Opinion | Today’s Opinions: Chips, chipmaking and how to protect Taiwan – The Washington Post
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In today’s edition:
It’s Chip Week here at Post Opinions, and if your knowledge on the subject skews (as mine does) more toward sour cream than semiconductors, then national security analyst Dmitri Alperovitch’s op-ed is the place to start brushing up.
Alperovitch provides an overview of computer chip technology, beginning with the very basics. (“Nothing happens without computer chips. … Advanced semiconductor manufacturing tools are the most sophisticated equipment that humankind has ever built.”) This primer comes through the lens of U.S.-China competition, where chipmaking takes center stage.
The most important consideration for the next 50 years of geopolitics, Alperovitch writes, is this: “China, as large and economically powerful as it is, does not yet possess the ability or knowledge to build the sophisticated machinery one needs to manufacture the most advanced chips.”
The world should want to keep it that way, Alperovitch writes. He proposes icing China’s chipmaking by preventing it from building up “fabs,” the factories where semiconductors get made. This is surprisingly doable; one of many things I learned from Alperovitch’s essay is that only three countries in the world know how to make the equipment that fabs require: Japan, the Netherlands and the United States.
Alperovitch presents three more points in his grand plan for restraining China (and protecting chipmaking giant Taiwan along the way), but you’ll have to discover those yourself. Instead, let’s stick for a minute in the States, and our own attempt to kick-start chipmaking.
Heather Long recently collaborated with Kai Ryssdal and Maria Hollenhorst of “Marketplace” to report from Phoenix, “ground zero” of President Biden’s push to bring chips back to the States.
Heather and her co-reporters write that the new fabs going up will require some 70,000 skilled workers to run them, plus all the jobs involved in their construction.
So the industry should be hiring like crazy, right? Well, it’s tricky. Those skills are hard to find without devoted training; Heather et al. write that the United States must rapidly expand chip-specific education, especially via apprenticeships, a model that has proved wildly successful.
But this is tricky, too! Because the jobs aren’t really here yet. In fact, chipmaker hiring is down over the past year, and some companies are even laying these specialists off. Boom and bust is “just the nature of the semiconductor business,” one trainer said.
Still, Heather and the “Marketplace” crew left pretty bullish on Biden’s bet on American workers.
Their reporting, however, ends with a local business making a different calculation: the Asian grocery opening up in anticipation of an influx of overseas workers.
Chaser: A three-part radio series based on this reporting will air this week on “Marketplace.” You can listen here.
Let’s zoom out to a different engineering challenge. Farther. Farther. Faaaaarther.
There you go — the planetary-level geoengineering that might be necessary to stave off the climate crisis.
The Editorial Board understands why such ideas as releasing aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect solar radiation back into space were once unspeakable in climate circles; we have no real idea what global thermostat-fiddling might do to the inhabitants of a climate-controlled Earth.
“But humans have not cut greenhouse emissions quickly enough,” the board writes, so global climate leaders need to provide a framework for stopgap geoengineering before other “public or private organizations … take matters into their own hands, with potentially disastrous consequences.”
Chaser: This is (slight spoiler) exactly what happens at the beginning of author Kim Stanley Robinson’s speculative climate novel “The Ministry for the Future.” Read his 2021 op-ed on how humanity’s declining fertility could be good for the climate.
Declining fertility?! Not on Tim Carney’s watch! In an op-ed addressing the pressures of modern-day parenting, he proposes a bold solution: “The best way to make parenting and childhood happier and less stressful is to have more kids, not fewer of them.”
He cites one survey of several thousand U.S. mothers that found that moms of four reported less stress than moms of one, two or three. Mostly, however, he cites his own family life; his wife has given birth to six.
The Carney household, he explains, has been liberated from “many of the supposed demands of modern parenthood [that] are really just the demands of a misguided culture.” Neither he nor his wife feels the need to “quarterback” the family or micromanage kids’ achievement. With six kids, they simply can’t.
Instead, the large-family “culture — perpetuated by everyone in the family — does the work day in and day out,” relieving Mom and Dad of plenty of stress, Carney says. Kids grow up with more independence and turn out just fine.
Sounds lovely — at least until it comes time for “culture” to change six diapers.
Chaser: In 2019, demographers Leslie Root, Karen Benjamin Guzzo and Alison Gemmill wrote that no one should ever be pressured to have more kids.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
American chips —
Hope that the big bet pays off
Or we’re kettle-cooked
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
