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Intel Honesty

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321–330 of 426 posts

Re: Intel Honesty

#321

Intel is trapped. Its debt repayments alone are massive. The poor performance in stock has encouraged 20years of wage stagnation to the point where you can literally earn over 50% more at amd or nvidia or even an startup for equivalent roles so they aren’t hiring the best. Their pay in the Bay Area is double tsmc in taiwan for equivalent roles in raw dollar terms but the ppp differences means your better off working…

It's grim at INTC but don't forget the CHIPS act and whatever else will follow that. The US government spends 0.5T per month - more than the market cap of all but the top 15 American companies [0] [1] Not saying it's a good or bad idea, or that it will or won't happen - but if the US government decides to reinvent Intel, they can easily write a cheque that (if spent wisely) might do the trick. [0] https://companiesma…

>It's grim at INTC but don't forget the CHIPS act and whatever else will follow that. ... if the US government decides to reinvent Intel, they can easily write a cheque that (if spent wisely) might do the trick.

I suspect the result of the CHIPS money going to Intel would be Starliner from Intel (btw, Starliner did meet all the development milestones set by the government, yet here we're). Rotten overbloated corporate managerial bureaucracy can digest any amount of money you throw at it, and it will make it only more rotten and overbloated.

Re: Intel Honesty

#322
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone looking to start a new manufacturing business would be insane to consider California for any number of reasons- cost-of-living, (urban) quality of life, regulatory environment, state taxes, etc. Right now manufacturers should be considering other states. Florida, Tennessee and Texas all are income-tax-free and have business friendly regulatory climates. Several states like Alabama and West Virginia offer extre…

>Florida, Tennessee and Texas all are income-tax-free and have business friendly regulatory climates. Yes, and abortion is illegal in those states, the schools are terrible, and they're full of MAGAts. You're not going to attract top talent to these places, especially women. There are very good reasons that knowledge industries are mostly concentrated in blue states.

You might be surprised to discover that roughly half of their population is women.

Re: Intel Honesty

#323
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked there on a contract while they were building a phone and had as many as six managers over six months. One of them would come in at 11, talk to me about nothing until lunch, then come back after lunch, talk more, and go home. I had to come in early to get anything done. When I was toward the end of my project and sure I wasn’t going to try to get a blue badge I laid into someone in a meeting. It wasn’t my bes…

This is a great indicator of how it's often presented as collaborative or even slightly-"woke" on the outside, when in reality, advancement is cutthroat. But conducted in an cliquey/politically repressive atmosphere where everyone is afraid to act like that, but when someone has the courage to start speaking their mind, the rest look to them as the one who can save the malaise from the stagnation. I wonder how it bec…

How did Amazon (possibly no less "toxic", Idk) embarrassed combative disagreement and sublimated that natural emergent expression/desire during stressful situations into something that worked for the company, whereas Intel sounds like it failed to do that?

All that worked (or seemed to work) for Intel for many years - 30+ years of profits and market dominance. I don't know the exact abuse level of Amazon, Microsoft, Apple or wherever but if they're equivalent, they'll keep going 'tell they stop.

The one thing toxic culture seems to do is prevent recovery when a company suffers a setback.

Re: Intel Honesty

#324
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The biggest reason is geopolitics: If escalated confrontation happens with China If escalated confrontation happens with China, and that is massive IF that is dependent on insanely belligerent action from the West like giving nukes to Taiwan, then new semiconductor manufacturing will be the least of our worries. A Chinese blockade on Chinese and East Asian exports to US would result in total economic collapse in US…

> (allegedly, some of their attempts were undermined by backchannel diplomacy from Gen. Milley and the JSOC) Did you mean JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff)?

Yes

Re: Intel Honesty

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Florida, Tennessee and Texas all are income-tax-free and have business friendly regulatory climates. Yes, and abortion is illegal in those states, the schools are terrible, and they're full of MAGAts. You're not going to attract top talent to these places, especially women. There are very good reasons that knowledge industries are mostly concentrated in blue states.

You might be surprised to discover that roughly half of their population is women.

Not women who'd work in a tech company.

Re: Intel Honesty

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of capitalism is to establish, reinforce, and perpetuate a class hierarchy where the people on the bottom must constantly pay to exist while the people on top constantly get paid to exist. This shit isn't a side effect, it's the entire point of the exercise.

Capitalism gives you opportunities to climb the ladder

Progress should be saying "we don't have to spend so much of our time and effort on the ladder".

Our forefathers would be baffled to see that we've coerced crops into tenfold their natural yield, conquered lightning, the wind, and the sun itself, and yet, millions of people are still working 40+ hours a week to not starve or go homeless.

Re: Intel Honesty

#327
post #225
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those rails involve an amazing amount of complexity that boils down to the entire system being nonsensical. Payments are pulled instead of pushed; the underlying credit card numbers lack even a semblance of security; there is all kinds of mis-design due to the way that restaurant tips work; it all started when credit card imprints/readers were all assumed to be offline; etc.

What do you mean "it all started..." ? One of my earliest memories is my mum paying for groceries using her credit card in the 90/00s, where the machine used was completely mechanical/manual. It copied the card number (that was embossed on the plastic) by literally taking a carbon paper rubbing of the card. The system was designed to be offline, because back then there was no "online".

You could argue the problem was that it took a system that more-or-less worked offline, and tried to hammer it into working online.

A "built for online first" payment paradigm would look different, but it would have an enormous chicken-egg or installed-base problem, unless you had something with government-level muscle enforcing it.

Re: Intel Honesty

#328
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you suggesting the parent comment should be considering derivatives like agricultural product futures?

Yeah. The government could pre-pay for chips to guarantee demand then auction the futures right before the chips are manufactured.

what if no one buys the futures, which is entirely possible?

Re: Intel Honesty

#329
post #5

The geopolitical bit of all this is the real wild card. No one really knows what's going to happen there.

The geopolitical bit is that TSMC is building local US and EU fabs in case of a Taiwan invasion. Once those are up and Intel becomes redundant the ad hoc subsidies might just dry up.

I have to wonder if a TSMC-owned fab in Phoenix is still a different geopolitical risk factor than an Intel-owned one.

It reduces the deterrence factor of the TSMC facilities on Taiwan: if they get damaged or sabotaged during an invasion, the entire industry doesn't get blown back to 2010. But now I'm imagining they'd have a board of directors having to meet overseas and claim their legitimacy to trading partners, almost like the "governments in exile" during wars.

Re: Intel Honesty

#330
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. The government could pre-pay for chips to guarantee demand then auction the futures right before the chips are manufactured.

what if no one buys the futures, which is entirely possible?

Then it's a bailout.
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