cutting edge chips to be fabbed in China because they don’t have the tech to do it and everyone know they’ll steal your designs and crank out knock-offs on the sly whenever possible. China’s semiconductor industry is mostly smoke and mirrors all the way down.
Semiconductor subsidies have all the hallmarks of a classic Washington boondoggle: The wrong action at the wrong time for the wrong problem.
Second, the shortage wasn’t the result of a “chip shortage,” it was the result of “a lack of available foundry wafer starts.” Automakers cancelled their orders for display drivers when it looked like Flu Manchu lockdowns were going to depress the economy for a while, and were caught off-guard by the V-shaped recovery under Trump, and got sent to the back of the line to get their product fabbed after they changed their mind. Remember, just about all foundries are running flat-out 24/7/365, pausing only to switch to different chips for different customers. There’s no slack in the system, and those wafer starts are already spoken for (and possibly paid for) by other customers well in advance. Just as nine woman can’t give birth to a fully grown baby in one month, you can’t just “make chips quicker” in an existing fab.
Third, remember that cutting edge semiconductor fabs are hideously expensive. Moore’s second law states that the cost of a new, cutting edge semiconductor plant doubles every four years. Samsung’s planned fab in Taylor, Texas is going to cost $17 billion.
Fourth, nothing about these subsidies will address the real problem with American semiconductors, which is that the overwhelming majority of cutting edge chip designs have to flow through TSMC fabs in Taiwan. What will solve that problem is TSMC opening a state-of-the art fab in Arizona in 2024. No amount of U.S. taxpayer money will make that already-under-construction fab start producing chips any quicker.
Could these subsidies boost American semiconductor manufacturing 2-3 years from now? Possibly. Knowing the cycling nature of the industry and the tendency of government subsidies to backfire, new/upgraded fab lines might come online just as the industry is experiencing a glut.
But the real key to restoring America to the cutting edge of semiconductor manufacturing is the already-in-progress inshoring of cutting edge foreign owned fabs from Samsung and TSMC, and having American semiconductor manufacturers like Intel and GlobalFoundries master sub-10nm chip fabrication processes, something they have heretofore been unable to do. (Intel is closer, having been on the cutting edge until they lost their way, while GlobalFoundries stopped all development on their 7nm node because they couldn’t find a way to make the investment pay off.)
Throwing buckets of budget-busting borrowed taxpayer money around isn’t going to make any of those things happen any faster.
Enough links have filtered into the semiconductor bucket to be worth doing a roundup. This one touches on China and the corruption of our political elites.
The congressional Democrats’ attempt to throw money at the problem is going nowhere fast.
The Biden administration is laser-focused on sending Ukraine billions of dollars in weapons, including the latest round of anti-ship systems, artillery rockets, and rounds of 105 mm ammo for howitzer cannons that it has entirely lost focus on reshoring efforts to boost semiconductor production Stateside.
Multiple manufacturers of semiconductor wafers have announced plans for new multi-billion dollar factories across the U.S. but are contingent on Congress allocating funds to aid in building facilities under the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act.
Congress passed the CHIPS Act in January 2021 as part of last year’s National Defense Authorization Act, which proposed $52 billion in funding for increasing the domestic capacity of chip production, though the House and Senate have come to a standstill over disagreements on certain parts of the bill that have sparked so much uncertainty among companies set to build new factories.
In a letter on June 15, dozens of technology executives from IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Analog Devices, Micron, Amazon, and Alphabet called on Congress to move quickly on the CHIPS Act. They wrote, “the rest of the world is not waiting for the U.S. to act,” and funding for new chip factories must be achieved immediately.
Taiwan’s GlobalWafers announced a new $5 billion factory in the U.S. on Monday, but contingent on subsidies from the federal government.
“This investment that they’re making is contingent upon Congress passing the CHIPS Act. The [GlobalWafers] CEO told me that herself, and they reiterated that today,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told CNBC, the same day GlobalWafers announced its development plan.
Notes:
IBM doesn’t own any fabs any more, having sold them all to GlobalFoundries.
Intel runs a huge number of very profitable fabs (troubles with their sub-10nm process yields notwithstanding) and doesn’t need federal subsidies.
Microsoft doesn’t own any fabs and is deeply unlikely to build any; their flagship Xbox Series X uses a custom AMD Zen 2 fabbed by TSMC as its CPU.
Analog Devices is an Integrated Device Manufacturer that owns several fabs with pretty old technology; they don’t have any 300mm fabs. They closed a small fab in Milpitas they got from their acquisition of Linear Technology last year. Designing analog chips is its own black art, and not everything that applies to shrinking digital circuits applies to the analog realm.
Amazon has no fabs and probably won’t be building any, but they do have a chip design division to support Amazon Web Services, and recently designed a cloud computing chip. They work closely with AMD (fabbed at TSMC), Intel (own their own fabs) and Nvidia (another fabless design house that also gets their chips fabbed at TSMC).
Alphabet AKA Google has no fabs and probably won’t be building any, though they do have a lot of AI chip design work going on.
GlobalWafers isn’t a semiconductor manufacturer, it’s a silicon wafer manufacturer. Making such wafers (the substrates upon which semiconductor fabrication depends) has its own challenges, but they are several orders less difficult than cutting edge chip fabrication. Maybe I’m quite far out of the loop, but I’m deeply suspicious that GlobalWafers planned wafer plant in Sherman, Texas will cost $5 billion. That’s a relatively piddling sum for a new semiconductor fab, but extremely expensive for a wafer factory. This makes me suspect a subsidy grab is afoot.
So of the companies mentioned, Intel could suck up government funding to build a fab they were going to build anyway, I’m sure Analog Devices would build a fab with government money, but chances of them running an under 10nm process in said theoretical fab is extremely slim, none of the other mentioned copies are going to build a fab, and none of that government money is going to alleviate the main problem that the overwhelming majority of cutting edge chip designs have to flow through TSMC fabs in Taiwan. What will solve that problem is TSMC opening a state-of-the art fab in Arizona in 2024. No amount of U.S. taxpayer money will make that already-under-construction fab start producing chips any quicker.
$250 billion in taxpayer subsidies wouldn’t get you a single additional wafer start this year, and probably would accomplish little more than channeling money to politically connected firms and sticky pockets in a state (New York) that no one wants to build fabs in any more because of high costs, high taxes and union rule requirements.
So who expects to earn immediate gains from the taxpayers subsidizing semiconductors? Would you believe Nancy Pelosi?
I bet you would.
This past week it hit the terminal that House Speaker Pelosi was doing a little portfolio re-jiggering, including exercising $8 million of call options in Nvidia and selling Apple and Visa calls. The data was per CongressTrading.com and was reported on by Bloomberg.
The Nvidia LEAPS were bought June 3, 2021 with $100 strikes, set to expire June 17, 2022 and the position appeared to be disclosed on Thursday morning for the first time. $8 million trades seem a little odd for members of Congress to begin with, but who are we to judge?
But then, what did Speaker Pelosi do just hours after disclosing the trade, on Friday?
She threw her weight behind a stalled $50 billion CHIPS PLUS bill that “would provide $52 billion in funding for semiconductor manufacturing grants and investment tax credits for the chip industry.”
We tend to discuss leading-edge nodes and the most advanced chips made using them, but there are thousands of chip designs developed years ago that are made using what are now mature process technologies that are still widely employed by the industry. On the execution side of matters, those chips still do their jobs as perfectly as the day the first chip was fabbed which is why product manufacturers keep building more and more using them. But on the manufacturing side of matters there’s a hard bottleneck to further growth: all of the capacity for old nodes that will ever be built has been built – and they won’t be building any more.
Not strictly true. Remember, Bosch just finished building a 65nm fab.
As a result, TSMC has recently begun strongly encouraging its customers on its oldest (and least dense) nodes to migrate some of their mature designs to its 28 nm-class process technologies.
Nowadays TSMC earns around 25% of its revenue by making hundreds of millions of chips using 40 nm and larger nodes. For other foundries, the share of revenue earned on mature process technologies is higher: UMC gets 80% of its revenue on 40 nm higher nodes, whereas 81.4% of SMIC’s revenue come from outdated processes.
That’s because UMC has fallen woefully far behind TSMC, and no one trusts them because they let Chinese spies walk out the door with other company’s IP. SMIC is on Mainland China, sucks even more, and is trusted even less.
Mature nodes are cheap, have high yields, and offer sufficient performance for simplistic devices like power management ICs (PMICs). But the cheap wafer prices for these nodes comes from the fact that they were once, long ago, leading-edge nodes themselves, and that their construction costs were paid off by the high prices that a cutting-edge process can fetch. Which is to say that there isn’t the profitability (or even the equipment) to build new capacity for such old nodes.
This is why TSMC’s plan to expand production capacity for mature and specialized nodes by 50% is focused on 28nm-capable fabs. As the final (viable) generation of TSMC’s classic, pre-FinFET manufacturing processes, 28nm is being positioned as the new sweet spot for producing simple, low-cost chips. And, in an effort to consolidate production of these chips around fewer and more widely available/expandable production lines, TSMC would like to get customers using old nodes on to the 28nm generation.
“We are not currently [expanding capacity for] the 40 nm node” said Kevin Zhang, senior vice president of business development at TSMC. “You build a fab, fab will not come online [until] two year or three years from now. So, you really need to think about where the future product is going, not where the product is today.”
This video asks whether China can produce their own chips:
Obviously, they already produce some of their own chips, but the video covers most of the issues China has with fabbing more complex chips that I’ve already discussed here and here. They’re still dependent on the same three leading fab companies (TSMC, Intel and Samsung) everyone else is for sub 10nm feature chips, and are overwhelmingly dependent on both foreign talent and foreign semiconductor equipment manufacturers like ASML and Applied Materials.
Speaking of TSMC and Intel, India would really like them to build fabs there. The problem is, despite a whole lot of technical talent there, it doesn’t have a terribly large domestic electronics manufacturing base.
The economy is contracting (thanks Biden), attacks and counterattacks in eastern Ukraine, regulation madness, and something from the 1875 crime blotter in 2022. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Note: Today’s LinkSwarm will be a bit shorter than usual because: A.) I’m off Twitter for the time being, so I’m not grabbing links there, and B.) I took the day off from work and I’m just feeling lazy.
Sure, the Biden Administration sucks on basic competence when it comes to the American economy, but to balance that, they also suck on regulation.
The Biden Administration capped off its first full year in office with more than $201 billion in regulatory costs and 131 million hours in new annual paperwork, putting it far ahead of the two immediately preceding administrations’ respective first years by a wide margin.
Actions related to vehicle emissions and COVID-19 safety measures provided the vast majority of these administrative burdens.
Additionally, in terms of executive orders issued during the first year of an administration, the 77 put forth by President Biden represent the highest number since the Ford Administration.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, and Russian forces seem to be making a slow, grinding advance on the strategic city of Severodonetsk in eastern Ukraine. “Moscow has poured thousands of troops into its assault on Severodonetsk and its sister city of Lysychansk. The twin cities, straddling the Siverskyi Donets river, have been in Russian sights for months. They currently comprise the lone Ukrainian redoubt in the Luhansk oblast.” Taking Lysychansk will require Russians to cross the Donets, previous attempts at which have been disasterous for them.
Russia has succeeded in taking Lyman, but Ukraine has launched counterattacks against the Russian forces encircling Severodonetsk.
The Texas Association of School Boards is set to leave Its parent organization, the National School Board Association, according to records obtained by Texas Scorecard.
The National School Boards Association made headlines last year following their letter to President Joe Biden and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting federal intervention in local school board meetings and referring to concerned parents as “domestic terrorists.”
It has since been revealed that the NSBA leadership urged the Biden Administration to deploy military forces in an effort to prevent parents from attending school board meetings.
Since then, parents have been calling on the state organization—the Texas Association of School Boards—to leave the organization, as more than 20 states already have.
“Professor Fired Over Tweets Questioning BLM Movement Gets Reinstated, Awarded Back Pay After Arbitrator Finds In His Favor.” “An arbitrator has ruled that a University of Central Florida professor, Charles Negy, has to be reinstated.”
Who’s been funding the attacks on Elon Musk following his Twitter bid? Would you believe Bill Gates? Of course you would. “Would you believe what perfidy Ernst Stavro Blofeld is up to this week?” Why yes, I would. The biggest difference is that Blofeld has better fashion sense and never tried to inflict Microsoft Bob on the world…
I’ll take headlines from 1875 for $400: “Loving County judge arrested for cattle theft….Loving County Judge Skeet Jones is accused of livestock theft and organized criminal activity.”
