This is a completely meaningless statement. It sounds good, but contains no actual argument. why are chips like agriculture? What makes that statement not apply to literally every product category that exists?

Agriculture is self-evident, we need food on a daily basis to live. I don’t need three square microprocessors a day.

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mlyle 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Just like you don’t want to wait many months to tool up to make food if there is conflict…

You don’t want to wait many years to tool up to make chips that go in weapons, either.

Else, you risk being structurally defeated very early, and this leads to others concluding that they can take you on. It undermines other preparations.

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melenaboija 3 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, we understand that, but it’s not a good comparison.

Producing chips and agricultural goods are fundamentally different, starting with limits like climate, seasonality, and land. At most, you could compare it to mining minerals for chip production

	▲	knifie_spoonie 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I don't think they're referring at all to any similarities in how they're produced. It's more to do with similarities in the consequences of not have any local supply in times of emergency.
	▲	mlyle 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The only things that matters for this consideration are: A. How bad is the consequence of not having them? B. How long does it take to tool up domestic production if there's a supply disruption? C. How long can you tolerate the shortage of them? D. How easy is it for a disruption or disaster to disrupt international supply? The answers to A and D are fairly different, but both are "bad enough" to trigger this kind of thinking. The ratio of B to C are probably similar between food and critical integrated circuits.

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201984 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Farming equipment needs microchips, as does practically any modern device, vehicle, machine, etc. If you don't have domestic microchip production then pretty much everything else you make will have foreign dependencies that could be embargoed.

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iw2rmb 3 days ago | parent [-]

Microchips for farming are made in several counties including US. There are highly specific processors, like those required for ML, but that’s not what farming can live without.

Having narratives as broad as yours, without any evidence and reasoning, is the fastest way to achieve Russia-level disaster with government monopoly in the name of “security”.

The only sense it makes if you want corruption at state level and to go on war with at least half of the world.

Good luck with that.

Hello from Moscow.

	▲	mlyle 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think there's surely a little bit of a middle ground? Subsidizing and protecting local production has a cost: there are gains from trade and operating less efficiently makes everyone's standard of living goes down. But you don't need to go 100% into protectionism. You can ensure that you have enough domestic industry to - better weather changes and disruptions - have a starting knowledge and capital base to use to ramp up production if you have to. Just having a few percent of domestic demand for advanced ICs covered by local production is enough to make the worst international shocks much softer. Critical needs can still get filled. So a certain amount of subsidy can make sense.

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conradev 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The Internet is made of microprocessors. Maybe we don't need the internet to live, but it seems pretty important these days!

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fragmede 3 days ago | parent [-]

Of course we'd think that, we're on the Internet, discussing it. The people who aren't, aren't here to rebut that. I met this woman who lives part-time in Romania, and was saying that they don't have smartphones still, which is why she has to spend her time in Romania, because she can't just have this particular subset of elderly people in Romania get information from her off of Instagram.

	▲	conradev 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Sure. I could live in the middle of nowhere in the US and communicate exclusively via written letter… …but the USPS will still use machines with microprocessors to sort that mail.