To get the construction of its Arizona chip factory back on track, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) says it needs more workers with the expertise and skillsets that Americans don’t have. Since June, the company has been in discussions with the US government about receiving accelerated non-immigrant E-2 visas for as many as 500 Taiwanese workers.
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The Arizona Pipe Trades 469 Union, a labor union that says it represents over 4,000 pipefitters, plumbers, welders, and HVAC technicians, has started a petition to urge US lawmakers to deny these visas. The petition claims that TSMC has deliberately misrepresented the skillset of Arizona’s workforce. By approving TSMC’s visa requests, a union website says lawmakers would be laying the groundwork for “cheap labor” to replace American workers.
hmmm. while i get the point the union is trying to make, there is a staunch difference between welding and pipe fitting versus creating semi-conductors.
i think it’s silly to assume the workers wouldn’t learn the necessary skills to be able to work there, but it’s also silly to say “well we can fit pipes and weld shit so we can make semiconductors.”
We’re not talking about semiconductor workers though. This is from the earlier article that this article references:
TSMC and its suppliers are in talks with the U.S. government to assist with the application process for non-immigrant visas in a bid to dispatch more than 500 experienced workers as early as July to expedite the construction of cleanroom facilities and the installation of pipelines and other equipment, three chip supply chain executives said.
Chip making factories need water, electricity, ventilation. I don't think that surprises anyone.
And if there was one thing American's are Semi-good at, it is trade skills.
If this was a case of needing more experienced professionals for chips, I would agree with Tiawan. However, could anyone make an argument on why we need a concrete expert from Taiwan? Or an electrician from Tiawan? Or a plumber from Tiawan?
Specialized electricians for some of the more sophisticated systems is the only one that makes any sense. Even then, there’s plenty of US workers available unless it’s something highly specific to chip fabs.
“We are now entering a critical phase of handling and installing the most advanced and dedicated equipment,” said TSMC chairman Mark Liu. “However, we are encountering certain challenges as there is an insufficient amount of skilled workers with those specialized expertise required for equipment installation in a semiconductor-grade facility.”
I still have some suspicions on that, AMD and Intel aren’t complaining about shortages. I’d be curious to see what expertise/certifications they’re looking for because I’m sure they could find a company in Cali or Texas if they’re willing to pay up.
More so these days it's all about the "money", as in wages.
Companies are too beholden to investors instead of the company. When the rich boys scream about wages sucking up too much of their profits, this is what happens.
A lot of the major equipment will come from ASML (Dutch) and a lot of the minor stuff will probably be from a major conglomerate that has no issue providing multiple language manuals.
Furthermore, for larger/built in equipment installs the company providing will send out a technician for final programming at the very least.
“We are now entering a critical phase of handling and installing the most advanced and dedicated equipment,” said TSMC chairman Mark Liu. “However, we are encountering certain challenges as there is an insufficient amount of skilled workers with those specialized expertise required for equipment installation in a semiconductor-grade facility.”
To add on, this union represents a large number of skilled pipefitters and other tradespeople who have done the exact same work on several similar Intel facilities within Arizona. It’s pretty clear that TSMC wants to take US taxpayer funding (for a project designed to stimulate the skilled trades in AZ, as well as create jobs for Americans) and instead of paying market rates for American workers, pay a lot less to bring workers over from Taiwan.
they’re talking about building the facility. which includes a shit load of plumbing. between all the high-purity water line, the chemical line. the gas line. the everything else to feed the machines… yeah. they’re gonna need pipefitters
How are they justifying these visas in any way? If it’s those trades listed, claiming any kind of shortage is bullshit. They just don’t want to pay union prices.
“We are now entering a critical phase of handling and installing the most advanced and dedicated equipment,” said TSMC chairman Mark Liu. “However, we are encountering certain challenges as there is an insufficient amount of skilled workers with those specialized expertise required for equipment installation in a semiconductor-grade facility.”
These are highly specialized engineers and scientists.
Honestly this next election is shaping up to be a shit show… again. My prediction is that the Republican party puts forth another candidate who has his potential pool cannibalized by Trump running independently and Biden campaign come under question due to his old age and low approval rating leading to a push for a different blue candidate.
I was curious about the budgeting implications because enacting a increase to revenue doesn’t necessarily mean increased spending would be covered. For any one to lazy to go off site, but also interested:
“$1 billion of the state’s record $56.2 billion fiscal budget for 2024 came from the state’s new 4% tax on millionaires.”
“State lawmakers agreed to put $523 million of revenue from the new tax toward education and put $477 million aside for transportation.”
Didn’t find the cost there but on one of their sources:
“A portion of that money will go toward the $172 million needed to provide free school meals, the State House News Service reported.”
So out of a billion extra dollars, they didn't even spend 20% on the kids (it's too early for me to do the calculation out of the total budget, but it'd be pitiful).
Which is great, but using them as a headline all things considered seems manipulative and like they're burying the lead.
Good for the kids, don't get me wrong, but somewhere along the way a lot more of that money has been spent on other things, and most likely is lining the pockets of the already rich and powerful.
So yeah, it's a great example of what a tiny hike in taxing the rich can do, but it not only doesn't come close to being enough, it also feels like another scam where good publicity hides a whole manner of sins going on behind the scenes.
I mean all we know so far is that half of the new tax is going to education (and 172mil of that has already gone towards an excellent cause) and half is going to transportation. Of course skimming off the top is incredibly common, but I think it’s far too early to call the amount misspent.
Sorry if my quoting gave off the wrong impression. I believe it meant that of the total 1 billion dollars 523 million will be spent on education. Of the 523 million to be spent on education 172 million will be used to pay for lunches. The remaining 351 million I would assume is being used for other educational expenses like new equipment or for salaries.
Perhaps there is miss management of the funds but I don’t think that it fair to conclude the 351 million has been misappropriated just based on this information.
This article is wild. Sounds like they discharged him after a day, and the parents say they’re glad they’re taking him home in the front seat instead of in a box.
List of injuries:
9 broken vertebrae
Collapsed lung
Ruptured spleen
Broken hand
That kid ain’t seeing the front seat anytime soon, partially because of healing, and partially because that family won’t be affording seats of any kind in this lifetime
It’s insane that kid walked away without any head injuries.
But those don’t sound like unrecoverable injuries. It will cost a fortune, of course, but unless there’s some complications those likely won’t be lifelong issues. He’s incredibly lucky.
Like, oh no, what would a state do without their money hoarding exploiters that alredy contribute less than the bare minimum???
And worse - if everyone decided to make these laws, where will the poor millionaires escape to then???
Oh look, someone else who doesn’t understand how progressive tax brackets work. Their effective tax rate wouldn’t be 80%, only income above a certain (very high) number would be taxed at 80%.
Made me curious what the total tax rate would be in Mass. Apparently it has a flat 5% income tax, plus 4% millionaires tax, plus federal rate for income over about 578k is 37%, so altogether it’s 46% for income over a mil in Mass.
Definitely think it should be higher for such wildly high income. Also disappointed to see for being a relatively progressive state Mass has a flat rather than progressive income tax.
It would take massive and severe state action to deprive the rich of that wealth, and that money would still not find its way into the hands of the poor because the state, and corrupt bureaucrats within it, would take it for themselves.
The poor themselves would have to band together, organize, steal back all the resources from the rich, and distribute it amongst themselves fairly. And that won’t work without a deeply organized plan everyone in the group already agrees to, and even then it might not because the sociopaths and evil people among the poor – which comprises of a lot of them, sorry-not-sorry but it’s true – will just hoard all of those resources, creating a new ruling class.
Stuff like a ruling class is just the human condition because humanity is inherently evil. The non-evil humans will have to accept that reality is like this, figure out who is trustworthy and who is not, band together the like-minded, isolate themselves and pray a sociopath or evil person never infiltrates their ranks, figure out how to suss them out, and kill them.
Until humanity itself evolves to be more docile, it’ll never change.
And yet you guys wonder why millionaires move to Texas. You increase the taxes above a certain number and they’ll take all their wealth, consumption and their taxes to another state.
Taxes should be sustainable. High taxes on rich people aren’t sustainable because they’ll leave taking whatever taxes they pay and whatever consumption they do which contributes to the economy.
Rich people do not need to exist for corporations to exist. Also, you think wage theft doesn’t happen under capitalism?
According to the Economic Policy Institute, wage theft costs U.S. workers as much as $50 billion per year — a number far higher than all robberies, burglaries and motor vehicle thefts combined.
Grifters, con-artists and fascists all use the truth to sell a lie. The truth is that we have been steadily raised on a diet of mass produced garbage, optimised purely for profit while disregarding all public and environmental welfare in its construction and delivery. The lie is that the grifters, con-artists and fascists are not just doing the exact same thing to the extreme.
They offer what they call good, wholesome and honest solutions to contrast with the big globalist elitist fat-cats selling expensive unnatural poisons. But natural or synthetic, poisons can kill you the same type of dead.
Donald Trump successfully sold the slogan: Drain the Swamp
as long as the "truth" they're advertising is scary and misunderstood somehow, they can sell anything while they're pandering to the listener's ego.. this is Alex Jones' entire ethos..
Pandering to egos, or what I see more frequently, predating on fears. I run my own email server, partly because I enjoy watching the diversity of spam and trends, partly so i know what new scams to look out for. I receive far more "drink this to cure your disease once a day!" types of emails than I do "smoking hot babe wants to send you a message" types of emails.
the pandering can be pretty sly, although there is as much tits and ass as necessary.. Rush Limbaugh pandered to his listener's ego by convincing him that he already knew everything he needed to know.. he did that sort of with his method of bitching about the world, and they sat there and ate it up.. and just got stupider by the minute.. Rogan does the same thing.. it's the entire right-wing playbook, all the way back to Goebbels..
the idiot's response to every good conspiracy theory is: SEE I TOLD YOU.. they just get addicted to listening for that SEE I TOLD YOU ego stroke moment..
I like to pretend it’s a 5D chess long con (it’s not, but pretending is fun). It’s much easier to scoop off the scum when it floats to the top, and trump got a whole bunch of them to take the mask off so they can be arrested for treason.
Similarly it’s fun to pretend Apartheid Clyde went full fascist so that neonazis would replace their coal rollers with low-poly 90s video game pedestrian crushers to own the libs.
yes if you eat only a high sugar and fat diet you will die a premature death, but honesty it’s still probably healthier than the diets of our 200,000 year old ancestors (I asset confidently with no evidence).
I’m just assuming that when any type of farming was a rare occurrence, disease, malnutrition and poisoning were much more common.
And this is before more localised issues like food deserts, natural disasters, recommendations influenced by industry, etc. Or even other issues like additives, factory farming, sugary drinks being cheaper and safer than the water supplies...
Don't get me wrong, many of us have access to a much larger variety of food from across the world, if we can afford it, the fortification of many foods helps maintain some forms of nutrition, and regulations have made a lot of our food safer. But overall, our produce is worsening in quality and the cheaper per calorie/time foods are what people are forced to eat, and it is killing them.
It makes sense that the people who will believe one category of such “simple and easy explanations and solutions” will also believe other categories of “simple and easy explanations and solutions” - believing crystals will help you tune your soul to feel better might not at all be the same thing as believing all the problems of society are due to people with the least power in it (immigrants, the “lazy” poor) but it certainly is the product of the same kind of cognitive take on the World and emotional desire for understandable “explanations” and silver-bullet “solutions” so the path from one to the next is way shorter than it might seem if all one looks at is the information space rather than the psychological and intellectual characteristics of the “believers”.
Or to put it in cruder terms: both kinds of outlook in the World appeal to the the same kind of sucker.
People refuse to try to address that sort of wooly thinking when it is low stakes then when it becomes high stakes act shocked to see the people around them acting irrationally. One’s hypothetical friend who refused to take the vaccine because they thought it had a mind control chip in it and died as a result invariably was previously banging on about how their acupuncturist was going to help them win the lottery and people simply indulged them because “what’s the harm in them having funny beliefs about things?” The only time you actually could get through to people around you about these harmful ways of thinking is when it’s about things that don’t really matter much. If you wait until it’s life or death it’s too late to get though to them.
I think it’s important to realize that almost everyone is at least occasionally a sucker. There’s a grift that targets basically every personality type. There’s grift for health conscious folks, for worried parents, for ‘I’m so much smarter than others’, for gamers, for outdoorsy types, there’s something for everyone. If you aren’t careful you’ll be laughing at the other ‘idiots’ while you yourself fall into a different trap.
Honestly once you start paying attention it’s really scary how many different and seemingly totally unrelated topics can be used to pull people into facism. So many times I’ve clicked on a different YouTube video or something and then all the sudden my feeds been taken over by right wing bullshit.
I agree that at in some ways and at some points in time we’re all suckers.
I once was scammed and analysing the whole thing later I had to admit the scammer came at in the right ways to get me to draw the conclusions that better served his objectives and use my wants against myself.
Frankly, I both was impressed and was felt it as quite an eye opener on my own blindsides and the limits of intelligence.
Not saying he was an amazing scammer and that’s only why I was scammed (frankly I have no idea were in the hierarchy of scam artists the guy was), rather that, as you pointed out, we’re all suckers in some way or another.
So many times I’ve clicked on a different YouTube video or something and then all the sudden my feeds been taken over by right wing bullshit.
The strange thing to me is how much the Youtube search results and suggestions have changed, even just in the last few months. I mostly go there to listen to music and I used to get stuff I was actually interested in.
Yesterday I went looking for a specific video. Of the top 15 results, only 2 were close to what I wanted. It wasn't even the top 2. One relevant result, then a bunch of political clickbait. Zero connection to music. And the autoplay will feed you the same thing if it's on.
A couple weeks ago, YouTube was still giving me a whopping 3 relevant results at the top before turning on the BS algorithm hose.
So many times I’ve clicked on a different YouTube video or something and then all the sudden my feeds been taken over by right wing bullshit.
I watched one youtube video which contained a complete takedown and exposure of Tucker Carlson and his lies (back when he was on Fox). Of course this meant that youtube thought I was interested in Tucker Carlson, so immediately all my recommendations was to actual official Tucker Carlson videos and similar right wing talking heads.
I had to expunge the anti-Tucker Carlson video from my viewing history to get rid of all those shitty recommendations.
I was on disability for two years. I got a grand total of $14,000 after it was determined that 60% of my ability to work would be affected by my (since mitigated) nerve disorder. Apparently being able to work at 40% capacity means I needed to get a job. I’m sure they would have loved me screaming in pain in whatever office.
Also, I got that $14,000 after the fact due to the legal system being so swamped.
Republicans are awful people. Not every Democrat or leftist is a good person - just look at Lemmygrad and Hexbear, or turds like Anthony Weiner. But every Republican has chosen to support a party which revolves around anger and bullying those who are vulnerable.
Both parties are garbage. Not necessarily the people. To say one side of shit is better than the other side of shit just means your not looking at the shit the right way.
100 percent. ‘Enlightened centrist’, they’re either a kid living with their parents who doesn’t really understand or a person born into privilege that refuses to see the reality of the world.
If the Democrats are like a flood of sewage that comes unbidden into your home, the Republicans are like you constructed a sluice specifically to pipe it in.
No. Democrats are like having to eat mushy vegetables with no salt because they’re healthy for you. Undesirable, but necessary.
Republicans are like being paid to eat something gross from the back of the refrigerator. And only rich people get the money. If you’re poor, you just have to eat the garbage. Both unnecessary and disgusting.
“MuH bOtH sIdEs” as you’re in a thread about hateful right-wing politics and people driving an objectively good teacher out of her state. You’re not very bright.
In quite a few ways they are similar. Both parties get money from the rich, attack those that have different view points, believe themselves more enlightened than the other, don’t keep most of their promises, lie to get what they want, throw fits when they don’t get what they want, try to divide people on issues, have zealots, and start to do stuff right before elections come up. Ultimately they are the same with minor differences in views that are taken to the extreme by few loud people.
Abortion rights since one party thinks they shouldn’t exist. LGBTQ rights since one party thinks they shouldn’t exist. Labor rights because one party doesn’t want unions to exist or workers to get things like paid vacation or sick time. Child labor laws, because that’s it’s own category because one party thinks that 14 year olds can work 40+ hour work weeks. Free school lunches since one party thinks children in poorer familes should starve. Public education, since one party wants to siphon public funds to private schools through school vouchers. Public education again because one party supports book bans and defunding libraries. Healthcare because one party’s stance on vaccination caused twice as many of them to die during the pandemic. Healthcare again because one party’s stance is to allow insurance companies to be able to discriminate against anyone for any reason by repealing the ACA. Environment because one party has no plans of acknowledging climate change, let alone dealing with it. Environment again because one party wants to dismantle protections that limit pollution emitted into our air, water, and land. Healthcare a third time because one party wants to dismantle protections on food and medicines that would stop people from being poisoned. Labor rights again because one party wants to dismantle protections on workers that would stop them from being injured or dying.
I love how you don’t specify which party but everyone knows. Everyone always knows. The people in that party know and get mad when they’re called out and start their whataboutism.
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