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US Intel

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Re: US Intel

#191

Post by zoeysmithe »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #72
zoeysmithe wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a real folly in capitalist countries thinking they can be self-sufficient walled castles. Capitalism by its nature will seek out the lowest cost be it in labor or manufacturing. That means often means outsourcing. Our system has no breaks for this. In fact it works actively for this, hence the neolib ideal of "just move towards efficiencies, and let the chips fall where they may." This is ideal under capitali…

> Nationalism/protectionism and capitalism are fundamentally incompatible Huh? France and Germany are prime counter examples of your statement.

They both have strong labor unions and/or collective bargaining agreements the USA does not have. That is to say socialist-coded policy is what is helping here, not capitalist ones.

Their benefits are almost purely from the strength of the working class, hence workers having it better there.

In France, the percentage of employees covered by a collective bargaining agreement, which is very high (around 95-98%)

In Germany, about 50% of workers are directly covered by collective bargaining agreements (CBAs)

In 2024, the union membership rate in the United States was 9.9%, representing 14.3 million workers, while 16.0 million workers were represented by a union under a collective agreement, accounting for 11.1% of the workforce.

---

If American workers want a better life they need CBA's and unions, not protectionist tariffs and buying chunks of random tech companies.

Re: US Intel

#192

Post by nikbackm »

ulfw wrote: post #173
troad wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have developed an economy oriented around selling one another websites, and we are only belatedly noticing that none of our enemies seem to have followed.

What 'enemies'?

Geopolitical rivals then if you prefer that.

Re: US Intel

#193

Post by chatmasta »

Diog wrote: post #51

To be honest, for most Chinese people, the reason we haven't taken action regarding Taiwan is not because of TSMC, but rather our patience with the current will of the Taiwan people. However, this patience has its limits. Even if TSMC has better chips now, China mainland will surpass them next 10 years. You can compare the gap in chip technology between Chinese companies in 2015 and that projected for 2025 to see thi…

China mainland surpassing Taiwan in chip manufacturing seems like it would be very bad for Taiwan. At that point the Chinese have little incentive to “be gentle” with an invasion of the island. It’s in Taiwan’s interest to ensure both China and the US have a dependency on its manufacturing sector.

Re: US Intel

#194

Post by 9cb14c1ec0 »

MangoToupe wrote: post #68

Note that all our issues with china would be solved if we stopped pretending like they're our enemy.

Oh yes, that nice warm fuzzy China that definitely doesn't speak regularly about war and conflict with the West.

Re: US Intel

#195

Post by ecshafer »

chatmasta wrote: post #184
rjsw wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would still outsource running the fab to Intel, just have a government body overseeing it.

This won’t solve the biggest challenge/problem, which is lack of talent for staffing the fab. In Arizona they had to import a bunch of temp workers from Taiwan just to train the locals. We don’t have the skills. If you want to involve the government, maybe we should be training units of the military to make their own chips.

How many workers do we need? TSMC has 80k workers all in. 15-24 there is about 3 million US NEETs. I think that we could have a 10 year plan to get 80k people with EE/CE/NanoTech Eng/ChemEng/etc degrees. Make college free, or hell even a stipend for people to pursue "Critical Careers", heavily fund Phds in the same areas for US Citizens, and we will see workers with the skills.

Re: US Intel

#196

Post by sailfast »

blueplanet200 wrote: post #153
sailfast wrote: post #114

I’m confused. Why is equity required when the current loan guarantees were perfectly adequate? The only answer is that the USG wanted more control and leverage than was required to achieve national security objectives. Kinda negates the whole approach to the article in my opinion.

Were the current loan (and grant) guarantees perfectly adequate? Citation needed. In some investors view they were not. > "The deal certainly has the appearance of the government clawing back the remaining portion of the previous grant, as the government is getting equity not previously contemplated for dollars already committed," Morgan Stanley analysts "The trade-off, in our view, is that the company will have the…

Fair enough. In reality though they have absolutely committed to “public service objectives” which is a weird way to say “doing whatever the administration asks otherwise they rapidly liquidate their stake”

Not sure how many times people will keep repeating this mistake assuming they won’t be hit up for protection money again later…

Re: US Intel

#197

Post by ks2048 »

bawana wrote: post #61

How is this ‘equity stake’ different than nationalization? (The thing that soviet socialism did to russian property and business a hundred years ago). After all the government prints the money. So instead of just taking control of a company the govt prints the money to buy it. Isnt it the same thing? And where is the example of a successful govt run business? Why dont we encourage businesses here w free trade zones?

> And where is the example of a successful govt run business?

If you look at the list of largest companies by revenue [1], 4 of the top 6 are state-owned. (I'm not saying I support this move by Trump - and natural resources are probably different than technology, etc.. But just to answer the question).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...

Re: US Intel

#198

Post by theMMaI »

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…

Maybe the problem for Intel is complacency exactly because there is this expectation of a bailout when things don't go to plan.

While other hardware companies got lean operationally and employee wise Intel did not. The ex-Intel employees all paint somewhat the same picture of bureaucracy, layers of (poorly managed) dependencies and reliance on paradigms that worked during late 90s / early 2000s.

If you followed sources like semiaccurate the situation at Intel is not surprising either, they've been reporting on issues there since their inception.

Re: US Intel

#199

Post by roughly »

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…

> Very well argued. It's such a stunning dereliction the US let things get to this point. We were doing the "pivot to Asia" over a decade ago but no one thought to find TSMC on a map and ask whether Intel was driving itself into the dirt? "For want of a nail the kingdom was lost" but in this case the nail is like your entire metallurgical industry outsourced to the territory you plan on fighting over.

What's annoying about this is that it's the same people who drove the outsourcing and decline of American industry who are using the same framework they've been using to drive that stunning dereliction to argue that this is the wrong approach.

Re: US Intel

#200

Post by kccqzy »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #170
foobarian wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You don't really micromanage things, just like managers in a company shouldn't micromanage things. You don't make decisions on how much bread should be made by each of the 300 bakeries; you decide that making bread itself is important so you give subsidies. You decide that making bread locally is important so subsidies are only available to locally made and not imported bread. You decide that whole wheat bread is more important than white bread so you give subsidies only to whole wheat bread.
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