8 ms·

No big deal, it is going to be essentially covered by government (taxpayers'?) money as usual https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/20/white-house-proposes-up-to-8-5b

by dimask 3y ago

No big deal, it is going to be essentially covered by government (taxpayers'?) money as usual https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/20/white-house-proposes-up-to-8-5b-to-fund-intels-domestic-chip-manufacturing/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/20/white-house-proposes-up-to...

voisin 3y ago
> government (taxpayers'?) money The question mark makes me think there is some uncertainty here and I am irrationally upset about the ambiguity. Of course it is taxpayers’ money! What is possibly unclear about the situation?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- foobarian 3y ago
  How is it just taxpayers? What about non-tax paying citizens? And what about government revenues from non-tax sources?
- wizzwizz4 3y ago
  > What is possibly unclear about the situation? While that's how things work at the district or even state level, that's not quite how money works at the federal level. To a first-order approximation, federal government spending is a tax on dollar-holders, with federal tax corresponding roughly to fealty (such service being delivered to dollar-holders). They're decoupled because the US federal government, via the Treasury, is able to create and destroy dollars. The IRS is responsible for collecting taxes, but delivers them to the Treasury for reallocation or destruction. Since money is fungible, only the net change in extant money matters, and they don't actually have to destroy and reprint notes… though in unrelated news, they do also do that. Though, at organisational levels below the central bank… once money has been set aside for the interests of the commons, does it truly still belong to those it was appropriated from? If I give money to a malaria charity, I don't then get to say "hey, spend that money on vaccines instead of nets": it's theirs to allocate as they see fit. If I don't like how a charity organises money, I'll choose a different one: just like how, if you don't like how your local government organises communal resources, you should vote accordingly (which, in theory, works) and otherwise take political action.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > While that’s how things work at the district or even state level, Aside from the fact the fiscal argument you are making isn’t the most important reason why the “taxpayers’ money” thing is wrong at all levels, its also not accurate even within the narrow view of “where does the money come from” at the district or state level, either, since those entities get funded by sources that aren’t “the taxpayers” as well, including other levels of government, like the feds, for whom you acknowledge (correctly) that it is not true because of money creating power.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      But "other levels of government" are also getting the money from taxpayers, and money printing is constrained by its propensity to cause inflation, so in practice the amount of it that happens will correspond to the amount necessary to hit the Fed's inflation targets rather than scaling with the amount of government spending. Consequently any incremental increase or decrease in government spending would have to correspond to the same increase or decrease in tax collection, whether as the full amount in the current year or as future interest payments via deficit spending.
      - wizzwizz4 3y ago
        Inflation is when the number of dollars increases faster (or decreases slower) than the amount of value in the (USD) economy does. If the money is invested in a way that creates over a dollar's worth of value per dollar, printing money can actually reduce inflation. In typical circumstances, such investment possibilities do not exist. However, in disasters (e.g. a 4-year-old virtuoso needs surgery to repair a ventricular septal defect; an average person is homeless and needs a place to live; an asteroid's on a collision course with the planet), creating additional money is often the correct decision. Experts disagree whether the recent pandemic was such an opportunity and – if so – what the correct response was: we saw lots of different strategies playing out in lots of different countries, but I don't think that's helped resolve the controversy.
        3y ago
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Of course it is taxpayers’ money! No, its the government’s money. Or, viewing the government as merely an agency for collective action, it is the citizens’ money. Obviously, the citizenry and the taxpayers have substantial overlap in most real systems, but they aren’t the same group.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    By that logic it's actually Intel's money, because it used to belong to the taxpayer, but the law says that Intel gets it now. The trillion dollars spent on the F-35 was quite an inefficient use of Lockheed's money.
- dimask 3y ago
  That is the government that decides to spend the money is a fact. Whether the "taxpayers" (and what "taxpayers" means) are the ones that will pay for it, is an interpretation up to perspectives on political economy.
zer00eyz 3y ago
Note: I'm a left leaning liberal, who thinks that our system is fucked when it comes to taxes and how we distribute money... Spend about a day catching up on where the Ukraine conflict is. Up to speed: good! You will have noted that not having domestic chip production has fucked Russia, and the restrictions on china are to inhibit pass through and limit what they too can do. You dont give a potential advisory (china) leverage (Taiwan as the sole place chips are made).
- konfusinomicon 3y ago
  left leaning liberal and fiscally responsible... I see you too are a member of the silent(ced) majority and i agree with your assessment
- johnkizer 3y ago
  I understand the argument for national security. Having said that...where's the accountability if what they build is terrible? Where's the return to the investor (the public) if they succeed? I'm not saying the government should just take over businesses...but if the government is going to essentially be an investor in a business, it should be at least as rigorous as a private investor would be.
  - signatoremo 3y ago
    Maybe read this to try to answer your own question? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39911733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39911733 Sometime I don’t understand HN. Such an informative article gets no traffic, yet people jump to a sensational article to discuss the very topic covered in details over there.
    - mattmaroon 3y ago
      Most of us don’t see articles that don’t hit the front page.
  - gruez 3y ago
    Presumably because it's cheaper to pay intel to set up a foundry in the US and allow them to keep all the money that results from it, than it is to pay them to set up a foundry and demand a % of the revenue.
russellbeattie 3y ago
This comment is an absolutely perfect example of Brandolini's Law [1]: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. One sentence of the same tired myopic cynical trolling bullshit causes 20 responses and paragraphs of explanation to try and refute. Absolutely perfect. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law
- dimask 3y ago
  Partly yes, I mean my effort was just to search for a link about the subject to something that seems reputable enough to share. On the other hand, I just stated a fact. If by "explanation to try and refute" you mean just the story around china and geopolitics, it is not any high effort one. It is just repeating the same official story over and over. It does not change the fact of who is paying for it, as any sort of geopolitical justification for a war (or supporting a side in a war or supporting the continuation of a war) does not change the fact of who dies for it. Or who profits. Funny note: your comment being self-referential.
65a 3y ago
There would be an ironic twist if nvidia (who first competed with AMD nee ATI) was forced to license their IP to intel for national security reasons, but it would rhyme with history (x86 licenses to AMD) and benefit the consumer.
- UncleOxidant 3y ago
  Why couldn't Intel fab GPUs for Nvidia? Taiwan just had 2 7+ earthquakes this morning, so we can add that to the geopolitical risk of having a large number of the world's most advanced chip fabs on the island of Taiwan.
  - 65a 3y ago
    Other than process specifics, they could, and that's exactly what happened when the 1980s US Government got worried about a single CPU supplier. The result was (to some extent) modern cheap computing.
twelve40 3y ago
Yes, it seems they are following the large defense dinosaurs of the past into this perpetual too-big-to-fail mode of milking the public for free money. However, we've found ways before to push some things back into the private sector, to find people with energy and new ideas to run circles around stagnating boeings and lockheeds, and show them how it's done in space and other areas. It's been pretty fascinating to watch. Maybe the USG will find some way to light fire under Intel's ass too, like maybe with a little help from Taiwan or something. How these companies go from a super-innovative disruptor to a welfare program and then back has been fascinating and scary to watch. Doesn't really fit into any of the "left" or "right" cliches.
- UncleOxidant 3y ago
  Given the geopolitical (and seismic) risk of having many of the world's most advanced fabs in Taiwan, it seems like it makes sense to try to locate more of them in the US from a national security standpoint (I guess that would be a 'right' argument - or at least traditionally the right was concerned about national security). Given that Intel (for better or worse) is the US' most advanced semiconductor company and that they know how to build fabs it seems like it makes sense to send some $$ their way to build more fabs in the US (I guess that would be a 'left' argument?). The market doesn't seem like it's going to optimize for the national security issue so the gov stepped in with the CHIPs act. Can you imagine any market-based mechanism that would address this problem on it's own? Keep in mind that it takes at least 5 years from the time a fab is planned until it's operational. And it takes about $10B to build a competitive fab. The market prioritized social media from about 2005 to 2020 or so, and seemed to de-prioritize investment in things like semiconductor production. That doesn't seem to have worked out so well for us.
  - twelve40 3y ago
    it feels terrible when incompetent people take over and start pissing away our money, essentially holding whatever defense concern they managed to monopolize as a hostage. So that part to me is very depressing. My bigger point was that this process is not linear or predictable. Saturn rocket was a miracle that seemingly no market forces could afford to build. Organizations that built that miracle have exhausted and are nowadays essentially welfare. Now, SpaceX and starlink are a private miracle that was hard to imagine just a couple decades ago. Not sure what the moral is here, but somehow we seem to find a way, whether private or public.

by dimask 3y ago

voisin 3y ago

> government (taxpayers'?) money The question mark makes me think there is some uncertainty here and I am irrationally upset about the ambiguity. Of course it is taxpayers’ money! What is possibly unclear about the situation?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
foobarian 3y ago
How is it just taxpayers? What about non-tax paying citizens? And what about government revenues from non-tax sources?
wizzwizz4 3y ago
> What is possibly unclear about the situation? While that's how things work at the district or even state level, that's not quite how money works at the federal level. To a first-order approximation, federal government spending is a tax on dollar-holders, with federal tax corresponding roughly to fealty (such service being delivered to dollar-holders). They're decoupled because the US federal government, via the Treasury, is able to create and destroy dollars. The IRS is responsible for collecting taxes, but delivers them to the Treasury for reallocation or destruction. Since money is fungible, only the net change in extant money matters, and they don't actually have to destroy and reprint notes… though in unrelated news, they do also do that. Though, at organisational levels below the central bank… once money has been set aside for the interests of the commons, does it truly still belong to those it was appropriated from? If I give money to a malaria charity, I don't then get to say "hey, spend that money on vaccines instead of nets": it's theirs to allocate as they see fit. If I don't like how a charity organises money, I'll choose a different one: just like how, if you don't like how your local government organises communal resources, you should vote accordingly (which, in theory, works) and otherwise take political action.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > While that’s how things work at the district or even state level, Aside from the fact the fiscal argument you are making isn’t the most important reason why the “taxpayers’ money” thing is wrong at all levels, its also not accurate even within the narrow view of “where does the money come from” at the district or state level, either, since those entities get funded by sources that aren’t “the taxpayers” as well, including other levels of government, like the feds, for whom you acknowledge (correctly) that it is not true because of money creating power.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    But "other levels of government" are also getting the money from taxpayers, and money printing is constrained by its propensity to cause inflation, so in practice the amount of it that happens will correspond to the amount necessary to hit the Fed's inflation targets rather than scaling with the amount of government spending. Consequently any incremental increase or decrease in government spending would have to correspond to the same increase or decrease in tax collection, whether as the full amount in the current year or as future interest payments via deficit spending.
    - wizzwizz4 3y ago
      Inflation is when the number of dollars increases faster (or decreases slower) than the amount of value in the (USD) economy does. If the money is invested in a way that creates over a dollar's worth of value per dollar, printing money can actually reduce inflation. In typical circumstances, such investment possibilities do not exist. However, in disasters (e.g. a 4-year-old virtuoso needs surgery to repair a ventricular septal defect; an average person is homeless and needs a place to live; an asteroid's on a collision course with the planet), creating additional money is often the correct decision. Experts disagree whether the recent pandemic was such an opportunity and – if so – what the correct response was: we saw lots of different strategies playing out in lots of different countries, but I don't think that's helped resolve the controversy.
      - 3y ago
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Of course it is taxpayers’ money! No, its the government’s money. Or, viewing the government as merely an agency for collective action, it is the citizens’ money. Obviously, the citizenry and the taxpayers have substantial overlap in most real systems, but they aren’t the same group.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  By that logic it's actually Intel's money, because it used to belong to the taxpayer, but the law says that Intel gets it now. The trillion dollars spent on the F-35 was quite an inefficient use of Lockheed's money.
dimask 3y ago
That is the government that decides to spend the money is a fact. Whether the "taxpayers" (and what "taxpayers" means) are the ones that will pay for it, is an interpretation up to perspectives on political economy.

zer00eyz 3y ago

Note: I'm a left leaning liberal, who thinks that our system is fucked when it comes to taxes and how we distribute money... Spend about a day catching up on where the Ukraine conflict is. Up to speed: good! You will have noted that not having domestic chip production has fucked Russia, and the restrictions on china are to inhibit pass through and limit what they too can do. You dont give a potential advisory (china) leverage (Taiwan as the sole place chips are made).

konfusinomicon 3y ago
left leaning liberal and fiscally responsible... I see you too are a member of the silent(ced) majority and i agree with your assessment
johnkizer 3y ago
I understand the argument for national security. Having said that...where's the accountability if what they build is terrible? Where's the return to the investor (the public) if they succeed? I'm not saying the government should just take over businesses...but if the government is going to essentially be an investor in a business, it should be at least as rigorous as a private investor would be.
- signatoremo 3y ago
  Maybe read this to try to answer your own question? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39911733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39911733 Sometime I don’t understand HN. Such an informative article gets no traffic, yet people jump to a sensational article to discuss the very topic covered in details over there.
  - mattmaroon 3y ago
    Most of us don’t see articles that don’t hit the front page.
- gruez 3y ago
  Presumably because it's cheaper to pay intel to set up a foundry in the US and allow them to keep all the money that results from it, than it is to pay them to set up a foundry and demand a % of the revenue.

russellbeattie 3y ago

This comment is an absolutely perfect example of Brandolini's Law [1]: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. One sentence of the same tired myopic cynical trolling bullshit causes 20 responses and paragraphs of explanation to try and refute. Absolutely perfect. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law

dimask 3y ago
Partly yes, I mean my effort was just to search for a link about the subject to something that seems reputable enough to share. On the other hand, I just stated a fact. If by "explanation to try and refute" you mean just the story around china and geopolitics, it is not any high effort one. It is just repeating the same official story over and over. It does not change the fact of who is paying for it, as any sort of geopolitical justification for a war (or supporting a side in a war or supporting the continuation of a war) does not change the fact of who dies for it. Or who profits. Funny note: your comment being self-referential.

65a 3y ago

There would be an ironic twist if nvidia (who first competed with AMD nee ATI) was forced to license their IP to intel for national security reasons, but it would rhyme with history (x86 licenses to AMD) and benefit the consumer.

UncleOxidant 3y ago
Why couldn't Intel fab GPUs for Nvidia? Taiwan just had 2 7+ earthquakes this morning, so we can add that to the geopolitical risk of having a large number of the world's most advanced chip fabs on the island of Taiwan.
- 65a 3y ago
  Other than process specifics, they could, and that's exactly what happened when the 1980s US Government got worried about a single CPU supplier. The result was (to some extent) modern cheap computing.

twelve40 3y ago

Yes, it seems they are following the large defense dinosaurs of the past into this perpetual too-big-to-fail mode of milking the public for free money. However, we've found ways before to push some things back into the private sector, to find people with energy and new ideas to run circles around stagnating boeings and lockheeds, and show them how it's done in space and other areas. It's been pretty fascinating to watch. Maybe the USG will find some way to light fire under Intel's ass too, like maybe with a little help from Taiwan or something. How these companies go from a super-innovative disruptor to a welfare program and then back has been fascinating and scary to watch. Doesn't really fit into any of the "left" or "right" cliches.

UncleOxidant 3y ago
Given the geopolitical (and seismic) risk of having many of the world's most advanced fabs in Taiwan, it seems like it makes sense to try to locate more of them in the US from a national security standpoint (I guess that would be a 'right' argument - or at least traditionally the right was concerned about national security). Given that Intel (for better or worse) is the US' most advanced semiconductor company and that they know how to build fabs it seems like it makes sense to send some $$ their way to build more fabs in the US (I guess that would be a 'left' argument?). The market doesn't seem like it's going to optimize for the national security issue so the gov stepped in with the CHIPs act. Can you imagine any market-based mechanism that would address this problem on it's own? Keep in mind that it takes at least 5 years from the time a fab is planned until it's operational. And it takes about $10B to build a competitive fab. The market prioritized social media from about 2005 to 2020 or so, and seemed to de-prioritize investment in things like semiconductor production. That doesn't seem to have worked out so well for us.
- twelve40 3y ago
  it feels terrible when incompetent people take over and start pissing away our money, essentially holding whatever defense concern they managed to monopolize as a hostage. So that part to me is very depressing. My bigger point was that this process is not linear or predictable. Saturn rocket was a miracle that seemingly no market forces could afford to build. Organizations that built that miracle have exhausted and are nowadays essentially welfare. Now, SpaceX and starlink are a private miracle that was hard to imagine just a couple decades ago. Not sure what the moral is here, but somehow we seem to find a way, whether private or public.