[HN Gopher] Samsung asks for planning permission for 11 fabs in ...
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Samsung asks for planning permission for 11 fabs in Texas
Author : WaitWaitWha
Score : 152 points
Date : 2022-07-24 18:43 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.electronicsweekly.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.electronicsweekly.com)
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Here's something that confuses me about building fabs in Texas.
| IIUC:
|
| 1) Power disruptions in fabs are very expensive.
|
| 2) Texas's power grid has gained a reputation lately for being
| unreliable.
|
| If those things are true, how do they plan to deal with that?
| Heavy investment in onsite power generation?
| wnevets wrote:
| As long as it doesn't get chilly, a little too warm or too many
| people set their AC to below 78 the texas power grid works
| great!
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| gwern wrote:
| Apparently they just... shut down:
| https://www.kvue.com/article/money/economy/boomtown-2040/sam...
|
| I've read about chip fabs colocating with power plants, but
| apparently they just plan to sign agreements with the local
| utility for guarantees:
| https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2021/09/24/samsung-u...
| extheat wrote:
| > just shut down
|
| Yes, a year ago.
| mshumi wrote:
| Buffer of batteries and generator backup
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Fabs have all sorts of power systems because even the slightest
| blip or glitch in power could mean millions in losses
|
| I know a decade or two ago IBM was using superconducting
| magnets for power smoothing to handle sub-millisecond events.
| Then you have battery and flywheel systems for bigger drops
| that are designed to carry load until generators can start and
| accept load (usually a very short period of time if the
| generator's oil and coolant are on heaters.)
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Austin resident here, who used to work in fabs.
|
| Basically, there was a time (1980's) when fabs in Austin had
| their own power generation. AMD, which used to have its own
| fabs, had its own power for them. Then, they (not just AMD but
| everybody with fabs in Texas) eventually decided it wasn't
| worth the cost, and started using the regular power grid,
| because Austin's power had become more reliable. Obviously, as
| the percentage of solar, wind, and natgas has increased, and
| the percentage of coal has decreased, this reliability has been
| thrown into question. Also, the rapid population increase has
| also just meant a general problem of building new capacity fast
| enough.
|
| My guess is that they have an eye on it, and it is also
| possible they will build their own power generation, but more
| likely they are just getting guarantees of some sort that
| enough power capacity will be built.
| mortenlarsen wrote:
| The recent issues did not have renewable energy as the main
| cause. Fox News is entertainment, not news (by their own
| claim).
| makomk wrote:
| Renweable energy was not the "main cause" because it
| reliably fails to generate adequate amounts of power at
| that time of year and so the grid was entirely reliant on
| other generation (mostly natural gas) to fill in the gap.
| Basically, it wasn't the fault of renewable energy because
| everyone knew it was useless anyway.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I would like to point out that the New York Times has made
| the same claim very recently too (in the same context, a
| defamation trial).
|
| Events like the Texas blackouts rarely have one sole cause.
| Reliance on renewables was clearly one factor out of many.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| It's actually not a meaningful factor AT ALL. Where
| renewables failed it wasn't because the nature of the
| technology but because of failure to winterize.
| hadleybelter wrote:
| It was, and is, a hugely meaningful factor. Sticking your
| head in the sand and pretending that it's a republican
| smear campaign doesn't help.
|
| Texas has more wind power generation than any other state
| in the US _by far_. Texas is all aboard the wind train.
| It 's a huge part of the economy. Texas wants wind to
| win. But that doesn't change reality.
|
| In the last month, Texas has gotten close to electricity
| demand exceeding supply. A significant factor behind this
| is that Texas gets nearly 20% of its electricity from
| wind generation. On your average summer day, wind
| generates between 15 and 25 GW. However, during the
| recent heat wave, wind speeds dropped in west Texas
| (where the bulk of the wind farms are) and wind was only
| generating less than 2 GW during the hottest part of the
| day.
|
| Similarly, Texas usually gets about 10 GW of power from
| solar. However, solar drops off to 0 GW very rapidly
| around 7 or 8 PM. However, in the summer in Texas, the
| temperature is still at its peak around 7 PM, so there is
| still significant demand while solar generation is
| dropping.
|
| Wind and solar are unlike thermal generation in that we
| (humans) can _choose_ to burn more oil and create thermal
| generation when needed. But with solar and wind, we
| cannot choose to suddenly create more wind or sun. We are
| at the whims of nature, and until we figure out better
| solutions for these problems (battery storage, maybe),
| wind and solar have their disadvantages compared to
| thermal. Pretending otherwise is not helpful.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| There is nothing but incompetence and greed keeping Texas
| from having as good a grid as the rest of the US.
| hadleybelter wrote:
| You mean the rest of the US that has been facing
| widespread threats of blackouts this summer?
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/dypnja/majority-of-us-
| power-...
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/31/us/power-outages-electric-
| gri...
|
| https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-
| rene...
|
| https://www.eenews.net/articles/grid-monitor-warns-of-u-
| s-bl...
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/02/blacko
| ut-...
|
| I'll agree with you that there's greed and incompetence
| all over Texas's politicians and state management. But it
| isn't unique to Texas. We have a widespread societal
| problem with our electrical grid that transcends state
| lines.
| rayiner wrote:
| It goes without saying that, just because Fox News is
| saying it doesn't mean it's right. Partisan bickering in
| either direction isn't a good way to educate yourself on
| the issues.
|
| Renewable power throws a wrench in how Texas does grid
| planning. In every other ISO, there is both a capacity
| market, which pays providers to commit to making certain
| generating capacity available, and a generation market,
| which pays for actual electrical production:
| https://cpowerenergymanagement.com/why-doesnt-texas-have-
| a-c.... In Texas, there is just a generation market.
|
| Ordinarily that isn't a big deal. Generators build adequate
| capacity so they can be in a position to receive payments
| for generation at times of peak demand.
|
| Renewables break this down. They undercut traditional
| generation sources in the summer, but can't be counted on
| to be there at times of peak winter demand. So last winter
| renewables didn't fail in the sense that _nobody was
| expecting them to generate much power begin with._ But the
| natural gas plants that are irreplaceable for dealing with
| winter demand are dealing with reduced revenue because
| renewable sources are underbidding them in peak summer
| months.
| [deleted]
| konschubert wrote:
| Looks like the free market for power has decided that a
| few days of outages is not worth running extra power
| capacity.
|
| Which might be right! But are the externalities all
| correctly priced in here?
| JamesBarney wrote:
| I don't think they can charge whatever they like. There
| are some regulations on the max price a generator charge
| for electricity, which we hit during the last freeze.
| kurthr wrote:
| I heard about people paying over $10/kWH and having $15k
| bills for about 5 days of power. I know people who paid
| well over $1000 for the month and their power was out for
| much of the cold spell (~50%). I hear they're going to
| try and lower billing to less than $9000/MWh, but that's
| not going to encourage building proper infrastructure,
| and making gouging profitable doesn't encourage any of
| them to improve reliability. Why bother weatherproofing?
|
| I'm reminded of Enron's "grandma Millie" comments.
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/deep-
| freeze-s...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/weekinreview/word-for-
| wor...
| rayiner wrote:
| There's no "free market" for electricity anywhere in the
| developed world, including Texas. In the US, the grid is
| centrally planned by several regional transmission
| organizations. In Texas that's ERCOT. An artificial
| market, a bid-auction system, is used to decide the
| actual price of electricity at any given moment. But in
| the case of ERCOT they concluded that, because outages
| prevent generators from making money during periods of
| peak demand, generators had adequate incentives to invest
| in reliability without a separate capacity market. And
| that worked fine for decades!
|
| It's not a choice of "free market versus regulation."
| It's a heavily regulated market. The question is only
| about the design of the regulatory scheme.
| vel0city wrote:
| On top of that, when attempting to do rolling blackouts
| critical gas infrastructure froze and so gas supply
| plummeted. The gas plants weren't able to generate their
| capacity because there wasn't enough gas to burn.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| The things is there really isn't partisan bickering on
| both sides of this issue in the first place. There is
| non-partisan reality where poor planning by non-partisan
| entity predictable led to service disruption. Even the
| failure of legislators is itself a non-partisan failure.
| Ordinary incompetence.
|
| The only partisan bickering is the attempt to incorrectly
| blame renewables for the lack of capacity when in fact
| planned downtime, ordinary logistical failures, and
| failure to winterize are in fact to blame.
|
| Everybody ought to have expected them to need that much
| power. Not every day and not every winter but everyone
| ought to have expected another bad winter to come round
| because they had bad winters in 1957 1960 1973 1985 2015
| 2017 2021. This includes 3 years out of the last 6.
|
| They weren't prepared because they were short sighted,
| greedy, and stupid not because solar took so much of the
| profits and not because insufficient capacity had been
| built out for lack of such profits. Capacity existed and
| it sat unused or broke when it was most needed.
| mortenlarsen wrote:
| It sounds like a free market working as expected. Maybe
| something important like this needs regulation to prevent
| optimization based on only one parameter ($).
| rossdavidh wrote:
| So, I wouldn't know, because I haven't watched Fox News in
| many years. The best low-emotion, technically informed
| analysis of "Snowpocalypse" is probably this one from
| "Practical Engineering", made by a San Antonio-based
| engineer:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08mwXICY4JM
|
| The outages were not from any one "main cause", except
| perhaps "Texas doesn't get cold that often and wasn't
| ready". But, wind icing up was certainly one of several
| major causes, along with natural gas pressure dropping so
| that natgas-powered electrical plants could not keep
| operating.
| hadleybelter wrote:
| The most recent issues for which the Texas electrical grid
| was in the news for, the near-blackouts earlier this month,
| were specifically because of unpredictably low wind speeds
| in west Texas which reduced Texas's expected wind
| generation from ~20 GW to under 2 GW during the periods of
| peak demand. For context, peak demand in Texas is around 80
| GW. Taking 18+ GW off the table is a _huge_ blow. 18 GW is
| more than the entire electrical demand of most US states.
|
| Fox news has nothing to do with it. Generation capacity
| being reduced by nearly 25% due to unpredictably low wind
| speeds is physics. It's a huge problem being faced, and
| sticking your head in the sand and crying "fake news" isn't
| helpful.
| Fargoan wrote:
| Probably. I would think that would be common in that industry
| no matter the location
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > Probably. I would think that would be common in that
| industry no matter the location
|
| In particular, I was thinking about the power disruptions in
| Taiwan earlier this year [0].
|
| IIRC, there was concern that a power drop could ruin some/all
| chips currently in the fab pipeline, and might also require
| several days to re-initialize the pipeline's equipment.
|
| [0] https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/03/power-outage-in-taiwan-
| affect...
| Victerius wrote:
| 3) Foundries are water guzzlers and Texas is mostly arid.
|
| The Northeast or the Great Lakes would make more sense.
| silisili wrote:
| That area of TX gets about 40 inches of rain a year, about as
| much as Seattle.
|
| It's not as 'wet' as some areas, but far from the dusty
| tumbleweeds people often associate with central and west TX.
| vel0city wrote:
| Parts of Texas are literally considered rain forests.
| randrews wrote:
| Parts are, but other parts, like the gulf coast, have plenty
| of water. Texas is not the giant desert you see in cowboy
| movies.
| bushbaba wrote:
| Didn't intel's fab recycle the bulk of their water?
|
| https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/water-.
| ..
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Here's something that confuses me about building fabs in
| Texas.
|
| > Texas's power grid has gained a reputation lately for being
| unreliable.
|
| As stated, there's nothing to be confused about. You'd want to
| build new fabs in Texas for the same reason you want to buy
| stocks while they're down rather than while they're up.
|
| The reputation only matters if you're trying to sell your new
| fab to someone else. If you want to use it yourself, what
| matters is the reality.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > The reputation only matters if you're trying to sell your
| new fab to someone else. If you want to use it yourself, what
| matters is the reality.
|
| Certainly. My point was that (perhaps) the grid _in
| actuality_ has reliability issues, and the reason I thought
| that might be true is because of its current reputation.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Also odd since their state government leaders are highly
| politically motivated and want to make political waves even if
| their actions are irrational (like on power production, blaming
| wind turbines instead of recognizing their failure to winterize
| wind and coal power systems).
| jrockway wrote:
| I think it's a favorable tax environment. Just remember that
| these companies claim to be progressive, but if they can save
| $20 on their taxes, that all goes out the window.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| I think the tax environment for companies is favorable,
| also fewer environmental regulations (and making chips uses
| some nasty chemicals)
|
| Just wanted to say that taxes in Texas are less favorable
| than eg California when it comes to middle class citizens -
| no income tax, but very high property taxes.
| bbarnett wrote:
| I've driven through Texas, and there is this 300 mile+
| stretch, in the North, that is hell on earth. Pure putrid
| smog, the skies darkened, the air thick, dank, cloying
| from refineries or something.
|
| So yeah, great place to build something, and save cash on
| tech to cleanup your waste. Yay Texas!
|
| I swear people must die 10 years sooner in that stretch.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> people must die 10 years sooner in that stretch_
|
| No Texas county breaks the top 10 for counties with the
| shortest life expectancy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L
| ist_of_U.S._counties_with_sho...
|
| 10 years less than the national average would get you to
| 69, and be #5 on the list. For comparison, #50 is only 6y
| below the national average.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| There are worse places just in Texas - there's a chemical
| refinery locus to the east side of Houston near the port
| and bigger one near the border with Louisiana with so
| many flares at night it reminds one of Mad Max a bit,
| though there are various plants scattered along the gulf
| coast as well, were a half dozen that I knew of in the
| mostly rural county I grew up in to the south of Houston.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| > very high property taxes
|
| CA property taxes are highly regressive. Old boomers get
| to pay sub 0.1% tax rates because of Prop 13 while new,
| young, and poorer buyers get to pay tax on inflated
| property valuations.
|
| When it comes to increasing class mobility high property
| tax >>> high income tax.
| anfilt wrote:
| I don't live in CA, but forcing low or fixed income
| people out their homes just because their property
| increased in value which is often outside their control
| is not good.
|
| From my understanding part of the problem also is the
| even landlords benefit from prop 13 and same with people
| that own multiple properties. Honestly, I think something
| like Idaho's Homeowners Exemption is better. The owner
| has to live in it to qualify.
| https://tax.idaho.gov/i-1051.cfm
| notatoad wrote:
| that's a fair criticism a lot of the time, but I don't
| think Samsung ever makes any real claims of being
| progressive. not too many woke companiese have a division
| that builds tanks.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| How are you defining woke as you use it here?
| jackmott wrote:
| rossdavidh wrote:
| There is plenty of politics in Texas, for sure, but it wasn't
| coal power systems that failed in the winter, it was wind,
| natgas, and one nuclear power plant.
| vel0city wrote:
| Actually some coal plants did fail in the freeze as well.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| My understanding is that this is incorrect, and it was coal
| power plants that weren't properly winterized that failed.
| Of course you had a lot of people claiming the opposite,
| without evidence.
|
| EDIT: Okay there was some loss in capacity in wind power,
| but the greatest loss in capacity was natural gas plants,
| which lost 15GW of capacity. I confused natural gas with
| coal as I don't consider either to be climate friendly.
| Wind lost about 3GW of capacity.
|
| See at 7:50 here: https://youtu.be/08mwXICY4JM
| Aloha wrote:
| Natural Gas may not be climate friendly, but there is
| lots of it in Texas, and it's more environmentally
| friendly than coal.
|
| The Natural Gas distribution system just fell apart two
| years ago.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Excellent video channel, I follow it as well.
|
| By the way, natgas is actually much friendlier (well,
| less hostile) to the environment than coal, if you're
| looking at carbon/kWh or all of the other things released
| into the atmosphere when you burn coal.
|
| However, you can much more easily make a giant mound of
| coal next to your power plant, than store up enough
| natgas (LNG is much more expensive to store). So, the
| power plants required natgas to show up in the pipeline,
| and when the temperature dropped and everybody cranked up
| the heat, not only in Texas, the natgas pressure in the
| pipelines dropped. Oil (liquid) and coal (solid) are just
| fundamentally easier to stockpile than natgas or wind
| (gas) or solar (light).
|
| A big freakin' battery would help with this, but that
| isn't a cost-effective option (yet?).
| abathur wrote:
| Iirc wind performed more or less as forecast (admittedly
| not great, but as expected) during Feb 2021 and nearly all
| of the shortfall came down to natural gas plants and infra
| failing.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I'm all in favor of wind power in Texas, and want more of
| it, but it did do worse than expected in Feb 2021. It's
| just a problem to be fixed, not a reason to drop wind
| power (west Texas has a lot of wind), but it did actually
| happen.
| seydor wrote:
| Mexican labor
| [deleted]
| bob1029 wrote:
| There is no way in hell you can run a modern fab using on-site
| power anymore. Maybe in the 80s/90s, but now you got things
| like EUV light sources that require megawatt-class power
| delivery all on their own. Just stepping back 1 generation to
| DUV and you are "only" talking ~100kW per machine, which is
| still insane.
|
| What would probably happen is a special grid arrangement. If
| you are going to build _eleven_ of these things, entire power
| plants, switchyards and transmission lines will need to be
| constructed ahead of time. They will likely need to run
| isolated from the broader grid in some manner. I cannot imagine
| Samsung executive management agreeing to this many factories
| (even with subsidies) unless some guarantee could be made WRT
| power delivery.
| lkbm wrote:
| Proposed starts of operations are 2034-2042. I'd expect a fair
| bit of on-site generation/storage, but I also would hope ERCOT
| gets its act together by then (or is replaced with a multi-
| state system).
| tekno45 wrote:
| Private solar farm makes sense in certain parts of texas.
|
| But then water is probably the harder issue.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Texas is very good at water planning. Solar does make sense
| if you have lots of land. How much skilled labor actually
| works _at_ a fab? Attracting skilled labor to work far enough
| out, that that amount of land is affordable could be a
| problem. If the weather, and power situation remain. It might
| be hard in any case.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Depends where in Texas. Houston area is more similar to the
| Deep South in weather, no shortages of water, in fact dealing
| with floods is a huge part of their urban planning challenge.
| ars wrote:
| > 2) Texas's power grid has gained a reputation lately for
| being unreliable.
|
| Having the appearance of something is not the same as actually
| being that thing. They had one outage during a cold snap, and
| then warned about high usage, but there has not actually been
| another outage.
|
| California is also warning about an outage.
|
| https://www.nerc.com/pa/RAPA/ra/Reliability%20Assessments%20...
| the graph on page 6 (labeled as page 5) should be more
| instructive.
| [deleted]
| Aloha wrote:
| As a Texan, I can concur.
|
| That said, the failure and piss-poor government response to
| it makes me almost viscerally angry. Texas has promoted
| itself as an energy leader, from traditional oil and gas
| production, to large (and growing) production of renewables,
| we shouldn't be having these failures.
|
| The issue for me isn't the failure of the power grid,
| extraordinary events happen - its that:
|
| One - it's happened before (twice before).
|
| Two - we should have had a governmental response to
| adequately winterize the grid.
|
| Three - the deregulated power system in Texas creates
| perverse incentives to building more capacity in - and power
| usage in Texas is growing faster than either base load or
| peaking capacity is.
|
| These are all governmental and regulatory failures, and ones
| that were both foreseeable and preventable.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| They are in fact doing rolling "brownouts" as of a few days
| ago. I put it in quotes because the friend who told us about
| it had been without for a couple hours at that point.
| trashcan wrote:
| This is not being done by ERCOT that manages power
| distribution in Texas. Your friend had a local power
| failure, probably caused by a downed power line.
|
| Rolling blackouts would be documented here if they were
| happening:
| https://www.ercot.com/services/comm/mkt_notices/opsmessages
|
| More info: https://www.kxan.com/news/texas/do-you-know-the-
| difference-b...
| marcinzm wrote:
| Given this is just an initial permission with no concrete plan
| to build they may also be trying to induce a bidding war with
| another location that is more favorable (but more expensive).
| trentnix wrote:
| Samsung asks permission (but makes no actual commitments) right
| before Washington votes on whether to subsidize chip
| manufacturing. Maybe I'm just old and jaded and maybe asking
| permission has nothing to do with posturing for DC money, but
| experience tells me this might not be as genuine as the headline
| suggests.
| mike_n wrote:
| Wouldn't it be prudent for them to ask for 11 fabs in 11
| states, and get 11x more politicians lobbying for them?
| anfilt wrote:
| Maybe they like the laws in Texas more, alot companies have
| been moving to Texas for that reason. Although that is
| conjecture. Also having them geographically close has perks
| for logistics.
| brewdad wrote:
| I hope they are bringing their own power grid along with
| those fab plans. Power bumps and brownouts are terrible for
| fabs.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I don't see the problem. If the US government shows a potential
| interest in subsidizing fabs, the expected outcome is that chip
| makers would explore their options for building fans here.
|
| That's the entire purpose of the subsidies.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Wouldn't the goal be to _not_ apply, before the law passes?
|
| The touted concept is, no one will build without subsidies.
| Yet without them, Samsung is planning to build! The proof?
| Well, they spent cash to plan, pay for application prep, and
| apply.
|
| So yes it seems weird. If anything, it could kill the bill.
| foota wrote:
| It could be to incentivize local politicians to vote for
| it.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Samsung might want the bill dead because it is in
| relatively better shape.
|
| In this case, however, samsung has specifically said they
| don't have plans to build at this time, and only one fab
| they applied for has a _start build_ date prior to 2029
| (and online dates are in the 203x timeframe).
| syrrim wrote:
| Planning is not doing. Subsidies are only useful if fabs
| are on the verge of being built, but are being held back.
| If no one would ever build a fab in the US, then any
| subsidies handed out will be wasted. If fabs are being
| built anyways, then there isn't much benefit. Samsung is
| saying they might build a fab, and thus could be enticed by
| subsidies.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Their actions say otherwise, because to plan means you
| think it worthwhile.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| Unless their plan is "let's get permissions so that if
| the subsidy is put in place, we're ready to build."
|
| That doesn't suggest that they'd build without the
| subsidy, but that they want to be able to take advantage
| of the subsidy right away, if it gets put in place.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Right. So spend time designing plants specific to local
| build codes, environment and terrain, paying architechs,
| examining land conditions, paying legal and lawyers, all
| to get permits to build, when you can wait until after,
| and do the same?!
|
| Sure, companies love to spend hundreds of thousands on
| unknowns, for no real reason.
| dgfitz wrote:
| As a sibling comment points out, I don't think it's
| disingenuous at all, and I agree with your point in all but
| that remark. Almost seems like the brass at Samsung are on top
| of things, and it doesn't seem like they're trying to "pull a
| fast one" at all. Disclaimer: I buy Samsung things but have no
| affiliation.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Well I personally know several Samsung people in the area.
| Samsung is very serious about expanding into Texas in a big
| way. I'm not sure if recent attempts by Texas government to
| promote Christian Nationalist/Qanon ideas has dissuaded them,
| although I consider that the biggest detriment for businesses
| going forward in Texas (attracting young people to a state
| where half the population and their rights is considered less
| valuable than the other half)
| terrorOf wrote:
| bilsbie wrote:
| Better to ask forgiveness than permission.
| terrorOf wrote:
| neilv wrote:
| Would they have hiring difficulty, considering recent Texas
| politician positions and maneuvers on some societal issues that
| are important to a lot of educated people (e.g., abortion rights,
| birth control rights, gun regulation, civil rights).
|
| (To avoid "politics" discussion on HN, I'm _not_ asking about
| what values and rights individuals should have. I 'm asking
| whether, given the values many skilled workers seem to have, and
| that it's suddenly looking a lot harder to coexist in Texas
| (regardless of pockets like Austin), how will that affect hiring
| of high-tech workers who'd need to reside in Texas.)
| smegger001 wrote:
| there are plenty of people for whom this is either not a deal
| breaker, is a non issue, or support it. secondly i think this
| may be a point that breakes the red hold on the state it has
| been purple for a long time already and this will probably
| result in quiet the backlash against the right.
| vel0city wrote:
| I personally know a lot of right leaning, church going, gun
| toting, EE/material science/physics/fab-related-field people in
| Texas. There's plenty of people working highly skilled jobs who
| don't have that much of a problem with the recent reversal of
| Roe.
|
| You can technically be highly educated and still be pro gun,
| anti gay marriage, and pro-life. It's not like learning how
| silicon crystals form or how electrons move suddenly makes you
| pro choice.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| I don't foresee a large exodus from Texas. There's been a large
| inflow during COVID and I don't see people leaving their big
| houses and cheap CoL. The Twitter crowd screams a lot about
| these things but if you look at sites like 538 for example,
| there's been only a minor shift towards Democrats in the polls
| due to Roe v Wade being overturned. The economy matters a lot
| more to people than social issues.
| 88840-8855 wrote:
| WHY cannot we have such stuff here in Germany? WHY is everything
| here so much Kleinklein? I am very mad!
|
| Good for Texas! It is the place to be.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| EU has chips act (actually passed) and is already paying Intel
| billions to create a new fab in Germany.
| Y-bar wrote:
| What?
|
| > Intel picks Magdeburg in Germany for new European chip
| factory
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-picks-magdeburg-ger...
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Hi! I used to work in fabs in Texas, and then our company's new
| fab got made in Germany (way back in 2000 or so). I actually
| worked in Dresden for six months, as one of a few Americans
| helping to get things going. These things have a way of going
| in cycles. I expect Germany will get some more fab building
| going soon.
| pjc50 wrote:
| https://www.techzine.eu/news/infrastructure/83384/bosch-buil...
|
| (it's just a massive US news availability bias)
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