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US Intel

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Re: US Intel

#161

Post by davedx »

dfxm12 wrote: post #124
themgt wrote: post #7

I’ll be honest: there is a very good chance this won’t work .... At the same time, the China concerns are real, Intel Foundry needs a guarantee of existence to even court customers, and there really is no coming back from an exit. There won’t be a startup to fill Intel’s place. The U.S. will be completely dependent on foreign companies for the most important products on earth, and while everything may seem fine for t…

It's such a stunning dereliction the US let things get to this point. It's a side effect of systemically putting short term gains ahead of long term research. CHIPs act may be too little, it is certainly too late...

> systemically putting short term gains ahead of long term research

That's more the stock market than the US government though. You could argue the US government tries to play a long game, and often the way the US plays that game is to let the free market decide (hands off, small government). It's definitely a valid strategy and has worked extremely well in a number of other industries, but for this specific niche, less so, and even then you could argue it's down to Intel's mismanagement than anything the government could or should have done.

Re: US Intel

#162

Post by davedx »

nonethewiser wrote: post #129
themgt wrote: post #7

I’ll be honest: there is a very good chance this won’t work .... At the same time, the China concerns are real, Intel Foundry needs a guarantee of existence to even court customers, and there really is no coming back from an exit. There won’t be a startup to fill Intel’s place. The U.S. will be completely dependent on foreign companies for the most important products on earth, and while everything may seem fine for t…

Is it just me or is the author only making an argument for why Intel is too big to fail? He says hes steelmanning the equity stake but then he doesn't argue why it's necessary. He devotes 2 sentences to CLAIMING its necessary after aruging that Intel is too big to fail. The article is basically like this: > Leading edge domestic foundry companies are a national security concern. Therefor Intel is too big to fail. OK.…

Yeah he could have explained that more, maybe he's assuming familiarity with other public-private ventures around the world?

If I was explaining it I would say "a huge equity stake gives you a lot of votes and influence over the company's strategic direction", including what the returns to shareholders should look like.

Think of railways in countries where the government has say, a 50% stake.

Re: US Intel

#163

Post by jmyeet »

foobarian wrote: post #73
jmyeet wrote: post #30

The short version is: this can work but it won't. Let me just say, for those of us who remember the 1990s and 2000s, Intel's drop off has been something nobody would've predicted. It's hard to overstate just how dominant they were (other than the fairly brief but significant Athlon64 era). And even when they were behind on consumer CPUs, which they were until the Core Duo/Centrino platform (which was really the Penti…

> There are multiple ways to describe China's economy but the most accurate and relevant for this topic is that it's a command economy That brings up an interesting point. It seems to be a conventional wisdom that centrally planned economies don't work (and did not work in cases where they were tried) as well as Western-style capitalism because of the communication and command bottlenecks. But what if those bottlenec…

What is "conventional wisdom"? It's propaganda, basically.

You might be tempted to think of academics as if they're operating independently, almost as if they're in an Ivory Tower where they bless us with missives occasionally as they make deep, apolitical discoveries. But that's just not the case.

There is an entire ecosystem of think tanks and funding to push the neoliberalism agenda. This is entirely self-interested. And it's not necessarily that funding is buying particular opinions. It's that anyone who contradicts this narrative simply gets self-selected out of the academic grants pipeline.

I stend to refer to this as the Tyranny of Austrian Economists [1].

There is an entire industry built to convince people that capitalism is good and collectivism of any kind is bad. It also misattributes the wealth of the developed world to capitalism when it's really about exploitation (eg slavery), colonialism and imperialism.

It's really no different to all the industry funded tobacco research that "proved" how safe smoking was.

Africa isn't poor. The people might generally be poor but Africa is not. It's simply been looted by the West. You don't commit resources to an imperial project that is poor.

If command economies are so unsuccessful why do they need to be isolated and starved (eg Cuba)? Won't they just fail on their own? The whole point is to punish any contradiction to capitalist dogma and to engineer their failure to prove that point.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#Austrian_School

Re: US Intel

#164

Post by davedx »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #90
themgt wrote: post #7

I’ll be honest: there is a very good chance this won’t work .... At the same time, the China concerns are real, Intel Foundry needs a guarantee of existence to even court customers, and there really is no coming back from an exit. There won’t be a startup to fill Intel’s place. The U.S. will be completely dependent on foreign companies for the most important products on earth, and while everything may seem fine for t…

Perhaps then fabs should be considered important enough for the US then that a new entity, perhaps not unlike NASA, is created to create and run these.

The US already has DARPA that does semiconductor research, particularly where it intersects the military.

Re: US Intel

#165

Post by AnIrishDuck »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #157
monknomo wrote: post #121

the president unilaterally extorting 10% ownership out of a company isn't going to build the kind of system that competes with anyone. Big business can't really thrive under this kind of thing any more than corner stores can thrive under a protection racket.

Didn't the US pay $9.8 billion? Intel's market cap is $106 billion, so $9.8 billion for 10% is buying at a slight discount. If that data is correct, how did the US "extort" ownership? Look, I'm as terrified of Trump's overreach as the next guy. I could easily see him extorting partial ownership of companies. But I don't see this as being that. Can you make a convincing argument otherwise?

What was the legal basis for this "purchase"? Because as I understand it, Trump came in, saw a law he didn't like (CHIPS), and unilaterally "altered the deal"

I don't think it's fair to characterize this as some kind of standard stock sale, as the terms were never set out as such from the start. (And to be fair, there are lots of valid criticisms of CHIPS)

Instead, funding was voted for by Congress... and then a third party came in, threatened to kill it on a dubious legal basis, and extracted protection money (well, shares). That's textbook extortion.

Re: US Intel

#166

Post by yndoendo »

Intel is dead to me for capitulating to narcissistic, authoritarian, inhuman, apathetical Donald Trump.

There is no one in the Trump administrator that has the balls to tell Donald Trump he is and idiot and doesn't know what he is talking about. Intel will bend over backwards and fail because of this mentality. Donald Trump knows better than all the engineers at Intel according to his followers. Just like when stated he knows more about dish washers than anyone else in the world.

Intel will need to hide the actual course their are taking to actual product a viable solution. This scenario seems to mirror the development of the MP43/MP44. Government was against it because the administration was too dumb to understand it. Government will also like short versus long term gains because the short gains allow for quick propaganda usage.

Re: US Intel

#167

Post by [deleted] »

RealityVoid wrote: post #130
makestuff wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah seeing the innovations DJI is making in agriculture makes me wonder why VCs do not want to fund other startups like it. I know the margins are worse and it takes way more capital to fund hardware companies, but that has to be better than funding another chat-gpt wrapper. I guess that is why I am not a VC though lol.

They're just hard. What is the US robotics startup that you would use as an example of success? iRobot? It barely broke even.

[deleted]

Re: US Intel

#168

Post by davedx »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #157
monknomo wrote: post #121

the president unilaterally extorting 10% ownership out of a company isn't going to build the kind of system that competes with anyone. Big business can't really thrive under this kind of thing any more than corner stores can thrive under a protection racket.

Didn't the US pay $9.8 billion? Intel's market cap is $106 billion, so $9.8 billion for 10% is buying at a slight discount. If that data is correct, how did the US "extort" ownership? Look, I'm as terrified of Trump's overreach as the next guy. I could easily see him extorting partial ownership of companies. But I don't see this as being that. Can you make a convincing argument otherwise?

It was a grant (free money). Then the terms were (mostly) unilaterally changed to be an equity investment. Right?

Re: US Intel

#169

Post by klooney »

maxhille wrote: post #149
klooney wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best case, we get President Vance before 2028 and things settle down.

Well given Vance's connection to Peter Thiel I don't think it would be less destructive

It would be less mercurial, I think, although Vance is such a a political chameleon I don't totally know what he would do if he got his brass ring.

Re: US Intel

#170

Post by AnimalMuppet »

foobarian wrote: post #73
jmyeet wrote: post #30

The short version is: this can work but it won't. Let me just say, for those of us who remember the 1990s and 2000s, Intel's drop off has been something nobody would've predicted. It's hard to overstate just how dominant they were (other than the fairly brief but significant Athlon64 era). And even when they were behind on consumer CPUs, which they were until the Core Duo/Centrino platform (which was really the Penti…

> There are multiple ways to describe China's economy but the most accurate and relevant for this topic is that it's a command economy That brings up an interesting point. It seems to be a conventional wisdom that centrally planned economies don't work (and did not work in cases where they were tried) as well as Western-style capitalism because of the communication and command bottlenecks. But what if those bottlenec…

There are two problems with a command economy.

First, as you say, because of communication bottlenecks. 300 small bakeries (number made up) keep a better eye on how much bread is needed in Manhattan than a technocrat in DC, or even Albany. As you say, we now have the communication technology to overcome that.

But second, there is the command problem. You may be able to get the data there, but who's going to make the decisions? They were made by 300 (or however many) bakery owners; now they're going to be made by one or a few people. They may have the data, but do they know what to do with it? Do they know enough about bakeries and bread? Do they have the mental capacity to replace 300 people?

This gets worse as you get bigger scale. What if you're not just trying to do the bakeries of Manhattan? What if you're trying to do all the food supply in Manhattan? All of retail in Manhattan? All of retail in the whole country?

The other problem with a commander is that they can decide that they want something, whether or not the data supports it. And their subordinates may decide that they'll get better promotions (or at least keep their jobs) if they 1) do what the commander says and 2) tell the commander what he wants to hear.

Better ability to communicate the data does not fix the second problem at all.

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