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Literally my same conclusion since 2008. Hundreds of thousands of people without jobs? Let it fail. No more domestic semiconductor company? Let it fail. No m

Literally my same conclusion since 2008. Hundreds of thousands of people without jobs? Let it fail. No more domestic semiconductor company? Let it fail. No more domestic aerospace company? LET IT FAIL. We keep avoiding making the hard policy decisions by funneling taxpayer money into the hands of the already-wealthy who promise that this time it’ll be different, this time they won’t give it to shareholders and payout bonuses. Let it fail. Once hundreds of thousands of Americans are jobless due to executive mismanagement and shareholder greed, will actually meaningful and impactful policy be made.

talldayo 2y ago
At least in Intel's case, I can see why the US government wouldn't want to get rid of them. For one, Intel is a defense asset and there will generally be apprehension of letting them slip under without the feds gutting what they want out of it. For two, I kinda think Intel did everything right from a US nationalism perspective even if their customers ditched them for it. Intel was never going to keep their Apple contract unless they outsourced to TSMC, abandoned any form of profitable margins and gave up on domestic chipmaking. From the perspective of US lawmakers, Intel is kinda damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't. I still support letting Intel fail, but I have absolutely no confidence anyone will let it happen.
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  > Intel is a defense asset So nationalize them and remove the waste
  - naveen99 2y ago
    Nationalize and waste removal is an oxymoron.
    - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
      I think the opposite is true! What bigger waste is there than profit? Schumpeter agrees with me. It would be different, of course, if intel were the bleeding edge of innovation.... but that hasn't been true for about twenty years. Maybe longer.
    - stego-tech 2y ago
      The IRS is one of the most effective government agencies out there, despite continued lack of funding and political mismanagement. NASA still leads space exploration, despite Congress intervening in its agendas. The mismanagement and waste come from a Congress more obsessed with its re-election and petty politics than it is actually running a gargantuan empire in a sustainable manner, not the agencies themselves, with one notable exception: the Department of Defense. That is a profoundly mismanaged and exploited department that drains valuable taxpayer money into fantasy boondoggles meant to get people promoted and swindle ever-more income from taxpayers in the process. At the very least, the government should be the baseline option, with Capitalism competing against it on either efficiency or outcome, ideally both. Instead, what we have are Capitalist companies who game the system to extract more wealth for themselves and from each other, and demand the government cover their own mismanagement under the guise of “National Security.” They cannot have it both ways. If they’re critical to the security of the country, they cannot exist as private enterprise. If they want maximum profit, then they cannot be of import to the government.
      - naveen99 2y ago
        Have you tried calling the irs ? If you gave google the authority to jail customers who didn’t buy their services with 25% of income, even google might provide some customer service, but would surely provide better api’s.
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      - tredre3 2y ago
        > The IRS is one of the most effective government agencies out there It is one of the most cost effective agencies because their entire reason d'être is finding missing money and collecting it. It doesn't really say anything about them being one of the most effective in the sense of good management and having minimal waste. I had to deal with them as an immigrant and it was a nightmare of wait times.
  - typeofhuman 2y ago
    Nationalizing it would only increase the waste.
    - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
      How do you figure? The profit motive isn't a factor when nationalized. Where would the waste come from?
      - from-nibly 2y ago
        From the fact that you can get profit by removing waste. Without profit there is no reason to remove waste. Waste isn't a thing you add intentionally if you have a reason. Waste is entropy it happens unless you continually clean it out. If you don't HAVE to clean out the waste it doesn't get cleaned out.
        ocdtrekkie 2y ago
        You also apparently need to wipe out the profit occasionally or else the company gets sucked dry of functional capability out of greed. Perhaps we need a cycle of allowing capitalists to remove waste, nationalization to remove profit, and then capitalists to be allowed to begin again removing waste.
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        ta1243 2y ago
        Your definition of waste is likely different to other peoples.
        xhkkffbf 2y ago
        Seems like a good one to me. I suppose there are more blatant forms of waste and raw corruption, but the entropy kind seems like one of the most important for a society to tackle.
- toast0 2y ago
  > Intel was never going to keep their Apple contract unless they outsourced to TSMC, abandoned any form of profitable margins and gave up on domestic chipmaking. Intel switching to TSMC probably would have sidestepped their 10nm fab failures, and the resulting design pipeline bubble that meant a lot of stagnation after Kaby Lake instead of the tick/tock(/tock) cycle of sort of annual improvements. But, even if Intel was still doing its thing right, Apple prefers to vertically integrate, and Apple has a niche where their cpu requirements are different enough, that a custom solution is better. AFAIK, Intel hasn't been willing to make really custom CPUs. The Apple cpus target a lower clockspeed, and that enables a smaller chip, and makes wider execution more feasible, and generates less heat. Intel probably wasn't willing to make a high performance but clock limited design. And Apple might not have wanted to have people compare their laptops with an Intel CPU that only runs at say 3GHz when everyone else is using chips that turbo to 4.5Ghz.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    > Intel switching to TSMC probably would have sidestepped their 10nm fab failures It would, but it would also drain a lot of investor confidence. Intel pulling the TSMC card in 2024 is acceptable, or even desirable, from a shareholder perspective. Doing it in 2017 would have been jaw-dropping, even if it came with the advantages of TSMC 7nm that AMD's mobile chipsets boasted. It might have been the right call, but it would be a kick in the pants to their fab business and a terrible omen of things to come. > But, even if Intel was still doing its thing right, Apple prefers to vertically integrate 100% agree, and I feel like it's more to my point. Intel was a holdover from an era where Apple had to ditch their reliance on PowerPC. Buying pre-designed chips was an opportunistic success story on a high-margin product like the Mac, and it worked both ways until Apple started designing their own cores. Once Apple could ship an SOC that outperformed Intel, it didn't matter how much it cost to make because there was no middleman to pay. By any means necessary, undercutting Intel was a business imperative for Apple. I guess the ultimate irony of this is how I hear people begging OEMs to license ARM tech for PCs now. Intel failed as a rent-seeking middleman for high-performance core designs, so now they will be supplanted by Arm, a rent-seeking middleman for low-performance core designs. All Arm Holdings has to do now is buy a fab and they'll be a dead ringer.
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Tostino 2y ago
As long as there is support for the start-ups which need to rise out of the ashes to replace the dead husk. It's not like the demand has gone away for advanced fighter jets, or cutting edge microprocessors. They need to foster a healthier supply chain to ensure that capacity is met.
- kragen 2y ago
  SMIC will be more than happy to satisfy the demand for advanced fighter jets and cutting-edge microprocessors if Samsung and TSMC don't have enough capacity to make up for Intel's hypothetically closed fabs. If not buying from SMIC means that US AI, supercomputers, fighter jets, drones, etc., are too expensive to be competitive in countries like India, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Brazil, Nigeria, Indonesia, and the UK, until the ashes finish rising, well, probably that will suit some people just fine. Not US legislators, though.
catlikesshrimp 2y ago
You don't want this (likely) scenario: -Intel Fails -Production stops worldwide. (Not just development) -US scrambling to sort out the supply chains -China invades Taiwan -US Fails Intel must be replaced domestically. At least wait until there is another fab within the US mainland.
- stego-tech 2y ago
  If that happens, it’s because our Government failed to intervene sooner, and is a damning indictment of Western Capitalism in general. All the more reason to let Intel (or Boeing, or whoever) fail hardcore while we have time to adapt. Intel falling isn’t going to result in a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, but it would smack the hell out of politicians and consumers both that globalism, while a nice idea in times of peace, is not compatible with interests like National Security and the growth of the Middle Class.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    So let me get this straight; Intel fails and the American government drops the ball, therefore Western Capitalism itself is indicted and China should be free to start a war and send Taiwanese people to reeducation camps? It sounds like that's what you're saying. Here's a tip; part of that "Western Capitalism" thing is governments sensibly not binding themselves to extreme libertarianism and being willing to protect strategic industries when necessary. Maybe you think that's not true capitalism or something, that it's not fair, but so what? The stakes are too high to fuck around with letting strategic industries fail out of some insane commitment to ideological purity.
    - stego-tech 2y ago
      I was going to take this response seriously and write a thought-out retort, but… > Here’s a tip; You’re not looking for discourse so much as to have someone agree with your anxiety about a perceived potential conflict and its stakes, and I am not going to be that person to you, sorry. I made my statements and I stand by them. If you’re extrapolating to the extremes to justify your point of view, then I hate to break it to you but you’re treading ground my OCD has already mapped down to the millimeter. The “National Security” defense is not a valid one absent plans to prevent the exploit of that reasoning by bad actors.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
> Once hundreds of thousands of Americans are jobless due to executive mismanagement and shareholder greed, will actually meaningful and impactful policy be made. What policy would that be? Policy to stop large companies from mismanagement golden parachutes, and people losing their jobs due to shareholder greed? I'm all for it, but those are features, not bugs, of the rent-seeking capitalism on which the US is built.
- xhkkffbf 2y ago
  Is there non-rent-seeking capitalism?
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    That's probably an oxymoron, but who knows, one day some variant might emerge.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
In other industries that might be ok (though not for the hundreds of thousands of people without jobs), but not this one. It would be like the US military being reliant on other countries, and potentially its main adversary (China), for its most advanced weapons.
- r053bud 2y ago
  Then why not nationalize it?
  - LadyCailin 2y ago
    Exactly. Industries that are too big to fail shouldn’t be allowed to exist in general (anti trust regulation should see to that), but if that must happen for some reason, then it must be nationalized, or at least very tightly regulated, like utilities are.
  - treis 2y ago
    It's not like the nationalized companies do that great. The USPS is in perpetual crisis and eventually the Federal Government is going to be on the hook for 10s of billions in pensions.
    - ctoth 2y ago
      > ON the hook Weird to see this framing for something that was promised as a condition of employment. The USPS gets me my mail regularly. Not sure what else it should be doing. And yes, paying people pensions you promised them is a good thing to do and has nothing to do with mismanagement. Taking the money you had already promised for pensions to instead pay shareholders or executives seems to be mismanagement to me.
    - sgarland 2y ago
      The USPS is only in perpetual crisis because people who are deeply against public goods passed a law requiring them to pre-fund retirement benefits 75 years in advance [0] which is utterly ridiculous. [0]: https://apwu.org/usps-fairness-act https://apwu.org/usps-fairness-act
ryandrake 2y ago
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- 14 2y ago
  This is why I look forward to the day machines take over millions of peoples jobs. Yes there will be a hard transition but if there are millions of people without the funds to add to the machine how can the machine continue? It is a senseless waste of time having a human stand in front of a hot pot of oil dipping fries and moving them over to a customer. I look forward to the day humans move beyond that. When so many people don’t have jobs that the ones that are left we decide are better off split up to everyone so we all work only 3 maybe 4 hours a day and then move on to passions we have. Spend more time with our children. Spend more time exploring the world. Maybe my belief is naïve having grown up watching Star Trek but I do think we will one day end capitalism for something else.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    You only have to look at history to see how those "something else" alternatives tend to work out.
  - Nevermark 2y ago
    > if there are millions of people without the funds to add to the machine how can the machine continue? Identifying natural resources, extracting them, transforming them, improving the technology of all those steps, selling the results to the rich who own shares in any of those steps. Even if it is all machines doing the work, there is an economic cycle that continues. If the machine doesn't need people, by definition it is doing well without them.
quickthrowman 2y ago
> Let it fail. Once hundreds of thousands of Americans are jobless due to executive mismanagement and shareholder greed, will actually meaningful and impactful policy be made. There’s more at stake than money when it comes to companies like GM, Boeing, and Intel. Wipe out existing shareholders and management and start over like GM in 2008, letting Intel die would be a gift to our adversaries.
- LadyCailin 2y ago
  If that’s true, which it may well be, this is an extremely strong argument for why it should be nationalized.
- BadHumans 2y ago
  Then nationalize it. If it is genuinely so important to the country then we can't let it die then it should be nationalized if it needs to be bailed out.
  - whatwhaaaaat 2y ago
    Great idea. Let’s let the same people who built and managed healthcare.gov build bombs and airplanes.
    - gjsman-1000 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - saulpw 2y ago
        The government would run the existing, already-innovated fabs, and not be responsible for any new innovations. Just keep the lights on and the factory producing.
        gjsman-1000 2y ago
        Honestly, I don’t think our government has the competence.
commandar 2y ago
The option is not a binary between "let it fail" and "no strings attached bailout." If things get bad enough for Intel, the precedent that makes the most sense is to follow the model that was used with GM: the company enters bankruptcy, existing investors and creditors are wiped out, and a new corporate entity backed by the fed.gov steps in and assumes the assets and operations of the company. Once things have sufficiently stabilized, the government can then divest its ownership in the company. Intel is economically and strategically important enough that just letting it collapse without a plan to pick up the pieces is a serious footgun. We have a framework for handling this kind of situation that has been shown to work without rewarding those who caused the problem. It'd be silly not to use it.
- PopePompus 2y ago
  It's not just the investors and creditors that need to be wiped out. Above all else the managers need to be fired, with no bonuses or golden parachutes.
  - tester756 2y ago
    Which manager receives golden parachute? wtf?
    - electricwire 2y ago
      For some hires, they wont sign on without penalties for early dismissal
      - stogot 2y ago
        Who?
    - nothercastle 2y ago
      Executive mis management is why companies fail. The majority of the bad decisions are made at the executive level.
rvz 2y ago
> Let it fail. Once hundreds of thousands of Americans are jobless due to executive mismanagement and shareholder greed, will actually meaningful and impactful policy be made. Exactly. Then we should have let all the startups that had their funds in SVB bank fail, instead of another pseudo-bailout that occurred in March 2023, given that FDIC insurance did not apply to them given the majority of their capital is over the limit.
- tredre3 2y ago
  Those startup's only mistake was choosing the wrong bank, one that was the de-facto standard in the sector and pushed by the likes of YC. I don't know if I agree with the gov making them whole, but it isn't really comparable to the Intel situation imho. It's not like the gov bailed out SVB and its investors itself.
weebull 2y ago
If it dies, hundreds of companies will rise from it's ashes. One of the big problems America has is the tech giants hoovering up all competition. The 70s,80s and 90s weren't boom times because of the fact these tech giants got their break at that time. It's because the market still had 5-7 major semiconductor companies. Fairchild, Motorola, TI, Intel, Zilog, and that's without really thinking about it.
- _boffin_ 2y ago
  My following question isn’t meant to be snarky or anything besides inquisitive. Question: what about if the thing they’re worried about isn’t about letting it fail, but rather geopolitical and military risk? Could the lead time to get the new companies up and running to fill In the gap be too long for them to not consider it too big of a risk of letting them fail?
  - JohnBooty 2y ago
    geopolitical and military risk Yeah, I think that's what's largely missing from this discussion and why the auto industry bailouts of 2008 are a poor comparison point. There is a non-zero chance that China decides to simply seize Taiwan in the next decade or two. Militarily there's absolutely nothing to prevent that unless we're willing to go nuclear or launch a land invasion of China (lol) or something; the idea of our carrier groups being an effective deterrent under a constant rain of missiles a couple hundred km from China's mainland is beyond delusional.
    - churchill 2y ago
      China's nuclear deterrence also isn't to be messed with. They've built a super-redundant delivery triad. And given the speed with which China scales up technology, I will bet my entire net worth that they have thousands of warheads ready-to-go. Since China & USA can't invade each other (LMAO) and a nuclear exchange would be suicide, any conflict in the South-China sea would have to be standoff - lobbing cruise missiles at the other non-stop. And the US doesn't even have that front locked down. Despite spending $800b/y, the US military has a stockpile of just 4k Tomahwaks (as of 2020). If we translate China's production-spamming to the Taiwan situation, then we can safely assume they have a stockpile of missiles that dwarfs that several times. And since they're projecting power in their backyard, it'll be a logistical walkover, especially with how the CCP tends to get things done quickly and at scale. Sorry if this feels off the point, but your comment just got me thinking about the SCS/Taiwan situation.
JohnBooty 2y ago
The difference between this and the auto industry bailouts in 2008 is that in many peoples' views, the semiconductor situation is a national security concern. Things are building toward war with China over Taiwan, with TSMC being a major factor. Militarily there is nothing short of a full-scale open war with China that can prevent this and perhaps not even that.
corimaith 2y ago
Is this the reasoning that is borne out the best interests for USA (and the world) or just an emotional backlash to "stick it to the man"? We're not living in a playground with rounded corners, sometimes there are bad choices and there are even worse choices. You might feel moral indignation at the bankers who "got away" with the GFC, but is the feeling of moral satisfaction worth realizing a second Great Depression and potentially WW3 to come out of it? The GFC happened due to the improper conduct by ratings agencies that gave subprime loans much higher credit status than should have gotten, overloading banks with toxic CDO assets that lead to a major systemic risk once the housing bubble popped. 10 years later, perhaps the executives got away with "golden parachutes", but we're not dealing with exotic derivatives much anymore, the biggest bubbles are just in pure hype stocks or index funds, whose risks are very much anticipated and do not pose a unknown systemic risk poised for incorrection. So I would argue that lessons were learnt.
amy-petrik-214 2y ago
On the topic of "let it fail, they are benefiting too hard" -> "moral hazard". happened in 2008, as a counterexample, bank-wise... ... and they did indeed let it fail. see bear stearns or lehman another word to throw around here is monopoly as in these companies have monopoly (or duopoly) on the american market i.e. boeings domestic planes, intels domestic fabs. So what are we doing here. We have 5 or more huge banks (not a monopoly), we let them fail, when things are more monopoly seeming, "oh no we need to keep it". Really? A monopoly? The thing the gobmint is sposed to be destroying and it's breathing life into it?
inglor_cz 2y ago
While I understand your argument, which is based on perverse incentives for management of failing firms ("Uncle Sam will bail us out!"), there is a nontrivial global dimension to the problem. The US cannot afford to lose some capabilities, like spaceflight. Or production of certain hardware. You can theoretically outsource them to allies, but some of those allies may be in strategically precarious situation. Like Taiwan and South Korea, the two giants of advanced semiconductor production. Or Finland, the only nation which is capable of producing advanced icebreakers for reasonable price and on reasonable schedule. Also, an adversary like China may be able to kill a healthy US corporation by massive dumping. Then what?

talldayo 2y ago

At least in Intel's case, I can see why the US government wouldn't want to get rid of them. For one, Intel is a defense asset and there will generally be apprehension of letting them slip under without the feds gutting what they want out of it. For two, I kinda think Intel did everything right from a US nationalism perspective even if their customers ditched them for it. Intel was never going to keep their Apple contract unless they outsourced to TSMC, abandoned any form of profitable margins and gave up on domestic chipmaking. From the perspective of US lawmakers, Intel is kinda damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't. I still support letting Intel fail, but I have absolutely no confidence anyone will let it happen.

PittleyDunkin 2y ago
> Intel is a defense asset So nationalize them and remove the waste
- naveen99 2y ago
  Nationalize and waste removal is an oxymoron.
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    I think the opposite is true! What bigger waste is there than profit? Schumpeter agrees with me. It would be different, of course, if intel were the bleeding edge of innovation.... but that hasn't been true for about twenty years. Maybe longer.
  - stego-tech 2y ago
    The IRS is one of the most effective government agencies out there, despite continued lack of funding and political mismanagement. NASA still leads space exploration, despite Congress intervening in its agendas. The mismanagement and waste come from a Congress more obsessed with its re-election and petty politics than it is actually running a gargantuan empire in a sustainable manner, not the agencies themselves, with one notable exception: the Department of Defense. That is a profoundly mismanaged and exploited department that drains valuable taxpayer money into fantasy boondoggles meant to get people promoted and swindle ever-more income from taxpayers in the process. At the very least, the government should be the baseline option, with Capitalism competing against it on either efficiency or outcome, ideally both. Instead, what we have are Capitalist companies who game the system to extract more wealth for themselves and from each other, and demand the government cover their own mismanagement under the guise of “National Security.” They cannot have it both ways. If they’re critical to the security of the country, they cannot exist as private enterprise. If they want maximum profit, then they cannot be of import to the government.
    - naveen99 2y ago
      Have you tried calling the irs ? If you gave google the authority to jail customers who didn’t buy their services with 25% of income, even google might provide some customer service, but would surely provide better api’s.
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    - tredre3 2y ago
      > The IRS is one of the most effective government agencies out there It is one of the most cost effective agencies because their entire reason d'être is finding missing money and collecting it. It doesn't really say anything about them being one of the most effective in the sense of good management and having minimal waste. I had to deal with them as an immigrant and it was a nightmare of wait times.
- typeofhuman 2y ago
  Nationalizing it would only increase the waste.
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    How do you figure? The profit motive isn't a factor when nationalized. Where would the waste come from?
    - from-nibly 2y ago
      From the fact that you can get profit by removing waste. Without profit there is no reason to remove waste. Waste isn't a thing you add intentionally if you have a reason. Waste is entropy it happens unless you continually clean it out. If you don't HAVE to clean out the waste it doesn't get cleaned out.
      - ocdtrekkie 2y ago
        You also apparently need to wipe out the profit occasionally or else the company gets sucked dry of functional capability out of greed. Perhaps we need a cycle of allowing capitalists to remove waste, nationalization to remove profit, and then capitalists to be allowed to begin again removing waste.
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      - ta1243 2y ago
        Your definition of waste is likely different to other peoples.
        xhkkffbf 2y ago
        Seems like a good one to me. I suppose there are more blatant forms of waste and raw corruption, but the entropy kind seems like one of the most important for a society to tackle.
toast0 2y ago
> Intel was never going to keep their Apple contract unless they outsourced to TSMC, abandoned any form of profitable margins and gave up on domestic chipmaking. Intel switching to TSMC probably would have sidestepped their 10nm fab failures, and the resulting design pipeline bubble that meant a lot of stagnation after Kaby Lake instead of the tick/tock(/tock) cycle of sort of annual improvements. But, even if Intel was still doing its thing right, Apple prefers to vertically integrate, and Apple has a niche where their cpu requirements are different enough, that a custom solution is better. AFAIK, Intel hasn't been willing to make really custom CPUs. The Apple cpus target a lower clockspeed, and that enables a smaller chip, and makes wider execution more feasible, and generates less heat. Intel probably wasn't willing to make a high performance but clock limited design. And Apple might not have wanted to have people compare their laptops with an Intel CPU that only runs at say 3GHz when everyone else is using chips that turbo to 4.5Ghz.
- talldayo 2y ago
  > Intel switching to TSMC probably would have sidestepped their 10nm fab failures It would, but it would also drain a lot of investor confidence. Intel pulling the TSMC card in 2024 is acceptable, or even desirable, from a shareholder perspective. Doing it in 2017 would have been jaw-dropping, even if it came with the advantages of TSMC 7nm that AMD's mobile chipsets boasted. It might have been the right call, but it would be a kick in the pants to their fab business and a terrible omen of things to come. > But, even if Intel was still doing its thing right, Apple prefers to vertically integrate 100% agree, and I feel like it's more to my point. Intel was a holdover from an era where Apple had to ditch their reliance on PowerPC. Buying pre-designed chips was an opportunistic success story on a high-margin product like the Mac, and it worked both ways until Apple started designing their own cores. Once Apple could ship an SOC that outperformed Intel, it didn't matter how much it cost to make because there was no middleman to pay. By any means necessary, undercutting Intel was a business imperative for Apple. I guess the ultimate irony of this is how I hear people begging OEMs to license ARM tech for PCs now. Intel failed as a rent-seeking middleman for high-performance core designs, so now they will be supplanted by Arm, a rent-seeking middleman for low-performance core designs. All Arm Holdings has to do now is buy a fab and they'll be a dead ringer.

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Tostino 2y ago

As long as there is support for the start-ups which need to rise out of the ashes to replace the dead husk. It's not like the demand has gone away for advanced fighter jets, or cutting edge microprocessors. They need to foster a healthier supply chain to ensure that capacity is met.

kragen 2y ago
SMIC will be more than happy to satisfy the demand for advanced fighter jets and cutting-edge microprocessors if Samsung and TSMC don't have enough capacity to make up for Intel's hypothetically closed fabs. If not buying from SMIC means that US AI, supercomputers, fighter jets, drones, etc., are too expensive to be competitive in countries like India, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Brazil, Nigeria, Indonesia, and the UK, until the ashes finish rising, well, probably that will suit some people just fine. Not US legislators, though.

catlikesshrimp 2y ago

You don't want this (likely) scenario: -Intel Fails -Production stops worldwide. (Not just development) -US scrambling to sort out the supply chains -China invades Taiwan -US Fails Intel must be replaced domestically. At least wait until there is another fab within the US mainland.

stego-tech 2y ago
If that happens, it’s because our Government failed to intervene sooner, and is a damning indictment of Western Capitalism in general. All the more reason to let Intel (or Boeing, or whoever) fail hardcore while we have time to adapt. Intel falling isn’t going to result in a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, but it would smack the hell out of politicians and consumers both that globalism, while a nice idea in times of peace, is not compatible with interests like National Security and the growth of the Middle Class.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  So let me get this straight; Intel fails and the American government drops the ball, therefore Western Capitalism itself is indicted and China should be free to start a war and send Taiwanese people to reeducation camps? It sounds like that's what you're saying. Here's a tip; part of that "Western Capitalism" thing is governments sensibly not binding themselves to extreme libertarianism and being willing to protect strategic industries when necessary. Maybe you think that's not true capitalism or something, that it's not fair, but so what? The stakes are too high to fuck around with letting strategic industries fail out of some insane commitment to ideological purity.
  - stego-tech 2y ago
    I was going to take this response seriously and write a thought-out retort, but… > Here’s a tip; You’re not looking for discourse so much as to have someone agree with your anxiety about a perceived potential conflict and its stakes, and I am not going to be that person to you, sorry. I made my statements and I stand by them. If you’re extrapolating to the extremes to justify your point of view, then I hate to break it to you but you’re treading ground my OCD has already mapped down to the millimeter. The “National Security” defense is not a valid one absent plans to prevent the exploit of that reasoning by bad actors.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

> Once hundreds of thousands of Americans are jobless due to executive mismanagement and shareholder greed, will actually meaningful and impactful policy be made. What policy would that be? Policy to stop large companies from mismanagement golden parachutes, and people losing their jobs due to shareholder greed? I'm all for it, but those are features, not bugs, of the rent-seeking capitalism on which the US is built.

xhkkffbf 2y ago
Is there non-rent-seeking capitalism?
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  That's probably an oxymoron, but who knows, one day some variant might emerge.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

In other industries that might be ok (though not for the hundreds of thousands of people without jobs), but not this one. It would be like the US military being reliant on other countries, and potentially its main adversary (China), for its most advanced weapons.

r053bud 2y ago
Then why not nationalize it?
- LadyCailin 2y ago
  Exactly. Industries that are too big to fail shouldn’t be allowed to exist in general (anti trust regulation should see to that), but if that must happen for some reason, then it must be nationalized, or at least very tightly regulated, like utilities are.
- treis 2y ago
  It's not like the nationalized companies do that great. The USPS is in perpetual crisis and eventually the Federal Government is going to be on the hook for 10s of billions in pensions.
  - ctoth 2y ago
    > ON the hook Weird to see this framing for something that was promised as a condition of employment. The USPS gets me my mail regularly. Not sure what else it should be doing. And yes, paying people pensions you promised them is a good thing to do and has nothing to do with mismanagement. Taking the money you had already promised for pensions to instead pay shareholders or executives seems to be mismanagement to me.
  - sgarland 2y ago
    The USPS is only in perpetual crisis because people who are deeply against public goods passed a law requiring them to pre-fund retirement benefits 75 years in advance [0] which is utterly ridiculous. [0]: https://apwu.org/usps-fairness-act https://apwu.org/usps-fairness-act

ryandrake 2y ago

[flagged]

14 2y ago
This is why I look forward to the day machines take over millions of peoples jobs. Yes there will be a hard transition but if there are millions of people without the funds to add to the machine how can the machine continue? It is a senseless waste of time having a human stand in front of a hot pot of oil dipping fries and moving them over to a customer. I look forward to the day humans move beyond that. When so many people don’t have jobs that the ones that are left we decide are better off split up to everyone so we all work only 3 maybe 4 hours a day and then move on to passions we have. Spend more time with our children. Spend more time exploring the world. Maybe my belief is naïve having grown up watching Star Trek but I do think we will one day end capitalism for something else.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  You only have to look at history to see how those "something else" alternatives tend to work out.
- Nevermark 2y ago
  > if there are millions of people without the funds to add to the machine how can the machine continue? Identifying natural resources, extracting them, transforming them, improving the technology of all those steps, selling the results to the rich who own shares in any of those steps. Even if it is all machines doing the work, there is an economic cycle that continues. If the machine doesn't need people, by definition it is doing well without them.

quickthrowman 2y ago

> Let it fail. Once hundreds of thousands of Americans are jobless due to executive mismanagement and shareholder greed, will actually meaningful and impactful policy be made. There’s more at stake than money when it comes to companies like GM, Boeing, and Intel. Wipe out existing shareholders and management and start over like GM in 2008, letting Intel die would be a gift to our adversaries.

LadyCailin 2y ago
If that’s true, which it may well be, this is an extremely strong argument for why it should be nationalized.
BadHumans 2y ago
Then nationalize it. If it is genuinely so important to the country then we can't let it die then it should be nationalized if it needs to be bailed out.
- whatwhaaaaat 2y ago
  Great idea. Let’s let the same people who built and managed healthcare.gov build bombs and airplanes.
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - saulpw 2y ago
      The government would run the existing, already-innovated fabs, and not be responsible for any new innovations. Just keep the lights on and the factory producing.
      - gjsman-1000 2y ago
        Honestly, I don’t think our government has the competence.

commandar 2y ago

The option is not a binary between "let it fail" and "no strings attached bailout." If things get bad enough for Intel, the precedent that makes the most sense is to follow the model that was used with GM: the company enters bankruptcy, existing investors and creditors are wiped out, and a new corporate entity backed by the fed.gov steps in and assumes the assets and operations of the company. Once things have sufficiently stabilized, the government can then divest its ownership in the company. Intel is economically and strategically important enough that just letting it collapse without a plan to pick up the pieces is a serious footgun. We have a framework for handling this kind of situation that has been shown to work without rewarding those who caused the problem. It'd be silly not to use it.

PopePompus 2y ago
It's not just the investors and creditors that need to be wiped out. Above all else the managers need to be fired, with no bonuses or golden parachutes.
- tester756 2y ago
  Which manager receives golden parachute? wtf?
  - electricwire 2y ago
    For some hires, they wont sign on without penalties for early dismissal
    - stogot 2y ago
      Who?
  - nothercastle 2y ago
    Executive mis management is why companies fail. The majority of the bad decisions are made at the executive level.

rvz 2y ago

> Let it fail. Once hundreds of thousands of Americans are jobless due to executive mismanagement and shareholder greed, will actually meaningful and impactful policy be made. Exactly. Then we should have let all the startups that had their funds in SVB bank fail, instead of another pseudo-bailout that occurred in March 2023, given that FDIC insurance did not apply to them given the majority of their capital is over the limit.

tredre3 2y ago
Those startup's only mistake was choosing the wrong bank, one that was the de-facto standard in the sector and pushed by the likes of YC. I don't know if I agree with the gov making them whole, but it isn't really comparable to the Intel situation imho. It's not like the gov bailed out SVB and its investors itself.

weebull 2y ago

If it dies, hundreds of companies will rise from it's ashes. One of the big problems America has is the tech giants hoovering up all competition. The 70s,80s and 90s weren't boom times because of the fact these tech giants got their break at that time. It's because the market still had 5-7 major semiconductor companies. Fairchild, Motorola, TI, Intel, Zilog, and that's without really thinking about it.

_boffin_ 2y ago
My following question isn’t meant to be snarky or anything besides inquisitive. Question: what about if the thing they’re worried about isn’t about letting it fail, but rather geopolitical and military risk? Could the lead time to get the new companies up and running to fill In the gap be too long for them to not consider it too big of a risk of letting them fail?
- JohnBooty 2y ago
  geopolitical and military risk Yeah, I think that's what's largely missing from this discussion and why the auto industry bailouts of 2008 are a poor comparison point. There is a non-zero chance that China decides to simply seize Taiwan in the next decade or two. Militarily there's absolutely nothing to prevent that unless we're willing to go nuclear or launch a land invasion of China (lol) or something; the idea of our carrier groups being an effective deterrent under a constant rain of missiles a couple hundred km from China's mainland is beyond delusional.
  - churchill 2y ago
    China's nuclear deterrence also isn't to be messed with. They've built a super-redundant delivery triad. And given the speed with which China scales up technology, I will bet my entire net worth that they have thousands of warheads ready-to-go. Since China & USA can't invade each other (LMAO) and a nuclear exchange would be suicide, any conflict in the South-China sea would have to be standoff - lobbing cruise missiles at the other non-stop. And the US doesn't even have that front locked down. Despite spending $800b/y, the US military has a stockpile of just 4k Tomahwaks (as of 2020). If we translate China's production-spamming to the Taiwan situation, then we can safely assume they have a stockpile of missiles that dwarfs that several times. And since they're projecting power in their backyard, it'll be a logistical walkover, especially with how the CCP tends to get things done quickly and at scale. Sorry if this feels off the point, but your comment just got me thinking about the SCS/Taiwan situation.

JohnBooty 2y ago

The difference between this and the auto industry bailouts in 2008 is that in many peoples' views, the semiconductor situation is a national security concern. Things are building toward war with China over Taiwan, with TSMC being a major factor. Militarily there is nothing short of a full-scale open war with China that can prevent this and perhaps not even that.

corimaith 2y ago

Is this the reasoning that is borne out the best interests for USA (and the world) or just an emotional backlash to "stick it to the man"? We're not living in a playground with rounded corners, sometimes there are bad choices and there are even worse choices. You might feel moral indignation at the bankers who "got away" with the GFC, but is the feeling of moral satisfaction worth realizing a second Great Depression and potentially WW3 to come out of it? The GFC happened due to the improper conduct by ratings agencies that gave subprime loans much higher credit status than should have gotten, overloading banks with toxic CDO assets that lead to a major systemic risk once the housing bubble popped. 10 years later, perhaps the executives got away with "golden parachutes", but we're not dealing with exotic derivatives much anymore, the biggest bubbles are just in pure hype stocks or index funds, whose risks are very much anticipated and do not pose a unknown systemic risk poised for incorrection. So I would argue that lessons were learnt.

amy-petrik-214 2y ago

On the topic of "let it fail, they are benefiting too hard" -> "moral hazard". happened in 2008, as a counterexample, bank-wise... ... and they did indeed let it fail. see bear stearns or lehman another word to throw around here is monopoly as in these companies have monopoly (or duopoly) on the american market i.e. boeings domestic planes, intels domestic fabs. So what are we doing here. We have 5 or more huge banks (not a monopoly), we let them fail, when things are more monopoly seeming, "oh no we need to keep it". Really? A monopoly? The thing the gobmint is sposed to be destroying and it's breathing life into it?

inglor_cz 2y ago

While I understand your argument, which is based on perverse incentives for management of failing firms ("Uncle Sam will bail us out!"), there is a nontrivial global dimension to the problem. The US cannot afford to lose some capabilities, like spaceflight. Or production of certain hardware. You can theoretically outsource them to allies, but some of those allies may be in strategically precarious situation. Like Taiwan and South Korea, the two giants of advanced semiconductor production. Or Finland, the only nation which is capable of producing advanced icebreakers for reasonable price and on reasonable schedule. Also, an adversary like China may be able to kill a healthy US corporation by massive dumping. Then what?