531–540 of 657 posts
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Yes, they have just forced China to make their own chips, and they will make them cheaper and in higher volume than anyone can do...
Absolutely correct; same for banning any other tech sales to China. I’m not sure it’s terrible policy, though. It’s only speeding up the inevitable a little.
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I ask again, who are these "shareholders" and why do we continue to play along with this monumental scam?
How do you think companies should work? If they all re-invested all their earnings into growth, wouldn't that mean that every company is growing un-sustainably? And what is the incentive for investors to fund these companies that never return anything to the investors?
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The alternative is to be dependent on the rest of the world for chips. The market decided that the most efficient transaction is to offshore all of this infrastructure to geopolitically-compromised areas and pray that China never does what every other emerging power in the history of geopolitics has done. The market chose wrong.
> pray that China never does what every other emerging power in the history of geopolitics has done. I am curious what you mean by this precisely. What other emerging powers have done what?
EDIT: There really does seem to have been this mindset in the 80s and 90s regarding China that they were going to liberalize once we shipped them a bunch of our industry and IP. You can only really believe that would happen if two things are true:
1) You have a woeful misunderstanding of Chinese politics
2) You think that the West, and the US in particular, have some sort of magic that will invariably keep us ahead of the Chinese. Maybe it was racism, maybe it was underestimating the power of collectivism, but there were people who really saw China as nothing more than a workforce that would happily do whatever Western companies wanted them to do, while providing absolutely no competition, forever and ever.
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Reinvesting in growth seems more sustainable than extracting all value until the company can't even keep up with its newer competitors. There's surely a middle ground where a company should return _excess_ profits to shareholders when they're doing well. Intel was too busy paying out hundreds of billions to notice that Apple/TSMC/ARM/AMD/NVIDIA were eating their lunch.
That doesn't mean that lack of funing was the problem. If the company leadership can't find a way to get a return on the money, why not take it somewhere else? Intel investors sell and become Nvidia investors. It seems like people have the blind assumption RnD investment always has profitable returns and is the limiting factor. There are real institutional differences and limitations to what money can do. You can't d…
Suppose I own you, my slave. I can work you for ten years, collecting the profits off your labour - or I can sell your kidneys, liver, eyes and heart for a large up-front profit. One approach is long-term sustainable, the other is not.
But looking at it this way entirely disregards your perspective on the situation. Perhaps you would like to have a say in some of the decision making? Perhaps the owner's profits aren't the be-all-end-all of things?
You can pretend to have a billion dollars and show great concern about how to turn it into two. Or you can accept that for 99.999% of people this is an exploitative system that destroys everything of true value, in the end leaving the one biggest capitalist with a giant bag of money and nothing left to buy with it.
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Semiconductor manufacturing is very capital intensive so running the company as a nonprofit is a nonstarter. You've presented historical data to counter the of argument that wage/salary growth MAY lead to potential unprofitability solely on the basis of one year's profit numbers. That's literally driving forward looking in the rearview mirror because it says very little about how profitable the company would be if it…
Ok then perhaps offer a better approximation, let's say 50% of profit instead of the 100% share. That is still a very decent wage and is on top of the existing labour expense which profit has already accounted for
- what if the EU writes a rule and then fines you for breaking it as a percentage of revenue? You can't have no money available for the future. You need a huge amount of money available for the future, as otherwise a company that pays its workers less (but still retains them) will beat you eventually
- why would anyone invest in you for the chance of no return? It's a high risk strategy to put $1m on a number in roulette for the chance of making a fortune; it's a ridiculous one to put $1m on a number in roulette for the chance of getting your money back
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It wasn't just intel, it was every semi-conductor manufacturer in the valley (hence the inability to find other work). They closed because it was cheaper to build in other countries, or to outsource from contractors who build in other countries (where organized labor doesn't exist). The U.S. lost thousands of high-paying (and tax-paying) labor positions and atrophied the skills that went with them. Intel profited fro…
> Now, the taxpayer has to pay Intel $8.5B to bring back manufacturing capacity to the U.S The tax payer had nothing to do with it. This is yet another example of the government taking our money (or borrowing our future money) and spending it in ways that we never agreed to and had no input on.
I understand why Intel is getting these, but would be nice to see this money go to companies that are still innovating and are somewhere in the US coalition/orbit (TSMC, Samsung, etc.)
Samsung? I wonder if this is coming from a position of ignorance... Samsung is among the companies of the world that might be producing negative externalities that weigh more than their positive contributions
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>Japan cannot get involved unless the US is directly attacked, their constitution and laws governing use of the JSDF are very explicit in forbidding any use other than defending themselves or the US. Japan can change this on a whim with one meeting of the legislature. You think Japan can't change its own laws? >If (when?) Taiwan gets China'd, that by itself cannot serve as a casus belli for Japan. Wrong. I don't know…
>Japan can change this on a whim with one meeting of the legislature. You think Japan can't change its own laws? Please have some clue about what you're talking about first: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Japan#Amendmen... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_96_of_the_Japanese_Con... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_9_of_the_Japanese_Cons... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Mutual…
What exactly do you think is the punitive remedy for Japan breaking clauses in thosd documents in that political scenario?
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Honestly it blows my mind they were able to give control of one of the most important industries in the world over to a foreign country like that.
>> Honestly it blows my mind they were able to give control of one of the most important industries in the world over to a foreign country like that. The engines of capitalism only look 1 quarter ahead. And the politicians who support them only look up to the next election. Unless you are majority or largely controlled by your founders, who care about building a good legacy.
As opposed to what, something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign?
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"because East Asia devolves into a war stricken basket case" The past decade of American media has been promoting this new cold war narrative as if there is inevitably going to be a major war with China. If there is war in East Asia then the whole international economic system will collapse, people will be starving in the streets. That's if it's not a nuclear Armageddon and we're left to rubbing two sticks together.…
> The world is so interconnected and everyone depends on everyone so much that there is basically no point in planning for this scenario There's always a point in planning for a scenario if you think the risk is high enough and there is something you can do to better prepare for it. In this scenario, the ones most impacted immediately will be the ones most dependent of the global economy. If you can't get the basics…
Even in the most benign case, if China is for whatever reason peacefully cut off from the global economy and we haven't been nukes into the stone age - having to move back to 22nm chips is going to be the least of our problems. To put it in perspective.. this is going to be a world where we no longer have cellphones and toiletpaper (b/c those are all made in China) and most equipment/machinery/refrigerators/washing-machines/cars/trains will overnight become at least in part unrepairable. Basically ever sector of the economy depends at least in some small part on the Chinese supply chain.