There’s no problem that the federal government throwing money at it can’t make worse.
Today’s example: Democrats pimping billions in taxpayer subsidies for the semiconductor industry.
As the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbates supply chain backlogs and global computer chip shortages
Correction: It wasn’t the pandemic itself, it was government lockdowns and other overeactions that did that.
Democratic leaders in Congress as well as President Joe Biden want Congress to fast track a $250 billion bill to develop American independence from China and other competitors in chip manufacturing.
The Capital Region â home to SUNY Polytechnic Institute, the only publicly owned 300-millimeter semiconductor research and development center in the U.S. â stands to reap significant benefits from the enactment of Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumerâs multi-billion dollar bill, which he envisions as a direct investment in his home stateâs economy.
âSen. Schumer wrote this legislation with upstate New York always at the forefront of his mind,â Schumer’s spokeswoman Allison Biasotti said. âWe are already seeing the excitement in major employer expansions and thousands of jobs on the horizon from GlobalFoundriesâ planned expansion (in Malta) and (his) push for Albany Nanotech to be a hub for the National Semiconductor Technology Center.â
A focal point of the bill, which the New York Democrat co-sponsored with Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., is a historic $52 billion investment in stateside semiconductor research and development to address a global chip shortage plaguing the automotive industry.
Lawmakers began to focus more on the low domestic production of semiconductors when the COVID-19 pandemic cut off supplies from overseas. Without access to chips, several automakers shut down their production lines, and manufacturers of essential medical devices and consumer electronics struggled to meet increasing demand.
Roughly 12 percent of the world’s semiconductors are manufactured in the United States, down from 37 percent in 1990, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.
Either these stats are false or misleading (probably the latter). The most recent stats I can find show that the United States has some 47% of the semiconductor market. It’s possible that the 12% refers to the entire worldwide number of individual chips produced, including discrete components (transistors, resistors, etc.). Those are indeed semiconductors, but they’re produced on old amortized fabs (inside the industry these are referred to as “jelly bean factories”) and sell for pennies a piece (or less). If you’re already in that industry, those old fabs make small, steady profits every year, but nobody jumps into that business with new fabs.
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.
First, there are already signs that the automotive semiconductor crunch is easing, thanks not to the Biden Administration but to the actions of the free market.
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. Mooreâs 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, if you go to a random semiconductor company and go “Here’s 20 billion! Go build a state-of-the-art 5nm wafer fabrication plant!”, then:
A.) You’re looking at a very minimum of 2-3 years before the first production wafer comes off the line. You canât just take an existing building and turn it into a fab, it has to be specially built from the ground up with exacting standards for cleanroom air filtering, concrete slab level uniformity, etc. And 2-3 years is probably the lead time to get an ASML EUV stepper.
B.) Unless you’re TSMC, Samsung or (maybe) Intel, the answer is probably “Uh, we’ll try, but no promises,” because those three companies are the only ones that actually having wafer fabs running 10nm or smaller process nodes. GlobalFoundries, mentioned in the article, has Fab 8 in Malta, NY, running 14nm, which is not horribly far off the state-of-the art, but not good enough to fab the really cutting-edge chips demanded of companies like Apple, NVIDIA, etc. Tiny problem: In 2018, GlobalFoundries stopped all work on 7nm development.
The contract maker of semiconductors decided to cease development of bleeding edge manufacturing technologies and stop all work on its 7LP (7 nm) fabrication processes, which will not be used for any client. Instead, the company will focus on specialized process technologies for clients in emerging high-growth markets. These technologies will initially be based on the companyâs 14LPP/12LP platform and will include RF, embedded memory, and low power features.
So it was too hard a game for them to play, but with a big heap of taxpayer subsidies, I’m sure they’d be willing to give it another go.
Of course, you don’t need a cutting edge fab to build display drivers. Bosch just opened a $1.2 billion, 65nm fab in Dresden to do just that. But you don’t need subsidies to build trailing edge fabs.
$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.
It’s a bad idea congress should reject.
Hey folks, there’s an exciting new Flu Manchu side effect: “agonizing penis pain“:
A manâs agonising penis pain was blamed on Covid infection, as docs warned of the rare side effect.
Writing in a medical journal, the Iranian team described how the virus led to blood clotting in the poor manâs shaft.
For most men (outside of an extremely narrow band of S&M fetishists) “agonizing penis pain” is generally considered “undesirable.” Mao Tze Lung is just the gift that keeps giving.
So I guess guys should take the vaccine to avoid this rare side effect?
Not so fast, bucko! When it comes to rare adverse effects in the male groinological area, searching the VAERS database for COVID-19 and “penis” brings up 11 records, including such phrases as “Penile pain,” “Penile vein thrombosis” and “penile haemorrhage.” A veritable buffet of “Do Not Want!”
It’s like a Monty Python skit.
John Cleese: All right, time for your vaccine!
Eric Idle: Is it safe.
John Cleese: Oh, totally safe, totally safe. (under his breath) Except for the horrifying side effects…
Eric Idle: What?!
John Cleese: Nothing!
Eric Idle: What side effects?
John Cleese: Nothing to worry about! Just a tiny number of cases of agonizing penis pain.
Eric Idle: What?!
John Cleese: Really, it’s only very small number of cases of profuse bleeding and absolutely excruciating pain in your standing hampton! Now roll up your sleeve!
Eric Idle: But I don’t want to experience agonizing penis pain!
John Cleese: Well, I don’t want to be allergic to soft cheese, but there’s just nothing to be done about it! It’s science! Now roll up your sleeve!
You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
I saw Agonizing Penis Pain open for The Genitorturers at SXSW.
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) January 18, 2022
(Hat tip: Stephen L. Miller on Twitter.)
Everyone in the Democratic Media Complex wants us to know that electric vans are THE FUTURE of delivery. That remains to be seen, but they sure seem to have a lot of trouble being the present of delivery.
In the fall, Jeff Bezos tweeted praise for Rivian, a start-up under contract to make 100,000 electric delivery vans for Amazon, and its founder, R.J. Scaringe, calling him âone of the greatest entrepreneurs Iâve ever met.â
Then, Mr. Bezos worked in a jab: âNow, RJ, where are our vans?!â
The comment may have been in jest, but the problem he raised is a serious one.
Amazon has an insatiable appetite for electric vans, thanks to a ballooning logistics operation and a pledge that half of its deliveries will be carbon-neutral by 2030. But that hunger is running into the reality that the auto industry barely produces any of the vehicles yet.
While consumer electric cars are finally hitting their stride â Tesla delivered almost a million cars last year â the market for commercial electric vehicles is still nascent, with their heavier loads multiplying the technology challenges. Amazon would not say if Rivian delivered the first 10 production vans in December, as was expected, and other automakers are not manufacturing at scale yet, either.
Even though Amazon owns nearly 20 percent of Rivian, it has also put in orders with other automakers, to lay claim to as many vans as it can before they are even under production.
This month Amazon said it would buy âthousandsâ of electric Ram vans from Stellantis, the company formed last year after the merger of Fiat Chrysler and the French automaker Peugeot.
I too stumbled over “Stellantis” the first time I saw it, a company formed from the merger of three car companies, none of whose quality screamed “reliable.” (Or, indeed, even whispered it.) But I digress.
It has also ordered 1,800 electric vans from Daimler in Europe. And it has formed a partnership with Mahindra, the Indian automaker, as part of its goal to have 10,000 electric three-wheeled vehicles on the road by 2025.
âThe scale and speed at which weâre trying to do this requires a lot of invention, testing and learning, and a completely new playbook,â Ross Rachey, who oversees Amazonâs global fleet, said in a statement.
Amazon expected to have roughly 175,000 of its vans on the road by the end of 2021, according to an internal document from late 2020, nearly all of which burned fossil fuels.
That number is growing quickly. Amazon is several years â and tens of billions of dollars â into a huge push to deliver packages, shifting away from relying on large carriers like UPS. To begin the expansion, Amazon ordered 20,000 diesel Sprinter vans from Mercedes-Benz.
You saw very few of those Mercedes vans on the road before Amazon started buying them, but now they’re everywhere. But, again: gas-powered.
Through its network of contractors, Amazon now delivers more than half of its orders globally, and far more in the United States. Amazon has six times as many delivery depots now as it did in 2017, with at least 50 percent more new facilities set to open this year, according to data from MWPVL, a logistics consultancy.
That logistics boom, accelerated by the pandemicâs shift to online shopping, multiplies the challenges the company faces in meeting its pledge to reduce its climate impact. Its vow to make half of its deliveries carbon-neutral by 2030 is part of the companyâs broader pledge to be net-carbon-neutral by 2040.
Conveniently far in the future that deadlines can slip long after the people making such promises are retired.
âElectrification of their delivery fleet is a really important part of that strategy,â said Anne Goodchild, who leads the University of Washingtonâs work on supply chain, logistics and freight transportation.
Delivery vans are well suited to electric propulsion because they usually travel 100 miles or under in a day, which means they donât need large battery packs that add to the cost of electric cars. Delivery trucks are often used during the day and can be recharged overnight, and usually require less maintenance than gasoline trucks. Electric vehicles donât have transmissions and certain other mechanical components that wear out quickly in the heavy stop-and-go typical in delivery routes.
This isn’t strictly true. Some electric vehicles have two-speed transmission, and they still need gears to change drive-speed ratio.
In September 2019, when Mr. Bezos announced Amazonâs huge Rivian order â the largest ever order of electric vehicles â he positioned it as central to Amazonâs commitment to reduce its carbon footprint. At the time, he said he expected the 100,000 vans to be on the road âby 2024.â
Amazon invested at least $1.3 billion in Rivian, which Amazon says is supposed to make 10,000 vans as early as this year. Amazon also locked up exclusive rights to Rivianâs commercial vans for four years, with the right of first refusal for two years after that. The companies have been testing the vans for almost a year.
In regulatory disclosures in November, Rivian said it would make the full delivery to Amazon âby 2025.â Last week, Mr. Rachey said Amazon expected to have the vehicles on the road âno later than 2030.â
Rivian declined to comment.
Yeah, I bet.
There’s nothing impossible about making an all-electric fleet. With enough money (and assuming certain Biden-era supply chain disruptions don’t get worse), it could be done by the end of next year. But whether it could be done cost-effectively is another question. Battery capacity is constantly improving, but not by Moore’s Law-esque leaps and bounds. Lots more can go wrong on a gasoline-powered car, but the technology is mature and many individual engine parts are relatively affordable. By contrast, as the man who blew up his Tesla showed, replacing current lithium ion batteries for an entire car is hideously expensive right now. That will probably come down, but no one knows by how much or how quickly. There’s a case to be made that those batteries are so expensive that electric cars are actually worse for the environment than modern gas-powered automobiles. But pointing that out commits heresy against The Holy Global Warming Narrative.
By the way, it’s not just Amazon that’s having trouble. The Postal Service is finding electric vehicles a lot more expensive than they expected.
After the USPS was criticized on Capitol Hill for its $9.3 billion plan to replace 165,000 trucksâspecifically because 90 percent of them would be powered by gas combustion enginesâthe government-operated service went back and crunched the numbers again. In its recently released Final Environmental Impact Statement, the USPS estimates that the cost of an all-electric fleet would be $11.6B. Thatâs an additional $3.3B.
If that price tag seems a bit steep, the USPS estimates that it could electrify 75,000 of its vehiclesâless than half of the proposed totalâfor an additional $2.3B ($10.3B total). Still too high? That figure is a mere fraction of the financial losses the USPS has experienced in the last 15 years. According to a report published by the Government Accountability Office in September 2021, the USPS has lost more than $87 billion since 2007 as the volume of mail it delivers has dropped.
A billion here, a billion, and pretty soon you’re talking real money…
What happens when ostensibly non-partisan institutions enter the culture wars on the side of radical leftwing social justice? They destroy themselves.
Until this fall, the National School Boards Association was a noncontroversial, bipartisan lobby group.
Note the lie right off the bat. Obviously the NSBA was corrupted and infected with social justice before, but this fall was when they were caught.
Then its leaders wrote President Biden a letter. It alleged that the threatening and aggressive acts against school board members across the country might be a form of âdomestic terrorismâ and asked for federal law enforcement intervention.
Now, the association is at risk of total collapse.
In between, conservative think tanks, media, intellectuals, lawmakers, researchers and activists turned what might have been a forgotten mistake into a potentially fatal blow to a group that has for eight decades been a national advocate for public education.
Calling for the federal government to arrest and imprison parents who disagree with your radical leftwing ideology a “forgotten mistake” is some world-class gaslighting, Washington Post.
Note the omission of the word “parents” from that list of critics. Also note omission of the phrase “Critical Race Theory.” It was the attempt to indoctrinate children with CRT and transexual ideology that turned “parents” into “activists.”
It is a perfect illustration of how polarized education has become in the past year â a case study in how activists can shape not just big public policy debates, but also obscure interest groups that most Americans had never given a momentâs consideration.
Nineteen mostly GOP-led states have withdrawn from the association or promised to when this yearâs membership expires, and six members of what was a 19-person board have left. Several states are discussing forming an alternative association for school boards. A new executive director of the National School Boards Association (NSBA) is working to save the organization, lobbying individual states to reconsider, but so far he has not persuaded any of them to change their minds.
âI hope theyâll give us a chance,â John Heim, the newly installed executive director, said in an interview. His goal, he said, is to ârebuild trustâ in the association, which critics believe took sides in a partisan debate.
No, they shouldn’t be given another chance. Only an organization that has already been infected with social justice across multiple levels of the organization would think that getting the federal government to label ordinary parents who object to their radical indoctrination as “domestic terrorists” was a remotely acceptable idea, or even a conceivable idea.
In October, the association apologized and promised to conduct a âformal reviewâ of its procedures and said it would announce âspecific improvementsâ to ensure better coordination and consultation with its members, but nothing has been announced and a spokesperson would not say where the group is in this process.
No, vague, sheepish mea culpas are not enough. Everyone involved in the organization from top to bottom needs to lose their jobs and the institution shut down forever and replaced with one that will never make that mistake again. Everyone needs a pink slip.
The leftwing establishment would love if the NSBA were “reformed,” with a few insincere apologizes and a few token changes high in the organization, but their hard-left cadres still in control of the machinery deep in the bowels of the organization.
That’s why the NSBA needs to be completely destroyed. Only when backing social justice over the wishes of parents earns educators a pink slip will the fellow-travelers and weak-clingers fall away so that the real work of eliminating indoctrination and restoring education can begin.
Hard reboot.
No quarter.
(Hat tip: PrairiePundit.)
“Police in Colleyville, Texas, involved in standoff at synagogue.
Authorities are negotiating with a man who has reportedly taken people hostage at a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, during services on Saturday that were being streamed live, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
The Colleyville Police Department posted on Twitter earlier on Saturday that it was conducting SWAT operations on the block where Congregation Beth Israel is located and said that all residents in the immediate area were being evacuated.
Evidently a jihadist mad that his jihadist sister was jailed:
Via @AaronKatersky – Aafia Siddiqui is a Pakistani neuroscientist who was convicted in Manhattan federal court in 2010 of trying to kill US soldiers and FBI agents in Afghanistan.
She was sentenced to 86 years in prison. Hostage-taker in TX claiming Siddiqui is his sister. @ABC— Erielle Reshef (@ErielleReshef) January 15, 2022
Updates as they occur…
Update: One hostage released.
Update 2: All hostages rescued alive and well.
#BREAKING: Gov. Abbott says all hostages have been rescued alive and safe. This comes just after our @DavidSFOX4 heard what sounded like a flash bang followed by multiple gunshots – at the scene near a Synagogue in Colleyville https://t.co/l4Q06WHQsi https://t.co/d3y7FgBYEb
— FOX 4 NEWS (@FOX4) January 16, 2022
Not word yet on the hostage-taker.
Update 3: Hostage-taker reported dead.
I can confirm the hostage-taker is dead.
— Karol Markowicz (@karol) January 16, 2022
Update 4: Dead hostage-taker identified as UK citizen Malik Faisal Akram.
We may never know the motivation of Malik Faisal Akram, who attacked a synagogue to release an Al Qaeda terrorist.
— Sunny McSunnyface (@sunnyright) January 16, 2022
Here’s a profile Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, who was praised for remaining cool during the entire hostage event.
Update 5: NRO has an interview with the rabbi.
The terrorist, who the FBI named as 44-year-old British national Malik Faisal Akram, reportedly knocked on the door of the synagogue before Cytron-Walker welcomed him in and made him a cup of tea. Struggling to speak on air, the rabbi said that he didnât notice anything suspicious about the character until they prayed together.
The rabbi said he realized something was amiss when, during prayer, as his back was turned away from the man, he heard a click and âit was his gun.â The man then revealed himself and started ranting for hours about his family and Islam, according to a Facebook livestream broadcast from inside the house of worship.
âIf anyone tries to enter this building, Iâm telling you . . . everyone will die,â he said during the livestream. He demanded the prison release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist convicted of attempting to murder U.S. soldiers while Siddiqui was in their custody in Afghanistan in 2010.
Snip.
âDuring the last hour of the standoff, he wasnât getting what he wanted. It didnât look good, it didnât sound good. We were terrified. And when I saw an opportunity where he wasnât in a good position, I made sure that the two gentlemen who were with me, that they were ready to go. The exit wasnât too far away,â he explained. âI told them to go, I threw a chair at the gunman, and I headed for the door, and all three of us were able to get out without a shot being fired.â