Category: The Current Situation

Election Day in the U.S. was only yesterday, but the results and impact will be big and consequential one, with over half the country voting for what is, in my opinion, recrudescence.

But that’s living in a democracy: sometimes the person you think should win, doesn’t. And modern democracy, as imperfect and crazy-making as it can be, is still preferable system under which to live than most others.

Thanks to yesterday’s “Emotional Support Canadian” post, I’ve been approached by a number of people asking if I could post something on the topic. It’s short notice, but I do have a rough idea of what to do next, or as the President-Elect would say: concepts of a plan.

Here they are in the form of two lists — things to not do, followed by things to do.

(I’ll probably do a more refined version of this article in the coming weeks as my thoughts coalesce.)

Things to not do

• Don’t capitulate. Yes, concede — once verified, acknowledge the results of the election, because that’s what you’re supposed to do in a democracy. But don’t capitulate. As Timothy Snyder wrote in his book, On Tyranny:
  
  “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
  
  Also, don’t self-censor like the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times did when they decided to simply not endorse a presidential candidate. Activist and educator Daniel Hunter provides an important reminder: “Political space that you don’t use, you lose.” Unless it puts you in some kind of danger, do not “sit this one out.”
  
  
• Don’t try and figure out who’s to blame, whether it’s the people who didn’t vote the way you did, or the people who ran the campaign, or the media, or whatever. There will be a lot of popular theories and post facto analysis over the next little while, a lot of which will be wrong, and all of which won’t really matter.
  
  
• Don’t take in the media for the next couple of days. You don’t have to, and really, aside from weather reports, most of the time you don’t need to. Why self-aggravate? Turn off the TV, put down the phone and stop doomscrolling — hell, if you need to, stop reading this article. It’ll still be here when you’re ready to get back.
  
  
• Don’t get despair and analysis confused. Again, Daniel Hunter: “The key to taking effective action in a Trump world is to avoid perpetuating the autocrat’s goals of fear, isolation, exhaustion and disorientation.” I’ll talk more about this a little later in this piece.
  
  
• Don’t storm the Capitol. It’s stupid, and accomplishes nothing.
  
  
• Don’t shut yourself in. It’s stupid, and accomplishes nothing.

Things to do:

• Freak out, but put a timebox on it. That’s a bit of sage advice from software developer relations guru Scott Hanselman — or more accurately, his mom, who gave him that advice. Feel your feelings, because if you don’t, they will find another, less healthy way to manifest themselves. But set a time limit on those feelings, because after that, it’ll be time to put on the grown-up pants and get gangsta.
  
  
• Learn the new regime’s game plan. They’ve published it in plain sight — Project 2025. Your new game plan is to counter this game plan. (I wrote about Project 2025 here.)
  
  
• Build trust. One of strategies of the Trump campaign was to foment and harness general distrust — of the media, the medical profession, subject matter experts, immigrants, women, and, if you’re not on board with general MAGA philosophy, even yourself. I consider all this a “south-pointing compass” and a guide for whom to trust and to build trust, which comes in a number of forms:
  
  
  • Trusting yourself: If you were a kid in the 1970s, you might remember a series of educational shorts on TV called The Most Important Person. One of its main messages (and I think I remember at least a couple of other children’s shows saying this as well) was that you can’t love someone else if you can’t even love yourself. It’s the same with trust, and once again, I’m going to quote Daniel Hunter: “It includes trusting your own eyes and gut, as well as building protection from the ways the crazy-making can become internalized.”
    
    
  • Being trustworthy. Tell the truth as you see it. Speak truth to power. Educate yourself, so that if you need to shoot off your mouth, your brain isn’t loaded with blanks. Be someone on whom your friends, family, and community can count on.
    
    
  • Build networks of trust. With distrust comes isolation and loneliness, and authoritarian leaders rely on that, and the new regime is relying on the nation’s epidemic of loneliness to get what they want.
    
    Here’s the thing: Authoritarians thrive in conditions where people are feeling social isolation and atomization, when people don’t form bonds, acquaintanceships, friendships, and trust.
    
    I was incredibly young when it happened, but I distinctly remember the feeling of people turning inward when President Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines, a lot of what kept him in power for the next dozen years was a breakdown of social trust.
    
    Around the same time and across the ocean in Chile under General Pinochet, people took care introducing themselves at social gatherings by name or forming anything more than casual acquaintances at those gatherings. One of them could be an informant or at least inadvertently get you on the radar of Chile’s National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) or other authorities. (And you’d better believe that there are MAGA people looking at Pinochet’s tactics approvingly and taking notes.)
    
    And even if we didn’t have an authoritarian incoming government, there’s still a reason to build networks of trust: isolation and loneliness lead to deaths of despair.
    
    Again, I turn to Daniel Hunter: “Get some people to regularly touch base with. Use that trust to explore your own thinking and support each other to stay sharp and grounded.” Get to know your neighbors.
    
    And not just your neighbors on your side of the political fence, but people on the other side too! You probably know a family that had been staunchly anti-gay until a relative came out of the closet and then slowly inched towards acceptance. I have neighbors who initially viewed me with suspicion, but got to know me — one of them even refers to me as “his first Oriental friend.” You’ll find that what we have more in common than we’ve been told by campaigners.
    
    
• Stand with minorities. There are people who are being targeted as “the problem” — immigrants (not just the undocumented ones, but Dreamers and documented ones as well), visible minorities, anyone in the letters LGBTQ+, and more. We’ll need to step up, and Pastor Martin Niemöller’s poem First They Came is truly applicable today.
  
  
• Stand with women. Depending on the circles you move in, you may know a few — or many — women who will be distressed by the election results, and in my opinion, rightfully so.
  
  There’s been a cultural shift towards having women step back into more traditional roles, for some people because it’s Biblically ordained, and for others because it’s their destiny as decreed by biology. Look at the “tradwife” trend, or the fandoms of Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan (or Lex Fridman, who’s the Luigi to Rogan’s Mario), that idea that Sydney Sweeney ended wokeness with her very nice breasts or most concerningly, the way both the incoming President and Vice President talk about women. The Republican campaign capitalized on this to capture the vote, remembering Andrew Breitbart’s doctrine: politics is downstream from culture.
  
  
• Stand up for institutions. The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), and even the NOAA (National Oceaning and Atmospheric Administration, a valuable resource for hurricane warnings) are under threat by the incoming government. Speak out for them!
  
  
• Focus on your health. If you want to make change, you have to be healthy, and it’s going to be more of a challenge soon. RFK Jr. — or maybe someone else; Trump operates on whim — will start monkeying with health policy in all sorts of ways; I’m imagining a national Surgeon General like the quack we have here in Florida or Trump’s dictation-taking personal physician. Get in shape, eat well, or at the very least, brush more often with a fluoride or hydroxyapatite toothpaste, because RFK Jr. has bought into the fluoridation conspiracy.
  
  
• Get involved. Politics isn’t a thing you do at the ballot box every couple of years; it’s something you do every day. Every action you take, every word you say, every dollar you spend — each one of those is a vote for the kind of world you want to live in.
  
  And politics isn’t just a thing at the national level, but the local level as well! The book bans in Florida happened because people who wanted those book bans started showing up at school board meetings — even if they didn’t have kids in those boards’ schools, or even if they didn’t have kids. And you can do more at the state level, especially now, with the emphasis on states’ rights — but only if you organize and get involved.
  
  
• One pragmatic, Machiavellian tip: Invest! Wall Street looooves what happened last night. Times will get tougher if you’re on the bad side of income inequality, especially if the promise to put Elon Musk in charge of government efficiency comes true. You might as well harness the investor class’ love of the current situation to make your own situation better.
  
  
• And finally, I have a motto for how to live in interesting times that you should adopt. It’s from poet Dennis Lee, a fellow Canadian:

Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.

Of all the dunderheaded things the Republican party will do should Trump win the election — and they have a 900+ page wishlist of dunderheaded things — one of the most dunderheaded is killing the CHIPS Act.

The CHIPS Act — also known as the CHIPS and Science Act, where CHIPS is short for “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors” — authorizes $280 billion in new funding to boost manufacturing of semiconductors (a.k.a. “microchips”) in the United States. Its goal is to make our semiconductor supply chain more resilient and prevent China from owning the industry outright.

The bill for the CHIPS Act enjoyed bipartisan support, and President Biden signed it into law in 2022.

The CHIPS and Science Act is incredibly important. Here’s Renée James, former President of Intel — if you have a computer running Windows or Linux or have a Mac made prior to 2020, there’s a good chance that its central processing unit was made by Intel — explaining just how important it is:

The CHIPS and Science Act also represents a much-needed return to industrial policy, a practice where a government directs or influences a country’s industrial development and economic growth in a specific direction or towards specific fields. This may sound like an outlandish idea in 2024 America, where there’s been a steady drumbeat of propaganda that government is incapable of doing anything (usually shoveled out by conservatives working in the government), but industrial policy has created some of the biggest success stories in the past century, including:

• Japan’s post-WWII targeting of electronics and automobiles
• America’s emphasis on science, engineering, and space after the wake-up call of Sputnik
• South Korea’s development of heavy industries and electronics (which was once Japan’s thing)
• China’s current focus on manufacturing goods for Western customers (which was once Japan’s thing), and now semiconductors and electric vehicles

Here’s a Wall Street Journal piece on how the CHIPS Act signals a much-needed return to industrial policy:

There is a race to be number one in the semiconductor game, and I’d rather the Chinese Communist Party not win it. Want to know how high-stakes this race is? Here’s a Financial Times piece that explains things:

When campaigning for Trump and the Republican Party on Saturday, November 2nd, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson was asked if he and his party would try to repeal the CHIPS Act if Trump wins and they have control of Congress. His answer: “I expect that we probably will.”

https://twitter.com/lukeradel/status/1852457020877582462

He walked it back a little later…

But here’s the thing: Trump hates the CHIPS Act — or at least that’s what he said during his October 25 podcast interview with Joe Rogan:

https://twitter.com/costellojoseph_/status/1850200350482936040

Instead of using federal money to encourage American firms to build fabrication plants (or “fabs,” which are factories that produce chips), he’d rather hit foreign companies with high tariffs to force them to force them to build fabs in the U.S.. The problem with his idea is that tariffs are paid by the people importing them, not the exporters.

Trump also says that companies like TSMC “stole” chip manufacturing from America, but that’s not true either.

Intel was originally in the DRAM (dynamic RAM) business, but Japanese companies like NEC, Toshiba, and Hitachi were producing DRAM chips with defect rates of about 10 parts per million, while American companies were relative slackers, producing the same chips, but with defect rates were anywhere from 10 to 100 times greater and at twice the cost. By 1986, Japan had 80% of the DRAM market.

These days, it’s Taiwan-based TSMC that owns the semiconductor market, as they make about 90% of the most advanced chips. But what’s truly interesting is TSMC’s origin story.

Morris Chang founded TSMC in 1987 in collaboration with the Taiwanese government and the electronics company Phillips. He could have been an American success story — although he was born in Taiwan, he got his education at MIT and Stanford and spent most of his career in the U.S. as an executive at Texas Instruments for 25 years. Despite having a strong performance record at Texas Instruments, he was passed up for the CEO role. Racism may have played a role (it’s a company based in Texas, he’s Asian, it was the 1980s, you do the math), but so did his concept of only manufacturing chips instead of designing and manufacturing them, which was revolutionary at the time.

The Taiwanese government recruited Chang to lead their industrial policy initiative, providing a lot of the capital to get it started, and partnered with Phillips for their tech, their manufacturing expertise, and to provide credibility with initial customers.

TSMC’s approach succeeded because:

• It let chip design companies avoid massive factory investments.
• Companies that designed chips didn’t have to worry about TSMC becoming a competitor.
• Single focus: TSMC could concentrate entirely on the manufacturing process and excelling at it.
• It enabled the rise of “fabless” chip companies like Qualcomm and the company that just displaced Intel on the Dow Jones Industrial Average: Nvidia!

Asian companies didn’t steal the chip industry from America; America simply handed it over to them.

The most advanced chips in the world, including Apple’s new M4 CPU and Nvidia’s Blackwell and Rubin AI chips, are made by a single company in a single factory in Taiwan, a mere 100 miles from China.

China has been performing military exercises in the general area of Taiwan, partially as an intimidation tactic, partially as a rehearsal for a military takeover or blockade, and they also have the “soft power” option of getting China-leaning politicians elected.

Taiwan is the weak link in the semiconductor supply chain, and it’s better for security — and not just for the U.S., but the world — if there were other places that could produce advanced semiconductors. The CHIPS Act is not a guarantee that the U.S. will go back to being a semiconductor manufacturing leader, but it’s the best shot we’ve got.

Don’t let Trump and company kill the CHIPS Act!

Recommended viewing

Want a crash course in chips, their importance, and the current state of the industry? Watch this video, which came out only two days ago:

You’ve probably seen the headline: 1 in 8 women say they’ve secretly voted differently than partners. But you shouldn’t be surprised.

Perhaps I need to remind you that this happened during “Orange Julius Caesar’s” first election campaign back in the more innocent time of 2016:

The reason it’s a headline is because of this ad:

The “controversial” part of the ad is that it tells women that they can vote for the candidate of their choice, even if it’s not the same as their husband’s choice.

As you’ve probably surmised, the ad has some high-profile conservative pundits up in arms:

But imagine the gender-flipped scenario: An ad that tells you that you don’t have to vote for who your wife wants to vote for, and you don’t even have to tell her who you voted for — after all, you’re your own man, right? Suddenly, it sounds like common sense.

From The Economist’s editorial, A second Trump term comes with unacceptable risks:

The risks for domestic and foreign policy are amplified by the last big difference between Mr Trump’s first term and a possible second one: he would be less constrained. The president who mused about firing missiles at drug labs in Mexico was held back by the people and institutions around him. Since then the Republican Party has organised itself around fealty to Mr Trump. Friendly think-tanks have vetted lists of loyal people to serve in the next administration. The Supreme Court has weakened the checks on presidents by ruling that they cannot be prosecuted for official acts.

If external constraints are looser, much more will depend on Mr Trump’s character. Given his unrepentant contempt for the constitution after losing the election in 2020, it is hard to be optimistic. Half his former cabinet members have refused to endorse him. The most senior Republican senator describes him as a “despicable human being”. Both his former chief-of-staff and former head of the joint chiefs call him a fascist. If you were interviewing a job applicant, you would not brush off such character references.

Good presidents unite the country. Mr Trump’s political genius is for turning people against each other. After the death of George Floyd, he suggested the army shoot protesters in the leg. America’s prosperity depends on the idea that people are treated fairly, regardless of their politics; Mr Trump has threatened to turn the Justice Department on his political enemies.