A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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To stay competitive against China, should the United States become a little more like it?
I’m being provocative, but that’s essentially the question behind the U.S. government’s plans to provide financial help to American-made computer chips, and maybe to other homegrown technologies, too.
In practice, the U.S. government subsidizes or props up industries all the time. But the idea of a government helping its favorite industries is something that the United States typically mocks as a perversion of the free markets. It’s what China does, or what European governments do with their leading airplane maker.
That makes what’s happening with computer chips just the beginning of a thorny policy debate: Should the government intervene more to create American winners, particularly in technology and other key areas? And if so, how?
What’s happening: Computer chips are like the tiny brains or memory in everything from jet fighters and satellites to refrigerators and cars, as my colleagues Ana Swanson and Don Clark have written. Silicon Valley was named for a material in computer chips — and Intel was an industry pioneer and star. Not anymore.
Taiwanese firms including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and South Korea’s Samsung have leapt ahead in advanced designs, and they’re kings of manufacturing now. The vast majority of the world’s chips are made outside the United States, in part because of government subsidies abroad.
The pandemic caused chip shortages that slowed U.S. car factories, leading to more urgency among the U.S. military and American corporations to have a safe and uninterrupted supply of chips closer at hand.
So last year, Intel and federal government agencies proposed financial help for American chip manufacturing. The result was an authorization of taxpayer money to subsidize U.S. chip factories and chip research in the military policy bill finalized a month ago.
Congress hasn’t funded the program yet so the dollar amount and specifics are in limbo, Don told me. He also said that government money may take years to translate into more U.S.-made chips. But you get the goal: Ensure that more chips are churning inside America’s borders, whether made by Intel or foreign chip makers on U.S. soil.
The bigger picture: The backdrop of all this is China. One fear is that perennial tensions between China and Taiwan could at some point disrupt the chip industry on the island and affect the rest of the world.
The Chinese government also has been spending gobs of money to develop its own chip industry and rely less on imported chips and equipment.
In the political, military and economic competition between the United States and China, chips are one of the leading fronts.
More at www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/technology/computer-chips-government-help.h
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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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So, SECONDRATE, I see you decided to ignore this
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So, have you figured out where you went wrong in understanding my post?
You seem to think that I'm some sort of Republican grinch who barely peel a dollar offa wad of cash to better anyone's life.
What you failed to understand is that EVERYTHING that I posted about: retrofitting homes, rebuilding infrastructure, teaching and healing, environmental stewardship ... even investing in factories and steel mills and cement plants, if private investors fail to show up ... takes government money.
LOTS of government money. It's not that I'm unwilling to tax the wealthy to spend government money. And it's not that I don't want to reduce the wealth gap ... of course I do! And it's not that I don't want people's lives to be better ... of course I do!
But you don't reduce poverty by HANDOUTS. You reduce poverty by changing the rules of the game, by rewarding work, not speculation or rentier capitalism or monopolism.
You have never understood my signature, have you?
PITY WOULD BE NO MORE,
IF WE DID NOT MAKE MEN POOR
There will always be some who will need more than they can immediately return to society: the very young, the very old, the sick and the disabled. But MOST people are able to create a good life for themselves and their families if the deck wasn't already stacked against them. And that deck-stacking ... it's not natural or inevitable, it was a conscious choice made by the wealthy who gained control of government and changed the rules of the game to favor themselves.
It's really obvious. A bright guy like you claim to be should be able to see this.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
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Quote:Not ignoring, but your ideas and even the purpose of your life are as empty of weight and substance as the quacking of a duck, even if the duck profoundly thinks differently about the noises it makes.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So, SECONDRATE, I see you decided to ignore this:
You have never understood my signature, have you?
PITY WOULD BE NO MORE,
IF WE DID NOT MAKE MEN POOR
On to cold, hard, sad and unforgiving complexities of American reality:
The progressive organization No Excuses PAC is seeking to find primary opponents for Democratic senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, both of whom are up for reelection in 2024, Politico reported. Some progressives are frustrated with the unwillingness of Manchin and Sinema, among the most conservative Democrats in the Senate, to abolish the filibuster, which would make easier the passage of President Joe Biden's legislative agenda.
The notion of replacing them with Democrats who will more actively support progressive ideas may be appealing at first, but it is a colossally stupid idea that would be a gift to the Republicans. The reason for this is simple; both Manchin and Sinema would be extremely difficult to defeat in a primary, but any candidate who beat them from the left in a primary would almost certainly lose in a general election to the Republican.
More at https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/05/opinions/progressive-senate-democrats-m
anchin-sinema-mitchell/index.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Jesus Christ.
And Nilbog says that I'M the narcissist on this board.
Inflated ego much?
What a piece of shit.
--------------------------------------------------
A government is a body of people usually, notably, governed by Mark Zuckerborg and Slack Dorsey. 
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Quote:Will, HE can go off on flights of unsubstantiated fantasy about "how the world works" but he can never accepted anyone else's ideas that cast blame in his direction.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Jesus Christ.
And Nilbog says that I'M the narcissist on this board.
Inflated ego much?
What a piece of shit.
--------------------------------------------------
A government is a body of people usually, notably, governed by Mark Zuckerborg and Slack Dorsey.
Also he can't admit being 100% wrong about y pov.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
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Quote:Projection, much?
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Fuck you, cultist.
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Quote:Do YOU have anything to say about my Rx for the USA?
Originally posted by reaverfan:Quote:Projection, much?
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Fuck you, cultist.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Here is the post, THUGR.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So, have you figured out where you went wrong in understanding my post?
You seem to think that I'm some sort of Republican grinch who barely peel a dollar offa wad of cash to better anyone's life.
What you failed to understand is that EVERYTHING that I posted about: retrofitting homes, rebuilding infrastructure, teaching and healing, environmental stewardship ... even investing in factories and steel mills and cement plants, if private investors fail to show up ... takes government money.
LOTS of government money. It's not that I'm unwilling to tax the wealthy to spend government money. And it's not that I don't want to reduce the wealth gap ... of course I do! And it's not that I don't want people's lives to be better ... of course I do!
But you don't reduce poverty by HANDOUTS. You reduce poverty by changing the rules of the game, by rewarding work, not speculation or rentier capitalism or monopolism.
You have never understood my signature, have you?
PITY WOULD BE NO MORE,
IF WE DID NOT MAKE MEN POOR
There will always be some who will need more than they can immediately return to society: the very young, the very old, the sick and the disabled. But MOST people are able to create a good life for themselves and their families if the deck wasn't already stacked against them. And that deck-stacking ... it's not natural or inevitable, it was a conscious choice made by the wealthy who gained control of government and changed the rules of the game to favor themselves.
It's really obvious. A bright guy like you claim to be should be able to see this.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
TPTB decided to eliminate manufacturing for financialism. But that doesn't create wealth, it just concentrates money.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
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Quote:Let's translate that to reality. TPTB is short for The Powers That Be, who are the top 1% of wealth in America. Since WWII, maybe even before that, the Top 1% have ever so slowly, and then faster and faster, shifted their decisions to benefit themselves more and more while benefiting the bottom 99% less and less. The expectation was that the Federal government would step up to the responsibility as the Top 1% stepped down, in the same way as the Federal government took responsibility for ending the Great Depression. The Top 1% have watched with bemusement as the voters in the bottom 99% have squabbled over the size of Federal government's role in looking after the bottom 99%. Too many voters can't understand that it is either the Federal government or else nobody will be taking over the responsibilities that once rested exclusively on the shoulders of the wealthy. All this squabbling by voters has kept the Federal government from properly taking over the responsibilities that most of the Top 1% have left behind. Christopher Lasch even wrote the book about this process called The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
TPTB decided to eliminate manufacturing for financialism. But that doesn't create wealth, it just concentrates money.
Christopher Lasch would say I over-simplified his books, removing all the beautifully worded nuance, but you won't have time to even read the above paragraph, let alone all the books he wrote, which are available for free here:
https://libgen.unblockit.ltd/search.php?req=Christopher+Lasch
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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I agree - the 99% have never tested the power of the vote. And I would very like to see what would happen if we did.
But I suspect if we did the US would have a REAL coup - like in Myanmar - instead of the (giggle giggle) 'coup' in Washington a few weeks ago that everyone is fainting over.
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