News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Intel Honesty by AnotherGoodName on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @01:34PM (#41448341)
Intel is trapped. Its debt repayments alone are massive. The poor performance in stock has encouraged 20years of wage stagnation to the point where you can literally earn over 50% more at amd or nvidia or even an startup for equivalent roles so they aren’t hiring the best. Their pay in the Bay Area is double tsmc in taiwan for equivalent roles in raw dollar terms but the ppp differences means your better off working for tsmc in Taiwan than intel in the Bay Area. That’s not a joke. Intel are literally incapable of attracting talent from Taiwan right now.

They don’t have the talent they need and the debt trap and poor performance means a lot of push back to the needed doubling of wages to attract that talent. It’s a very hard sell for any exec trying to correct this problem. They sidelined lip bu tan who was one of the advocates for even more layoffs and wage freezes but he’s one of many backwards thinkers they need to remove. It’s going to be difficult to fix their board.

Without talent intel has no hope of winning and they can’t get that talent due to poor stock performance for the past 20years leading to executives and shareholders wishing to implement the opposite of what they need right now. In fact they have ongoing layoffs right now. A true downward spiral and the only real hope is for a newcomer to step up.

Re:Intel Honesty by joe_the_user on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:23PM (#41450339)
I worked for Intel in the 90s.

I think the company always paid "industry standard" compared to other companies paying actually well. And it was a terrible place to work by most objective measures - people got let go quite freely, etc. When Andy Grove writes a book called "Only The Paranoid Survive", he's not committing to employee loyalty.

I think the way Intel got good people, and they did get good people, was by a combination of the opportunity to build something that gets widely used and a cult-like spirit of "are you good and tough enough to survive the bullshit".

But yeah, seems there's no recovery when that approach stops working. And it's disturbing that many of America's "crown jewels" (Intel, Boeing, etc) are basically constructed that way.

Re:Intel Honesty by closeparen on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @02:10PM (#41448703)
>Their pay in the Bay Area is double tsmc in taiwan for equivalent roles in raw dollar terms but the ppp differences means your better off working for tsmc in Taiwan than intel in the Bay Area. That’s not a joke. Intel are literally incapable of attracting talent from Taiwan right now.

There's some whiplash in hearing constantly how the US is a corporate-dominated oligarchy, and then also seeing trillion-dollar industries at the forefront of the global economy constantly getting their shit rocked by a few dozen NIMBY retirees at city council meetings.

Re:Intel Honesty by amluto on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @02:21PM (#41448823)
Some of the issues are way downstream of those NIMBYs:

Non-housing costs are quite low in Taiwan. Food and childcare, in particular, are so much cheaper than California that it’s hard to believe.

But the NIMBYs aren’t totally in the clear. Rental housing with 3+ bedrooms (for families) is severely lacking in much of the US. Maybe fire codes are to blame. Taiwan is full of very nice new high-rise development that contains units with lots of bedrooms. Wandering around those developments and the new 3-story developments in California, the ones in Taiwan are much, much, much nicer, even from the outside. The NIMBYs should take note.

Re:Intel Honesty by zelon88 on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:17PM (#41450268)
> Non-housing costs are quite low in Taiwan. Food and childcare, in particular, are so much cheaper than California that it’s hard to believe.

That statement is the problem.

Nobody wants to rent. There are too many rental properties, and not enough affordable housing. The reason you need rental properties is because you're already trying to make a living from families having a home. You're not supposed to do that. That's supposed to be the prize for the family for assimilating with capitalism. By buying it and renting it back to them you're disincentivizing the working class from working.

But by all means, keep privatizing the shit out of 3 bedroom family homes and see what happens. Take every drop of value out of the housing market and bank it. That's what pitchforks are for.

Re:Intel Honesty by schmidtleonard on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:21PM (#41450322)
The purpose of capitalism is to establish, reinforce, and perpetuate a class hierarchy where the people on the bottom must constantly pay to exist while the people on top constantly get paid to exist. This shit isn't a side effect, it's the entire point of the exercise.
Re:Intel Honesty by closeparen on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:53PM (#41450672)
The relevant world-historical political philosophy here is feudalism: land ownership and hereditary relationships to land are paramount, people should mostly stay where they were born, merchant/capitalist/productive sources of wealth and income are a suspicious, threatening upstart that we landowners, the legitimate heirs of political power, must keep in check.

The landowners in this case happen to think of themselves as middle class.

Re:Intel Honesty by closeparen on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:00PM (#41450744)
Unfortunately in their rejection of capitalism, the people have mostly decided to do feudalism, i.e. legitimacy comes from land ownership and land tenure. It is even hereditary: heirs get to pay much lower property tax than transplants.

I don't think we're going to see eye to eye on capitalism, but even Marx would agree with me that it's better than feudalism.

Re:Intel Honesty by schmidtleonard on Thursday September 05, 2024 @04:58PM (#41460362)
"That's not true capitalism!!!"

Sure dude. Now where have I heard that before?

Re:Intel Honesty by graymatters on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:33PM (#41450465)
Spoken like a true Marxist. The purpose of Marxism is to literally kill hundreds of millions of people who oppose the Marxist way. Like they did during the 20th century in the countries where Marxism prevailed (even briefly).
Re:Intel Honesty by astrange on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:41PM (#41451175)
It is not spoken like a true Marxist; they didn't even believe this. Here's Engels saying being a renter is not exploitation:

https://x.com/TheOmniZaddy/status/1559949666543878151

Georgism is better though, and the homeownership market isn't about "capitalism".

Re:Intel Honesty by schmidtleonard on Thursday September 05, 2024 @06:04PM (#41460760)
Ah, Georgists. Smart enough to see the problem, but dumb enough to think the people benefiting will help them solve it.
Re:Intel Honesty by madmask on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:37PM (#41450507)
Capitalism gives you opportunities to climb the ladder
Re:Intel Honesty by angelaguilera on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:43PM (#41450573)
Capitalism also continuously adds steps to that ladder
Re:Intel Honesty by hakfoo on Thursday September 05, 2024 @12:17AM (#41453422)
Progress should be saying "we don't have to spend so much of our time and effort on the ladder".

Our forefathers would be baffled to see that we've coerced crops into tenfold their natural yield, conquered lightning, the wind, and the sun itself, and yet, millions of people are still working 40+ hours a week to not starve or go homeless.

Re:Intel Honesty by kilotaras on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @02:57PM (#41449254)
> Non-housing costs are quite low in Taiwan. Food and childcare, in particular, are so much cheaper than California that it’s hard to believe.

Those are downstream of housing restrictions to a large extent. From "Housing theory of everything" [0]:

Consider a cleaner living in Alabama. In 1960 they could move to NYC and earn wages 84% higher, and still end up with 70% higher income after rent. In 2010, they could move to New York City and become 28% more productive, and earn a wage 28% higher – and reduce the surplus of workers back home, letting them demand higher pay. But since housing costs are so much higher, the net earnings and living standards of someone like this would fall if they moved today, and wouldn’t be worth it. The same would be true for plumbers, receptionists and other professions that allow other people to specialise at what they’re best at and minimise the time they spend on things like DIY and answering the phone. By contrast, top lawyers get wage boosts that are still sufficiently higher to justify a move in both 1960 and 2010, even after the higher rents they’ll have to pay.

[0] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...

Re:Intel Honesty by efitz on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:14PM (#41450242)
Anyone looking to start a new manufacturing business would be insane to consider California for any number of reasons- cost-of-living, (urban) quality of life, regulatory environment, state taxes, etc.

Right now manufacturers should be considering other states. Florida, Tennessee and Texas all are income-tax-free and have business friendly regulatory climates. Several states like Alabama and West Virginia offer extremely low cost-of-living and property costs and likely would negotiate tax abatements.

Re:Intel Honesty by apercu on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:29PM (#41450407)
Does anyone truly want to live in Florida, Texas, Alabama, WV? (I left Tennessee off the list because it seems a lot to people _do_ want to live in Nashville anyway).

I grew up in Texas. I've lived in 5 states and a Canadian province.

My sisters house in Fort Worth is assessed a little lower than my house in WI. But her property tax is more than my property tax plus WI state income tax so.....

Re:Intel Honesty by decafninja on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:25PM (#41451018)
Florida and Texas don’t belong on the same list as WV and Alabama.

I can see why even a deep blue liberal might hold their nose and move to FL or TX. I can’t see why you’d do so for AL or WV.

Re:Intel Honesty by shiroiushi on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @08:26PM (#41452272)
They wouldn't, just proposing the idea here is crazy. The OP might as well have suggested Idaho, Wyoming, or northern Alaska as viable places to build giant tech company campuses.
Re:Intel Honesty by sroussey on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @09:22PM (#41452579)
> Florida and Texas don’t belong on the same list as WV and Alabama.

Most of Texas and Florida is a lot more alike to WV and Alabama when you take out some of the cities which the state very much hates. Both states are very much local control when it comes to the Federal government, but exactly the opposite when it comes to their cities.

Re:Intel Honesty by murderfs on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:00PM (#41450751)
Florida and Texas are among the fastest growing states in the country, whereas California is losing population.
Re:Intel Honesty by DiscourseFan on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @07:57PM (#41452082)
Florida will be underwater immanently, in Texas abortion is illegal. I'd call it a "bubble," for lack of a better term.
Re:Intel Honesty by kortilla on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @08:42PM (#41452355)
Whatever you want to call it, people want to live there.
Re:Intel Honesty by DiscourseFan on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @10:18PM (#41452880)
They want a well-paying job or a better community or better schools. Nobody "wants" to move to a state just because its that state. Long term political and ecological trends won't deter short term gains for many, that's all.
Re:Intel Honesty by kortilla on Thursday September 05, 2024 @10:30PM (#41462344)
Okay, nobody “wants” to live in California either by that logic.
Re:Intel Honesty by DiscourseFan on Friday September 06, 2024 @11:16PM (#41471249)
Well, there are a few...but most people I know who've moved to California recently only did so for work.
Re:Intel Honesty by nunez on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @08:57PM (#41452438)
Texas politics is temporary IMO. Tides will turn eventually.
Re:Intel Honesty by DiscourseFan on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @10:15PM (#41452862)
History is not some abstract concept that moves with as much regularity as the moon around the ocean. It takes people to change laws.
Re:Intel Honesty by nunez on Thursday September 05, 2024 @09:30PM (#41462018)
Agreed; fortunately, those people are moving to Texas en masse.
Re:Intel Honesty by astrange on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:33PM (#41451106)
The population increasing in a state is mostly about age structure of the country, not people deciding to move there. California's low growth and Florida's high growth are because Americans are getting older, retiring, and not having children.
Re:Intel Honesty by dragonwriter on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @08:03PM (#41452116)
California having negative growth is a result of immigration curtailment from COVID; as immigration numbers have recovered, California’s population loss rate as dropped from the 0.91% pandemic peak to 0.19% in 2023. For a long time before the pandemic California has had high internal outmigration mostly at lower income levels, nearly offset by internal inmigration mostly at higher income levels, with net growth because of international migration.
Re:Intel Honesty by murderfs on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @06:35PM (#41451601)
This is absolutely false, to the point where there's literally a wikipedia article about net migration out of California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_exodus
Re:Intel Honesty by astrange on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @07:09PM (#41451811)
Net migration is not the same thing as population change. You can have net out-migration and population growth because people have children.

> as well as comparatively high tax levels and a complex regulatory environment for businesses.[8] Texas is the leading destination of California's former residents

Texas has higher tax levels than California because property taxes are higher. People are leaving pretty much entirely because of housing costs because California refuses to build anything.

Re:Intel Honesty by scarface_74 on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:07PM (#41450831)
And how many of the traditional demographics of tech workers do you think want to move to Florida? It is currently my home state and I work remotely. But I’m older. I would never want to live here if my wife were younger or I thought there was any chance we wanted to become pregnant.
Re:Intel Honesty by decafninja on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:23PM (#41450994)
I don’t know, Miami is pretty nice. The only reason I wouldn’t consider living in Miami is that if I ever got laid off, the tech job ecosystem is poor at best.

It’s not perfect but neither is SFBA, NYC, or Seattle.

Re:Intel Honesty by scarface_74 on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:50PM (#41451253)
Until you have to pay the skyrocketing insurance costs.

I am not blaming the government for that. It’s just life when you live in an area with frequent hurricanes

Re:Intel Honesty by p1esk on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:34PM (#41451113)
After many years in CA I love it in Florida. Palm Beach or Boca Raton are very nice, schools are excellent, weather is perfect 7 months out of 12. And houses are significantly cheaper than in equivalent areas in CA. Less woke culture too.
Re:Intel Honesty by fragmede on Friday September 06, 2024 @11:28PM (#41471273)
7/12 is 58% is an F.
Re:Intel Honesty by kortilla on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @08:45PM (#41452369)
Why would you have difficulty becoming pregnant in Florida?
Re:Intel Honesty by acdha on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @09:02PM (#41452466)
That’s mostly not the problem: it’s what happens if it goes wrong in ways which are guaranteed to happen for a certain percentage of women every year, and you’re no longer allowed to get medical treatment because some failed Christians couldn’t be bothered to read their own holy book (the Old Testament god is down with abortion, the New Testament one isn’t concerned with it). There are more children who used to have mothers until an attempt at a sibling went wrong than there used to be, and that’s simply shameful.

This has ripple effects: it’s not just women suffering permanent injuries or death but also growing problems in many red states with doctors leaving to avoid the high likelihood of being charged for exercising what is standard medical judgement in the free world.

Even getting pregnant is at risk for couples who need to use IVF. Those attempts can go wrong which are easily resolved if you can get medical care which is increasingly under legal threat. IVF patients tend to be richer and whiter so the GOP is trying to carve out exceptions but that’s far from a given and you’ll still have a nightmare if you get the wrong DA.

Re:Intel Honesty by kortilla on Thursday September 05, 2024 @10:29PM (#41462338)
Travel to an adjacent state if you need an abortion. If you don’t have the funds to do that you aren’t smartly planning a family in the first place.
Re:Intel Honesty by acdha on Friday September 06, 2024 @09:15PM (#41470875)
Traveling to an adjacent state isn’t something you can do in an emergency. It’s not something you can easily do if you have family commitments, as growing families often do. It’s not going to help you if you have trouble finding a doctor because they’re leaving a state which is looking for excuses to attack their medical judgement. It’s not something you can easily do if you have a relationship which turns bad and the make partner is opposed because he sees the permanent anchor of a potential birth.

Yes, there are ways that people can cope with that but just because it’s possible doesn’t mean people won’t try to avoid being in a bad situation in the first place, as was the topic of this thread.

Re:Intel Honesty by selimthegrim on Saturday September 07, 2024 @01:57AM (#41471773)
Adjacent state? Have you checked the map lately?
Re:Intel Honesty by scarface_74 on Saturday September 07, 2024 @07:43PM (#41477146)
Notice I didn’t say anything about an “unwanted pregnancy”. I’m talking about a case where a pregnancy is hypothetically putting my wife’s life in danger and I have to choose between aborting her pregnancy during an emergency and killing her. I am going to choose my wife every time.

Doctors in anti-abortion states are afraid to do medically necessary abortion and getting questioned by the judicial system.

I can’t take her to another state. My best friend and his wife were on the brink of making that choice. Instead they had their son delivered 2 months early and let the chips fall where they may (he’s healthy with some slight learning disabilities now). But he was not about to let his wife die and he later on got a vasectomy so he wouldn’t risk getting his wife pregnant

Re:Intel Honesty by Qwertious on Thursday September 05, 2024 @01:28AM (#41453787)
Nobody said anything about difficulty becoming pregnant. Florida has abortion bans, and that has knock-on effects on e.g. if a woman miscarries, the doctor is required to report any "suspected abortions" and CYAs and now you're in jail for having had a normal medical problem.
Re:Intel Honesty by nunez on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @08:56PM (#41452432)
Houston and Austin are frickin' awesome if you're into food and hot weather.

Alabama has beautiful beaches...and Huntsville. Birmingham is actually quite nice.

Florida has amazing beaches.

Re:Intel Honesty by water_556 on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @09:20PM (#41452570)
Hard stop there pal. Austin food is overpriced and mostly bland. Some good Asian and BBQ other than that.... LOL. Food abomination maybe
Re:Intel Honesty by nunez on Thursday September 05, 2024 @09:31PM (#41462028)
Definitely a lot of that in Austin but they have an overall good food scene.

Nothing on Houston though. Houston all day.

Re:Intel Honesty by kagakuninja on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:03PM (#41450780)
Texas actually has higher taxes than California, despite the lack of income tax. They make up for it in property tax AFAIK. California actually has low property taxes for many property owners, thanks to the controversial proposition 13.

Desirable urban areas of California are expensive because we don't have enough housing.

Re:Intel Honesty by taormina on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @06:11PM (#41451421)
As a Texan, who has considered moving to California many times, this is laughable. I pay maybe $10k-$11k in property taxes (https://tax-office.traviscountytx.gov/properties/taxes/estim...). I work for myself at the moment, but if I took my previous salary of $200k and earned that in CA instead, I would owe CA closer to $15k, and I'm not grandfathered into prop 13. Never once in my career has the math made any sense for living in CA over TX from a tax perspective. And you if you don't own your property, you don't owe TX anything.
Re:Intel Honesty by kagakuninja on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @07:31PM (#41451929)
Housing is presumably more expensive here. I know my uncle has a house twice as large as mine at similar cost, although that was 20 years ago. But then of course you have to pay much higher AC bills.

The tax thing is just something I hear in the California reddit groups when people discuss the never ending claims of a "California exodus". Allegedly, people have moved to Texas and discovered that they aren't actually saving money compared to California, and the weather is way worse.

Re:Intel Honesty by monocasa on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @07:19PM (#41451864)
> And you if you don't own your property, you don't owe TX anything.

If you're renting, it's not like your landlord isn't baking that I to your rent.

Re:Intel Honesty by nunez on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @08:54PM (#41452420)
But the rent is way lower on the average because cost per sq ft is way lower.
Re:Intel Honesty by monocasa on Thursday September 05, 2024 @06:35PM (#41460970)
Wages are lower as well.
Re:Intel Honesty by philsnow on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @09:48PM (#41452727)
Back in 2018 I did the math and ended up buying a house in Texas. Table stakes for a 2- or 3-bed shack on the SFBA peninsula was ~$1.5M at the time. At 1%, that's $15k / year in perpetuity to CA. In TX I found an amazing house in the town I was looking at for about $450k, and the property tax on this particular one (every house is in a locality, county, school district, maybe some other domains, and each has their own tax) added up to about 3%, or $13.5k / year.

In addition to being fewer dollarbucks out of my pocket, I had confidence that that money was going to be used closer to my own community.

(All of this is to say nothing of TX having no capital gains tax, which pushed the move from being kind of a wash to being a slam dunk.)

I didn't end up actually moving there for personal reasons, and having done all this analysis makes the California taxes all the harder to stomach.

Re:Intel Honesty by lotsofpulp on Thursday September 05, 2024 @03:44AM (#41454483)
In Washington, the property tax rate is 1% with no income tax.
Re:Intel Honesty by eric-hu on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:16PM (#41450930)
> Desirable urban areas of California are expensive because we don't have enough housing.

I hear this a lot about California and other places. But I also know lots of people look to buy a 2nd, 3rd, etc property for rental income. For those homeowners, buying more property is rational because it's an investment they already understand. They can reap economy of scale benefits, even at a low multiple like 2-3 properties: water heaters, dishwashers etc become easier to maintain. The incentives are strong for homeowners to buy rental property. And they're in a stronger position to buy than renters.

My gut tells me that 7-8 of every 10 new houses built are bought with the intention to rent it out. It seems like "build more homes" will result in current property owners owning more property to rent out, and most renters will still be renters.

Re:Intel Honesty by kagakuninja on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:21PM (#41450978)
Then that would result in lower cost rental units. While not what everyone wants, it would be a great improvement over the current situation. There are also ways to create tax incentives that could discourage your scenario from happening.
Re:Intel Honesty by astrange on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:30PM (#41451065)
Houses are not built with any particular intent. Developers and property owners are not the same people, and don't even have the same interests. Single family homes for rental are actually quite rare and most businesses that try to enter the market fail and leave again.
Re:Intel Honesty by spockz on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:23PM (#41451000)
This is a large reason why many of our larger municipalities now forbid to buy a home in their zone if it isn’t (going to be) your primary residence. It seems to be working quite well.
Re:Intel Honesty by astrange on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:31PM (#41451073)
The only thing that matters is how many homes there are; stuff like this and vacancy taxes has barely any effect. The main reason to do it is if you want to appear to solve the problem without actually trying to solve it.

The main reason anyone would own two SFHs is that you need to do this in order to move. If you sell your first home before moving you're homeless. And after that it can take a long time to find a buyer.

They're a bad rental investment though because it's way too risky to own one; one bad renter or one roof replacement means you've lost money.

Re:Intel Honesty by Qwertious on Thursday September 05, 2024 @01:21AM (#41453747)
>The only thing that matters is how many homes there are

Cost of construction also matters - it reduces the renter's BATNA which reduces bargaining power.

Re:Intel Honesty by eric-hu on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:35PM (#41451127)
That sounds like a policy I can get behind. Can you share a name of such a policy or a link to one?
Re:Intel Honesty by kortilla on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @08:40PM (#41452345)
That’s an idiotic law. It discourages home building.
Re:Intel Honesty by scarface_74 on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:03PM (#41450786)
And you would be crazy to move your company to Florida where if you got on the wrong side of the governor, he would go out of his way to punish you.

Florida is my current home state.

You would be much better off moving to GA, TN, AL or almost any other southern state with more traditional business friendly Republicans.

And this isn’t meant to be a Republican vs Democrat thing. More so a “business friendly traditional Republican” vs “culture warrior Republicans”.

I have no opinion of how Democrats run their states. I’ve only lived in two states my entire life - GA and FL. I don’t keep up with state politics in other states.

Re:Intel Honesty by shiroiushi on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @08:24PM (#41452252)
>Florida, Tennessee and Texas all are income-tax-free and have business friendly regulatory climates.

Yes, and abortion is illegal in those states, the schools are terrible, and they're full of MAGAts. You're not going to attract top talent to these places, especially women. There are very good reasons that knowledge industries are mostly concentrated in blue states.

Re:Intel Honesty by slavboj on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @11:21PM (#41453155)
You might be surprised to discover that roughly half of their population is women.
Re:Intel Honesty by shiroiushi on Thursday September 05, 2024 @12:14AM (#41453409)
Not women who'd work in a tech company.
Re:Intel Honesty by selimthegrim on Thursday September 05, 2024 @08:42AM (#41456068)
We just lost a good (female, Australian) grad student we were recruiting, to UT Austin.
Re:Intel Honesty by pchristensen on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @03:57PM (#41450038)
The primary problem for getting 3+ bedroom apartments built in America is school funding. School districts are mostly locally funded (sometimes with a portion funded by the state government) and almost entirely from property taxes. At a very high level, schools are funded by the acre and their expenses scale with the 2nd-5th bedrooms in their district. A 4 bedroom apartment or condo and a 4 bedroom house will usually pay very different tax rates, so local governments are highly incentivized to deny and obstruct large apartments. A 2 bedroom apartment with one child is one thing, but a 4 bedroom apartment with 3-5 children is a huge money loser.

That's also an obstacle to a lot of cities densifying and intensifying. Built out cities have a model that lets them operate, but not capital or land to build and expand in areas of high growth and demand. That's just one of many factors that are freezing our cities in amber.

Re:Intel Honesty by ak217 on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:48PM (#41450629)
I don't think your analysis is valid in California. Public high schools in California receive most of their funding on a per-pupil, attendance-weighted basis from the state on a redistributive basis (all property taxes from across the state are pooled and redistributed).
Re:Intel Honesty by ghshephard on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:27PM (#41451038)
Parcel Taxes allow wealthy areas like Palo Alto to have much higher qualities of education. School District quality is probably one of the number one factors for families looking for a home.
Re:Intel Honesty by ak217 on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:58PM (#41451311)
Most school districts in California don't have any parcel taxes. There are definitely some like Palo Alto and other Bay Area and LA school districts that do, but they serve as a relatively small boost (0 to 20% of the district's budget). But yes, to the extent they constitute a significant portion of the revenue, the dynamics described by the parent post play a role.

Parcel taxes are known to be a poor funding mechanism for this reason, but they were the only viable way for districts to raise extra money while working around the toxic side effects of Proposition 13 (https://ed100.org/lessons/parceltax), which illustrates its long shadow in California state law. Prop 13 is of course responsible for multiple other self-reinforcing anti-growth incentive loops.

Re:Intel Honesty by ghshephard on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @07:14PM (#41451836)
My favorite loophole on Prop13 is where a Real Estate Trust can purchase a commercial property, and then sell portions of that Real Estate Trust to LLCs. Those LLCs maintain their ownership percentage, but investors can buy/sell shares in that corp without triggering any of the Prop 13 change-of-ownership triggers, and therefore keeping a cap on their tax increases.
Re:Intel Honesty by astrange on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:36PM (#41451138)
> The primary problem for getting 3+ bedroom apartments built in America is school funding.

It actually is mostly at the state level, namely fire codes and condo defect laws. America has building codes designed not for safety but to make single family homes cheaper and apartments more expensive. One of the things they do is require double stairways for tall enough buildings, with the result that all apartments must be built like hotels. That plus the requirement for a window on bedrooms makes it hard to fit them in.

Re:Intel Honesty by geodel on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @02:52PM (#41449175)
All true. The question still remains how many US folks can /want to go live in Taiwan vs How many Taiwanese can / want to live in US suburban dystopia. And I say this as immigrant to US increasingly disenchanted by suburbia.

From what I read housing price to income ratio has increased ~2.5 times from 6.5 to 15.8 in last two decades in Taiwan. And it seems to be worse in new developments in city like Taipei.

At a top echelon of Taiwan society or as a tourist it must be nice live, roam around in pleasant urban environments compare to US suburbia but I am not sure average Taiwanese are finding life great with stagnating wages and unaffordable housing.

Re:Intel Honesty by jay_kyburz on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @03:41PM (#41449834)
As a non US citizen, I think there are a lot of high level cultural issues that would prevent me considering a job in the US, well before I pulled out a calculator and starting comparing salary to cost of living.

I won't enumerate them because it would be sure to offend somebody (everybody?).

Re:Intel Honesty by geodel on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @03:56PM (#41450030)
That would make sense. There are really lot of reasons to not take job offer in US. And even after taking offer many may find job sucks in ways they have not initially thought of.

The only thing that's unlikely to happen is all good things one like to become available at a place one likes to live.

Re:Intel Honesty by nick3443 on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @03:50PM (#41449943)
You yada yada'd over the best part!
Re:Intel Honesty by re-thc on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @07:58PM (#41452089)
> with stagnating wages

That's not true. The minimum wage has increased every year for the last 8 years at least for quite a decent amount. Wages have increased, maybe even more so than the US.

> And it seems to be worse in new developments in city like Taipei

If you're looking at Taipei then you have to compare it to NYC or some other expensive city and NYC isn't much better in terms of pricing.

Re:Intel Honesty by qwytw on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @03:32PM (#41449727)
> Taiwan is full of very nice new high-rise development that contains units with lots of bedrooms

But presumably you'll never be able to buy and will have to rent forever? Real estate is significantly more expensive in Taiwan relative to income than in SF/etc.

Re:Intel Honesty by J_Shelby_J on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:04PM (#41450119)
Is a market where housing supply meets demand, housing is a depreciating asset. Why would you want to buy if renting is cheaper?
Re:Intel Honesty by qwytw on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @06:06PM (#41451361)
> Is a market where housing supply meets demand, housing is a depreciating asset.

How so? Supposedly house prices increased by 50% in 5 years there. So obviously it does not meet demand...

> Why would you want to buy if renting is cheaper?

Because it's usually considerably cheaper long-term? Rent prices go up all the time, so you'd lose a very significant amount of money over 10-20+ years.

Re:Intel Honesty by roenxi on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @08:59PM (#41452444)
If it is cheaper to buy than to rent, then presumably they can buy a house. The difference in prices just has to be bigger than interest rates and it becomes cost-effective to get a loan.

Say rents are >6% of the equivalent cost of ownership, then a mortgage at 6% will be cheaper than renting. So renting can't get that out of control relative to house prices in the long term, they have to go crazy together in a way that favours people who always lived in an area.

Re:Intel Honesty by qwytw on Thursday September 05, 2024 @07:41AM (#41455635)
I mean in normal markets you'd expect price-to-rent ratio to up to 20x. If it's higher buying probably doesn't make a lot of sense unless you expect prices to continue growing at a very fast rate (which of course makes it too risky if it's your primary home).

In Taipei it seems to be about 50x.

So if you live there and want to have children it's certainly not cheaper (you can't afford it anyway) and you end up paying already very high and continuously increasing rent payments all your life. By the time you retire you have no equity and very little savings.

Situation is the the same in a lot of major cities. It's just that rents are naturally caped at some proportion of median income (that leaves you with very little disposable income) while real estate prices have become almost completely detached from it.

Re:Intel Honesty by closeparen on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @02:30PM (#41448926)
While there are a number of technical issues with respect to the limited trickle of multifamily permits that are given, the fundamental dynamic is that engaged voters don't want to see significantly more people living in the region, and therefore it doesn't happen.
Re:Intel Honesty by cogman10 on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @03:37PM (#41449789)
Yeah, it has a lot to do with selfishness. More housing means more people means you have a lower property value for you home in the area. Further, it means your vote becomes less powerful as the poors that live in the high rise have the same voting power as you do in your single family home.
Re:Intel Honesty by amluto on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:05PM (#41450130)
I think it has a lot to do with people believing what you just said. Which is, of course, utter nonsense! If a neighborhood suddenly gets rezoned for 20-story mixed-use development, an existing house will be devalued, but an existing lot will likely gain more then enough value to compensate.
Re:Intel Honesty by closeparen on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:10PM (#41450206)
What is true, though, is that the transportation system "everyone drives and parks their car everywhere" would stop working.
Re:Intel Honesty by cogman10 on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:09PM (#41450189)
> Which is, of course, utter nonsense!

That doesn't change the loss of voting power. Further, value to who? I agree a 20 story high-rise has more value than a single-family home, but how does that help the single-family homeowner or the homeowners that live around the lot that gets rezoned?

That's the problem. The existing homes and their owners seem mostly downsides to rezoning even though the city as a whole would benefit greatly from them.

Re:Intel Honesty by ProfessorLayton on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @07:05PM (#41451793)
>That's the problem. The existing homes and their owners seem mostly downsides to rezoning even though the city as a whole would benefit greatly from them.

That's only part of the problem, though. Homeowners are voting in their interest, and selfish or not, that's democracy. The other side of the coin is that the people who stand to benefit the most don't vote for policies or politicians that have their interests in mind.

SF shows up in HN all the time for its NIMBYsm, but the city is mostly renters, whom could vote as a block like homeowners, and easily get more housing built. But they don't.

Re:Intel Honesty by _DeadFred_ on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:39PM (#41450535)
Is it selfish to have national parks when there are people that are homeless and the government could give them literally free land?

Long ago the people that lived in the area realized that they liked where they lived and how it was, and voted to put in place rules to keep it that way. It sucks now, I and all my friends the grew up there were forced to move somewhere affordable, but it's not pure selfishness. They didn't take something away from someone else, no one else ever had it. And to expand it does inherently change the nature of what 'it' is and opens a genie that can NEVER be put back.

Re:Intel Honesty by astrange on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:39PM (#41451156)
> Long ago the people that lived in the area realized that they liked where they lived and how it was

Ignoring that there were probably Indians there - that wasn't "long ago", residential zoning was mostly introduced in the 30s-60s. America hasn't had zoning for most of its life!

Most other countries have never had it and still don't.

(Except every other Anglo country has an even /worse/ planning system than American residential zoning.)

Re:Intel Honesty by _DeadFred_ on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:58PM (#41451307)
Am I wrong to use when this issue started as the discussion starting point? Or are you agreeing that it is unfair to force a living situation change on a native population because other people want to move in or force their say about things?

Zoning was introduced in the USA in 1904. The USA was 'urbanized' in 1920 the first time more Americans lived in cities than the rural countryside. Our zoning laws fit with the time period when we would develop things like... zoning laws.

When my family moved to the Bay Area huge parts of it was fruit trees (with another large part being future superfund toxic waste dumps).

If you were to drive (because they aren't designed for walking) along the 'Walmart strip' of any town in the USA I can't see how you can argue 'the USA has too strong of city planning'. Our growth is the stuff of ugly, out of control, unwalkable, car requiring nightmares.

Re:Intel Honesty by astrange on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @06:25PM (#41451514)
> Am I wrong to use when this issue started as the discussion starting point?

You're wrong about when it started. It's a lot more recent than that. We didn't build this way in 1904; we couldn't have afforded to live like this because we didn't have cars. A lot of places in the US were actually bulldozed since then to replace them with streets and parking.

American zoning specifically was introduced in California for the sole reason of keeping Chinese immigrants out of white neighborhoods - the idea was that if you banned running a business out of your home, they wouldn't be able to afford the neighborhood. (See "The Color of Law"… or you can read the city council minutes because, like, that's why they said they did it.)

But it's been kept since then mainly because of the assumption that everyone will own a car; cars cause traffic, so you can't attract them or strangers will make noise and park in front of your house.

Funny enough, another reason it's been kept in California is that 70s environmentalists read "Urban Growth Engines" and "The Population Bomb" and decided it was good because more expensive housing would stop people from having children. This is probably the inspiration for that Thanos guy.

> If you were to drive (because they aren't designed for walking) along the 'Walmart strip' of any town in the USA I can't see how you can argue 'the USA has too strong of city planning'.

Those are entirely caused by city planning. For one thing, no developer would want to build this way because it's not profitable - all that concrete for surface parking spaces is super expensive and nobody is using it. Parking minimums, stroads, federal highway funding, height limits and NIMBYs all come together to create sprawl. (See "Strong Towns".)

Oh, and fear that denser housing would lead to everyone dying in a nuclear war, that too.

Re:Intel Honesty by _DeadFred_ on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @08:59PM (#41452449)
None of the people that you called 'greedy' pushed for this zoning to keep Chinese immigrants out. I'm not sure why you are bringing that up. The fact that laws can be created for bad reasons doesn't mean we shouldn't have laws. If someone finds a historically bad use case no more laws should be allowed?

We agree the USA didn't have relevant zoning laws until the population needed zoning laws. I don't think that changes anything (other than maybe we both agree that first passes often turn out to be poor and need revision).

70s environmentalists didn't decide more expensive housing would stop people from having children. I'm a child of these people. I remember the discussion. I remember my parents talking about prop 13. Driving up the cost of housing had zero discussion. The little old lady down the street driven from her home over property taxes did. The rapid changes with no planning did. The loss of the local field where people played. The loss of access to beaches people were used to going to. That's why laws like The California Coastal Act of 1976 were added at this time as well to guaranty public access back to these beaches. It wasn't just 'no building houses and no property tax for boomers' there is a whole body of law created at this time trying to keep California what it had been such as a place where you can go to the beach (up until 1976 that wasn't a given).

While they have been used for racist reasons zoning laws are not defacto racist. Buying a home is the largest purchase most Americans will make. It is also a long term purchase. Guaranteeing that what you buy will stay what you bought for the lifetime of the purchase seems reasonable. Just because outside people don't like the guaranty that the government made doesn't mean that it should be taken away from the people it was made to. I had to fight hard to prevent an temporary (it was not temporary just because it was movable) asphalt plant from being put in across from my neighborhood. I was able to stop it because of zoning laws and all the meetings they had to have to get an exception. I was able to motivate enough people to go to those meetings that they finally gave up. My house was good for 1 thing, raising my children. Allowing an asphalt plant made the largest purchase I will ever make in my life useless for the reason I bought the house. Zoning laws are the government guaranteeing me my purchase will be usable. If the government wants to take away that guaranty they should have to buy me out.

Please remember I was driven out of where I grew up. I understand it sucks. I would have loved to be able to afford to stay and raise a family where I grew up. To have taught my kids to surf. Shown them the cool discoveries I made in Nisene Marks. But I also understand the reasons it ended up this way weren't nefarious, racists, trying to create a hellscape for $$$. It was people making what they thought were the right choices because they didn't like the rapid changes that were happening. Things can turn out bad without having premeditated evil intentions.

Edit: I am so tired of these attacks. My mom was the kindest gentlest person I have ever known. Her and her friends may not have made perfect choices but stop with the 'they were evil'. They were basic, fallible human beings. The results didn't end up great, so fix them. But stop blaming. It helps nothing. They tried. They got access to their beaches back as part of this same movement, something I don't hear all this 'older Californians just suck and are evil' complaining about. Stop attacking people like my dead mother, they don't deserve the attacks. Stop character assassinating these people whose motivations you know nothing about just because you are angry/frustrated.

Re:Intel Honesty by colechristensen on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @02:50PM (#41449155)
>Rental housing with 3+ bedrooms (for families) is severely lacking in much of the US. Maybe fire codes are to blame. Taiwan is full of very nice new high-rise development that contains units with lots of bedrooms. Wandering around those developments and the new 3-story developments in California, the ones in Taiwan are much, much, much nicer, even from the outside. The NIMBYs should take note.

And it's because of zoning. Cities allow density construction but then it's almost exclusively 0 and 1 bedroom apartments because you can charge more per sq ft. Zoning laws should force apartment construction to include multiple bedroom units but that would lower the cost of 1br units. So NIMBYs don't want density construction, and the people who build density don't want big units.

So cities are unlivable if you're not young and single or happy living in relative squalor. So people either don't have children or have to move to have children and you get cities that push out a big chunk of the demographic and then force people to commute.

Re:Intel Honesty by amluto on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:17PM (#41450262)
Not just zoning. Those high rises have units with lots of bedrooms around a central elevator core, and you can’t build those in the US.
Re:Intel Honesty by Wytwwww on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @03:30PM (#41449710)
But isn't housing extremely unaffordable in Taipei (and presumably rest of Taiwan)? Price per m2 is comparable to San Francisco or San Jose but median earnings are several times lower.
Re:Intel Honesty by foobarian on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @03:19PM (#41449555)
How could we get a council of a half-dozen visionaries to own a city-sized chunk of land and design a utopia, communist party-style but done right? I really think this is not possible without it being a private parcel where there aren't thousands of individual property owners in the loop for decision making.
Re:Intel Honesty by prewett on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @03:54PM (#41449992)
> How could we ... design a utopia, communist party-style but done right?

We can't. Certainly not until people stop being self-oriented, and stop being willing to sacrifice others for their own benefit. Recorded history says this is not going to happen. Even the one (as far as I understand) religion concerned with transforming human nature to love others sacrificially, Christianity, says this requires divine help. (There is even a book, "Critical Journey" that identifies the stages of spiritual life, with the life of sacrificial love as the sixth and last. Given the difficulty and slowness that even people who are committed to the journey find, getting to the life of sacrificial live probably requires multiple decades. So even within Christianity this quality is rare.)

Also, since Communism builds on Marxist ideas, which are founded on the idea of power, a Communist utopia is impossible, since the asserting of of power is the opposite of loving others sacrificially. And, indeed, 100% of the Communist states resulted in totalitarian dictatorships.

Re:Intel Honesty by closeparen on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:12PM (#41450225)
I don't think Manhattan or Chicago or any of our other great cities were built by selflessness or religiosity. We had the civilizational capacity at one point; can we get it back? And if not in the Bay Area, then where?
Re:Intel Honesty by colechristensen on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @03:49PM (#41449929)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_utopian_commu...

People try this thing on a fairly regular basis.

You're thinking "wouldn't it be great if there was a community led by an absolute authority which agrees with me" and, uh, that kind of thing doesn't scale, last, or continue agreeing with you for a particularly long amount of time.

>I really think this is not possible without it being a private parcel where there aren't thousands of individual property owners in the loop for decision making.

This is just saying democracy is bad. Ok, but go find me an example of something else that has actually worked.

It's troubling how people think dictatorship is the solution to their problems these days. It's not even one particular viewpoint that falls into this, people of all positions are increasingly advocating for authoritarian solutions.

Re:Intel Honesty by spencerflem on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:21PM (#41450318)
I think that's a response to the sort of obstructionate governance republicans have been doing. 27 laws total were passed by the senate in 2023 half of which were trivial things like commemorative coins.
Re:Intel Honesty by colechristensen on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:34PM (#41450476)
The party in power complains about the inactivity of the Congress because minority party obstruction.

The majority party has the full opportunity to get rid of the fillibuster, and yet does not. (pick a year to determine which party is assigned to which role)

The lack of activity is just as much the Democrats' fault, they have had plenty of opportunity to try to change procedure but they have not.

Re:Intel Honesty by foobarian on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:14PM (#41450244)
> This is just saying democracy is bad

It's more subtle than that, because it depends on the scope. Democracy is already not applied in many contexts today, such as most private corporations. In fact I think large companies have many analogous features to communist governments what with the central control and absolute authority.

There is certainly no suggestion that a whole state or country should be switched over to an authoritarian regime; of course we all know the classic "we tried this already and it didn't work" line.

There are a lot of cult-ish or vaguely religion-based communities out there. But that's not what I have in mind.

You tend to see a lot of lament in here on HN or other similar forums about things like car-centric suburban hellscapes, poor walkability, bike paths, what have you. Meanwhile in urban settings where these things are better solved there is the problem that property values are sky high, and create an elite environment that turn away support roles and cause a new set of problems.

I would love to see some tech billionaire drive an innovative design over a metro-sized zone. Maybe don't have roads and cars except for deliveries, use roads for cycles and pedestrians? Have a subway built before anything else? High-rise mixed-use buildings with important services like free child-care and urgent care? Have golf-cart-like EVs easily available for short-term rent. Free stupid-fast WiFi/Internet etc.

Kind of like a college campus but scaled up? Maybe the crazy sheiks in Dubai will manage it.

Re:Intel Honesty by colechristensen on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:28PM (#41450403)
Again, this happens regularly, they don't actually work.

You're advocating for local government to be a dictatorship. Private enterprise is not the same as a government with power over people and land.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telosa

>Telosa is a proposed utopian planned US city conceived by American billionaire Marc Lore and announced in September 2021.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/23/marc-andreessens-family-pl...

>California Forever is a proposed master-planned community, to be carved from over 60,000 acres of land that several members of Silicon Valley’s elite have quietly been buying in Solano County since 2017.

Here's some more: https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/celebrity/article/32166...

>There are a lot of cult-ish or vaguely religion-based communities out there. But that's not what I have in mind.

Honestly, people and their zoning/walkable/anti-car/density/environmental ideals and desire for a little dictatorship to create it is pretty indistinguishable from all the other cult community efforts. The hippies wanted free love and drugs or whatever, the luddites wanted no technology, everybody wanted their set of things. Nobody thinks their cult is a cult, they think they have great ideas, only what those other people are doing is a cult.

Seriously it's troubling how folks think billionaires and dictatorships are going to save them and can't even conceive of a community built on a strong foundation of well executed differing opinions compromising to achieve the best outcome.

Folks just want their opinions and only their opinions made real by force and absolute power. It's insane that people don't recognize how many people have tried before and the awful things that happen when it fails.

Re:Intel Honesty by foobarian on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:52PM (#41450664)
For me it's a pleasant thing to ponder, especially when faced with the above mentioned existing problems.

> It's insane that people don't recognize how many people have tried before and the awful things that happen when it fails.

I think it's just human nature, perhaps even more so in an engineering community. Look at how much of scientific progress follows that pattern, and even worse with the participants fully recognizing the immense amounts of preceding failures.

Re:Intel Honesty by colechristensen on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:04PM (#41450803)
Advocating for dictatorships isn't a fun little intellectual exercise.
Re:Intel Honesty by kagakuninja on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:09PM (#41450853)
The billionaires are trying that in California, and us peasants are quite suspicious of the deal...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Forever

Re:Intel Honesty by kmeisthax on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:48PM (#41451231)
The first step is don't do this, central planning is a canonical bad idea. Case in point: NIMBYism works because cities are already masterplanned, "communist-party-style". American suburbia is commie blocks. So all you have to do when someone wants to change the plan is to have two or three people shout "no" at the city council and for nobody else to show up.

If you actually want higher-density, what you actually want is national or state laws that restrict what zoning can restrict. Japan is a good model for this: they have a nationalized zoning plan. Individual city councils can only pick specific zones from a list of varying densities of mixed commercial/residential zones and industrial zones.

A lot of the harms of suburban life are specific to the segregation of commercial and residential: moving people away from the places they want to go to means they need a car, and the infrastructure to use it with, which takes up space, which pushes everything else away, which creates more demand for cars and car infrastructure, and so on. Conversely, we could imagine, say, taking a few lots in an otherwise single-family development and turning them into convenience stores or something, which would be something people could just walk to.

Once you have the legal capacity to build you can then start talking about having government money go into buying and developing upzoned property. Private ownership and developers will follow. The goal is not to bring about some specific master plan but to just generally increase access to land and housing. You can run it as a co-op if you want but do not, for the love of god, micromanage people into wishing they had their $500k mortgaged single-family homes that they """owned""" back.

Re:Intel Honesty by lotsofpulp on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @02:31PM (#41448932)
Part of the equation must be the simple fact that the US is big and has the option to give many people the 0.1+ acre detached single family home with a yard and 2+ car driveway/garage lifestyle (and schools with more exclusive student populations).

In smaller places, that simply isn’t an option, so there exists greater demand for family living in high rises.

Re:Intel Honesty by ghaff on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @02:44PM (#41449075)
Yeah, very few people who want and can afford 3-bedroom homes want to be renting apartments. I assume that even in New York City, the number of 3-bedroom condos is pretty minimal as a percentage because most people who want that kind of space just move to West Chester or Connecticut.
Re:Intel Honesty by structural on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @03:03PM (#41449351)
This is not universally true, and it's pretty common to hear people who moved out to the suburbs hate it, but they needed the third or even second bedroom! Slightly larger condos simply didn't exist on the market, or were priced at astronomic rates (double the $/sqft compared to a 1bd unit).

Looked at a dozen midrise buildings this year across DC/Phila/NYC markets, some new/recent construction, some office conversions. Most buildings had zero 3bd units except for maybe a single penthouse, a 2bd unit every other floor, and the entire rest of the building evenly divided between studios and 1bd units in the 400-600sqft range. The competition for the 2bd units was unreal, in several cases people were offering the entire year's lease upfront, in cash, to secure an apartment.

It really is that competitive and the demand is there, the supply is not.

Re:Intel Honesty by sgu999 on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @03:37PM (#41449791)
Part of the problem is what is available. If you're a Japanese or a Taiwanese, that detached single family home with a massive garden around it is simply not an option, so you don't feel worst off than anyone else by living in a small house or in a high rise.

Other advantage is that keeping cities very dense and preventing urban sprawl means everyone has access to nature quickly, through public transports.

Re:Intel Honesty by astrange on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:43PM (#41451199)
Oh, those kind of houses are definitely available in Japan. Houses in Japan are worth negative money; if you want to sell one the buyer will want you to knock it down first.

The reason they're so cheap is that nobody wants to live in those areas because cities are better and have better jobs.

Re:Intel Honesty by ghaff on Thursday September 05, 2024 @10:18AM (#41456891)
There's also a culture in Japan that houses are essentially disposable. Whereas on the east coast at least of the US, 100-200 year old houses aren't rare. The default may be to do some renovations if you buy one but not to knock it down. And a lot of those houses may not be in cities but they're often within an hour or so and many of the jobs are outside the cities anyway.
Re:Intel Honesty by ak217 on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:42PM (#41450557)
Absolutely true. Also I find it strange that the companies in question could easily resolve their workforce issues by forming a fund to build better/faster public transit to link up their offices with less NIMBY-dominated cities, but choose not to do so.
Re:Intel Honesty by closeparen on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:45PM (#41450598)
Transportation rights-of-way invoke all the same NIMBY problems, only worse because an individual holdout parcel sinks the whole thing.

What they can do is run buses on existing public roads. And they do that. It's still like 1.5+ hours from the Tri-Valley to SF.

Re:Intel Honesty by ak217 on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:01PM (#41450757)
I don't think the lack of usable rights-of-way explains public transit issues in the Silicon Valley.

Tech companies had very modest participation in the Caltrain PCEP project, and still barely participate in the Dumbarton rail corridor planning, have made no direct moves to expedite or simplify the BART Silicon Valley expansion, have not attempted to improve the performance of VTA light rail, have not publicly tried to pressure the SF city government to expedite or simplify Caltrain DTC, and have made no proposals to make use of vacant or underutilized rail or ex-rail rights-of-way across the Silicon Valley where no NIMBY opposition exists. (Yes, Atherton is famous for its NIMBYs blocking the original HSR construction plan. It's not currently relevant and can be bypassed.)

Re:Intel Honesty by insane_dreamer on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @03:45PM (#41449893)
> trillion-dollar industries at the forefront of the global economy constantly getting their shit rocked by a few dozen NIMBY retirees at city council meetings

A lot of Intel R&D (and all their manufacturing) is outside the Bay Area, i.e., Oregon and elsewhere, so not sure this is a factor in their case.

Re:Intel Honesty by kbolino on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @02:48PM (#41449131)
The federalized nature of American government means both things can be true simultaneously, even though they seem paradoxical when placed together in juxtaposition. The Feds have supremacy in certain matters, but not all.

Moreover, lobbying is more a question of connections and relationships which are lubricated with money than pure spending power, so it can be easier for a large corporation to nudge things its way at the national and state levels while still struggling to curry influence at the local level, and vice versa for small companies.

Re:Intel Honesty by kmeisthax on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:30PM (#41450419)
The thing that makes America a corporate-dominated oligarchy is veto rights. The American middle class has enough political power to get issues on the table but not to overcome an anonymous rich person saying "no". NIMBYism is the same underlying power - vetocracy. So corporations would have to spend way more time fighting their own power to get things done.
Re:Intel Honesty by closeparen on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:34PM (#41450469)
This is an insightful synthesis, thank you.
Re:Intel Honesty by dang on Thursday September 05, 2024 @12:59AM (#41453624)
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41448341.
Re:Intel Honesty by FredPret on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @02:48PM (#41449140)
It's grim at INTC but don't forget the CHIPS act and whatever else will follow that. The US government spends 0.5T per month - more than the market cap of all but the top 15 American companies [0] [1]

Not saying it's a good or bad idea, or that it will or won't happen - but if the US government decides to reinvent Intel, they can easily write a cheque that (if spent wisely) might do the trick.

[0] https://companiesmarketcap.com/usa/largest-companies-in-the-...

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

Re:Intel Honesty by twobitshifter on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @03:18PM (#41449528)
Intel is underserving of this investment and the chips act has no teeth to ensure that they follow through and build these facilities and create jobs. They will not follow through and spend the money wisely and that was clear from the moment that bill was drafted.
Re:Intel Honesty by bryanlarsen on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @06:05PM (#41451353)
> has no teeth

CHIPS act money is milestone based, and no money has yet been paid out, according to the article.

That sounds like teeth to me.

Re:Intel Honesty by kridsdale3 on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @03:36PM (#41449772)
Why doesn't the USA just buy out all of Intel's debt, let them start fresh? Call it a Silicon Era War Bond, in reverse.
Re:Intel Honesty by mixmastamyk on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @06:44PM (#41451642)
Better to help another company with better management.
Re:Intel Honesty by kortilla on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @09:09PM (#41452506)
Because you shouldn’t reward bad investors. Just wiping their debt without changing all of management will just result in the same problem in 10 years.

Better for Intel to sell off chunks to competent companies either voluntarily or through bankruptcy.

Re:Intel Honesty by sroussey on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @09:36PM (#41452654)
Because it doesn't have a union.
Re:Intel Honesty by Jerrrrrrry on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @11:02PM (#41453072)
Because then it couldn't be a morally - now literally - bankrupt company that is nothing more than a shell of the existing company large enough that it being a complete puppet company of the neo-industrial intelligence apparatus is not a viable idea to anyone but the most extreme of Bell-end dwellers.
Re:Intel Honesty by 4ggr0 on Thursday September 05, 2024 @08:35AM (#41456014)
Socialize losses, privatize profits. How cute.
Re:Intel Honesty by trhway on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @11:08PM (#41453097)
>It's grim at INTC but don't forget the CHIPS act and whatever else will follow that. ... if the US government decides to reinvent Intel, they can easily write a cheque that (if spent wisely) might do the trick.

I suspect the result of the CHIPS money going to Intel would be Starliner from Intel (btw, Starliner did meet all the development milestones set by the government, yet here we're). Rotten overbloated corporate managerial bureaucracy can digest any amount of money you throw at it, and it will make it only more rotten and overbloated.

Re:Intel Honesty by dv_dt on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @02:03PM (#41448644)
I think this contains mostly correct analysis with respect to hiring experienced talent, but under emphasizes how unique each process is per company. Experience is a positive, but less positive because of it.

There is a lot of potential that could be made from newer hires combined with focused in house training/experimentation - which is what all these businesses had to do in their initial expansion - with not enough people of experience at scale available, and they probably had to do a running training ramp up multiple times over multiple generations of growth. This is in general is an underutilized strategy - esp for mature companies that need to essentially build a new generation of tech in-house.

Re:Intel Honesty by nightski on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @01:53PM (#41448538)
I'm not saying you are wrong but personally I'd view the stock as an attractive perk right now since it is so low.

Whereas if I were joining a company such as Nvidia I'd honestly be kind of worried.

Historical performance isn't really a great indicator here.

Re:Intel Honesty by bluecalm on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @04:06PM (#41450142)
Intel stock is as high as it was 15 years ago when they had total market domination. Now they are at the brink of collapse. The market is way bigger today but still, I would take a dominant player over a failing one every day.

Another way to look at it: Intel market cap is 83B, AMD's market cap is 228B. Do you think Intel is expected to make 1/3 of the money AMD is going to make in coming decades? I see no reason to be as optimistic.

Re:Intel Honesty by eric-hu on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:30PM (#41451064)
> Another way to look at it: Intel market cap is 83B, AMD's market cap is 228B. Do you think Intel is expected to make 1/3 of the money AMD is going to make in coming decades? I see no reason to be as optimistic.

Nit: market cap is not earnings. That's stock price * shares outstanding.

This year's earnings looks like this:

Intel, 3 months ended: Jun 29, 2024

> Net income (loss) (1,654)

https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1704/...

AMD, 3 months ended: June 29, 2024

> Net income (loss) $ 265

https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1209/am...

So Intel lost 1654M and AMD earned 265M. This only makes your point stronger.

Re:Intel Honesty by bluecalm on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @08:54PM (#41452418)
Yeah but market cap is at least in theory about how much money a company is going to make in the future. Not this year, not the next year but decades is already pretty close (because of the discounting).
Re:Intel Honesty by valval on Saturday September 07, 2024 @04:14PM (#41476192)
No it’s not. It has no theoretical relationship with future earnings at all, and even if it did, that theory would be silly.
Re:Intel Honesty by Panzer04 on Thursday September 05, 2024 @02:11AM (#41454024)
Intel's revenue is 54B to AMD 22B. If Intel's CPU division was spun off, I see little reason to believe AMD deserves a 3x premium to that - and you get IFS with Intel as well right now!

Granted, IFS is the millstone hanging around their neck right now, unless they can fix it.

Re:Intel Honesty by bluecalm on Thursday September 05, 2024 @03:15AM (#41454331)
Intel still has 75% of data center market share (for CPUs). I think this is mainly momentum and they will lose most of it in coming years.
Re:Intel Honesty by yvdriess on Thursday September 05, 2024 @07:26AM (#41455541)
To add to that, AMD's has the more lucrative higher-margin part of that market.
Re:Intel Honesty by eric-hu on Thursday September 05, 2024 @02:46PM (#41459406)
Why focus on revenue instead of income? Regardless of what Intel’s revenue is, they’re losing money. AMD is earning.
Re:Intel Honesty by valval on Saturday September 07, 2024 @04:16PM (#41476205)
Losing money for one financial year is not a good enough indicator to draw conclusions.
Re:Intel Honesty by AnotherGoodName on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @02:03PM (#41448636)
You can trade your stock for intel stock when working at any company. Stock grants really should be swapped for income and reinvested how you see best. So ultimately the total take home income is what should matter for any new hire. Take the higher paying and job and buy intel stock if you believe it’ll rise.
Re:Intel Honesty by tedivm on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @02:10PM (#41448704)
Most stock vests over time though. I can't trade it immediately, and the value may drop between when I get the grant and when I can actually sell the shares.
Re:Intel Honesty by andreasmetsala on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @02:27PM (#41448900)
He’s saying ignore the potentially worthless options and invest that extra 50% salary you earn at elsewhere in Intel stock instead of working there.
Re:Intel Honesty by skeeter2020 on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @02:00PM (#41448615)
sotck can be low because it's undervalued by the entire market and going to jump once they catch up to the future value potential, or it can be low because it accurately reflects the decline and limited value. If you only see the "attractive perk" from being so low you're the one using historical performance as the indicator, thinking Intel's only a few quarters or years away from former glory days.
Re:Intel Honesty by sodality2 on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @02:04PM (#41448653)
Efficient market hypothesis dictates the price accurately reflects valuations. So if a stock price is down relatively, it's because the wealth of information available on it indicates its decline.
Re:Intel Honesty by wing-_-nuts on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @02:47PM (#41449126)
I too, used to be a dyed in the wool boglehead that believed in efficient markets. The missing small cap value / international premium over the past twenty years has me convinced otherwise today.
Re:Intel Honesty by sodality2 on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @02:52PM (#41449179)
You raise a valid objection:

    To put the US equity outperformance of the last 15 years in perspective, US equities historically have outperformed non-US equities by 2.3 percentage points annualized since 1926 and by 2.7 percentage points in the post-WWII period. In our strategic asset allocation models for clients, we assume one percentage point of outperformance annualized [0]
Not sure this really breaks the idea of small cap vs large cap (since there's been swings and reversals in that in just the past 15 years IIRC), just the international equity differences.

Also, just going to note that 20 years is really not that long and it's reasonable for valuation swings to take that long to reverse.

[0]: https://privatewealth.goldmansachs.com/outlook/2024-isg-outl...

Re:Intel Honesty by ohcmon on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @02:06PM (#41448674)
You would be surprised, but nvidia’s employee stock plans allow to select the purchase price within the last 2 years https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/benefits/money/espp/
Re:Intel Honesty by happyopossum on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @02:12PM (#41448728)
ESPP is completely different from stock-based compensation.
Re:Intel Honesty by _chris_ on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @05:56PM (#41451290)
> allow to select the purchase price within the last 2 years

I don't think that's true. My reading of that is "you lock in the price on your start date and can keep that for the next 2 years going forward". That doesn't help anybody joining at >$1k / share. :D (and that's only ESPP, not standard stock compensation).

Re:Intel Honesty by BeetleB on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @09:19PM (#41452565)
Can't speak for NVIDIA but at another company I know they use the lowest price on the last 4 periods (so lowest of 8 timestamps)
Re:Intel Honesty by sgerenser on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @10:33PM (#41452963)
ESPP is a very small amount vs RSUs. You’re limited to buying $25,000 per year (that you still have to shell out for even if it’s at a discount) vs just being given several hundred thousand (or more) in RSUs.
Re:Intel Honesty by bryanlarsen on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @02:05PM (#41448667)
By what metric do you consider INTC to be low? I took a look because I'd be happy picking up some cheap INTC, but it still looks expensive to me.
Re:Intel Honesty by phonon on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @03:01PM (#41449313)
It's trading significantly below book? $120 B vs $82 B.

Downside is that most of their assets are their fabs...

Re:Intel Honesty by AnotherGoodName on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @10:10PM (#41452830)
That can also mean they haven’t done asset writeoffs they should have already done in previous quarters.

If you have billions in obsolete equipment you can technically get away with not doing an asset write off so it doesn’t show in the books of current quarterly performance. Just claim it’s not actually obsolete yet. It catches up eventually though.

So the above may be more of a timebomb than a value signal. It can indicate that Intel hasn’t written off ~$40billion of assets it should have and it would seem a lot of investors are aware of this. They are already losing $10billion a quarter without counting those write off so I understand the hesitance.

Re:Intel Honesty by Panzer04 on Thursday September 05, 2024 @02:17AM (#41454051)
Their revenue is >twice AMD's. If IFS disappeared they'd probably have a better valuation than they do right now solely based on processor performance, but their success in the foundry business is probably contributing negative value to their market cap (presumably because it's soaking up so much cash for nil returns)

Intel upside right now is possibly very high, if they can fix the foundry. Their current stock is pricing in complete catastrophe, rightly or wrongly (TSMC is priced at 750B mkt cap, for perspective). Yes, intel isn't as successful as TSMC right now, but only ten years ago intel foundry was better than TSMC.

I don't know where they'll go. But I feel you have much better risk/reward with intel right now.

Re:Intel Honesty by seec on Thursday September 05, 2024 @05:45AM (#41455069)
And it seems like they don't have a whole lot to fix to be back on top or at least extremely competitive. They know how to run foundries, they just need to catch up on the tech side, it's going to take a bit of time and cash but it's not like if they don't have experience doing it previously.

On the chip design side of things, they seemed to have almost caught up (at least to AMD/Qualcomm, Apple is another story) because their upcoming low power laptop chips generation looks like it will be very competitive in terms of power per watts. And they benefit from years of refinement in the software side as well as quite competitive GPU stack, people seem to forget too easily but AMD products still have many annoyances that Intel ones just dont (recently WIFI issues on their latest laptops) and Qualcomm is a no go unless you do browser-based stuff for the most part.

I don't understand people giving up Intel for dead, because even at their worse in the past few years, they were still competitive, both in performance and price; once they figure out the process and design (seems to be on good way) I would worry a lot more about the other side of competition, but who knows...

Re:Intel Honesty by packetlost on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @02:03PM (#41448638)
I mean, I have a lot more confidence that nvidia will continue to deliver products to a market that wants to pay for them over Intel at this point in time, even if the stock is likely to come crashing back down to earth soon. As an employee, I wouldn't really factor in stock performance necessarily, but the overall image and outwardly visible struggles Intel is going through tells me the internal struggles are probably far worse than the public or shareholders know.
Re:Intel Honesty by jeffparsons on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @06:11PM (#41451413)
I think if Intel was a private company then it would have a better chance of recovery via a collection of focused experiments to overcome their biggest technical deficiencies (compared to their competitors) or to, e.g., figure out a compelling new product that the market didn't realise it needed, but that doesn't require solving difficult physics problems.

But to do this sort of thing you need a dictator at the top who is willing to risk a run of negative-profit quarters to fix the company's underlying rot. If you try to do anything like that as a leader of a public company, then shareholders tend to get angry.

I wonder if there's any lesson that could be distilled from the (minority of?) public companies that don't end up settling into a pattern of carefully-managed mediocrity. Is there a unifying theme? I haven't spent enough time thinking about this to even propose an answer other than "cult of personality around the leader" as maybe helping.

Re:Intel Honesty by theevilsharpie on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @06:45PM (#41451648)
> But to do this sort of thing you need a dictator at the top who is willing to risk a run of negative-profit quarters to fix the company's underlying rot.

Private companies still have shareholders that the CEO answers to -- who tend to get angry at taking losses quarter after quarter with no clear path to growth.

Re:Intel Honesty by bradleyjg on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @07:45PM (#41452011)
They sidelined lip bu tan who was one of the advocates for even more layoffs and wage freezes but he’s one of many backwards thinkers they need to remove.

Genuine question: why isn’t what they need large layoffs and dramatic wage increases?

Re:Intel Honesty by y-c-o-m-b on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @07:59PM (#41452093)
I worked there for a few years a little over a decade ago in Oregon. The wages were abysmal, so you're not wrong, but they still drew a lot of good talent because Intel was more accessible to the suburbs than the city of Portland (commuting to downtown Portland was awful) and remote options were limited. Krzanich era layoffs and the availability of more remote work options resulted in a rapid drain of talent though.

The working environment was toxic (still is based on what I've heard from folks I know working there). It encouraged working against your peers instead of with them. Top heavy management meant lots of poor choices and money burned on worthless projects that never saw the light of day. Always had the looming threat of layoffs which ate into morale. TONS of off-shoring and third-party contracts, which everyone here knows is a mess in itself. Piss-poor research before buying up smaller companies or doing joint-ventures. Pouring money into the construction of more buildings when so many of their current ones sit unoccupied. It's all just a recipe for immense failure.

Re:Intel Honesty by svnt on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @08:42PM (#41452354)
I worked there on a contract while they were building a phone and had as many as six managers over six months. One of them would come in at 11, talk to me about nothing until lunch, then come back after lunch, talk more, and go home. I had to come in early to get anything done.

When I was toward the end of my project and sure I wasn’t going to try to get a blue badge I laid into someone in a meeting. It wasn’t my best moment but I had absolutely had it with this person from a competing group blocking my progress. I was on my way out anyway. I wasn’t sure if I would be fired.

The manager from the competing group sought me out the next morning to offer me a L6/L7 position. He said he wasn’t sure I had what it took until that meeting.

My group manager did the same later that day.

I made the right decision leaving.

Re:Intel Honesty by keepamovin on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @10:40PM (#41452981)
This is a great indicator of how it's often presented as collaborative or even slightly-"woke" on the outside, when in reality, advancement is cutthroat. But conducted in an cliquey/politically repressive atmosphere where everyone is afraid to act like that, but when someone has the courage to start speaking their mind, the rest look to them as the one who can save the malaise from the stagnation.

I wonder how it became a culture so afraid of itself. How did Amazon (possibly no less "toxic", Idk) embarrassed combative disagreement and sublimated that natural emergent expression/desire during stressful situations into something that worked for the company, whereas Intel sounds like it failed to do that?

Org psychology point of view.

Re:Intel Honesty by joe_the_user on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @11:44PM (#41453271)
How did Amazon (possibly no less "toxic", Idk) embarrassed combative disagreement and sublimated that natural emergent expression/desire during stressful situations into something that worked for the company, whereas Intel sounds like it failed to do that?

All that worked (or seemed to work) for Intel for many years - 30+ years of profits and market dominance. I don't know the exact abuse level of Amazon, Microsoft, Apple or wherever but if they're equivalent, they'll keep going 'tell they stop.

The one thing toxic culture seems to do is prevent recovery when a company suffers a setback.

Re:Intel Honesty by keepamovin on Thursday September 05, 2024 @03:30AM (#41454399)
This is a good point. I get it probably gets ingrained, more so than a more open culture that would be open to bettering it self.

My view was Intel had a good culture until external pressures resulted in turning toxic.

Re:Intel Honesty by joe_the_user on Thursday September 05, 2024 @12:59PM (#41458482)
My gosh you can read the posts on this thread of myself and others talking about the toxicity of Intel's culture in the 90s.

If you're in doubt, I'd recommend David M. Gordon's Fat And Mean for a discussion of how toxic culture persists and intensifies in corporate America.

Edit: I think can credit the long period of success Intel had to shrewd leadership and leading in a massively expanding market. The thing about a chip company is that it is constantly gambling on extremely costly investments in machinery and people. Abusive tactics that get good people working really hard for average salaries are really useful and "only come due over time" and often when the company foundering anyway.

Re:Intel Honesty by keepamovin on Thursday September 05, 2024 @02:10PM (#41459095)
Hmmm....unhappy optimum. How can we do better?
Re:Intel Honesty by joe_the_user on Thursday September 05, 2024 @05:15PM (#41460469)
Well, clearly something other than maximizing shareholder value at all costs
Re:Intel Honesty by keepamovin on Friday September 06, 2024 @12:50AM (#41462978)
How does TSMC maintain a happy culture if they have one? Do they have one?
Re:Intel Honesty by seec on Thursday September 05, 2024 @05:28AM (#41454978)
I believe that any successful company is like that. There are always people that have a vested interest in pretending otherwise but that's just to avoid other people succeeding or to present a good front.

As far as I'm concerned there is no other way to get real progress; there are always a lot of pretenses on better ways to "manage" stuff but they never work because of group dynamics and basic human behavior...

Re:Intel Honesty by keepamovin on Friday September 06, 2024 @12:51AM (#41462983)
So, basically -- all stick no carrot? Or am I oversimplifying :) haha ?
Re:Intel Honesty by heresie-dabord on Thursday September 05, 2024 @07:56AM (#41455725)
Your second paragraph, with a slight reworking, is a succinct diagnostic for all bloated and dying corporate entities:

"Diagnostic for immense failure. Does the organisation...

= enable a toxic working environment that is openly discussed,

= encourage internal conflict act every level, business unit and staff,

= cultivate top-heavy management, promote low-talent that makes poor choices and burns money on worthless projects that never deliver,

= maintain the threat of layoffs to destroy morale and engagement,

= send critical functions off-shore and/or to third-party contracts,

= fail to do strategic research, make poor choices in acquisitions and partnerships, and build unnecessary facilities?

If so, the patient manifests late-stage corporate morbidity."

Re:Intel Honesty by keepamovin on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @10:35PM (#41452967)
If AAPL bought Intel could it fix it?
Re:Intel Honesty by keepamovin on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @10:41PM (#41452984)
Do you work in the Taiwan side of the industry?
Re:Intel Honesty by HDThoreaun on Thursday September 05, 2024 @01:18PM (#41458637)
Intel's debt is not bad at all. My reading has it at $53 billion. Before their revenue collapsed in the last few years that debt is only about 50% of revenue. High but manageable compared to att or warner discovery who actually have unmanageable debt. Intel's problem is that revenue is decreasing, and quickly.