normm
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White House urges TSMC, Intel to grow US-based chip production
Even if many more PPE companies resided in the US, we would still be screwed without planning and foresight. Companies can't just instantly up their production by several orders of magnitude. The free market is more about just-in-time than just-in-case. That's what government is for. Would your concern about "supply chain failure" be the same if Washington waited until attacking squadrons were overhead, before seeing if anyone could sell us fighter planes?tmay said:
National Security reasons are sufficient to bring fabs to the West.karmadave said:Most of Intel's chip manufacturing facilities are already in the United States (Oregon and Arizona) so I am not sure what they are talking about. TSMC (aka Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) has manufacturing facilities in Taiwan, Mainland China and the United States. While I believe we all want more manufacturing in the United States, there are a couple of issues to keep in mind 1) Since Taiwan, China, South Korea, and Singapore have done a MUCH better job of containing the spread of Coronavirus than the United States what benefit would there be if all these facilities existed in the US? It might even cause more supply chain disruption. 2) These are well-established Asian facilities which would take years to bring back IF even feasible from a financial and logistical standpoint. There is a reason why companies like Apple Manufacturer most of their product in Asia. Who wants to pay $2,500 for an iPhone?
Protectionism and economic populism may appeal to parts of the country that have lost significant manufacturing jobs, but this is not something I believe most tech multinationals would see as in the best interests of their shareholders and customers. Capitalism isn't a sentimental system. It's a system that maximizes shareholder value while delivering the best innovative products at the lowest possible prices. That's the stark reality and unless the US embraces 'state capitalism' (as the Chinese Communist Party as done) I don't see this happening. Not trying to make a political argument. Just an observation based on reality.
COVID19 just uncovered the fact that the West had many products, especially PPE, majority manufactured in China. That the supply chain failed for PPE is one of the reasons that the West is looking at incentives and regulations to change that. China didn't help this by having Chinese companies, operating around the world, buying up PPE; hence, shortages that wouldn't have occurred otherwise.
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Apple-Google contact tracing project originated at Apple, developed 'within weeks'
Google finds out nothing. A user finds out that their phone heard some anonymous tokens that were later labeled "infected." No one else is told.Beats said:Apples win: Their idea of protecting the world is realized.
Googs win: They get your data using Apples iPhone and tracing technology.
As usual, the only losers are Android users. -
Germany changes stance on Apple-Google contact tracing project
Just to be clear, in the Apple/Google system people who report having COVID-19 are verified in some manner by a health authority to actually have it; that information is known to the authority.AppleInsider said:Germany was previously looking to create a centralized contact tracing system that relies on a central server, an approach that would allow health officials to be able to directly observe and potentially contact people suspected of carrying COVID-19. A central system approach is viewed as both a security and privacy risk by critics due to the handing over of potentially sensitive medical data to a single source, and paving the way to future state surveillance.
What the authority does not know is who spent time near an infected individual; that information is only on people's devices, and is not reported to any authority.
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Foxconn's Wisconsin innovation centers remain unused one year later
apple ][ said:I remember Trump shutting down travel from China pretty early on, and some batshit insane dems and the garbage leftist media started attacking him claiming it was racist, while he was taking the appropriate actions. His ban on travel from Europe was also criticized. Trump has handled the current situation just fine, much better than the previous guy who came before him, who never bothered to replenish the nationwide stockpile of N95 masks, even though he was made aware of the shortage.Funny, I remember him doing nothing in December while ignoring his intelligence people's dire warnings, and then finally banning some travelers from China in late January, but it was too late, and there wasn't a complete ban or any testing of travelers. And for weeks afterwards, entirely a PR effort with no one at the top making sure that any testing was going on. It was almost zero. And finally, with the worst outbreak in the world here, we're now spending trillions of dollars and expecting one or two hundred thousand deaths. Meanwhile, South Korea, which had its first case the same day as us, did tens of thousands of tests a day right from the start and got the virus under control without shutting down their economy and have had only 217 deaths so far (3 yesterday, 3 today). Trump as usual gives himself a 10 out of 10.
Oh, and I'm surprised that it's still Obama's fault, four years later, that essentially none of the recommendations of the pandemic simulations and studies his people and Trump's did jointly during the transition, and that the new administration did subsequently, were ever implemented.
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Apple sources 20M face masks, designs and ships face shields for medical workers
Take a look at the logarithmic version of the "Total Coronavirus Deaths in the US" graph at Worldometer. This is the only unambiguous graph, because it doesn't depend on how much testing is being done. Deaths in the US are currently going up by a factor of 10 every 10 days, and this won't come down much until the whole country takes this seriously and locks down, to starve the virus of victims. The White House says that we can keep the number of deaths down to between 100,000 and 240,000 if everyone observes the social distancing restrictions. Extending a straight line on a graph, I think we'll be at 100,000 deaths ten days from now."georgie01 said:
You may be right and of course that would be very bad, but we as a country desperately need perspective. As of now, if the coronavirus deaths quadruple they will still be less than projected deaths for the flu. It also very likely that the death rate is strongly skewed toward a higher death rate since those who are suffering are mainly the ones being tested.seanismorris said:
My amateur projections saying the number of infected will quadruple over the next 2 week (in the USA)...
I really hope I’m wrong.I only say these things because our panic and overreactions to the coronavirus is causing more problems than the virus itself. We need to take it seriously, but we need to have perspective and patience.
And we also need self discipline—if people were acting responsibly this outbreak would already be under control, and we’d also not be perpetually out of foods and supplies and greedy losers charging $40 for a 16oz bottle of ‘Equate’ (Walmart brand) isopropyl alcohol on eBay.Some people are still saying we should ignore the virus to save the economy. But this won't work because nothing is going to get most of the country to come out of hiding until this rapidly growing fire is under control. In fact, if we all just stayed six feet apart for two weeks, the fire would go out for lack of new fuel.
South Korea and the US both reported their first cases on the same day. South Korea immediately took it seriously and did several orders of magnitude more testing than us, and got it under control without shutting down the country. We treated it mainly as a PR problem and announced the border was closed with China, but it was already too late to have much effect and we didn't actually close the border or do much testing, or really much else for quite awhile, and now our deaths are rising faster than any other developed country.
At the time I'm writing this, the headline numbers at Worldometer for the US are 9,618 deaths and 17,977 recovered, which is about a 35% death rate for cases that have been admitted to hospitals. This method of estimating fatality was accurate for the SARS epidemic in 2003.
