A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Taiwan makes more than 90% of the world’s semiconductor chips. But the threat of an impending invasion by China imperils its dominant position. Any disruption to the Taiwanese industry would derail global production of just about everything, from home appliances to automobiles to fighter jets.
Biden's visit to TSMC's Arizona plant underlines his big chip manufacturing push.
The T in TSMC stands for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Biden will visit TSMC’s upcoming Arizona factory on Dec. 6, the White House said, to attend its “tool-in ceremony”: the installation of the first batch of equipment on the shop floor. It’s a landmark moment for TSMC, the world’s biggest semiconductor chipmaker, but an even bigger moment for Biden, whose policies have lured TSMC to open its first advanced chip plant in the US.
After the pandemic and subsequent supply chain disruptions caused a worldwide shortage of chips, Biden has pushed to bolster chip manufacturing in America. In August, he earmarked $52.7 billion for semiconductor manufacturing and research, the bulk of which — $39 billion — went into incentives for domestic manufacturing. The legislation also provides a 25% investment tax credit for capital expenses and equipment.
The US needed the push. Last year, the country produced only 12% of the world’s chips. And if any firm has the know-how to boost the industry, it’s TSMC.
https://qz.com/bidens-visit-to-tsmcs-arizona-plant-underlines-his-big-
1849845281
Why the decline in US chip manufacturing? It became cheaper to build chip facilities in countries outside of the US. Foreign governments offer more attractive financial incentives to construct semiconductor factories, like tax breaks and grants. A US law was passed to do what other countries do, resulting in chip factories being built in the US instead of Taiwan.
There was an attempt to do something under the Trump administration — Apple supplier Foxconn (another Taiwan-based company) was slated to build a Wisconsin facility that would produce large-screen TV displays and said it would create 13,000 jobs, but the whole project never panned out. (Wisconsin offered incentives to Foxconn, but Trump wouldn't pay Foxconn so Foxconn didn't build the factory. No money == no factory. It was really that simple.)
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-us-doesnt-make-chips-semiconductor
-shortage-2021-4
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
I love how BusinessInsider needs to dumb things down for its barely literate readership.
I've been telling ya'all about the perils of Six Sigma-ing everything to fucking death for going on two decades now.
It's all fun and games streamlining the fuck out of everything to make the Globalists at the top rich off of all of our collective backs until something like worldwide shutdowns break all the feeble chains that were left after everything was gutted by The Bobs, leaving zero contingency plans in place to get anything back on track and leaving Big Gay Pete from South Bend, IN with nothing to do but sit on his big gay thumb and spin on it while the port shipping crisis never gets fixed, a worldwide diesel shortage further increasing retail prices, and we're staring down the barrel of a train rail shortage that could make things even worse.
Told 'ya so.
You think a chip shortage is bad? Just wait until we're forced to start making our own t-shirts, jeans and shoes again. You'll be paying $300 for a pair of XJ-900's from Payless when that happens.
And you won't even be paying union wages 'cause there ain't no fuckin' textile union in the US anymore. When the textile union comes back those XJ-900's at Payless just went up to $600 per pair.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Biden admin refuses to say if Nuclear Energy Waste non-binary staffer Samuel Brinton still getting paid after theft of womens under panties arrest
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Men are dropping out of the labor force because they’re upset about their social status
Men have been silently walking away from work for several decades — well before the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Men without four-year college degrees, between the ages of 25 and 54, have left the workforce in higher numbers than other groups. And they’re leaving because of their perceived social status relative to better-educated men of similar age, according to a new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/research-department-working-pap
er/2022/wage-inequality-and-the-rise-in-labor-force-exit-the-case-of-us-prime-age-men.aspx
Non-college-educated men have seen their pay shrink by more than 30% since 1980 compared to the average earnings of all other prime-age workers. Their weekly earnings have declined 17%, while those of college-educated men rose by 20%, adjusting for inflation. That earnings loss has caused a decline in their social status, prompting them to walk away from work entirely, Pinghui Wu, the author of the study, wrote.
“For many workers, a job not only offers financial security, it also affirms their status, which is tied to their position relative to their age peers and many social outcomes,” Wu wrote.
Younger white men in particular were more likely to leave when their expected wages fell relative to their more educated peers, according to the Fed study. Unlike men, women have not seen the same level of decline in their wages based on education. That group has seen a 32% increase in weekly earnings, irrespective of their educational qualifications.
There have been numerous studies investigating the decline of non-college prime-age men in the labor force over the past 40 years. Some have linked the decline in male labor force participation to the contraction of manufacturing jobs in the U.S., since men were disproportionately represented in the manufacturing sector. However, Wu says those do not explain the persistence of the decline in prime-age men’s labor participation over several years.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/men-are-dropping-out-of-the-labor-fo
rce-because-they-re-upset-about-their-social-status-according-to-a-new-study/ar-AA151JeY
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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There is always a shortage of skilled labor. Always.
Young men in America need to go to trade school unless they're really smart, motivated AND fully intend to get into a REAL job like being a doctor, engineer, lawyer, architect, etc.
Shitty cubicle office jobs aren't for white men anymore. Arguably, if it weren't for the great economy through the late 80's to early 2000's, they never were. Let the women and minorities have them. They were always miserable and thankless jobs that wouldn't give you any sense of pride or a feeling of a job well done at the end of the day anyhow. The pay was nice, but what a worthless existence it is to be a cubicle drone.
If you skipped out on trade school and can't afford it now, get yourself a tool belt. Fill it with tools. Learn how to use them. You'll always be able to find work somewhere, even if it's bartering and gig work at first.
Then get yourself some power tools. Hone your skills. YouTube University is one of the greatest things made for men so far in the 21st Century, and it's free.
There's nothing better than the feeling of accomplishment you have when you actually make something, or turn something that was in ruins into something that is fully functional and beautiful.
The big side benefit from choosing this less traveled path is that you're going to be in far better shape than your cubicle drone friends are.
And if you drink too much. Drink less. And if you play video games too much. Play less video games. And if you watch too much TV. Watch less TV.
White men today aren't dropping out of the workforce merely because of the financial reasons listed above, although I'm sure that working at Wal-Mart stocking shelves for a pittance at 30 years old isn't helping. They're among the two and going on three generations of divorced white families who's lives were trashed at a young age because their selfish and idiot parents should have never married in the first place.
They're lost. They had no role models at home, and there are no good male role models on TV for them to try to emulate either. They need an anchor. Many of them just need to find a reason to live.
It's out there. If you look for it.
I wish you all luck.
I can't give any advice to you beyond that, because trust me... You don't want to find the reason to live via the same means that I did.
All I can tell you is that when you find it, it's going to be a great feeling to have a reason to get out of bed every morning to face the challenges ahead of you for the day that doesn't involve hacking and slashing Orcs and Dragons with your fake online friends.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Quote:Specifically, build housing:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
There is always a shortage of skilled labor. Always.
Young men in America need to go to trade school unless they're really smart, motivated AND fully intend to get into a REAL job like being a doctor, engineer, lawyer, architect, etc. . . .
If you skipped out on trade school and can't afford it now, get yourself a tool belt. Fill it with tools. Learn how to use them. You'll always be able to find work somewhere, even if it's bartering and gig work at first.
Then get yourself some power tools. Hone your skills. YouTube University is one of the greatest things made for men so far in the 21st Century, and it's free.
There's nothing better than the feeling of accomplishment you have when you actually make something, or turn something that was in ruins into something that is fully functional and beautiful.
How One Tiny-Home Designer Makes a Small Space Feel 10 Times Bigger
Matt Impola was already living in a small space when he decided he would take on a new weekend project: his first-ever tiny home. With a background in construction and woodworking, he spent about 10 months putting it together. Almost instantly, he had nearly 500 email inquiries and 20 prospective buyers for his creation — so he decided to enter the tiny-house business for real.
Now Impola runs Handcrafted Movement, where he is the lead builder, structural and interior designer, photographer, marketer, and seller. Basically, he wears a lot of hats. https://handcraftedmovement.com/
The most striking thing about Impola’s tiny homes is that they don’t immediately look tiny. Interior shots reveal luxurious details (think: rich wood countertops and exposed ceiling beams) yet the structures themselves average about 250 square feet. Clearly Impola has picked up on plenty of ways to make even the smallest spaces feel much larger, and his advice can be applied to cramped apartments or even not-so-tiny homes. Here, he shares his tips.
The tips are at https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-one-tiny-home-designer-makes-a-
small-space-feel-10-times-bigger
Choosing a Tiny House Builder
The thing is, a tiny house is more than just a “normal house that is small”. Tiny houses have their own unique challenges. Make sure your builder has experience with tiny houses. Whether it is a company that specializes in tiny houses or a local builder from your region, ask these specific questions:
• Does the builder know advanced wall framing techniques that will minimize the lumber that goes into the structure, helping the house be as light and lean as possible?
• How do they plan to address moisture problems in your particular climate?
• How do they plan on properly sealing up and insulating a tiny house on a trailer?
• How will they install all appliances and systems?
• How do they plan to engineer the structure to withstand mobility or extreme weather?
Portland Alternative Houses’ Tiny Houses’ manual, Go House Go. ( https://padtinyhouses.com/product/go-house-go/ ) is a terrific resource book for tiny house builders that includes all the irregularities and uniqueness of building a tiny house.
https://insteading.com/building/tiny-house-builders/
Download one of Dee Williams' Tiny House books for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.pet/search.php?req=Dee+Williams
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Ted Conover lives 5 years with the angry poor white trash Trump voters to bring back their story:
Little House on the Prairie—With Meth
December 8, 2022, 9:22 AM ET
In the many decades that have passed since Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books became the most widely read, most beloved account of the American frontier experience, a revisionist view has emerged, not just of what these days is called settler colonialism but of her father, Charles—that is, Pa, the fiddler with the twinkling eyes.
As portrayed by Wilder’s biographer Caroline Fraser, Charles Ingalls was a feckless man, if a loving father. He dragged his wife and daughters out of Wisconsin and “a comfortable, established home with plowed fields and a productive garden,” in Fraser’s words, and then from bad to worse: a house illegally built on Native American territory from which they are expelled; a farm in Minnesota prey to apocalyptic locust swarms; a hotel in Iowa next to a saloon, where a man tried to force his way into the young Wilder’s room; and finally the Dakota Territory. Scientists at the time had warned that the Great Plains were arid and infertile and sure to drive small farmers into bankruptcy, but the government, urged on by the railroads, lured people there anyway, giving away homesteads, unleashing land rushes, creating the conditions that laid waste to the prairie ecosystem. When Pa died in 1902, he had nothing to leave his widow and blind daughter but the house they lived in.
A century and some years later, Donald Trump wins the presidential election, and the journalist Ted Conover lights out for the territories—well, for southern Colorado, parts of which have indeed become a barren land. An earlier magazine assignment sent him to that part of the state to write about South Park, the real town of TV-show fame, “a place nearly devoid of people that was overlaid with dirt roads from a moribund 1970s subdivision.” After the election, Conover feels compelled to go back. He heads for a settlement not far from South Park in the San Luis Valley, sometimes called the flats, where a transient population lives in one-room shacks or trailers, many without plumbing, electricity, or internet. “The American firmament was shifting in ways I needed to understand,” he writes in his new book, Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge. “These empty, forgotten places seemed an important part of that.”
I’m happy to report that over the course of his journey, Conover appears largely to forget his mission to explain the Trump voter, a too-common assignment that typically degenerates into cliché-mongering. Anyway, the people he meets in the valley strike him not as enemies of the great American experiment but, on the contrary, as the direct heirs of the pioneers—you might say, of Pa, which is perhaps why Conover has chosen a passage from Wilder’s The Long Winter as one of his epigraphs. The land isn’t free anymore, but, as Conover writes, “it is some of the cheapest in the United States”: $5,000 or so for a five-acre lot. The settlers “have a truck instead of a wagon and mule,” plus “some solar panels, possibly even a weak cell-phone signal,” he notes. “And legal weed.”
Who moves to the flats in the 21st century, and why? “What would drive you to it?” he wonders. Of course, that’s the mystery of Charles Ingalls, too. I should be clear that Conover doesn’t talk about Pa, but you can’t miss his ghostly presence. “My wife quipped that I could title this book Little House on the Prairie, with Meth,” Conover writes.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20221209203933/https://www.theatlantic.com
/books/archive/2022/12/ted-conover-cheap-land-colorado-book/672398/
Download the free book Ted Conover Cheap Land (2022) from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.pet/search.php?req=Ted+Conover+cheap+land
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Why the Age of American Progress Ended
Invention alone can’t change the world; what matters is what happens next.
. . . After World War II, Vannevar Bush, the architect of our thrillingly successful wartime tech policy, published an influential report, “Science: The Endless Frontier,” in which he counseled the federal government to grow its investment in basic research. And it did. Since the middle of the 20th century, America’s inflation-adjusted spending on science and technology, through the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, has increased by a factor of 40.
But the government hasn’t matched that investment in the realm of implementation. This, too, was by design. Bush believed, with some reason, that politicians should not handpick nascent technologies to transform into new national industries. Better to advance the basic science and technology and let private companies — whose ears were closer to the ground — choose what to develop, and how.
You could say that we live in the world that Bush built. “The federal government, through NIH and NSF, pours billions into basic science and defense technology,” Daniel P. Gross, an economist at Duke University, told me. “But for civilian technology, there has been a view that Washington should fund the research and then get out of the way.”
As a result, many inventions languish in the so-called valley of death, where neither the government nor private ventures (risk-averse and possessed by relatively short time horizons) invest enough in the stages between discovery and commercialization. Take solar energy. In 1954, three American researchers at Bell Labs, the R&D wing of AT&T, built the first modern solar-cell prototype. By 1980, America was spending more on solar-energy research than any other country in the world. According to the Bush playbook, the U.S. was doing everything right. But we lost the technological edge on solar anyway, as Japan, Germany, and China used industrial policy to spur production—for example, by encouraging home builders to put solar panels on roofs. These tactics helped build the market and drove down the cost of solar power by several orders of magnitude—and by 90 percent in just the past 10 years.
The U.S. remains the world’s R&D factory, but when it comes to building, we are plainly going backwards. We’ve lost out on industrial opportunities by running Vannevar Bush’s playbook so strictly. . . .
In 2022, the medical journal The Lancet published an analysis of which variables best predicted the rates of COVID infection across 177 countries. Outside wealth, one of the most powerful variables was trust in government among the public. “Trust is a shared resource that enables networks of people to do collectively what individual actors cannot,” the authors of the Lancet paper wrote. When I first read their definition, I stared at it for a while, feeling the shock of recognition. I thought of how much that could serve as a definition of progress as well: a network of people doing collectively what individual actors cannot. The stories of global progress tend to be the rare examples where science, technology, politics, and culture align. When we see the full ensemble drama of progress, we realize just how many different people, skills, and roles are necessary.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20221214161827/https://www.theatlantic.com
/magazine/archive/2023/01/science-technology-vaccine-invention-history/672227/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The White House trading desk did well this year:
Emergency releases from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve are slated to end this month, concluding an unusual attempt to lower gas prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent oil prices soaring. Over the release period, Washington sold 180 million barrels of crude at an average of $96.25 apiece, well above the recent market price of $74.29—meaning the U.S., for now, is almost $4 billion ahead.
Excellent work, team! I hope your boss gets a healthy bonus this year for bucking the conventional wisdom and going short on oil.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-scores-4-billion-windfall-on-oil-rese
rve-sales-11671420244
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The White House trading desk did well this year:
Emergency releases from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve are slated to end this month, concluding an unusual attempt to lower gas prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent oil prices soaring. Over the release period, Washington sold 180 million barrels of crude at an average of $96.25 apiece, well above the recent market price of $74.29—meaning the U.S., for now, is almost $4 billion ahead.
Excellent work, team! I hope your boss gets a healthy bonus this year for bucking the conventional wisdom and going short on oil.
Fuck you, Second.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/aid-ukraine-explained-six-charts
Quote:
U.S. aid to Ukraine totals $68 billion, and the White House has just asked Congress for another $37.7 billion. In the spring, the new Congress will consider aid in the context of the administration’s proposed FY 2024 budget. With these decisions ahead, it is worth reviewing how much aid there has been, what that aid does, and what the administration is requesting. Such a review turns up some surprises and will help clarify discussions about future aid packages.
Q1: How much aid has there been?
A1: Congress has passed three aid packages. The first in March ($13.6 billion) was tacked onto the massive $1.5 trillion omnibus appropriations for FY 2022. The package in May ($40 billion), which contained the major portion of the aid, was a standalone bill. The package in September ($13.7 billion) was attached to the continuing resolution. It was designed to provide aid through December, when Congress will consider full-year appropriation bills. As the chart below shows, the three packages total $68 billion.
Your President* is an swiss cheesed brained asshole.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Merry Christmas! We’re All Being Murdered by Capitalism.
Here at The Intercept, we are committed to ruining the holidays.
by Jon Schwarz / December 24, 2022 at 05:30AM
https://theintercept.com/2022/12/24/christmas-capitalism-covid-climate
-change/
Here at The Intercept, our internal motto is “More Bad News for You, the Bad News Consumer.” We also sometimes refer to ourselves as “Your Daily Death March of Sorrow.”
That’s why, as you celebrate the holidays with your family, snuggling your loved ones close and putting out the cookies for Santa Claus, it’s on brand for us to remind you that capitalism is killing us all.
So let’s get going. (If you’re not ready to dive in immediately, you can limber up by reading our previous yuletide bummer, “Merry Christmas! Remember the Children Who Live in Fear of Our Killer Drones.”)
Ho Ho Ho for Capitalism
Instead of the good news of Jesus, let’s start with the good news of capitalism. Even Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, not known as capitalism’s biggest fans, acknowledged it in “The Communist Manifesto” in 1848:
The bourgeoisie … has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce 100 years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. What earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?
The writer William Greider takes the same perspective in “Secrets of the Temple,” his gigantic tome about the Federal Reserve. Capitalism, he contends, was “a Faustian bargain. People surrendered control over their own lives and accepted a smaller role for themselves as cogs in the vast and complicated economic machinery, in exchange for mere material goods.” Nevertheless, you have to admit that “the devil certainly kept his half of the bargain.”
Take a look around where you’re sitting now and consider the huge quantities of crap just in your eyesight that you’ve accumulated, all thanks to capitalism. One of us (Jon) can see his iPad, which helps him understand the amount of grease his thumbs apparently exude. There’s his smoke detector, which is beeping in a vain plea to get him to replace its battery. And there’s the huge bag of chipotle powder that he bought in a burst of misguided enthusiasm in 2018, still four-fifths full. The other one of us (Elise) is sitting in fast-fashion polyurethane pants, made in Vietnam, that are already ruined and will eventually end up in the Great Pacific Trash Vortex. She’ll be spending her Christmas alone, traveling Italy, contributing to the tourist economy of a deeply neofascist government which hates journalists by buying large amounts of burrata, Aperol spritz, and whatever readily available substances she finds from the global market to numb the pain of living in such a society.
OK, those are the good parts of capitalism. Now let’s move on to the ones that risk the obliteration of Homo sapiens.
Covid-19 and Its Sequels
Our response to Covid-19 should make us dubious about our chances if we go up against something even deadlier. Only 5.5 billion people have gotten even one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, leaving billions more to host a constantly proliferating assortment of mutations. Already vaccines and therapeutics are less effective against new variants.
With some bad rolls of the dice, we could be back to the world of March 2020, or worse. This scenario is increasingly likely considering climate change and globalization. Another accurate point in “The Communist Manifesto” is that “the need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”
Sure, we could have decided to vaccinate everyone. Last year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimated this would cost $50 billio
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