Li'l story. I did a couple seminars with a completion bond producer up in Vancouver. This is a guy who, when your movie eats shit, comes in to turn it back into something that can be sold so that the insurer underwriting the production can recoup some of their losses. It won't be good, it won't be the director's artistic vision, but it'll be something that can be sold at a market somewhere. So, no surprise, he knew a thing or two about selling low-budg and micro-budg terrible movies.

Funny thing about Canada. They've got content rules that require 50% of what they air to be indigenous. And, since that wouldn't pay worth a crap left to its own devices, they fund it. Heavily.

My completion bond buddy thought this was the worst idea imaginable. Because, according to him, Canada as an exporter of content ranked somewhere below Chile. Nobody watches Canadian stuff except Canadians. Far and away, the best system was the American one, where the free market decides what you're going to watch, no subsidies anywhere.

But that was 2003.

The advent of digital production and internet communication made it so that pretty much anybody could suck down some of those sweet, sweet Canadian subsidies and tweak things a little so that Netflix can basically make things kinda Canadian, shoot in Canada and reap all those subsidies. The states caught on pretty quickly; you spend tax money on getting Californicators to show up and shoot in your back yard and your multiplier is 4x, 5x. So now your true-blue Hollywood production probably has eight key guys from Los Angeles and everyone else is a local whose wages are effectively paid by the tax subsidies necessary to drag Roland Emmerich and the 600 people he's paying out to a sound stage in Albuquerque to shoot Independence Day 2. So now Hollywood basically brands global shit and produces fuckall of it locally and everyone trying to make a living in the Valley is stuck doing porn.

Know who subsidizes chip manufacture? Everyone but the United States. Korea doesn't even really have a delineation between business and government. Taiwan?

Morris Chang came to the US to go to Harvard, transferred to MIT, got a Ph.D from Stanford, worked three years for Sylvania, spent 25 at Texas Instruments, became VP of Semiconductor Research and was told that was as high as his slant-eyed face was going to go.

After he left General Instrument Corporation, Sun Yun-suan recruited him to become chairman and president of the Industrial Technology Research Institute in Taiwan. As head of a government-sponsored non-profit, he was in charge of promoting industrial and technological development in Taiwan. Chang founded TSMC in 1987, the beginning of the period where firms increasingly saw value in outsourcing their manufacturing capabilities to Asia. Soon, TSMC became one of the world's most profitable chip makers.

Imagine where we would be if Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center had been a government nonprofit?