From this lens, the silver lining of the software layoffs going on may be to stem the bleeding of semiconductor workers to the field. If Intel were really smart, they’d be hiring more right now the people they couldn’t get or retain 3-5 years ago
How about paying more then?
Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
When I interviewed at intel the position they were offering was to be the "owner" of a tool and I'd be on call.... Yeah no thanks, I get a PhD just to be owned by some company?
Not all SW jobs are web related.
It was also the Korean automaker’s best July sales month since launching its first vehicle in 1986.
The growth was mainly driven by electrified vehicles, including EVs and hybrids (HEVs).
Contrast this with biotech venture capital which has been doing well for decades, often investing more capital in a year than software VCs. The difference is that all the research, clinical trial, and manufacturing expertise is already here and concentrated in a few localities like South San Francisco, San Diego, and Boston.
I think that's why most people just aren't that upset about tariffs. It would be nice to be able to participate in our own economy other than by grifting off real estate or software.
To fund a similar sized hardware start-up you need a full lab andddd already the proposition is dead.
And engineering teams usually scale up with revenue as well.
I feel like your numbers are the myth that gets told not what actually often happens
Exactly. Margins are dropping rapidly: https://ethanding.substack.com/p/openai-burns-the-boats
- The chatbot people have a personal attachment to
- The processing tool.
In the second, you only care about the result. Something like Claude Code can call any other provider if that's cheaper and visa-verse. Once I have the result, my dependency / lock-in is no more than a brand of toilet paper. The providers will have to do the 'capitalism thing' and compete.
It's almost like WeWork's, valuated at IT levels by being in the style, only for investors to eventually figure out the marginal production costs are not reducible to near 0, and you can't just bully out competition / network-effect to get a monopoly.
And this applies to any company that wraps and re-sells AI.
Something the tech-VC world is so unfamiliar with, it's scrambling to present the truth of what is 'econ-101' for the rest of the world.
Agriculture is much slower, every iteration may be is a year, or (in tropical climates) half a year. Microelectronics is comparably slow, and even more unforgiving about making mistakes. Building robots does not scale ls easily as producing chips, let alone software.
These areas need a different model of investment, with a longer horizon, slower growth, less influence of fads, better understanding of fundamentals. In some areas, DARPA provided such investment, with a good rate of success.
Leaving behind only those completely focused on returns.
When turning the spotlight to capital that is seeking returns, it is true that these areas may be mediocre places to deploy fresh capital, but it doesn't mean that these players aren't competing, and they will probably be cranking out sheet metal and port cargo logistics optimization well after 90% of the AI startups fold.
The caveat is of course Private Equity, which is about 10 trillion in assets. They can derive high returns from these areas, but it requires leverage.
In the US there have been a few, i.e., apparently less than 20, universities with an applied math program up to date in and teaching optimization.
Sooooo, anyone at all seriously interested, long, for decades, would, could, should visit some of those math programs, meet some of the profs, get recommendations for their former students, call them, chat, and offer a job better than their current lawn mowing, fast food restaurant kitchen cleaning, or car washing. Instead of just the US, might also consider Waterloo in Canada. Actually the Chair of my Ph.D. orals committee specialized in optimization in logistics. After sending 1000+ beautifully written resume copies and hearing back nothing, can begin to conclude that optimization is not a hot field and for highly dedicated optimizers who want to sleep on a cot in a single room, forgo bathing, most days eat bread, other days peanut butter, have no children, wife, or family contact, don't own a car, and must get any needed medical care from some of the last resort special clinics. Ah, real optimization!
PE is arguably much worse than VC. VC's business model is well understood and by taking VC funding, you are committing to their expected returns.
PE is, usually, unsolicited and is designed to exploit what appears to be a "lazy" balance sheet, but which is actually a stable business producing output and providing a reasonable ROI.
PE has very few redeeming features.
Labor costs, permits, fees, etc., means that buying used just doesn’t make sense unless it’s almost free.
Whereas developing countries were willing to pay a lot more, sometimes as much as 50 cents on the dollar compared to brand new equipment and they would send a team to rip it out too.
I’ve heard that applied to almost everything too heavy to move by forklift during the 80s, 90s, and 2000s.
Think of PE as the decomposers of capitalism, and VC as its seeds. Most people don't like to think of it that way because they don't like to be reminded that death is a part of life. But if you view capitalism as a living ecosystem and your role within capitalism as someone to accelerate growth and then accelerate death so that new growth can take its place, it all makes sense. And you can probably profit pretty handsomely from it, because most people don't view capitalism like that and instead seek stability in the dying parts.
It is still unsettling seeing Uber turning a profit, but even with that they're not turning a net profit over the lifetime of the company yet and won't be for a few years. Hopefully no-one pops up to compete with them now the sector has profits in it.
What VC capital is not interested in is regular fuel, which can burn steadily and expand gradually, without a shock wave. Such companies can be quite important. Say, GitHub was such a company for many years, before it took a large VC investment and got acquired MS. Investing in such companies requires much more diligence and foresight, maybe too much predictive power to work at mass scale.
VCs' math only works because a single 1000x hit easily pays for a hundred of duds. If ROI per hit is 2-3x, and research required is 10x more deep, the prospects likely start to seem too bleak for folks with billions seeking return.
I especially dislike the way VC funded startups use VC dollars to effectively be a “loss leaders” for years to choke out the rest of the market.
Who wants to risk their own capital or privately pooled funds against THAT?
Show them your finances and collateral to demonstrate that you'll be able to pay off the loan.
>I especially dislike the way VC funded startups use VC dollars to effectively be a “loss leaders” for years to choke out the rest of the market.
It's a fair point, but it's a point which does not apply to the industries we are discussing, which do not receive VC investment.
I actually really like your point about Masayoshi Son-style investments which are just an attempt to entrench a monopoly. I'm no socialist, but if socialists called for identifying and taxing such investments, I wouldn't object. The trick is to distinguish between the WeWorks of the world, and the Boom Supersonic type companies which genuinely need gobs of capital for breakthrough innovation.
I somewhat dislike antitrust because it requires judgement calls on the part of regulators. I prefer simple, elegant rules. Just like in software development. Law should ideally be elegant, just like code.
Just heard of Palmer Luckey. Hmm! Money? No big staff, not much equipment, essentially just one person?? $1B+, quickly? Example: Taylor Swift. Did she ever hear of Linux???
That said, allowing VC into 401ks and such I would agree is an abominable idea, because this stuff isn't marked properly until it is in distress. Actually, that area could use better regulation. Volatility laundering is already a systemic risk. Many of these vehicles have creative ways to not mark to their market value, which makes pension fund managers and leered participants happy because it greatly improves the perceived risk metrics and performance, at the equal expense of cloaked fragility.
But perhaps just let them have a thunderdome, and if they want to breach the walls and enter areas like retirement funds where society agrees standard are higher, there is a strong set of filters/regulations that must be adhered to.
They don't know anything else.
https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-re...
This YCW18 ag company was acquired less than 3 years in by John Deere for $250M: https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/05/john-deere-buys-autonomous...
I feel like anything relevantly practical is denied investment.
But when it comes to anything flashy and hip, a train of dump trucks filled with cash couldn’t deliver money as quick as the VC dollars that flow into to startups with no business model and no hope of being profitable…
Yeah, I get that startups should invest profits and not actually make profits for a while… But when they’re on their 4th round of funding with thousands of employees… shouldn’t they at least try to be a bit more financially responsible?
If you have money, the returns you'll get elsewhere are much less attractive, and can only be justified if they're very safe investments.
(Also, in neither country is the majority of its GDP comprised of websites.)
https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s...
Keep in mind that Ukraine is literally on the opposite side of the world from us. What's Brazil doing for Ukraine? What's Australia doing?
As an American, I consistently argue that the US should not ally with Europe here on HN. But even I don't argue in favor of actively working to harm Europe. I just think we should cut Europe loose, because nothing we do for Europe will ever be enough, and Europe is a wealthy region that's plenty capable of providing for itself.
And before you say anything about tariffs (which are paid by US companies btw), read this article: https://archive.is/MxUAa See also https://archive.is/WQQ45
Around $1.5B (AUD) so far, Bushmasters, 50 M1A1s, M113s, training, etc.
We didn't sign the Budapest Memorandum, neither are we part of NATO, but we do our part, as we did in Afghanistan, Iraq (after the lies about WMD), in the Red Sea and other international events.
Oh and on the articles you quoted, some of the biggest fines were from the UK, which is not part of the EU.
As for tariffs, the US upended 80 years of work on international trade, with Trump applying tariffs without any underlying criteria except his complete misunderstanding of the difference between a trade deficit and bad trade.
The US has maintained its currency's dominance for all of the post WW2 era, which has allowed you to borrow and spend in a currency that everyone else has to support to be able to buy things like oil.
As an American, you should realize that in the last 6 months, the US has decided to abdicate its leadership, and as oil becomes less important to world trade, the USD will start to lose its dominance over trade, which means that your debts will have to be paid back in other currencies while the tariffs do nothing but damage the US consumers and economy in general.
Very dumb on your part.
As a fraction of GDP, Australia is an order of magnitude below the US. See map at the top here: https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s...
We literally gave almost 10x as much as you on a per-GDP basis, yet we're still the bad guy. This is why I'm an isolationist.
Did you know that "Kevin", a common name in the US, is one of Europe's favorite insults?
>We didn't sign the Budapest Memorandum
The Budapest Memorandum is frequently misrepresented online. There's no promise to defend Ukraine in the text. Read it here: https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/P...
All the US promised in the Memorandum was to seek UN Security Council assistance if Ukraine was victimized. We went far beyond that.
Think about it: why would Ukraine be so desperate for NATO membership, if the "defense promise" in the Memorandum was already broken? Because there was no meaningful defense promise in the Memorandum! That is simply a malicious lie about the US that's very widespread online. Again, this is why I'm an isolationist. I give up. Our "allies" will hate us no matter what we do. I've figured it out. I want to be Switzerland. We'll worry about our continent, and you worry about yours.
And then looking at per capita the US sits at number 16.
The US is being targeted specifically because we've given so much. No one is bothering Japan, or Argentina, or Saudi Arabia. It's because the US has been generous (in absolute terms) that we get so much flak.
Imagine if we sent thoughts and prayers the way Kazakhstan does. That way we would get less hate. When's the last time you heard Kazakhstan criticized for lack of Ukraine support?
>And then looking at per capita the US sits at number 16.
I don't think that is accurate: https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1hd7aud/military_ai...
As I said... nothing we do for Europe will ever be enough. Better to cut them loose.
Was the US doing about as much as Japan the argument you wanted to make?
https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s...
Or are just here to be a contrarian?
Maybe the US have an incentive in seeing the American built world order continue?
But hey, turn inward and let China and India win.
But don’t get mad when tariff situation with Europe etc. Is equalized over time and the American big tech is targeted to lessen the dependency.
ctrl-f "per capita", nothing comes up.
I do notice that Japan is #19 in terms of % of GDP however...
I actually think your confusion here explains a lot. You don't know the difference between "per capita" and "GDP". That shows you don't speak English well. That's probably why you don't know much about the US.
The fundamental issue is that you think you know a lot, but you actually know little. You're mostly just reading what is written about the US in your native language. Probably there is lots of misinformation.
>Was the US doing about as much as Japan the argument you wanted to make?
Why is the US being harassed and not Japan?
>Or are just here to be a contrarian?
The absurdity of Europeans who complain endlessly about the US, while we've historically pursued a relatively generous foreign policy towards you, gets under my skin.
>Maybe the US have an incentive in seeing the American built world order continue?
I've very consistently stated in this thread, and on Hacker News more generally, that the US should abandon the so-called "American-built world order". It causes us no end of grief, as you are illustrating at this very moment with your comments.
>But hey, turn inward and let China and India win.
The US economy was doing amazing back when we were more isolationist. Switzerland does amazing despite rejecting memberships in multinational organizations like the EU and NATO. India is very explicit in its policy of "multi-alignment", i.e. avoiding big firm coalitions like EU/NATO.
You Europeans are so invested in the idea that America needs to protect Europe for America to succeed. As far as I can tell, this idea is total nonsense. Barely a shred of evidence is offered in favor of it.
China and India aren't exactly looking to form alternatives to NATO either. Why would a big country agree to defend a small country? It doesn't usually make sense from a national interest perspective.
>But don’t get mad when tariff situation with Europe etc. Is equalized over time and the American big tech is targeted to lessen the dependency.
You guys have been raiding big tech bank accounts for years now. You shouldn't be surprised by US retaliation. What goes around comes around. We can tell you're not actually our friends.
Sorry, the massive difference of "per capita" and "% of GDP". Which would be aligned assuming equal GDP.
Given GDP differences between the donor countries the differences aren't meaningful. But sorry, I should have specified as "% of GDP" where the US is a joke comparatively.
What is even more funny is that I have lived a year in the US, I have traveled all over the US. I have college credits in American history. You know the tiny High School course "AP US History"? Have you heard of it?
Which is also why I was not surprised when Trump won in 2016. I had seen the culture. I had seen the close mindedness.
> The US economy was doing amazing back when we were more isolationist.
You mean the roaring 20s right before the great depression? Because that is the last time the US was isolationist.
Seems like you are dreaming about something you don't have the slightest clue about.
Your response is very typical for the absolute craziness that has infected the US psyche. Donald Trump is not a one off, he is what Americans want.
You were the one who started with dickish behavior. Don't dish it out if you can't take it.
>Given GDP differences between the donor countries the differences aren't meaningful. But sorry, I should have specified as "% of GDP" where the US is a joke comparatively.
Actually it does make a difference here. See the link I provided: https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1hd7aud/military_ai... Considering per capita, 8 months ago the US was more generous than almost all of Europe. Per capita is arguably the correct metric, since part of why US GDP is greater is because Americans work longer hours and take less vacation.
In any case, even if we consider the metric less favorable to the US (% of GDP), the US gives more as a fraction of GDP than almost every country outside Europe. If the US is a joke, than Spain, Ireland, France, and Italy are even funnier. We're very generous in every sense considering this isn't our war.
But since you call US aid a joke, I hope you won't miss it when it's gone. And I appreciate you confirming the points I've made, with your remark: Helping Ukraine gets us nothing but grief.
>You mean the roaring 20s right before the great depression? Because that is the last time the US was isolationist.
"Frustrated by French meddling in U.S. politics, Washington warned the nation to avoid permanent alliances with foreign nations and to rely instead on temporary alliances for emergencies... Washington’s remarks have served as an inspiration for American isolationism, and his advice against joining a permanent alliance was heeded for more than a century and a half."
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1784-1800/washington-fa...
The US economy mostly did great during that century and a half. Furthermore, the Great Depression was not simply caused by "isolationism". This is more intellectual sloppiness on your part.
I advocate a Swiss approach to foreign policy. That doesn't mean disengaging from other nations. It means not promising to help them with their problems.
Your continent, your problem. This is the approach that most of the world adopts towards Ukraine. The US was foolish to get involved. And we've been punished severely for it, by people like you. No more.
Is that the particular one you're referring to?
It's slightly weird to me how foreigners seem to look on the Trump era as personifying the US to a greater degree than e.g. the Biden or Obama eras. Trump is not especially popular right now: https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
I don't believe collective punishment or collective guilt was ever the point of democracy, sorry.
What's the point of moral reasoning, if people can blame others for events they didn't cause, simply by saying the word "democracy"?
We're meant to believe that the 49%-to-48% election of Trump is some deep window into the eternal American psyche, but Orban's fifteen-year drive into corrupt, racist autocracy, endorsed by the voters at every turn, is just some sort of very temporary oopsie that says nothing at all about Europe.
When Meloni uses her pulpit as a popular Italian prime minister to attack gay families, you don't see anyone claiming this reflects the bullying nature of the Italian people, but that's par for the course for coverage of Americans and Trump. Swathes of Poland declaring themselves "gay free zones" is an aberration from European values, whereas anything that happens in deepest Alabama is the truest reflection of the American spirit.
It's mere hypocrisy.
The far-right party is most popular by far: https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/france/
The majority of second-round polling has the far right winning the next presidency in France, potentially even by a landslide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2027_F...
For that reason, it's rather ironic to me when I see Europeans rally around Macron. France is poised to rug-pull Europe. Sorry guys.
BTW, guess which party is most popular in the UK? It's not particularly close: https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/
At least AfD is merely a very close #2 in Germany: https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/germany/
Europe is sleepwalking.
Le Pen's far-right National Rally (RN) has had ties with the Kremlin for a long time. That alone should have discredited this party a long time ago, but no, it is ranking as high as ever, even after russia's overt invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Mélenchon's far-left "France Insoumise" party ranks very high too, and is similarly pro-russian, anti-EU, anti-NATO.
In the town where I live, more than half the votes have gone to the RN these past elections. I often feel like a Cassandra.
Because you do know that Labour in the UK won a landslide victory a year ago and the last date for holding a new general election is in 2029.
The Scandinavian experience is that these parties crash as soon as they get to real power and have to compromise. Suddenly they had to be responsible.
If we do see these Trumpian parties win the majority in these elections in more rather than one-offs then we have a problem. But you're just fearmongering because you can't accept how completely wacko Trump is and need to blame it on "everyone does it!!!".
So what happened in Hungary, or Italy, or other examples mentioned by troad?
Are you aware that RN, at this very moment, has by far the most seats of any party in the French parliament? Those far-right sentiments didn't magically disappear on election day.
>The Scandinavian experience is that these parties crash as soon as they get to real power and have to compromise. Suddenly they had to be responsible.
>If we do see these Trumpian parties win the majority in these elections in more rather than one-offs then we have a problem.
The "majority" comparison is meaningless in this context because the US only has support for two parties. (Imagine Germany had a contest between AfD and Die Linke only. That's akin to the situation in the US right now.) "Governing coalitions" aren't really formed here, so the notion of "they get to real power and have to compromise" doesn't exist in the same way.
So: Even assuming we grant your argument, Trump's power in the US has more to do with quirks of our political system than something fundamental about American culture.
>you can't accept how completely wacko Trump is
I never said he wasn't completely wacko. I simply said he doesn't personify the US any more than Biden does.
And the Social Democrats has been the largest party in Sweden since the early 1900s. Given that the left, with all parties combined, haven't held a majority since 2006 while managing to rule with a minority government from 2014 to 2022.
You make a lot of noise for understanding quite little.
Yes. The US has a broken political system, and you the American people haven't done jack shit to fix it.
> So: Even assuming we grant your argument, Trump's power in the US has more to do with quirks of our political system than something fundamental about American culture.
Trumps power in the US is entirely because he is what the American psyche wants or tolerates.
You keep attempting to dodge the outcome and blame it on everyone else. But you need to own it.
Trump is personifying America, which is quite evident given how he has won twice. The American people wants him.
Yes, Orban says nothing about Europe. It says plenty about Hungary though. Europe not being a country, and the EU being very heavily decentralised, that makes sense.
Hungary is literally in Europe. If Orban says nothing about Europe, then nothing can ever say anything about Europe.
Your country is choosing to stay in a union with Orban's. If EU membership is meaningless, as you imply, it should be easy for your country to quit in order to make a point about Hungary.
so are the Vatican and Andorra and Belarus, so all of Europe is theocratic and/or a kleptocracy?
> Your country is choosing to stay in a union with Orban's
Because the benefits far outweigh the association with that pigshit, who will also die some day. Also, the EU can and does exert influence over countries, so some of Orban's excesses can be curbed.
All of the places we're discussing are part of Europe, so insofar as any place can be said to "say something about" Europe, each says something about it.
>Because the benefits far outweigh the association with that pigshit, who will also die some day. Also, the EU can and does exert influence over countries, so some of Orban's excesses can be curbed.
One could make similar arguments for staying in the US. Trump is 79; Orban is 62.
Understand why your argument is a very poor one? If not, I have 46 more of these examples.
That's easy to explain. Trump is so much out there in being aggressively obnoxious, criminal, racist and senile. His platform was a list of nonsense combined blatant diminishing of rights and social progress. The fact that a majority of voting Americans chose him is irredeemable.
Biden, Bush, Obama were normal candidates with pros and cons, where depending on your views, you could pick one or the other, and you could understand others who voted otherwise.
Trump? I cannot understand anyone who voted for him. They were either extremely narrowly self-centred and thought they could make a buck at everyone else's expense, extremely misinformed and/or dumb, or just hate specific groups of people they know will get hurt. There's nothing redeemable in any of those. He and his voters are the personification of the "fuck you, I've got mine mindset".
Do I get to blame you if RN wins the presidency? Same country, after all.
"by far" only if you get stuck on political party; considering there has been a united left coalition for multiple years and rounds of elections, that seems purposefully omissive. United left and RN are pretty close, polls and election results wise. Neither of them have anything resembling a majority though.
And yes, I can understand them. RN's program contains points which cater to large amounts of French people, especially in rural disadvantaged areas. They're unrealistic or just fluff, mind you, but still sound good. RN is led by moderately charismatic people who have a good media presence - the party's head is Bardella, a young guy with a TikTok following who talks a decent talk. He's a nepo baby (son in law of Marine Le Pen), and mostly a grifter, but he can link a couple of phrases together and sound semi-convincing. Also, while Le Pen is a convicted criminal, it's "just" for stealing government and EU money, which a lot of people don't actually mind, and Bardella isn't.
Comparing to a delusional and senile old man who is literally convicted of rape, and there is plenty of credible evidence, out in the open, is also a pedophile. With a shit program with little concrete other than fucking up groups of people. After seeing his "work" his first term.
Yeah, I can understand, and probably have a discussion with an RN voter. (Those of the "black/brown people bad" variety mostly vote even further to the right, like Zemmour, those are the people I don't understand and wouldn't be able to talk with). A Trump voter? Something is seriously wrong with you to either like that, or pick your potential personal benefit over everything else.
I think your double standard is pretty clear at this point. I won't be offering further replies to you in this subthread after this one.
>Comparing to a delusional and senile old man who is literally convicted of rape, and there is plenty of credible evidence, out in the open, is also a pedophile. With a shit program with little concrete other than fucking up groups of people. After seeing his "work" his first term.
IMO, the fundamental reason people in the US vote for Trump is because they don't trust the establishment/media. So yeah, if you uncritically believe everything that's reported about Trump in left-leaning ("mainstream") US media, of course you won't understand why people vote for him.
I'm no Trump voter, but I think conservatives have good reasons to distrust the establishment/media: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
What double standard?? I'm merely pointing out that people distrustful of the government/EU are fine with Le Pen stealing from them. It's not an opinion I share, but I can understand it. I can't understand those people being fine with Putin bankrolling Le Pen though.
And still a million times better than Trump who not only stole from a cancer charity, but whose corruption is directly in the open and undeniable.
> IMO, the fundamental reason people in the US vote for Trump is because they don't trust the establishment/media
Regardless of that, they can see and hear with their own eyes and ears that he cannot string two coherent sentences together, and is obscenely disturbing as a human being.
It's normal for countries to prioritize their own self-interest. The unusual thing is the degree to which the US attempted to take responsibility for world affairs for as long as it did, to the point where other countries took the US for granted. Now other countries interpret America's failure to take responsibility for their problems as aggression. See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45035076
I'm not talking about countries, I'm talking about Trump voters. An "America first" approach is totally fine, nobody outside of the US cares about.
An "America first" approach by a convicted criminal that is obviously senile, that results in arbitrary tariffs, threats of invasion of various allies, and a million other absurd consequences, is a problem for everyone. It's a problem for US partners, allies, and also the US for it's short and medium term future. Nobody will trust the US as a future trade and military partner.
In any case, as I said, I'm talking about Trump voters. The "extremely narrowly self-centred" ones are of the Andreessen types, the ones who think they can make a little bit more money if Trump is in power, even if objectively he's a terrible candidate on literally every level (criminal, rapist, pedophile, senile, can't string more than half a sentence, mocks disabled people, lies, doesn't comprehend realtively basic things, promises to deport millions of people while that being physically impossible, makes up stuff on the fly, wants to curb rights for women, LGBTQ folks, etc)
The number of countries producing leading edge semiconductors is actually small. The number of companies doing this work is very small, too. Although much of the economy needs chips to operate, those leading chips are concentrated in the production of a very small number of companies.
...
adblockers?
This was a poor business decision for exactly the reasons you’re pointing out. The market is dictating their failure and we’re now undermining it.
Not in the "lots of people would lose jobs" or "ripple effects would cause economic disruption" but in the true national security sense. What allied semiconductor manufacturers have significant cutting edge fabs in Europe?
Secondarily, a TSMC fab on US soil seems like a better investment. In the catastrophic event that Taiwan were invaded — it’s still people, facilities and equipment that remain here.
This trope keeps getting repeated on HN.
No, the point of the top level comment and article is that no US based company will replace Intel's fabs, nor will they form a "better" Intel. This stuff is intensely capital intensive, and nothing short of a government mandate will make any other company spend so much money on such a big risk.
Trust me - if they could have, they would have. Intel's fabs have pretty much been up for sale since Pat was ousted.
The only companies that know how to use the people and the equipment are not US based. TSMC already had an opportunity to buy much of Intel's fabs, and they concluded that shifting their process to match TSMCs would be cost prohibitive.
You’re arguing about logistics under the current economic rules while simultaneously defending a change of rules.
When you put that on the table, then there’s a lot more ways to overcome the obstacles of today that aren’t being discussed.
If a company’s management becomes a risk to national interests, then giving them more money with no added oversight is not really solving anything.
Where I disagree is that if Intel fails, something better (US based) will replace them. It won't.
In the scenario where Intel fails (which would primarily be centered around defaulting on the 50 billion of debt that they built up and can barely service), the US gov could offer strong tax incentives to players who want to form up a new national fab company. Give it favored status essentially (again, if the US is already crossing fairly extreme lines of having US state owned corporations, this doesn't seem so extreme in comparison).
You already have Private Equity interests that are starting to consume Intel. Ex: some of the new fabs are funded by Brookstone, and they have sold off a portion of the profit from the venture, and then collateralized the transaction with the hard assets and put Private Equity at the top of the bankruptcy cap stack.
I think that if the US gave some incentives, the pieces would fall into place extremely quickly. PE would do the actual capital funding in a heartbeat if they had sweetheart tax incentives, and Japan/SK/TSMC would also get involved. Presumably - given the style of the current admin - the "deal" would be "you get favored status by taking part in this project. We will give strong tax benefits to also drive profit. If you turn it down, expect to see tariffs and calls go unanswered while your competition has a direct line."
It's made me one of the only leaders in my Software Org that actually knows what happens below the level of the instruction set. I can talk about the power and heat implications of algorithmic decisions. But mostly nobody cares, theres always enough money to buy more servers.
They literally cannot have a culture that encourages the now-traditional job hopping that is so pervasive in American business culture. They can't afford it.
This isn't SW. Those ratios don't exist in the HW world.
(And to be frank, it's a myth in SW too).
But the real trick is filtering precisely the 50% you want.
It's not just the pay, a fab operates 24x7x365 and how management turns that into work practices and life for employees.
I once interviewed at a fab that offered 'better work life balance'...and what they meant was you weren't allowed to access any email or information off site so they couldn't bug you as much. In reality, it just meant you had to actually go in to the plant if anythign went wrong.
The issue seems to be one of negotiation power as the determinate of wages taken to an extreme - leading to companies taking a monopoly position, paying poorly, then falling to foreign competition due to lack of talent.
Defense venture capital funding is literally in the billions and has resilient even in a broader VC pullback: https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/news-insight...
It would be interesting to see the graph before 2019. For a decade, all of the investment money, talent following behind it, piled into Uber, etc.
> has resilient even in a broader VC pullback
Yes, people are starting to catch on now. Even so, investment is at best a leading indicator. In terms of existing on-the-ground domestic infrastructure, we're sorely lagging in real-world capabilities, but the better part of the last fifteen years was spent creating a vast Grubhub-type delivery infrastructure across the US while the amount of resources dedicated to peer or near-peer conflict logistics and long term agricultural production were relatively ignored.
I started in hardware and pivoted to software for the same reason: It's easier to find higher paying jobs.
It's been strange to see the gap persist at companies that cling to salary data for compensation decisions. Incredible to see companies complain about not being able to find good hardware talent but then also refuse to pay hardware hires at the same level as software hires.
I’ve never understood why that’s the case; they are also high leverage jobs where a few can do extraordinary work and be rewarded thus. Look at Nvidia. Their employees are well compensated and they stay and the company does fantastically.
Who pays more than Intel?
In this context, semiconductor jobs is referring to people actually involved with developing the fab - so Nvidia/Apple/AMD don't count.
I loved, still love, the actual technology of semiconductor fabrication, but you’d have to pay me 8x what I was making for me to go back to the business of semiconductor fabrication.
The cog-in-a-machine corporate culture is not fun. Tech culture is much healthier.
There's no upside to big electronics companies here.
Gets you the entire datacenter market maybe. End user (PCs, cellphones etc) stuff is much more concerned about perf/$ (up front cost) than perf/watt (long term cost), and the embedded market (electronics, appliances etc) mostly care about 'good enough' as cheaply as possible - performance isn't a concern at all for many use cases.
And the corporate market mostly cares about (perceived) reliability/liability concerns over everything else - see how hard it's been for AMD cpus to penetrate despite being measurably better in every category compared to Intel at various points in time.
Financialization is a dead end when you face a nation state determined to control steps in you value chain. How profitable will apple be if they can’t get chips?
Intel switched to a "service the stockholders before the customers" mode and they have never recovered.
I'm sure it'll work out well for us...
It's a side effect of systemically putting short term gains ahead of long term research. CHIPs act may be too little, it is certainly too late...
That's more the stock market than the US government though. You could argue the US government tries to play a long game, and often the way the US plays that game is to let the free market decide (hands off, small government). It's definitely a valid strategy and has worked extremely well in a number of other industries, but for this specific niche, less so, and even then you could argue it's down to Intel's mismanagement than anything the government could or should have done.
I can't make the argument that the government is "hands off, small government" because I simply don't see the evidence of that. To the contrary, I have seen things like TARP, stimulus checks, oh, and the government buying 10% of Intel.
This looks like an incredibly corrupt action.
Just as an example, the calculus for "where should I build a factory" comes down to "which politicians give the biggest tax incentives" and not any market dynamics.
I don’t think propping up Intel is going to work though, they’re a sinking ship and their management seems too risk averse and incompetent. It might be better for the US, long term, to let them collapse and sell off strategic parts to different domestic players (NVIDIA, AMD, micron, TI, etc) and use tariffs or other trade policy to force some amount of leading edge semi fabrication to use domestic manufacturing.
The article is basically like this:
> Leading edge domestic foundry companies are a national security concern. Therefor Intel is too big to fail.
OK. Many can agree with this. And I think the author makes a very good argument for it. He makes some good points:
- Startup cant replace Intel - US cant rely on TSMC alone - Artificial demand could actually improve Intel by solving the chicken and egg problem
But that doesn't answer the question, "why the equity stake?" And for more context, it's replacing what would have been grants with the equity stake. So it's, "Why replace the $XB in grants with an equity stake?"
He does touch on it but it's just a claim thrown in at the end:
>The single most important reason for the U.S. to own part of Intel, however, is the implicit promise that Intel Foundry is not going anywhere. There simply isn’t a credible way to make that promise without having skin in the game, and that is now the case.
OK, maybe. But that now needs to be argued for. The US can give them money as grants. Grants put skin in the game for the US because they require Intel to meet the terms.
If I was explaining it I would say "a huge equity stake gives you a lot of votes and influence over the company's strategic direction", including what the returns to shareholders should look like.
Think of railways in countries where the government has say, a 50% stake.
It's not the same as taking part in decisionmaking? Intel could just say 'no' to grants. They don't have to accept the terms.
I'm not arguing they are exactly the same... I just think the author shouldn't state the hypothesis at the end of the article without examining it.
Frankly I think it's a good summary of why Intel may be too big to fail. It's just framed wrong.
If I am a capable person working on delivering node improvements dealing with smaller and smaller challenges as the physics issues become quantum - I will eventually start to ask myself: why am I working on the hardest physics problems in the private sector for 150k/yr, when I can transition to Facebook or Jane Street, work equally (if not less) as hard and make 500k/yr?
The US has plenty of smart people. I'd argue more that the wealth inequality gap makes it _incredibly_ difficult to justify working for less, even in a field you love, when you can make top 1-4% of income doing something else.
Personally I think the other half of the problem, Big Tech paying so much might be solving itself right now, excepting really only the very very top.
When Silicon Valley was cheap enough to live in that people could casually start a company in their garage... Then people didn't have to relentlessly optimize for short term comp.
Today you have to work at FANG to afford a garage in the Bay area.
What you’re describing is in the R&D area and also not physically dependent on being colocated in a fab. So we should have an easier time finding that talent, although we’re probably underpaying them now, as you point out.
These are all downstream of R&D. If your fab cannot shrink it's node size, then you won't get the most profitable orders.
If the government has to provide the funds, so be it, make those jobs valuable enough and the skills will be there.
Also skills from one industry do not transfer that easily to the other
There are loads of ways you can effectively steer an economy to stimulate growth while also meeting geopolitical needs through effective and liberal application of the national purse. DOGE seems to have different ideas about the value of such programs.
In case the first backup fails.
What are the chances that both a primary system and its backup would fail at the same time?
And for what?
You can go for full efficiency if you want, but then like the US auto manufacturers learned during Covid, you don’t have any way to handle disruptions to your business
It really didn’t work out, despite sometimes giving the appearance of a plausible alternative to the capitalist world.
If what you said were true, it would be cheaper for there to be only one flavor of soda (as Bernie Sanders might have put it) rather than dozens.
Competition is better for consumers than monopoly, and that applies even when the consumers are nations.
Thus to sustain those industries (semiconductor fabrication in this case) industrial policy (subsidies, tariffs, government investment, “Buy American” rules, … ) is essential.
But the justification I replied to was that the nation must inherently suffer material inefficiencies for a nation to do this, due to how economies work, which is not the case (or at least, no real justification was offered other than the heuristic that larger firms are somehow inherently more efficient, which if anything is opposite to my experience in a very large org).
A nation might well implement an industrial policy so as to pessimize its local industries that survive, but that is not required to happen either.
22nm is already overkill for a lot of applications. But, like, if your country gets embargoed, you should be able to make computer chips for cars and farming equipment. Top end GPUs? Not necessary. Some basic RISC-V cpu for compute appliances? That should be a capability that everybody has.
This part of why I have been advocating for years that the open source/free software folks should be focusing on optimization and stability/security as long term it will probably be much more useful that adding features that can be dumped on top.
This is how places like the US despite having 4% of the population have about a quarter of the material and energy consumption. Not to single them out, I am in Australia, it is a similar ratio.
I am not defending this situation, just highlighting its role.
Like, it might but if resources are equally distributed then raiding your neighbors for more is one of the best ways to get more of them.
Does no one study history? War wasn't invented in the 20th century.
Chimps in the damn jungle go to war with each other.
"No wars have been more ruthless and ravaging than “just” wars, fought in “defense” of religion, honor, or principle. If war must be, give me rather a war to capture an enemy’s wealth and territory, based on honest greed, in which I shall be careful not to destroy what I want to possess. " - Alan Watts
The problem with bleeding-edge fab is it's a (fast) moving target. It's not a solved problem. And customers can't simply migrate their designs to a different fab, as the designs are increasingly specific to a process.
I do think we need more fabs but not this kind. Very low cost fabs with standardized PDK and open(ish) tools, should be as simple as ordering a PCB. Not going to happen anytime soon though, needs old fabs to stop production and the bleeding-edge to hit a hard wall. Can't compete with fully depreciated legacy fabs/nodes.
Our system has no breaks for this. In fact it works actively for this, hence the neolib ideal of "just move towards efficiencies, and let the chips fall where they may." This is ideal under capitalism. As long as we avoid the needed migration to socialism, this is the best we can do.
Neolib economies generally work as much as anything "works" under capitalism. The GDP of the USA, median salary, quality of life, etc was the envy of the world until the recent nationalist movement that's based on "insourcing" and tariffs. You can't go back and capitalism migrates to efficiencies, which means outsourcing. Its more efficient to export factories and keep cushy office/service jobs here and drain the profits from those factories overseas.
Nationalism/protectionism and capitalism are fundamentally incompatible, so here we are. Demagogy and populism and "return to the past" mentalities used to win political power are the actual problem here.
Also what exactly happens if intel goes under? We have to buy 'foreign' licensed ARM? Manufacture in Asia? We're already doing that. And we have AMD which is a good, if not, superior product, regardless of manufacturing locale. We don't need local fabs the same way we don't need local factories for a lot of other things. You can't just depress wages with a wave of a hand nor do tariffs work outside of some really focused edge cases.
>The U.S. will be completely dependent on foreign companies
This is true of nearly all things in nearly all countries. Recent nationalist movements won't change how capitalism works and recent tariffs and protectionism has only hurt these industries and the working class. The toothpaste is out of the tube and it cannot be put back in. What we're seeing with the government buying intel is an attempt to do that, and it will fail. Expect more tomfoolery like this until we get responsible leadership, but until then we all have to sit here and watch these various economic horrors unfold. Be it this, inflation, mindless tariffs, etc. This will fail and its obvious it will, but currently it buys political power, so we will go this route because voters, largely uninformed on how capitalism works, think this is the "one weird trick" that will make them wealthy. It won't. In fact, all recent indicators are more negative as these policies continue. It will instead make them poor.
This is the same short sighted nonsense that got us into this mess. What happens if China invades Taiwan tomorrow? They can cut off the supply of chips to most of the world and global economies will collapse overnight. You really haven't thought through the implications of having critical dependence on a single small island that a global power is incredibly invested in controlling.
It sucks for a while; the system is strong and adapts.
I appreciate fabs are multi-year, massive capital investments, but TSMC already has one up and running in Arizona. There are others (including owned by Intel) all around the world. They won’t go poof when INTC is no more.
Current American culture can be pretty ugly.
It can mean outsourcing, but I think your broader point is undercut by the fact that the USD holds a very special place as the world reserve currency. This creates high foreign demand for the USD which pushes up the exchange rate and leads to US exports being less competitive on the international market (i.e. our manufacturing base gets hollowed out because it cannot compete). This is a large market distortion that the US actively defends because it benefits us in other ways. Tariffs and general protectionism is not a good thing in a free market, but that's not really what is happening at the international level.
Huh? France and Germany are prime counter examples of your statement.
Their benefits are almost purely from the strength of the working class, hence workers having it better there.
In France, the percentage of employees covered by a collective bargaining agreement, which is very high (around 95-98%)
In Germany, about 50% of workers are directly covered by collective bargaining agreements (CBAs)
In 2024, the union membership rate in the United States was 9.9%, representing 14.3 million workers, while 16.0 million workers were represented by a union under a collective agreement, accounting for 11.1% of the workforce.
---
If American workers want a better life they need CBA's and unions, not protectionist tariffs and buying chunks of random tech companies.
Even for integrated graphics, Intel has been behind Apple’s/TSMC ARM based processor before the Mx based Macs.
The reason they are in the shape they are in right now is because they didn’t have the volume to invest in the next generation and even now the CEO said they aren’t going to invest in making a cutting edge foundry until they have customers committed to it.
Like I did (at the time) high-end gaming on it, back when gaming used to sometimes tax your CPU and not only your GPU, and in that entire time I didn't ever feel like I would have benefitted at all from an upgrade, it was so far ahead of the curve. And that was AMD's budget chip line! They simply didn't deliberately cripple it nearly as much as Intel did their Celerons.
(Though I blame developers being lazy with optimisation as well as games also being released on console for this.)
IMO that's much less of a case for laptop and desktop (let alone server). Even if people don't understand the technical details e.g. Apple's superior performance per watt (or its implications at least) is something a lot more people notice.
Intel focus on low volume high end chips is another reason they are behind.
In what way?
TSMC doesen't design or sell the chips. If they have limited capacity they will of course charge more for manufacturing mobile chips if they can sell the capacity to Nvidia/AMD/Apple instead.
ARM chips (and that's pretty much by design based on ARM's business model) are close to being a commodity.
Apple is of course an exception but they are not directly part of the CPU market. And ARM and Qualcomm are barely bothering trying to compete with them because there doesen't seem to be a lot of point. They themselves are pivoting to datacenter because there is just more money to be made there.
> Intel focus on low volume high end chips is another reason they are behind.
I guess that's complicated. It seems like an optimal strategy if you are a chip designer (e.g. Nvidia or AMD vs Qualcomm). Not so much if you are a fabricator. Of course Intel being both makes things a lot harder for them.
That’s the entire point. Intel is behind because their vertical market strategy of using their own fabs only for their own chips doesn’t give them enough volume compared to TSMC who has volume because they are a foundry.
> ARM chips (and that's pretty much by design based on ARM's business model) are close to being a commodity.
ARM doesn’t manufacture chips. The entire argument is that it’s a strategic interest for Intel to manufacture chips in the US. ARM is irrelevant to this conversation.
> Apple is of course an exception but they are not directly part of the CPU market. And ARM and Qualcomm are barely bothering trying to compete with them because there doesen't seem to be a lot of point. They themselves are pivoting to datacenter because there is just more money to be made there.
Apple, Nvidia and to a lesser extent all of the companies that are designing chips and using TSMC as a foundry are more relevant than x86 chips.
Between phones, tablets, watches, and Macs, Apple, etc alone sells more devices with Arm chips than PCs and servers sold by Intel.
They have enough scale to fund leading edge processing.
Qualcomm is a bigger seller of processors than anyone since every mobile cellular chip that I’m aware of except for the very few designed by Apple for the low end 16e is sold by Qualcomm.
> Qualcomm is a bigger seller of processors
Yes, even for their highest end mobile chip (Snapdragon 8 Elite) the estimated OEM price seems to be under <$200.
A midrange AMD EPYC 9004 chip is $4000-6000. Presumably the gross margin is also higher. So hardly a fair comparison. Of course Intel seems to be propping up it's server marketshare by dropping its margins, so I wouldn't be surprised if they are lower than Qualcomm's.
> But you notice in the case of Google
They design their own mobile SoCs though which seems like a fairly serious effort for a hobby project (although being an off the shelf design like almost all ARM chips besides Apple's maybe not)
Not sure on volume, but Samsung and Mediatek are major players too. I dont think Google has used anything from Qualcomm since Pixel 5 (2020).
IIRC intel makes 2-3x in client sales what it does in datacenter.
Intel was very competitive in laptops until Apple started coming out with the M-chips. Now, AMD is doing pretty good. Has Microsoft released their Snapdragon surfaces? Haven’t heard much on that front.
While other hardware companies got lean operationally and employee wise Intel did not. The ex-Intel employees all paint somewhat the same picture of bureaucracy, layers of (poorly managed) dependencies and reliance on paradigms that worked during late 90s / early 2000s.
If you followed sources like semiaccurate the situation at Intel is not surprising either, they've been reporting on issues there since their inception.
What's annoying about this is that it's the same people who drove the outsourcing and decline of American industry who are using the same framework they've been using to drive that stunning dereliction to argue that this is the wrong approach.
Over a decade ago Intel wasn't driving itself into the dirt. Their failure was just beginning approximately 1 decade ago, starting with their failure at EUV leaving them trapped on 14nm.
> Intel is already the best microprocessor manufacturing company in the world
Intel was not driving themselves into the dirt if they are the best in their field. Instead, I'd suggest looking at when the process nodes were achieved:
| | Someone Else | Intel | Lead |
|------+----------------+-------+------|
| 32nm | 2011 (Samsung) | 2009 | 2 |
| 22nm | 2013 (IBM) | 2011 | 2 |
| 14nm | 2015 (Samsung) | 2014 | 1 |
| 10nm | 2017 (Samsung) | 2018 | -1 |
| 7nm | 2018 (TSMC) | 2021 | -3 |
Most new drugs come from biotechs nowadays (not all of them, not GLP-1’s). But many do. If that innovation is happening in China and not the US today then it will create an issue in several years. We will not control our supply chain for a critical set of goods.
There is strategic importance in maintaining home-grown capability.
(it's also the same reason France keeps propping up many other industries, and sells weapons/jet fighters to other countries...)
There were a few of us warning about this well before it all happened in 2013 and 2014. Predicted the death of Intel, and surge of AMD and TSMC before majority of people even heard of TSMC.
I also feel a little sad about TSMC, now that they have invested a lot in US but US is actively and strategically trying to pop up Intel to compete. But TSMC is at least 2 cycle ahead, meaning 5 - 6 years time. Unless TSMC make any mistakes even in the best case scenario I dont see Intel catching up within that time frame. Especially now they have little to no cash cow. Server, GPU, Consumer CPU are all under threats.
This realization means that no matter what, Americans need to make certain basic necessities, and chips are one of them. I have friends at Intel that have been there for 20 years and they basically say it's dead man walking. They have chip equipment that they paid billions for that is sitting idle because they don't have the demand, but they can't turn them off otherwise it will be destroyed. However, these machines cost hundreds of millions to keep on. Plus they are already out of date compared to TSMC. The entire thing is a disaster, but Americans need an American source of chips so they have no choice but to double and triple down on a bad investment and hope that something happens that will let them become competitive again.
America abandoned free enterprise in favor of managed monopolies. It happened via a wave of financialization, globalization, government bailouts, mergers and consolidation that all granted immediate financial benefits to shareholders, at the cost of long term competitiveness.
That's it that's the whole story in a nutshell, look at Boeing, Intel and others, you'll see it again and again.
This is not the right way and US economics are looking more like Mussolini's every day.
Force these incumbents to compete. With fragments of each other, or with new American companies. Perhaps shelter them from some foreign competition if you really must.
That would once again unlock the unparalleled power of the 350 million enterprising souls spread between the two coasts. Which is what got America to #1 in the first place.
Give those souls something to do again that isn't meth or opiates.
Managed monopolies are not the way.
Government makes policy.
Government decides when and where to apply tariffs.
If government applies a tariff on imports from any country that has cheap labor, businesses will stop offshoring to that country because it will no longer be cheaper.
Or at least, that's what businesses do in a free market economy. In the free market where many firms compete for your dollar, they can and will compete on price when they have to.
But in a "managed monopolies" economy like 2025 America, they may just raise prices instead because they have at most 2-3 competitors, and all it takes is a few games of golf, a wink and a nod to keep prices high.
We used to call that a cartel, prosecute the shit out of those companies, and defend the free market.
America's government stopped doing that. Now our enforcement is Luigi. When and where will the next Luigi strike? How many Luigis do you want to see? I would rather have government resume serving the People, it will work better, like it did with Standard Oil and AT&T.
Patriotism is not required. Policy that puts the people first plus competent law enforcement against corporate crime is all that we need.
The two are kind of antithetical.
I think your comment is low quality. Like I made an effort here to write at length about how government and economics work in the hopes that someone would learn from it, and you strawmanned one idea and called it "wild." This is not the Hacker News way and it is not commenting in good faith.
Free markets only exist in unnaturally heavily regulated circumstances. If you let the markets to be on their own devices then you get monopoly. Regulation is ironically what makes free markets possible.
It's basically exactly the same as democracy vs feudalism.
That’s Intel management’s FUD building a moat against such startups with the government’s help.
Several billions of dollars is not a scary level of funding these days for such startups to happen. Plus CHIPS pile of hundreds of billions. Plus Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Apple and others can always form a consortium to build a foundry. A lot of options, yet all of them are being killed by the Intel management skillfully working the bronze ear. That is how a tech race is lost - by letting government instead of the market to pick winner.
The dependence on oil from the Middle East is comparatively a bigger problem for the West (though not for the US with its shale oil reserves).
Very well argued. It's such a stunning dereliction the US let things get to this point. We were doing the "pivot to Asia" over a decade ago but no one thought to find TSMC on a map and ask whether Intel was driving itself into the dirt? "For want of a nail the kingdom was lost" but in this case the nail is like your entire metallurgical industry outsourced to the territory you plan on fighting over.