Comment by freeopinion 17 hours ago
How is using tax money to prop up uncompetitive companies good for national security? Wouldn't it be better to replace them with competitive companies? It's super hard to be successful when your own government in backing the competition.
You can't build a new Intel. That would take decades. These aren't startups. They are massive fucking machines that can't just be disassembled and put back together by someone else. So the idea is to control them and get them back on track to better serve the collective interest.
You do that by letting them fail.
You let them fail because that ensures that everyone else in the economy fixes their shit and stays competitive. America developed more world class successes, by getting out of the way and letting badly run firms fail.
Especially since NVIDIA is a competitor.
Intel failed because the Taiwan government started tsmc and supported an amazing business model that turned out to be perfect for SC manufacturing.
Unfortunately, this is in a country that China is threatening to takeover while building the largest bomb shelters and field hospitals right across the strait.
China is forcing us to invest kind of like they are forced to prop up Huawei to make GPUs for deepseek. Conflict makes irrational actions happen.
You can't build a new one so you keep the old one on life support? This makes no sense. The old Intel is not the right choice. How many decades do you think it will take them to recover if you don't clean house? How many decades has it already been? The later you start the longer you remain vulnerable to foreign competition.
You wouldn’t have to build a new intel. Their IP, infrastructure, and even the individual talent pool won’t simply disappear. They can either get redistributed into more competent companies like their competitors or restructured into a new venture. The only losers would be the current shareholders.
> or restructured into a new venture
Isn’t that exactly what the “too big to fail” bailouts were, in practice?
They did it with rail before
US needed functional railroads and they took over the rr companies.