What Happened Today: October 07, 2022
U.S. chip boom and 50,000 more jobs headed for New York; young dying from Amazon’s “suicide kits” draws lawsuit; American productivity bottoms out
The Big Story
Computer chip maker Micron Technology announced this week plans to build a massive $100 billion manufacturing complex in upstate New York, a project that could generate upwards of 50,000 jobs and spur much-needed growth for a region long suffering from economic decline because of industrial offshoring. Santa Mehrotra, Micron chief executive, said the project was driven in no small part by the incentives included in the CHIPS and Science Act, the legislation passed this summer offering tens of billions of dollars in subsidies for technology companies to manufacture in the United States. “There is no doubt that without the CHIPS Act, we would not be here today,” said Mehrotra. Supply chain disruptions and vulnerabilities in an overreliance on Asian manufacturing revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic have already spurred several major projects by chip makers across the United States, including a $20 billion pair of Intel plants in Ohio and Samsung’s $17 billion factory in Texas. The CHIP subsidies, which will start to flow to companies next year, are likely to spur even more domestic production.
New York has led the nation in population decline over the past two years, with most of that loss concentrated upstate, where a dearth of job opportunities has instigated a decline in the birth rate in and the migration to the area. With a historic $5.5 billion incentive package from New York pegged to various employment and investment milestones that Micron will need to hit over the next 20 years, Micron estimates it will need 9,000 new full-time employees with an average salary of at least $100,000, and another 40,000 jobs filled by vendors and contractors.
Julius Krein, founder of the journal American Affairs and an expert and frequent commentator on industrial policy, talked with The Scroll:
There’s no question that these announcements represent a positive development, assuming the projects are completed. I have been critical of some of the last-minute legislative maneuvering around CHIPS, which weakened restrictions on investment in China, but policies to rebuild a high-value industry like semiconductor manufacturing and strengthen critical supply chains are essential and long overdue. The next step is to learn from these experiences and implement policies that promote the development of other strategic industries and manufacturing sectors.
In the Back Pages: The Etrog by Nobel Laureate S.Y. Agnon
The Rest
→ The state of Louisiana will be withdrawing $794 million invested in BlackRock, the world’s largest investment company, because of BlackRock’s emphasis on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing. “Your blatantly anti-fossil fuel policies would destroy Louisiana’s economy,” Louisiana Treasurer John Schroder wrote to BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink. “Simply put, we cannot be party to the crippling of our own economy.” Louisiana is one of the top oil and gas producers in the country, and the state makes roughly a quarter of its revenue from the energy industry. That BlackRock’s focus on ESG is largely a performative gesture didn’t seem to factor into Louisiana’s decision—the company has huge investments in ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, and in the words of BlackRock’s former chief of sustainable investment, “It’s not totally clear if [ESG funds] create much positive environmental impact that would not have occurred otherwise,” he said. “Nothing stops [these companies] from pursuing decidedly non-green activities with their other sources of funding.”
→ Thread of the Day:
Attorney Carrie Goldberg outlines the lawsuit she brought against Amazon on behalf of several young adults who purchased its “suicide kits,” which include packages with highly concentrated, and thus lethal, doses of sodium nitrate, along with “Tagamet to avoid vomiting up the poison, a personal use scale to measure the proper quantity, and the Amazon Edition of The Peaceful Pill Handbook, a suicide manual with an entire chapter on how to die by [sodium nitrate].” With the matter now before the court, Amazon has continued to sell the products and delete one-star reviews from grieving family members, and it told Goldberg through its lawyers that it’s not accountable for how its products are used. CBS was set to air a segment on the lawsuit but, according to Goldberg, canceled the broadcast.
→ Graph of the Day:
The productivity level of the average American worker is bottoming out, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as offices seek to return to pre-pandemic norms while employees keep “quiet quitting,” or doing the bare minimum to get by. Julia Pollak, the chief economist at hiring company ZipRecruiter, credits the chaos of the job market over the past few years with causing this ennui among employees. As the graph above shows, productivity exploded in early 2020 in the beginning of the pandemic as workers were worried about losing their jobs and companies were firing in droves; once hirings replaced the firings, things leveled off until 2022, which marked the beginning of the current decline. “Workers came away from all of this feeling like the connection between working hard and being rewarded was broken,” Pollak told NPR. “That’s really discouraging to top performers.”
→ Furthering the White House campaign to bolster domestic computer technologies, the Biden administration announced new limits on semiconductor exports to China on Friday, ratcheting up the tension in the ongoing arms race for technological advantages between the superpowers. An extension of export restrictions first passed by the Trump administration against telecom maker Huawei, the new package will target dozens of Chinese companies and undermine their capacity to build computer chip technologies that power military weapons and surveillance equipment. “It is an aggressive approach by the U.S. government to start to really impair the capability of China to indigenously develop certain of these critical technologies,” said Emily Kilcrease, an analyst at the think tank Center for a New American Security.
→ Quote of the Day:
The fetish for manufacturing is part of the general fetish for keeping white males of low education outside the cities in the powerful positions they’re in in the U.S.
At an event on Thursday at the Cato Institute, Adam Posen, a Harvard-trained economist and the president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, lifted the veil on the fact that the focus on manufacturing jobs is really a ploy to keep the chronically unemployed princes of the Rust Belt in their positions of great power, with their average annual salaries of $36,000 and their life expectancy in steady decline.
→ Following the dustup after he wore a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt on Monday at Paris Fashion Week, Kanye West sat down with television personality Tucker Carlson to explain that, while he “[doesn’t] care about people’s reactions,” the controversy caused by the shirt brought to mind the flak he caught for donning a “Make America Great Again” hat and appearing with Donald Trump. “My so-called friends-slash-handlers around me told me if I said that I liked Trump that my career would be over, that my life would be over,” he told Carlson. “They said stuff like, ‘People get killed for wearing a hat like that.’ They threatened my life.” In the wide-ranging discussion, West said he might make another bid for the presidency in 2024 and criticized the embrace of obesity within the body diversity movement. “If someone thinks it’s attractive, to each his own. It’s actually clinically unhealthy,” he said.
→ Number of the Day: $570 million
The amount stolen from Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, in a hack that took place this past week, bringing the total amount stolen from crypto exchanges over the past 12 months to nearly $2 billion. This latest hack—yet another instance in a worrisome pattern of costly hacks, some of which U.S. law enforcement officials have linked to North Korea—is sure to hurt the standing of an industry that is still recovering from the loss of two-thirds of its value in recent years, amounting to some $2 trillion.
→ The body of Ahmad Hacham Hamdi Abu Marakhia, a 25-year-old Palestinian man who had fled the West Bank after his homosexuality became public, was found beheaded and beaten in Hebron this week. The Palestinian Authority is now investigating the crime. Ahmad had been living at the Al-Bait Al-Mokhtalef (The Different House), a safe place for those who were both Arab Israeli or Palestinian and identified as LGBTQ, before he was kidnapped. He was there for safety and for counseling related to the difficulties of being gay and growing up in the West Bank. “He was making extraordinary strides in his rehabilitation,” the director of Al-Bait Al-Mokhtalef told The Jerusalem Post. “An industrious, intelligent man ... he was looking forward to leaving the country. He was next in line.”
→ Videos of Azerbaijani soldiers killing and mutilating Armenian prisoners of war are circulating online, as the most recent fighting between the two countries comes to a fragile pause. While the border between these two countries has long been an area of dispute and conflict, heavy shelling began in early September, with hundreds of soldiers from each country killed before a cease-fire was reached later that month. Last week, video footage of Azerbaijani soldiers mowing down unarmed Armenian soldiers with machine guns emerged; this followed the release of footage of Azerbaijani soldiers killing a female soldier and then mutilating her body. Azerbaijan’s government has begun investigating these videos and has promised to take action, though the country’s previous promises to address war crimes have often been disappointing. Following the release of similar footage in 2020, one Azerbaijani soldier was arrested, only to be honored two years later with a medal for “service to the fatherland.”
Programming note: The Scroll will be off on Monday and Tuesday for Sukkot and will return on Wednesday.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
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Sukkot is a mere two days away, which gives you just enough time to move through the vast trove of Tablet articles, recipes, and histories that explore the weeklong holiday. You can begin on the Tablet Sukkot page or dive right in with “The Etrog,” a short story from the 1966 Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon that appeared on Tablet in 2015 as a new translation from Agnon scholar, Jeffrey Saks.
To witness how precious the mitzvah of Etrog is to the Jewish people one need only visit Meah Shearim between Elul and Sukkot. That neighborhood, which is like a withered plant all year long, becomes a verdant pleasure garden in that season, with stores full of etrogs, lulavs, and hadasim. Jews from all over Jerusalem crowd into those stores, inspecting the etrogs, lulavs, and hadasim, or sharing learned insights about them. Even the elderly, who never exit their own doorposts all year long, either due to weakness or fear of wasting moments from Torah study, come to purchase an etrog. Because of the importance of this mitzvah, they go to the trouble to select their own etrog—after all, an etrog selected by someone else cannot be compared to one chosen by one’s own hand. These elderly jump from courtyard to courtyard and from shop to shop, with renewed youth and vigor as the shopkeepers run to and fro with boxes full of etrogs, each according to the stature of the customer, and the budget he has to spend. In between push young boys with little baskets woven of the lulav palm fronds, used to bind the Sukkot species together, beautifying the mitzvah, and beautiful in and of themselves on account of their lovely shape.
The morning after Yom Kippur I went to purchase an etrog for myself. I pushed my way into the shop of a seller of old books, who abandons book selling during the month or so before Sukkot in order to sell etrogs.
The shop was full of customers, aside from the usual scholars and the types that crowd about wherever crowds are gathered. A beautiful scent arose from the etrogs and hadasim, which masked the smell of old books, most of which had come from the apartments of poor folk, forced to sell off their libraries to buy Sabbath provisions or to marry off their daughters.
The book seller, who had become an etrogger (that is, a seller of etrogs), was busy with his merchandise. Very, very busy. He leaped from corner to corner, from shelf to shelf, pulling one etrog out of its wrapping while wrapping another etrog back up. He opened one crate of etrogs, hiding away an etrog or two, all the while running to greet his customers, sharing a word with this one and that, like a guest of honor glad to see each and every acquaintance who had come to rejoice with him. It is the manner of merchants that every deed is intended toward advancing their livelihood, and this fellow, too, acted to increase his income, yet love of the mitzvah itself elevated the man to act with alacrity in order that his customers might merit beautiful lulavs, beautiful etrogs, and triple-leaved hadasim. Know this to be true, for that year road travel was perilous, and he endangered himself, traveling to Transjordan and a variety of other terrible places, to import lulavs, etrogs, and hadasim the likes of which Jerusalem had never seen even in times of peace. If a person should say, “There’s a wrinkle in this here etrog,” know that this wrinkle is to the praise of the etrog, for the fruit that Eve ate in the Garden of Eden was none other than an etrog, and her teeth marks remain on the fruit in the shape of this wrinkle.
On seeing that the shop was packed, and the storekeeper preoccupied, I decided to leave. He pulled me back and said, “Wait a moment and I’ll give you an etrog that blesses those who bless on it.” He abandoned all his other customers, jumped about while presenting me with two or three etrogs; about each he asked, “Were you looking for one like this? Is this the one you desire?” I hadn’t a chance to examine them before he presented a fourth, fifth, and sixth etrog. I hadn’t a chance to examine any of these either before he left me to attend to another customer. As he treated me, so he treated him. Despite the differences among the etrogs—in size, quality, and beauty—the storekeeper’s mouth had the same word of praise for each. While he was standing with an etrog held in the face of one customer, he had bounced back to me saying, “Nice choice. That’s the etrog I thought to suggest to you from the start.” When he told me its price, I set it aside. After all, aside from the etrog we have many other mitzvot, and none of them are free. I set aside that etrog and sought another more within my budget. The storekeeper smiled at me and said, “Rabban Gamliel purchased an etrog for one thousand zuz, and the sages did not even specify whether it was beautiful or not, and you set aside the choicest of etrogs on account of a few shillings?”
Aside from the storekeeper who at first ignored me, then attended me, then ignored me again, there were various others who didn’t leave me alone. They grabbed from my hand each etrog I picked up to inspect—either to buy it themselves or to speak some learned insight about it. In that way I heard the tales that are repeated each year: like the story of the rebbe from Nashkiz, who took all his savings to buy an etrog. He saw an old man crying over a dead horse. He asked the man why he was crying. The man replied, “I am a water carrier, and this horse would pull my wagon. Now that it is dead, so is my livelihood.” The rabbi took out all his money, giving it to the man to purchase a new horse. That righteous man said, “What’s the difference? Etrog is one of God’s commandments, as is giving charity. Let others recite a blessing over their etrogs. I will bless that horse.” Many other tales were told. Since they are old and well-known I will leave them be and only tell a new tale that has something new to teach us.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/the-etrog