U.S. advantage over China in semiconductor manufacturing is in strong U.S. labor law

August 3, 2022

The unspoken advantage that the U.S. can have in winning the commanding position in the geostrategically important manufacture of semiconductor chips is that the U.S. labor force is free and exists under a democratic system of government. The majority of semiconductor chip manufacturing is in mainland China, where workers are remarkably unfree. Yes, we do buy a lot of products from China for a variety of everyday uses, but this unique geostrategic element to the manufacture of semiconductor chips gives us the leverage to make this a significant labor issue, as well. American workers can do a better job making semiconductor chips because we have much more favorable labor laws than China does. Of course, U.S. labor law can be further improved to benefit the conditions of workers, which are still not where they need to be: – but that is actually a point in favor: that US labor laws can be improved, which is not the case in China. Despite China being called a communist country, it's factually not a "communist" or "socialist" system for the workers: it's factually communism only for the rich, if at all. We can easily verify this with easily accessible memory - for example, several members of the Trump family were taking advantage of very exploitative working conditions in China to manufacture cheap and low quality goods. Ivanka Trump was very vocal about how those exploitative labor conditions made it very easy to take advantage of Chinese workers to get those cheap products. That the quality of Chinese goods is low is sort of common knowledge these days, but that comment should really be generalized to say that any product made by low-paid and exploited workers will not be of high quality, and any industry that is making its bones by ripping off workers can't maintain the quality of its product for very long. The so called "Flying Geese Model" from development economics is actually the bit of economic mumbo–jumbo that explains this fact from common sense: that in order to maintain the buy-in of workers in a "developing" economy you have to continue to advance to more and more complex industries, because if an industry is frozen in time in a place, it begins to become more and more exploitative, and the workers will become discontented. However, we should also be very clear that the term "developing countries" is elite code for countries where there are weak labor laws and workers can be exploited. In a country like the US with stronger labor laws than China, the development of high-tech manufacturing can more easily expand along with workers wages and rights and safety – although we will need to commit to strong and vibrant labor unions in the industry. Without that, it's functionally impossible to maintain worker confidence, and without worker confidence, the quality of the product suffers. China, it should be noted, does not have labor unions, certainly not independent labor unions. We have a legitimate shot at taking a leading role in the high tech 21st-century economy, but even though we're taking on China in that race, our fundamental advantage in that is to lean on our own fundamentals, and that means an economy that is built on workers' rights and strong labor law, which is something that the US and Taiwan share.

This potentially revolutionary economic deal requires that we dig in on our essential domestic liberty

 August 3, 2022

The way things are in the U.S. right now has been really going to hell due to this sensitive Taiwan business. No one wants to admit it, but this has the flavor of another Straits Crisis because of the sensitive nature of the issues at stake. The cards are on the table. The only card that China had in this three-way contention was a certain knowledge of the area, and they were banking on the possibility that the U.S. wouldn't care enough to complete this crucial project, and secure this missing piece in assuring the safety and security of the 21st century economy. But there is now, a more full understanding of what is holding this 21st century economy together. And the very deepest strength of the US has been marshaled to connect these concepts together. Everyone knows that this has to happen for not only the short term but the long term health of the American body politick. 

The challenge that we have to overcome in this diplomacy, which will continue for the long after this high-level meeting, is the suspicion on either side that the other side is not doing the essential things that need to be done right, absolutely correctly, at a high level relative to the cultural standard of literacy. There is a distinct hesitancy to bring out the best of the best in each side toward an accord because there's a very limited way that you can ask another if that is really the best example of that, that you do. 

No illusions should be had that TW does the Condor-Eagle way of connecting cultures, but for us, the delegation that we sent over thre was legitimately a Condor-type mission. In this mission, Ms. Pelosi is representing the economy, which is internally not the standard governing structure, but she's meeting with the governing structure of the TW government which is not the ruling standard of the culture and Society. Ergo, it is a true meeting of the cultures at the very highest level we have seen.

On a strict diplomatic statesmanship level, if she is going there, the only government that is independent of the mission, here, is the president and vice president. The Senate is in dissent, and the Supreme Court is in recess. The rest of the country on a strictly hierarchical level, is clandestine. The left hand is shaking the left hand, and the evaluation of the strength of each culture is going on behind the scenes, in peacetime. The long recovery from this may extend out for several months: that is the real workout that is going to happen as a consequence of this huge deal. 

I want to note a strange coincidence that happened in the Senate today that I see as two speeches in commentary on this moment. Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse took to the floor today to make two speeches critiquing our economy and legal system. In short, Senator Sanders reported out once more that many of our economic problems can be attributed to the continuing tendency in law-making for conservative criticism of economic projects to end up in stripping protections for workers, even as the final bill still presents the appearance of delivering the framework, on a wide scale, that the people of the country have been asking for. This concludes in the capture of these new programs by the forces of the moneyed elite, and its co-optation to serve the interests of what we can call the 1% and/or our new robber barons, as in the case of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or it's elimination, as in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.

The following speech by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse amplified the principal critique by nailing down the fact that there is a class of moneyed elite that is scheming and manipulating to capture institutions of government and society. In particular, the 85 Fund and the Concord Fund, for example, put millions of dollars of anonymous money toward the appointment of social conservative judges to the bench, while blocking the appointment of liberal justices. These are the same organizations, a 501(c)3 and 501(c)4, that were created and operated concurrently to block the appointment of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court bench, and subsequently assisted in the appointment of three judges supported by conservatives to the same Supreme Court bench. There's a standard operating procedure in the machine of elite conservative politics where one faction of this class gets tax breaks when they win, and the other gets social conservative judges. Jonathan Chait spilled the beans on that recently, but let's not take it out on him, he was just doing his job. Still, it's not a big secret. There have long been these organizations like the Federalist Society and the John Birch Society that have operated clandestinely to manipulate the appointment of judges. But it's relatively new for these old–money people to corporatize this endeavor to the purpose of capturing as much of our legal system as possible. We have a legal system based on common law as opposed to civil law, and the system of constitutional legality is to a certain extent grafted onto the common law system to deal with cases involving government action too. For these schemers to be trying to "take over" a system of common law is delusional unless they are betting on the American people not noticing it and calling them on it. The common law is a great protector of the people's basic liberty, because it gives them recourse to the courts. But the British common law system doesn't give anyone much leeway to challenge the actions of government. Britain didn't want anyone to be able to hold their monarchy liable for anything, especially corruption, and so the American system of law that has both common and constitutional law elements is a significant innovation on the British system of unaccountable governmental power. However it's this constitutional system of law, and in general, law regarding the administration of federalism, that is vulnerable to co-optation by the conspiracy of the rich and powerful in this country, and in the series of shocking scandals involving the American Supreme Court it has been revealed that this problem is very serious. As Senator Whitehouse said, no one puts that much money into appointing certain judges unless they have a purpose. And the scale of the donations gathered, and their anonymity, indicates that the class behind this mobilization of regressive social conservative judges is the class of people in this country, who, being rich and powerful, presume they are the ruling class. This doesn't have to be so exhaustively reasoned out in the dark either, because, it's just common sense that that's who it would be. 

So not only do we have capture of our most important economic programs by bad actors among the rich and powerful, but we also increasingly have to contend with capture of our legal institutions, if not our actual legal system, by the functionally same social class of bad actors among the rich.

We wouldn’t have a sand shortage if we didn’t have too much fracking

 August 2, 2022

You might not have thought that you'd be thinking about the role of sand as a commodity, but you may very well be. Remarkably, there is a shortage of sand on the market. Sand is used in a lot more cases than you might expect, like concrete and glass of course, but also in metalworking for polishing. But it's not like we're using massively more sand in construction or metalworking. So what's going on?

The basically unspoken fact is that the significant factor in the increase in sand use is due to the use of sand in fracking operations. Fracking operations use a lot of sand, and the increase in fracking in the past decade or so has led to a shortage in the supply of commodity sand. Sand is basically wasted in fracking operations: it either can't be re-used when it's pulled out of the ground or it's left in the ground. 

What is not the cause of this shortage is this new and green use case of sand, which is in thermal batteries. Thermal batteries use not so much sand, and provide a simple and effective method of storing wind and solar energy for use in the off-peak hours. There are actually a lot of "simple" types of batteries that can store energy effectively enough at scale not to have to rely solely on the most efficient lithium-ion batteries: liquid salt and thermal sand batteries are two examples; and there is no reason that wind and solar energy can't be sorted in gravity-fed hydropower systems. 

But the sand shortage is evidence that the fossil fuel system is collaterally wasteful in ways we clearly didn't expect as well as collaterally polluted. I don't want to only focus on this; this should be common sense to anyone. 

What is making someone like me care about this above and beyond the economic analysis is the strange effect this demand for sand is having on communities in the Midwest, especially Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. They've been taking so much sand out of mines that weren't very busy before, that it's having deletrious effects on communities. Solastalgia feels abound, as well as this feeling that it's such a strange environmental problem to try to communicate: giant holes in places, some of them on shorelines and so forth. It's been hard to convince people that it's happening, let alone at a scale that is so problematic. 

All this is not to mention that fracking operations have basically demanded the best quality of sand in order for them to waste in the fracking process. Showing, overall, that fracking has imposed a significant waste on the supply of sand by decreasing the available supply for other legitimate purposes, and specifically decreasing supply of the highest quality of sand. 

It's a stange commodity to be talking about, but over several years, it has started to appear to be a critical commodity. The problem is, however, that the construction trades are experiencing this as a critical shortage because we've been wasting the best of what we have on strained and unnecessary contortions to get fossil gas that is getting in the way of a faster and more successful transition to a green, and frankly it appears a more profitable, less convoluted energy system.

Market-available quantum computing challenges encryption

 August 2, 2022

Every now and again someone releases a report about the state of quantum computing. It's not all that esoteric to talk about quantum computing because it's already got the potential to shake up some things we already take as structurally untouchable. Most encryption systems can actually be cracked with conventional computing, except for the high-standard SHA-256 protocol, but few mention that quantum computers can make short work of any conventionally-computed encryption system. Basically the only encryption system that couldn't be cracked by a quantum computer, including even anything government/military level encrypted, would be a message encrypted by a protocol based on quantum computing. Everything encrypted by a conventional computer can now be cracked by a quantum computing system. 

Well, the latest news is the research teams are starting to plan for market use cases for quantum computing - saying they'd like to know when quantum computing should pick up where conventional computing leaves off. This means we'll soon enough see quantum computing on the market, and encryption protocols up and down the line, even the highest SHA-256 standard are vulnerable to being uncoded by simple brute-force attack. This means that the field of information secrecy is again heavily asymmetrical, which will to a certain extent make data-based journalism more volatile, and so on. If you were relying on that, it might not hold, in the face of this.

Just thought you might want to know.

Edit: October 22, 2023 — Biden signs quantum computing cybersecurity bill into law | FedScoop

Genre

 August 2, 2022

To myself, I often despise when people ask "what kind of writing do you do?" because I do not like to boil down what I do to a brand or a catchphrase. The question of Genre is often an albatross around the neck of someone whose goal is to write something to be of use, to be informing and exciting, but also activating - of some hidden potentiality in the reader. What is the anti-genre? What is the flipside of a generic definition - where the reader may in the act of reading discover a genre in themselves but the writer doesn't cleave to a particular definition except for the effect that it, his writing, may evoke when mixed with the flavor of the time and the nature of the audience? 

I'm not sure what's got me philosophizing about genre and my own work again, other than, perhaps, Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan over the CHIPS Act, which opened up a lot of cultural room for a sort of celebratory philosophical interlude. 

I had a teacher once who would on occasion mention the literary issue of genre with an air of significance: as a substantial secret. And I get what she meant on some level - the dual signification of the word "character": as in, it's impossible to tell how "good" a person is without also determining what kind of person they are. 

I don't think that what genre someone consumes in their reading or information is completely dispositive of their character on either of those levels. But the existence of genres in popular art is in and of itself a meta-education on the existence of different kinds of characters in the human race, all of which can be of equally good character. To slightly strain the logical reasoning...it stands to reason that what matters in distinguishing types of characters can't all matter to whether they are of good character. 

There were, for example, some people in Taiwan that were locked up by the State for one reason or another, and some of those reasons were pretty flimsy reasons, such as, these were the "kinds of people" where were dangerous to the State. Taiwan had a pretty brutal period of military rule before it was fully democratized. This is in the distant past by now. Some, and I'd say, a good number of those people were actually of good character, which just goes to show that the distinction between the two kinds of character is often not understood. I'd say a good number of people privately thought that a lot of the people who got locked up were of good character too. It goes to show that a lot of what States or "the State" does is blind to whether people are of good moral character or not. Things are a little better now but they are not perfect. Taiwan disassembled its martial law system and is now one of the most democratic places in the world. People get the benefit of the doubt there more than they used to. But they still have to deal with the ever-presence of China’s associated threats. There's no one genre that describes Taiwan either, now that I think about it. It knows sorrow and joy, all the emotional weather of the human soul. Some parts are transcendently beautiful and some parts are astonishingly normal. 

To catch back on to the the thread I'm following overall, Taiwan is no more problematic an ally than the others we have. It has a problematic past, but it is now the most open democracy in East Asia. And its past is no more problematic than our own. What is most important is that it's our most important ally for securing a high-tech economy for the U.S.A. in manufacturing jobs, and for keeping tabs on and controlling our geostrategic competition with China. Getting up to speed on manufacturing semiconductor chips well, and better than future competitors in China and Southeast Asia, will take some doing, and may require that we dip into these deeper places once in a while. 

What we need to focus on when it comes to the issues at hand and the work to be done, when we look at what we could gain through this enhanced geostrategic and economic advantage the CHIPS Act would provide, is how do we do it in such a way that justice and fairness are served, and the benefits accrue to the workers in the American economy, not only to the 1%, the billionaire class, or the robber barons of our technofeudalist contemporary, however you wish to put it. For example, if this bill could benefit Intel, have we adequately considered, "stateside" (as they say in diplomacy) whether Intel workers are adequately unionized so that they benefit from the advantage that will accrue to Intel from the potential of this bill? We do have a certain problem of forgetting about that in the planning stages of economic policy. And how can we get more people into good-paying union jobs in the high-tech sector, which will expand on account of this bill? We have one picture of what a unionized blue collar job looks like in this country, but actually that's another "thing" that has no inherent "genre" when it comes to aesthetics and personality, and so forth.

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New distributions of regional power in the Internet Age

August 2, 2022, late night/early morning.

 In light of the previous story about California's new status as a global gateway due to the Internet Age, I think it's important to put in a word about what this means for the distribution of actual political power in the United States. We hear a lot about East and West Coast, urban and rural, or even the old North-South regional balances of power in the United States, but I think the Internet has opened up a new regionalism in the balance of power. Looking at the new economy only, I think that the way it is structured is around two cities and their corresponding roles in the U.S. economy and society. Those two cities are Washington D.C. and Los Angeles. In a very basic, even reductionist, analysis, D.C. makes the laws, regulations, and policies, and Hollywood in L.A. performs them for the public. 

Again, the inability of New York to "hack it" in the Internet Age with their publishing and media industries plays into the tension associated with this analysis. But recent history shows that New York has been a marginal player on the national stage, even during the Trump presidency (Trump was from New York, and there were more "very important" books published during his term, but it didn't catch on very deeply in the culture, because, as good as a paper book is to read, something about the quality of the product for information and the slow pace of publication didn't compare to the Internet.). More of American youth than you might expect have given up on New York publishing to be arbiters of culture, and they definitely don't dictate trends as they once may have. New York would like to add its Broadway theater tradition to the national cultural mix. But the medium is not translating well. It's not clear whether New York will be able to make a mark on the national culture, in the Internet Age, unless it can figure out a good mix of paper and Internet publishing and media. The New York publishing industry's inability to hang on in the age of the Internet's speed and diversity is filtering down as a failure to the level of writers and authors, and causing a lot of resentment among the youth. It's not easy to make a living on writing anything these days - it's harder than ever before, and making a living on Internet publishing is nigh on impossible. But the New York publishing industry is hemorrhaging profits too. Ergo, resentment. 

It's not fair to say that Washington D.C. is taking the place of New York either, because they are fundamentally different in character, even in their perception by the people. D.C. will never become New York, and New York will never switch places with D.C., not even in representation to the public. The rise of the D.C.-to-L.A. power distribution paradigm is a new and unconnected thing to any New York-to-L.A. cultural moment that could have once existed. This new paradigm is coming to be hand-in-hand with new cultural problems, namely financial, aesthetic, and those concerning artistic expression. A more politically aware cinema comes hand in hand with concerns about freedom of expression, covert messaging from powerful politicians, and contentious arguments about public morality. The apolitical national culture that prevailed when New York was writing the stories for the national consciousness only glorified the traditional repressive systems; the army's latest conquest and the banks' latest exploitations for example. But a new, politically aware national culture comes along with new internal contentions, about the artistic process and freedom of expression. This is the age we're actually in, and the contemporary mindset we have no choice but to operate in: - at least until the publishing world can wake up to the new technological paradigm and make the Internet work for writers and readers. But even then we have to admit that the world has changed, and no measure of tradition will be able to free the very late New York publishing world from having to deal with a new, more open, and more politically aware world. At the bare minimum, when the New York publishers wake, they will have to contend with the nascent contentions about artists's freedom of expression that are sure to arise, and at that point we will see whether they can stake out a progressive and liberal position on freedom of expression after all.

"Foreign money" allegedly propping up California secession is actually an example of the Internet's effect on cultural commodities.

 August 1, 2022

"Foreign money" allegedly propping up California secession is actually an example of the Internet's effect on cultural commodities.

Did anyone else see this crazy news from a couple days ago stating that Russian state money has been used to prop up the California secession movement? I want to highlight it, but not exaggerate it into sensationalism. 

For one thing, this is a Cold War holdover issue, as far as it is getting media attention, and as far as Chinese state money was found to be propping up U.S. election and lobbying efforts several years ago, and the media narrative mostly ignored that. And for the second thing, this "fact" was discovered by the press in a court indictment and therefore may be still unproven and is (almost) certainly exaggerated in some way. In other words, the Cold War is still not over for some, and so people will try to continue to wring money out of that. Russia these days is certainly in the news, but for regional power manipulations. And the publicity a case about Russia gets is also, it must be admitted, a factor of the ease of writing about the "nefarious" actions of Russia. 

But there's a cogent point to be made here about the relative power of California compared to other states, which we can attribute to the globalization of culture. It has a global cachet that is comparable to the traditional status of New York relative to all the other states, because of its global connections. But the status of New York is relatively in decline, whereas the Internet has comparatively made movies and television even more important cultural commodities. The New York publishing industry hasn't fully been able to figure out the Internet, and that has in the long term contributed to the decline of its status as a gateway to the world. Its internecine debate about whether or not to take an Amazon distribution center in its downtown area, for which there was positive and negative, but for which the traditional feelings about the superior quality of life and status of the city played a role in the rejection of the permit, just shows that the city that was once the gateway from America to the world is having a lot of struggles adapting to the Internet. Regional presses have expanded too, but it's the confusion of the New York elite about what to do "with the Internet" that is driving that decline to deeper levels. 

California and Hollywood doesn't have that problem so much. They're perfectly fine putting new and old movies and shows on streaming, and making new stars, and making old stars new mentors to young stars (the trend of "one older actress/actor with a whole bunch of new actors/actresses on this new Netflix and/or other streaming program" will probably continue, I think, until it doesn't go down easy any more.) They are losing money, but there is always "new market" exploitation, and hence, the increasing global importance of California. Of course, almost every other country wants a movie industry as robust as the American system based around the Hollywood and California studios, and if they can manage it, would love to be putting some of "their" stories into the mold of the American movie production system. This, I think, explains that story about Russian money propping up strange causes in California. There's bound to be a reaction to people's perception of foreign influence from a geopolitical competitor. Hollywood's writers, for instance, have been under a bit of duress for the past decade - sometimes prestige TV shows and so on with "great writing" have been hugely appreciated, but at other times strikes and labor actions have not been totally successful. I actually think that Hollywood productions have a lot of moral force in this country toward getting Americans to become familiar with the cultures of the world outside our borders. But it also can't be denied that that is a far cry from allowing the American movie industry to be an empty shell for stories from foreign influence, etcetera. Not only that there are some security issues (allegedly) because those may be overblown, but because when Hollywood tries to "do" movies that end up being cultural appropriation (Moana? Mulan? -Coco? - and so on) it ends up being pretty shallow art, too. A lot of the stories most worth being told have elements of cultures from other places around the globe. But it's also, isn't it, an old rule of thumb for artists, not to sell out to your influence. 

The story about Russian support for California secession movements is probably overblown, or at the very least we have to assume that those the allegations concern are innocent for now. But it is undoubtable that the globalization of culture has made California and the movie industry a coveted jewel of the American economy that other countries would take advantage of if they could. This has to be balanced with the understanding that part of Hollywood's civic responsibility is to present to the public, in America, stories to make them familiar with other parts of the world. But those involved shouldn't balk at transcending this paradox. The "solution", if you will, is that those stories about other cultures are right here, too. All of the beautiful melange of immigrant cultures in the United States provide a more authentic gateway to the stories of the world, if those concerned with finding them look to the American population, rather than foreign money, to provide them.