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The CHIPS Act treats the symptoms, but not the causes
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/07/farewell-mr-chips/#we-used-to-make-things
There's this great throwaway line in 1992's Sneakers, where Dan Aykroyd, playing a conspiracy-addled hacker/con-man, is feverishly telling Sydney Poitier (playing an ex-CIA spook) about a 1958 meeting Eisenhower had with aliens where Ike said, "hey, look, give us your technology, and we'll give you all the cow lips you want."
Poitier dismisses Aykroyd ("Don't listen to this man. He's certifiable"). We're meant to be on Poitier's side here, but I've always harbored some sympathy for Aykroyd in this scene.
That's because I often hear echoes of Aykroyd's theory in my own explanations of the esoteric bargains and plots that produced the world we're living in today. Of course, in my world, it's not presidents bargaining for alien technology in exchange for cow-lips – it's the world's wealthy nations bargaining to drop trade restrictions on the Global South in exchange for IP laws.
These bargains – which started as a series of bilateral and then multilateral agreements like NAFTA, and culminated in the WTO agreement of 1999 – were the most important step in the reordering of the world's economy around rent-extraction, cheap labor exploitation, and a brittle supply chain that is increasingly endangered by the polycrisis of climate and its handmaidens, like zoonotic plagues, water wars, and mass refugee migration.
Prior to the advent of "free trade," the world's rich countries fashioned debt into a whip-hand over poor, post-colonial nations. These countries had been bankrupted by their previous colonial owners, and the price of their freedom was punishing debts to the IMF and other rich-world institutions in exchange for loans to help these countries "develop."
Like all poor debtors, these countries were said to have gotten into their predicament through moral failure – they'd "lived beyond their means."
(When rich people get into debt, bankruptcy steps in to give them space to "restructure" according to their own plans. When poor people get into debt, bankruptcy strips them of nearly everything that might help them recover, brands them with a permanent scarlet letter, and subjects them to humiliating micro-management whose explicit message is that they are not competent to manage their own affairs):
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#shoppers-choice
So the poor debtor nations were ordered to "deregulate." They had to sell off their state assets, run their central banks according to the dictates of rich-world finance authorities, and reorient their production around supplying raw materials to rich countries, who would process these materials into finished goods for export back to the poor world.
Naturally, poor countries were not allowed to erect "trade barriers" that might erode the capacity of this North-South transfer of high-margin goods, but this was not the era of free trade. It wasn't the free trade era because, while the North-South transfer was largely unrestricted, the South-North transfer was subject to tight regulation in the rich world.
In other words, poor countries were expected to export, say, raw ore to the USA and reimport high-tech goods, with low tariffs in both directions. But if a poor country processed that ore domestically and made its own finished goods, the US would block those goods at the border, slapping them with high tariffs that made them more expensive than Made-in-the-USA equivalents.
The argument for this unidirectional trade was that the US – and other rich countries – had a strategic need to maintain their manufacturing industries as a hedge against future geopolitical events (war, but also pandemics, extreme weather) that might leave the rich world unable to provide for itself. This rationale had a key advantage: it was true.
A country that manages its own central bank can create as much of its own currency as it wants, and use that money to buy anything for sale in its own currency.
This may not be crucial while global markets are operating to the country's advantage (say, while the rest of the world is "willingly" pricing its raw materials in your country's currency), but when things go wrong – war, plague, weather – a country that can't make things is at the rest of the world's mercy.
If you had to choose between being a poor post-colonial nation that couldn't supply its own technological needs except by exporting raw materials to rich countries, and being a rich country that had both domestic manufacturing capacity and a steady supply of other countries' raw materials, you would choose the second, every time.
What's not to like?
Here's what.
The problem – from the perspective of America's ultra-wealthy – was that this arrangement gave the US workforce a lot of power. As US workers unionized, they were able to extract direct concessions from their employers through collective bargaining, and they could effectively lobby for universal worker protections, including a robust welfare state – in both state and federal legislatures. The US was better off as a whole, but the richest ten percent were much poorer than they could be if only they could smash worker power.
That's where free trade comes in. Notwithstanding racist nonsense about "primitive" countries, there's no intrinsic defect that stops the global south from doing high-tech manufacturing. If the rich world's corporate leaders were given free rein to sideline America's national security in favor of their own profits, they could certainly engineer the circumstances whereby poor countries would build sophisticated factories to replace the manufacturing facilities that sat behind the north's high tariff walls.
These poor-country factories could produce goods ever bit as valuable as the rich world's shops, but without the labor, environmental and financial regulations that constrained their owners' profits. They slavered for a business environment that let them kill workers; poison the air, land and water; and cheat the tax authorities with impunity.
For this plan to work, the wealthy needed to engineer changes in both the rich world and the poor world. Obviously, they would have to get rid of the rich world's tariff walls, which made it impossible to competitively import goods made in the global south, no matter how cheaply they were made.
But free trade wasn't just about deregulation in the north – it also required a whole slew of new, extremely onerous regulations in the global south. Corporations that relocated their manufacturing to poor – but nominally sovereign – countries needed to be sure that those countries wouldn't try to replicate the American plan of becoming actually sovereign, by exerting control over the means of production within their borders.
Recall that the American Revolution was inspired in large part by fury over the requirement to ship raw materials back to Mother England and then buy them back at huge markups after they'd been processed by English workers, to the enrichment of English aristocrats. Post-colonial America created new regulations (tariffs on goods from England), and – crucially – they also deregulated.
Specifically, post-revolutionary America abolished copyrights and patents for English persons and firms. That way, American manufacturers could produce sophisticated finished goods without paying rent to England's wealthy making those goods cheaper for American buyers, and American publishers could subsidize their editions of American authors' books by publishing English authors on the cheap, without the obligation to share profits with English publishers or English writers.
The surplus produced by ignoring the patents and copyrights of the English was divided (unequally) among American capitalists, workers, and shoppers. Wealthy Americans got richer, even as they paid their workers more and charged less for their products. This incubated a made-in-the-USA edition of the industrial revolution. It was so successful that the rest of the world – especially England – began importing American goods and literature, and then American publishers and manufacturers started to lean on their government to "respect" English claims, in order to secure bilateral protections for their inventions and books in English markets.
This was good for America, but it was terrible for English manufacturers. The US – a primitive, agricultural society – "stole" their inventions until they gained so much manufacturing capacity that the English public started to prefer American goods to English ones.
This was the thing that rich-world industrialists feared about free trade. Once you build your high-tech factories in the global south, what's to stop those people from simply copying your plans – or worse, seizing your factories! – and competing with you on a global scale? Some of these countries had nominally socialist governments that claimed to explicitly elevate the public good over the interests of the wealthy. And all of these countries had the same sprinkling of sociopaths who'd gladly see a million children maimed or the land poisoned for a buck – and these "entrepreneurs" had unbeatable advantages with their countries' political classes.
For globalization to work, it wasn't enough to deregulate the rich world – capitalists also had to regulate the poor world. Specifically, they had to get the poor world to adopt "IP" laws that would force them to willingly pay rent on things they could get for free: patents and other IP, even though it was in the short-term, medium-term, and long-term interests of both the nation and its politicians and its businesspeople.
Thus, the bargain that makes me sympathetic to Dan Aykroyd: not cow lips for alien tech; but free trade for IP law. When the WTO was steaming towards passage in the late 1990s, there was (rightly) a lot of emphasis on its deregulatory provisions: weakening of labor, environmental and financial laws in the poor world, and of tariffs in the rich world.
But in hindsight, we all kind of missed the main event: the TRIPS (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights). This actually started before the WTO treaty (it was part of the GATT, a predecessor to the WTO), but the WTO spread it to countries all over the world. Under the TRIPS, poor countries are required to honor the IP claims of rich countries, on pain of global sanction.
That was the plan: instead of paying American workers to make Apple computers, say, Apple could export the "IP" for Macs and iPhones to countries like China, and these countries would produce Apple products that were "designed in California, assembled in China." China would allow Apple to treat Chinese workers so badly that they routinely committed suicide, and would lock up or kill workers who tried to unionize. China would accept vast shipments of immortal, toxic e-waste. And China wouldn't let its entrepreneurs copy Apple's designs, be they software, schematics or trademarks.
Apple isn't the only company that pursued this strategy, but no company has executed it as successfully. It's not for nothing that Steve Jobs's hand-picked successor was Tim Cook, who oversaw the transfer of even the most exacting elements of Apple manufacturing to Chinese facilities, striking bargains with contractors like Foxconn that guaranteed that workers would be heavily – lethally! – surveilled and controlled to prevent the twin horrors of unionization and leaks.
For the first two decades of the WTO era, the most obvious problems with this arrangement was wage erosion (for American workers) and leakage (for the rich). China's "socialist" government was only too happy to help Foxconn imprison workers who demanded better wages and working conditions, but they were far more relaxed about knockoffs, be they fake iPods sold in market stalls or US trade secrets working their way into Huawei products.
These were problems for the American aristocracy, whose investments depended on China disciplining both Chinese workers and Chinese businesses. For the American people, leakage was a nothingburger. Apple's profits weren't shared with its workforce beyond the relatively small number of tech workers at its headquarters. The vast majority of Apple employees, who flogged iPhones and scrubbed the tilework in gleaming white stores across the nation, would get the same minimal (or even minimum) wage no matter how profitable Apple grew.
It wasn't until the pandemic that the other shoe dropped for the American public. The WTO arrangement – cow lips for alien technology – had produced a global system brittle supply chains composed entirely of weakest links. A pandemic, a war, a ship stuck in the Suez Canal or Houthi paramilitaries can cripple the entire system, perhaps indefinitely.
For two decades, we fought over globalization's effect on wages. We let our corporate masters trick us into thinking that China's "cheating" on IP was a problem for the average person. But the implications of globalization for American sovereignty and security were banished to the xenophobic right fringe, where they were mixed into the froth of Cold War 2.0 nonsense. The pandemic changed that, creating a coalition that is motivated by a complex and contradictory stew of racism, environmentalism, xenophobia, labor advocacy, patriotism, pragmatism, fear and hope.
Out of that stew emerged a new American political tendency, mostly associated with Bidenomics, but also claimed in various guises by the American right, through its America First wing. That tendency's most visible artifact is the CHIPS Act, through which the US government proposes to use policy and subsidies to bring high-tech manufacturing back to America's shores.
This week, the American Economic Liberties Project published "Reshoring and Restoring: CHIPS Implementation for a Competitive Semiconductor Industry," a fascinating, beautifully researched and detailed analysis of the CHIPS Act and the global high-tech manufacturing market, written by Todd Achilles, Erik Peinert and Daniel Rangel:
https://www.economicliberties.us/our-work/reshoring-and-restoring-chips-implementation-for-a-competitive-semiconductor-industry/#
Crucially, the report lays out the role that the weakening of antitrust, the dismantling of tariffs and the strengthening of IP played in the history of the current moment. The failure to enforce antitrust law allowed for monopolization at every stage of the semiconductor industry's supply-chain. The strengthening of IP and the weakening of tariffs encouraged the resulting monopolies to chase cheap labor overseas, confident that the US government would punish host countries that allowed their domestic entrepreneurs to use American designs without permission.
The result is a financialized, "capital light" semiconductor industry that has put all its eggs in one basket. For the most advanced chips ("leading-edge logic"), production works like this: American firms design a chip and send the design to Taiwan where TSMC foundry turns it into a chip. The chip is then shipped to one of a small number of companies in the poor world where they are assembled, packaged and tested (AMP) and sent to China to be integrated into a product.
Obsolete foundries get a second life in the commodity chip ("mature-node chips") market – these are the cheap chips that are shoveled into our cars and appliances and industrial systems.
Both of these systems are fundamentally broken. The advanced, "leading-edge" chips rely on geopolitically uncertain, heavily concentrated foundries. These foundries can be fully captured by their customers – as when Apple prepurchases the entire production capacity of the most advanced chips, denying both domestic and offshore competitors access to the newest computation.
Meanwhile, the less powerful, "mature node" chips command minuscule margins, and are often dumped into the market below cost, thanks to subsidies from countries hoping to protect their corner of the high-tech sector. This makes investment in low-power chips uncertain, leading to wild swings in cost, quality and availability of these workhorse chips.
The leading-edge chipmakers – Nvidia, Broadcom, Qualcomm, AMD, etc – have fully captured their markets. They like the status quo, and the CHIPS Act won't convince them to invest in onshore production. Why would they?
2022 was Broadcom's best year ever, not in spite of its supply-chain problems, but because of them. Those problems let Broadcom raise prices for a captive audience of customers, who the company strong-armed into exclusivity deals that ensured they had nowhere to turn. Qualcomm also profited handsomely from shortages, because its customers end up paying Qualcomm no matter where they buy, thanks to Qualcomm ensuring that its patents are integrated into global 4G and 5G standards.
That means that all standards-conforming products generate royalties for Qualcomm, and it also means that Qualcomm can decide which companies are allowed to compete with it, and which ones will be denied licenses to its patents. Both companies are under orders from the FTC to cut this out, and both companies ignore the FTC.
The brittleness of mature-node and leading-edge chips is not inevitable. Advanced memory chips (DRAM) roughly comparable in complexity to leading-edge chips, while analog-to-digital chips are as easily commodified as mature-node chips, and yet each has a robust and competitive supply chain, with both onshore and offshore producers. In contrast with leading-edge manufacturers (who have been visibly indifferent to the CHIPS incentives), memory chip manufacturers responded to the CHIPS Act by committing hundreds of billions of dollars to new on-shore production facilities.
Intel is a curious case: in a world of fabless leading-edge manufacturers, Intel stands out for making its own chips. But Intel is in a lot of trouble. Its advanced manufacturing plans keep foundering on cost overruns and delays. The company keeps losing money. But until recently, its management kept handing its shareholders billions in dividends and buybacks – a sign that Intel bosses assume that the US public will bail out its "national champion." It's not clear whether the CHIPS Act can save Intel, or whether financialization will continue to hollow out a once-dominant pioneer.
The CHIPS Act won't undo the concentration – and financialization – of the semiconductor industry. The industry has been awash in cheap money since the 2008 bailouts, and in just the past five years, US semiconductor monopolists have paid out $239b to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, enough to fund the CHIPS Act five times over. If you include Apple in that figure, the amount US corporations spent on shareholder returns instead of investing in capacity rises to $698b. Apple doesn't want a competitive market for chips. If Apple builds its own foundry, that just frees up capacity at TSMC that its competitors can use to improve their products.
The report has an enormous amount of accessible, well-organized detail on these markets, and it makes a set of key recommendations for improving the CHIPS Act and passing related legislation to ensure that the US can once again make its own microchips. These run a gamut from funding four new onshore foundries to requiring companies receiving CHIPS Act money to "dual-source" their foundries. They call for NIST and the CPO to ensure open licensing of key patents, and for aggressive policing of anti-dumping rules for cheap chips. They also seek a new law creating an "American Semiconductor Supply Chain Resiliency Fee" – a tariff on chips made offshore.
Fundamentally, these recommendations seek to end the outsourcing made possible by restrictive IP regimes, to undercut Wall Street's power to demand savings from offshoring, and to smash the market power of companies like Apple that make the brittleness of chip manufacturing into a feature, rather than a bug. This would include a return to previous antitrust rules, which limited companies' ability to leverage patents into standards, and to previous IP rules, which limited exclusive rights chip topography and design ("mask rights").
All of this will is likely to remove the constraints that stop poor countries from doing to America the same things that postcolonial America did to England – that is, it will usher in an era in which lots of countries make their own chips and other high-tech goods without paying rent to American companies. This is good! It's good for poor countries, who will have more autonomy to control their own technical destiny. It's also good for the world, creating resiliency in the high-tech manufacturing sector that we'll need as the polycrisis overwhelms various places with fire and flood and disease and war. Electrifying, solarizing and adapting the world for climate resilience is fundamentally incompatible with a brittle, highly concentrated tech sector.
Pluralizing high-tech production will make America less vulnerable to the gamesmanship of other countries – and it will also make the rest of the world less vulnerable to American bullying. As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman describe so beautifully in their 2023 book Underground Empire, the American political establishment is keenly aware of how its chokepoints over global finance and manufacturing can be leveraged to advantage the US at the rest of the world's expense:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties
Look, I know that Eisenhower didn't trade cow-lips for alien technology – but our political and commercial elites really did trade national resiliency away for IP laws, and it's a bargain that screwed everyone, except the one percenters whose power and wealth have metastasized into a deadly cancer that threatens the country and the planet.
Image:
Mickael Courtiade (modified)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/197739384@N07/52703936652/
CC BY 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
#pluralistic#chips act#ip#monopolies#antitrust#national security#industrial policy#american economic liberties project#tmsc#leading-edge#intel#mature node#lagging edge#foundries#fabless
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I created a new style for myself for drawing the clones and its so crazy easy. So here meet the boys of Mariden.
Description of the boys below the cut
Top row, left to right:
Rocker: proclaimed by his brothers as the "best medic on the whole GAR," Rocker is creative, compassionate, resourceful, and very very good at coming up with devious prank ideas. He and Claptrap are inseparable and often if one is up to mischief, the other isn't far behind. Rocker's creativity also comes in handy when they run out of important medical supplies. He knows exactly what to use as a substitute and rest assured that he will find the perfect plant or herb from the forests of Mariden to cure what ails you.
Dagger: with a temper to rival that of Darth Maul, Dagger is hands down the strongest member of this squad. He's terrifying when he's angry and if he somehow becomes the victim of Claptrap and Rocker's latest prank, they'd better run and hide. Despite his gruff exterior, Dagger does care for his brothers and will do anything to protect them, especially Scrap. Though the two of them have vastly different personalities, you can usually find the two of them working on a new weapon in Scrap's workshop or spotting each other in the gym.
Sarge: this poor man needs a nap like nobody's business but the only way he'll take one is if Rocker sedates him. Sarge doesn't have a temper like Dagger but he's not the warmest man on base either. Gruff and stern, Sarge has a rough past that taught him a lot - some lessons good, some bad - but no matter how bad his past, he's focused to the here and now and making sure his current squad doesn't kill themselves on accident. He may not show it a lot but he loves his men and will gladly lay down his life to keep them safe.
Bottom row, left to right:
Claptrap: the personification of "chaotic hot mess," Claptrap serves as two things at the Mariden station: the communications officer, and the resident prank expert. He loves a good joke or prank and will target anyone (except Rocker; the last time he tried that didn't go over so well). Despite his desires for laughter and practical jokes, Claptrap knows when any one of his brothers is having a bad day and will do whatever he can to help them and cheer them up. He'll tell them stories, make them a cup of caf, or take them outside on a hike. Even if the forests of Mariden can be dangerous, Claptrap is one with nature and is the perfect hiking guide. He loves art and has a handmade journal cataloging the various creatures he spots, and more often than not can be found hanging with Rocker in the med bay.
Scrap: clever, creative, and too curious for his own good, Scrap began tinkering while still on Kamino. Give him a broken Droid, and handful of old tools and about ten minutes and he'll have that Droid up and running like it was brand new. However, his inventions don't always work the way he intended them to, but he's determined to learn from his mistakes and never stop improving. And though brilliant he may be, his common sense and sense of self preservation aren't always in tact. Sarge has had to ban more than one of Scrap's ideas or prototypes due to safety reasons, but that doesn't stop Scrap from trying. You can most always find him in one of two places: in his workshop, or wherever Dagger is.
Visor: by far the most quiet natured clone you'll ever meet, Visor is probably the most mentally collected person in the whole squad (usually anyway). He's got a gentle nature and a heart full of compassion and if any of the boys need an ear to listen or a shoulder to lean on, Visor is gladly there for them. Even Sarge comes to him fairly often to let off some steam. He's not that hard to find: look for him on the lookout tower or out on the landing platform outside, patrolling the area and keeping an eye out for any droids or dangerous animals. He's ever vigilante and won't let anything that could hurt his brothers get past him.
#tmsc#the mariden station chronicles#rocker#dagger#sarge#claptrap#scrap#visor#clones#clone ocs#clone oc#clone#star wars#star wars the clone wars#fanfiction#fan story#star wars fan story#star wars fan characters#digital art#my art#twinkys brush
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I pull out of you with a satisfied grin, feeling you already swell up by the passing second. You'll have my baby breaking you any second now, and it'll be delicious to watch you as you birth right here in front of me. "I hope you're ready, darling, this is going to hurt."
(As a general warning, reminder that this is a long and painful birth. If discussions of distress during birth trigger you, maybe skip this one <3)
Labor starts one hour after these potions kick in, so I barely get any rest at all. I wake to a deeply uncomfortable aching in my stomach, and look down to see my belly an angry red with stretch marks. My chest, flattened out by surgery, has grown again slightly, tips leaky with milk. The baby is big and it's in just the right spot to stretch me the most. I groan slightly and look around for you, and not seeing you immediately, try to sit up.
And that's when the first contraction hits. I scream, the force of my body ramming my baby into my unprepared cervix sending shocks up my spine for minutes afterward. Gestation may have only taken an hour, but labor? I have no idea how long I'll be here. And judging by the pain, it's going to be some time.
I can feel the tension wrap around my abdomen with each contraction, my eyes wide. "No, no, nonononoNNNNNH--" I wail, praying that my body listens and stops pushing, I'm not ready. I try to stick my fingers inside to check and cringe, my cervix already sensitive.
Hours later, I'm still in the throes of the first stage. I'm cold with old sweat and my face is soaked in tears and snot. My throat is hoarse from crying, and I haven't yet been fully able to peel off the clothes I foolishly tried to put on twenty minutes in. Like I was going to make it to the hospital.
Finally, I begin to feel the baby drop into my canal. "S--ss-sstretching me, oh, god," I whimper, voice half gone. "Full, full, too much, too much--" my voice cracks and I choke back a sob, dedicating my energy to pushing. The contraction fades and I go nearly limp for a moment before pushing out of turn, trying so desperately for this to all be over. "Stop it, stop it, please, please just get out of me," I plead with my little one, white-knuckling the counter as I bear down again. With each completed contraction, I feel the baby slide backwards, and this marathon birthing only drags on.
I saw the sun set before I had that potion. It's now midday and I'm not even bulging yet. My legs have gone numb with the tension as I try fruitlessly to push more. I don't dare try to press on my stomach with my hands--I don't want to hurt the baby, even as its progress is tearing me apart--but I feel like I'm losing this battle.
Finally, blissfully, I feel my vulva start to stretch as the baby's head flattens my G-spot. I buck my hips in exhausted bliss, happy for the stimulation, if only for a moment. It took long enough to get this baby past my pelvis, and now I have to get it out of my cunt. I bend over, grip the towel I somehow managed to grab yesterday, and push for everything I have. My labia part as the head becomes visible for a moment, then it slips back in. I wail and try again. There it is. And it's gone. And there it is. And it's gone. There it iIIIIIIS--
I scream again as the weight of the baby hits my reddened vulva and stretches it out obscenely, two, three, four, five, seven inches out from its resting place. I shiver and reach down to feel it. "H-hi," I breathe, before pushing again. Nothing. My labia is almost white, the force and the stretch pushing all the blood out of it. "Stop, stop, please, just get out, just--just get--" I sob and push fruitlessly, the burning sensation becoming almost all I can feel.
At this point, I'm starting to get worried for the baby's safety. It's two hours past sunset again, and my water hasn't even broken by this point. I reach down to feel the sac, my vulva still engorged with the crown, and resolve myself. I'm either going to get this baby out now or it's going to be all over.
So I squat on shaky, unforgiving legs, grip the counter, and push. I tense my whole body, from shoulders to chest to belly and try to squeeze this child, your child, this huge, massive, painful, beautiful creature out, it's coming out, it's comi
(CW: upcoming mention of prolapse. The baby and I are fine, if you want to stop here :>)
You find me passed out on the floor, clammy, exhausted beyond belief, with my cunt turned inside out and twitching slightly, an angry, painful red, with your precious baby suckling at my meager chest without a care in the world.
Somewhere in my nearly-dreamless sleep, I think about doing it all again.
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Did you eat breakfast?
...
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Wha- hey, noooooo
You are scary, let me gooooo
-Boo
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Mind Slaughter notes
@mindslaughter-ms pspspspspsppsps
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Mariden Station: Base Rules
The Mariden Station Chronicles Directory
Every military operation requires rules to maintain the order and keep free of chaos, and Mariden is no different. But... Just because there's rules doesn't mean that they're ALWAYS obeyed. And sometimes the troopers manage to find loopholes, so some rules have to be adjusted over time. I must give a shout out to my lovely mutual @cross-my-heartt for their contributions to this! Thank you, Cross! :) You're amazing and I hope you enjoy these!
All troopers are to stay INDOORS after dark.
Experimental weapons are NOT to be tested on the premises of the base.
Scrap is not allowed unsupervised access to the cleaning closet.
Scrap is not allowed ANY access to the cleaning closet.
"Claptrap's story took a while last night" is not an acceptable excuse for being late for morning inspection.
No pets.
Neither Claptrap nor Rocker are allowed to bring any bundle or box on base that moves or makes any animal noises.
Stay away from the landing platform with grease of any kind.
The landing platform is NOT a slip-n-slide.
The emergency tunnels are not to be used as a storage space for snacks.
Scrap is not allowed any access to the cooking supplies in the galley.
Scrap is not allowed to be in the galley unsupervised.
No painting the computer consoles.
Any attempts at building a "killer droids" for the sake of sparring practice are prohibited.
"Killer droids" are prohibited.
Do not provoke Dagger to anger just to get him to wrestle with you. You will die.
Dagger's bunk is off-limits for pranks.
Claptrap is not allowed anywhere near the paint remover unless its an emergency.
Sarge must take a nap at least every 12 hours. Rocker has permission to use sedatives.
No one is allowed to pull an all-nighter before GAR inspections.
If Claptrap is seen going near anything with paint (besides himself or his belongings), stop him immediately.
All requests for new tools, paint, or devices is to be approved by Sarge first.
Dagger is not allowed to order extra quantities of caf without approval.
Prank wars are forbidden.
"The floor is lava" is not to be played with actual fire.
Claptrap is not allowed to have a paintbrush anywhere except in his and Rocker's barracks.
Fruit is not a projectile.
Visor is not allowed to stay up past curfew to finish his carvings.
Rocker is not allowed to test the poisonous aspect of any plants on his own person. There are machines for that.
No more screaming contests.
Caf is not an acceptable substitute for sleep.
The 22:00 curfew applies to Sarge, too, whether he likes it or not.
Visor is the only one allowed to cook anything for any reason at any time.
Twilight is still a child and thus is not allowed to have caf until she she's 60.
More to be added as I think them up. ^^
#mariden rules#tmsc#the mariden station chronicles#base rules#mariden#claptrap#rocker#scrap#sarge#visor#dagger#twilight#star wars#clone ocs#star wars ocs#cross-my-heartt
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the mary shelley club x letterboxd: rachel chavez
open for better quality! felicity / bram / thayer / freddie / all credit for scream review goes to sopheyquinn on letterboxd
#the mary shelly club#goldy moldavsky#rachel chavez#letterboxd#horror films#bram wildling#felicity chu#tmsc#msc#mary shelley club#thayer turner#horror aesthetic#the last girl#freddie martinez
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Appleが2nmプロセスA20作るでー
Appleが2nmプロセスA20作るでー
先日発表されたiPhone15 Pro/Maxには初めて3nmプロセスのA17 proというCPUが採用されました。なのに数日後今度は2nmプロセスの開発を記事としたニュースが飛び込んできました。
まだ、3nmプロセスでもやることがわんさかあるのに、既に次のニュースに移っているのはAppleらしいと思います。
今回は2nmプロセスをTSMCが作っているので、その解説とIntelの開発状況を解説します。
【タグ】
#Apple #CPU #TSMC #2nm #3nm #N2 #N3 #Intel #ゆっくり動画
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Piper Perri Rides That Dick Like a Hungry Slut
Piss Femdom in Public Park
ASA AKiRA SHOWS HOW MUCH
Bootylicious ebony pounded from behind POV
silver buffalo casino anadarko
Cute black BBW teen facefucked hard
jerk off to madison ivy
Four sexy teens licking each others cunt
PervCity Brandy Aniston Hot stepmom Anal
Fucking My Anal Slut Hubby in the Ass with a Dragon and Make Him Take a Creampie Pegging
#Jacobinisation#potentiate#gyn-#megascopically#calcifies#TMSC#trigraphs#portrayist#shotting#Gilbertine#Boxford#decalitre#cortexes#qualitied#waftage#tiltmaking#moon-charmed#ole-#kathal#predefine
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Inktober Day 2: Spiders. Dagger fears no spider. Granted, he wouldn't want one as a pet, but he's fine with them crawling on his person. Now Scrap on the other hand...
#i used too much ink on Dagger#too much black ⚫️#but that's alright#i think for the rest of these i'll still with using a pencil to color in their blacks#dagger#dagger the trooper#clone oc#star wars#the mariden station chronicles#tmsc#inktober#inktober 2023#twinkys brush#my art#traditional art#sketch#ink#scrap#scrap the trooper#clone trooper ocs#spiders#wheres spiders georg when you need him#maridentober
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I grin, wondering if you knew exactly what you were asking for. My hips stutter into yours, pounding away at your boy pussy greedily, slamming deeper and deeper inside you. "I can't wait to see you struggle and squat and scream my baby out." I purr, thrusts getting faster as I pant into your ear. "I can't wait to see you beg me for more babies after." I grunt, slamming my hips one last time into before spilling my load of hot cum into your pussy, knowing the second it touches inside of you that a baby is already forming.
I come again around you, leaning in close. "God, god, yes...thank you...." I sob into your shoulder. "Thank you..."
As the orgasms fade and my body works into overtime to build a baby, I fall asleep against you almost immediately. You can feel my stomach start to grow under your hands, and soon, I'll be squatting your baby into those same waiting hands.
TW: Somno suggestion under the cut
Maybe you could get to feel me swell up both inside and out, you know. I'm sure I'll appreciate it before the pain of labor sets my cunt on fire...
#tw somno#tmsc#prg#brt#potion rp#last chance to add something before I drop the birth novella :>#delivering-rosie#pushingrosie
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This vote is mostly for the family...
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Hello, dear kredena
-Boo
You fall right into my trap~
@mikebeanz @agent-felix
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Dear Mind Slaughter (And Boo too)
MS, you mentioned that the idea was just to confuse people, but I will admit, you really scared me ;w;
(it took ages to go to sleep last night and now I'm very tired waa)
It's mostly not your fault since my brain automatically puts in a tone of voice (and weirdly the one for you is scary asf) so yeahh
I'm just a sensitive kid ok idk what to do about that T0T
Boo, you're a goober /pos
You're one of the nicest AND you have a lot of funny videos for us (which is helping me with the sensitivity thing ahgshag) like the Among Us booty shake <33
So just thank you :]
If you see this, please actually. Respond. I'm going to get all akshhadgfafaghfdh if you don't waaa /neg /nm
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