https://archive.md/9U8YL
"I arrive in Taiwan brooding morbidly on the fate of democracy. My luggage is
lost. This is my pilgrimage to the Sacred Mountain of Protection. The Sacred
Mountain is reckoned to protect the whole island of Taiwan—and even, by the
supremely pious, to protect democracy itself, the sprawling experiment in
governance that has held moral and actual sway over the would-be free world for
the better part of a century. The mountain is in fact an industrial park in
Hsinchu, a coastal city southwest of Taipei. Its shrine bears an unassuming
name: the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
By revenue, TSMC is the largest semiconductor company in the world. In 2020 it
quietly joined the world’s 10 most valuable companies. It’s now bigger than
Meta and Exxon. The company also has the world’s biggest logic chip
manufacturing capacity and produces, by one analysis, a staggering 92 percent
of the world’s most avant-garde chips—the ones inside the nuclear weapons,
planes, submarines, and hypersonic missiles on which the international balance
of hard power is predicated.
Perhaps more to the point, TSMC makes a third of
all the world’s silicon
chips, notably the ones in iPhones and Macs. Every six months, just one of
TSMC’s 13 foundries—the redoubtable Fab 18 in Tainan—carves and etches a
quintillion transistors for Apple. In the form of these miniature masterpieces,
which sit atop microchips, the semiconductor industry churns out more objects
in a year than have ever been produced in all the other factories in all the
other industries in the history of the world."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-heart-united-states-democracy-uruguay-nature-rights-ecuador/>
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
