Comment by bongodongobob
13 hours ago
Well as much as you don't like it, companies this big failing is terrible for the economy and in this case, national security to a degree. I'm of the thinking that when your company gets to a certain size we'd be well off nationalizing. Apple has more money than some nation states. Something that huge has the potential to affect global politics. There's lots of other reasons too, but this isn't like letting the corner store fail. The repercussions are huge. If we're going to bail out, the people should own some of it.
When a company “fails” it does not disappear in a puff of smoke. It goes into bankruptcy and is sold in parts. Some of those parts are perfectly functioning divisions which will continue to function but they will be owned by someone else.
I would rather have Intel go bankrupt, sell profitable pieces to private buyers, and if there are any pieces that are not profitable but crucial to national interests, create a company out of them and have the government buy them. This way you are not propping up a dysfunctional behemoth.
Things must die in order for new better things to take their place. This applies to companies as well.
> Apple has more money than some nation states.
And Apple needs their chips fabbed, so why not have Apple invest $50B into Intel? Nvidia could afford to chip in too. These companies that face a huge amount of geopolitical risk because they've put all of their eggs in the TSMC basket should have to pay for this not US taxpayers.
If TSMC diseaper tomorrow, people will still buy computers, with chips made from Korea, or China, who cares. What are apple or Nvidia risking? They have worked hard to lock their customer. The problem is for the US military.
Apple & Nvidia switching to, say, Samsung as their foundry would likely take at least a year before they'd start to see production. Meanwhile, little to no revenue. It is a risk for them. And if China went for Taiwan, why not also cause some trouble for S Korea while they're at it? (Wouldn't have to invade, just block shipping, etc. - if China decided to do maximal damage. It's also quite possible that N Korea would take advantage of the situation)
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You’re proposing that the United States government force Apple to invest in Intel? Apple chose a different supplier than Intel; at this point it’s hard to consider Intel a competitor to TSMC but let’s pretend they are.
You have proposed a “free market” system in which if you choose the wrong competitor you can be forced to bail out the chosen one. The economics of that don’t work at all.
I'd rather the citizens control the companies than the other way around.
Branding nationalizing companies as “citizens control” is quite the spin. Chinese citizens surely own the means of production, right?
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How is using tax money to prop up uncompetitive companies good for national security? Wouldn't it be better to replace them with competitive companies? It's super hard to be successful when your own government in backing the competition.
They did it with rail before
US needed functional railroads and they took over the rr companies.
You can't build a new Intel. That would take decades. These aren't startups. They are massive fucking machines that can't just be disassembled and put back together by someone else. So the idea is to control them and get them back on track to better serve the collective interest.
You do that by letting them fail.
You let them fail because that ensures that everyone else in the economy fixes their shit and stays competitive. America developed more world class successes, by getting out of the way and letting badly run firms fail.
Especially since NVIDIA is a competitor.
You can't build a new one so you keep the old one on life support? This makes no sense. The old Intel is not the right choice. How many decades do you think it will take them to recover if you don't clean house? How many decades has it already been? The later you start the longer you remain vulnerable to foreign competition.
You wouldn’t have to build a new intel. Their IP, infrastructure, and even the individual talent pool won’t simply disappear. They can either get redistributed into more competent companies like their competitors or restructured into a new venture. The only losers would be the current shareholders.
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> I'm of the thinking that when your company gets to a certain size we'd be well off nationalizing.
The public sector is great at two things: (1) getting literally millions of people to show up to work and do well-defined jobs (i.e. nothing outside the lines) that do not change from year to year, and (2) dumping billions into research, with very little of (2) affecting (1). Critically, the public sector has extraordinary difficulty with the agility needed for iterative product development.
If companies get to a certain size and their day-to-day operations are more-or-less fundamentally the same year-after-year, yeah there's an argument for nationalizing them. You see this in arguments to nationalize segments from oil refineries, apartment construction, and airlines. There's something coarse about caretaker CEOs and private shareholders getting rich, instead of the public purse, off the economic rents thrown off from a mature machine that doesn't have much more, if any, room for growth. But the key question is whether the potential for growth has been fully exploited or not; if it hasn't been, then the government certainly won't succeed at exploiting additional growth, and it's better for the company to stay in private hands, which will be motivated to privatize the wealth from achieving that growth, and the government will be paid more in taxes if they succeed.
That's why I'm not convinced chip manufacturing is there when there is still yearly research into reducing process sizes. Maybe there's a case for nationalizing the foundry lines producing older, larger processes that are used in current weapons designs, but that's not the case for nationalizing the whole company.
As a non-American, a big part of the appeal of American companies was their independence from the American government.
Was.
Then as part of the bail out break them up so that they're no longer too big to fail.