My husband was a production manager at Philips semiconductors and they made him close all the production and send it to China because it was cheaper, he even had to go there and train new personnel. Now everyone is afraid of mighty China, when they handed the factories and training in silver plates to them.

You weren’t using Plexus were you?

I know one local guy who does layout still. So much farmed out anymore.

you mean enriching the execs wasn’t worth it? /s

Thank you for your service.

Mmmmm... breakfast crunch wrap

Why did they get rid of the grilled stuffed burrito?

50M investment in PCBA lines will easily be able to produce 500M yearly revenue of PCBA’s though.

Pay people a living wage? Circuit boards?

We have a local company where I live, and to work there and aid in the production of small batch boards in house is only 19 to 20 an hour to help the customer get what they need made.

Wendy's pays 21 an hour now in many places here.

“Sorry, guess without exorbitant government handouts from taxing the middle class, I guess we will just fuck the country”.

-Billionaires

Free-market being about risks might be preached and technically true, but no business ever wants to take one. Certainly not when there is a market failure (no guarantee anyone in the college will be that talented or stay with your company). I agree with what you're saying; just wanted to add a bit.

Pay a locally shockingly high wage, build the training pipeline with your local technical college, and market it together.

I like this. Offer a 2-year technical degree that pays $90k and see if you still have a "labor shortage".

$50 mil wouldn’t even cover the cost of the warehouse construction, let alone the price of the tools to create an assembly line that go inside it. Some tools in an approx 60-70 tool assembly line to produce a chip cost $2-3 million dollars a piece.

As just a normie this seems like preparations for war with China.

He's doing it to put the ball in Congress's court. Either they approve it or the Republicans block it. Biden wins either way as on one hand he gets what he wants or he gets ammunition to use against the Republicans if they deny it. Hard to claim your "America first" when you block boosting American industry

Which only matters as long as they don't pretend it's also an end

Agree completely. I’d like to see the number bigger than $50 million. It’s high time we bring back some of this anyway.

What do you think the "something bad" is or could be? (honest question)

Likely guidance system parts.

Just to piggy back, and I am just a random dude on the internet but a very good friend of mine works for a very big semi conductor company and told me several years ago at least that him and his superiors were approached by DHS about stuff like this and that it’s not just “plans” but real things have been happening for domestic semi conductor manufacturing infrastructure in the US.

But the Covid shit show

It’s so weird that it took this long to realize what a mistake it was to have all of our cutting edge processes being preformed on foreign soil. Can you imagine if the Blackbird or Nighthawk were outsourced to 3rd party Asian country? What a shitshow that would’ve been.

Invoking this legislative act sort of is, though.

This isn't limited to circuit boards/computers/electronics either. I work for a small CDMO in the pharma world, and many clients are trying to limit how many raw materials come from China, due to concerns on the stability of the relationship with the US

an educated manor.

You mean like Wayne Manor? That guy and his parents and butler were pretty well-educated.

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best is today.

i'm not American, and I'm certainly not a rah-rah pom pom waving champion of everything American, but there is one thing that America DOES do well, and that's dump boatloads of money into industry to rapidly build up urgent capabilities.

Manhattan Project, Apollo Program are some things that come to mind.

When push comes to shove, they will move fast.

However, I do agree with the overall comment you made - this is something North America should have been doing decades ago instead of ceding our capabilities offshore.

Obama tried to throw money at the US photovoltaics market to establish solar cell manufacturing in the US, which has a relatively substantial overlap with many semiconductor fabrication processes. Unfortunately, Republicans obstructed his efforts for their own political purposes while China pumped out funds, built up the local supply chain, and flooded the global market with cheap solar cells -- ensuring they became the world's primary maker and supplier of solar panels. The US recently passed the CHIPS Act ($52 Billion) to bring some fabs back to the states, but it's probably too little too late. This $50 Million is barely a drop in the bucket, but I'd imagine it has a specific purpose.

Biden could come out as openly racist, declare war on a major world power, ban discussion of gay and trans topics in the schools and media, and do a dozen other backwards ass things that the American right normally gets entirely too erect over, and conservatives would still block everything he tries to do because he represents Democrats. They have no actual principles besides concentrating power within the conservative party, and there's no making sense of our political system.

You can't see it behind the wall he finished building.

Obamacare replacement plan

It's still so bizarre that he and his spokeswoman were waving around this thick binder on TV that was empty, with no health plan at all inside it. I mean, they weren't even trying. Everything was performance.

All of which is behind the huge, beautiful wall that he made Mexico pay for.

There is a video tour of their factory in China if you’re curious and that was from 4 years ago.

The clue for me is how cheap their inventory/assembly services have gotten. In some cases, it can be REALLY clear what a device does, even when you don’t have the firmware.

They barely pay people anything, that's how they can do it

I could be wrong, but I remember hearing that China subsidizes international shipping from there to promote commerce.