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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

"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."

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

    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]

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...

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).

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

TBH, it's easy to say this with the benefit of hindsight. Throughout most of the 2010s, EUV lithography was like the "year of the Linux desktop" - i.e., this year will be the year where EUV was suitable for high volume manufacturing. I don't really blame Intel for deciding to go with self-aligned quadruple patterning for 10 nm, but combining it with cobalt interconnects was probably biting off more than they could chew.

FWIW, Intel was funding EUV R&D since 1997: https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/1997/CN0911...

That press release had an interesting prediction:

> Intel projects that the microprocessor of the year 2011 will contain one billion transistors, operating at over 10 gigahertz and delivering 100,000 MIPS (millions of instructions per second).

They weren't that far off in estimating the transistor count and MIPS: the i7-2600k released in January 2011 had 1.16 billion transistors [0] and delivered 117k MIPS [1] @ 3.4 GHz. The clock speed prediction was way off due to the failure of Dennard scaling in the early-mid 00s.

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/14043/upgrading-from-an-intel...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second#CPU_re...

(Genuinely asking, I don't know anything about chips - I'm the kind of programmer who is profoundly comforted by pretending like my CPU is like a really fast version of the thing I did in CompE 201, as opposed to reality which i gather is a bit more like a demonically possessed stone that glues together a bunch of barely understood physics that kind of "even out" at macro levels but seem pretty f'd up at quantum levels).

How they will get to 3nm is another question but back when Intel made its decision, 7nm was on the horizon so choosing to not go the EUV route is not as dumb as it may look now.

A tangent, and I realise this phrase is a meme, but it has always bothered me. Nobody has ever defined what year of the Linux desktop actually means, so it's a phrase without any real meaning.

Windows is an ugly pain in the butt to create install media for (when you're not on the native OS), and it's just as bad to Install on random hardware. Maybe more so since it's less likely to ship network drivers for random wifi gear and lan connections. Even Debian has non-free blobs for drivers with the (at least 'Live' versions) these days, finally.

Repair shops are the next big thing I hear. The goal posts always move if it isn't exactly what someone already knows.

I know for sure because my PC was a cutting-edge HEDT at some point and indeed the network drivers weren't present at installation and GPU driver wouldn't auto-install either. But it just meant I had to right click install the network after desktop load and just download the GPU drivers from the internet.

Now that the PC is old, any re-installation is extremely straightforward with everything automatically loaded and basically zero intervention to get fully functional hardware on Windows.

The thing about Linux is that not only it wouldn't have worked at all when the hardware was cutting edge but even today, some patching and manual intervention is required for the network/motherboard that is not usual. It's a process way more involved and annoying than I ever had to do on the Windows side.

Any fool can go on the manufacturer website and download a driver bundle to execute sequentially, just figuring out what you'll need to do on Linux is a problem in itself...

That sounds like a Linux problem, not a Windows problem. Windows can create Linux boot USBs just fine.

>Maybe more so since it's less likely to ship network drivers for random wifi gear and lan connections.

Eh. IME the opposite is true. I've never seen Windows not recognize a network card, but I've on occasion had to manually install drivers for Debian for a plug-in NIC, but that years ago, now. On the other hand, very occasionally Windows needs to be spoon-fed drivers for a storage controller during installation.

We need to learn to recognize the difference between something that's never going to happen for either physical or economic/social/structural reasons, and something that is just really difficult and takes a long time.

I always think of this when I think about fusion and the irritating "fusion is 20 years away and always will be" meme. In reality fusion has been edging closer, and closer, and closer for decades. Like EUV lithography it's just incredibly hard and requires a ton of capital and time and some of the smartest people on Earth to make it a reality. The same logic applies to things like a working HIV vaccine, life extension, or human space flight and space settlement.

The reason there's never been a year of the Linux desktop on the other hand has to do with the full picture of what's required to mass market a desktop OS and support that, not just the technical problems, as well as business reasons around what Microsoft does to incentivize vendors to stay in their ecosystem. Linux desktops are just about ready today but no mainstream laptop/desktop PC vendor is going to sell them for a long laundry-list of non-technical or para-technical (legacy software base) reasons.

And people how know will and must reinstall anyway Arch, Gentoo, Suse, Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu.

The Steamdeck is an excellent proof how a full featured Linux (SteamOS is based upon Arch) is shipped well. Not a unmaintained or googlyified closed-source derivate of Linux (Android and ChromeOS).

* I ordered an X13 Gen1 AMD with Linux for fun. Worked well, installation was clean. No 120$ for Microsoft and its stock owners. You shall not feed the bad guys. Especially when you will never use Windows.

The thing is that I don't really want a budget Chromebook (which certainly exist).

I want something for travel mostly. Ended up getting a new iPad Air recently which isn't all that light but probably fits my needs best as it now has a pretty functional keyboard and can easily be used without the keyboard as an entertainment/consumption device.

They may not be traditional laptops or desktops, but they're PCs, and they're being sold with compatibility with a large installed base of Windows games in mind. Moreover, handheld gaming PC users seem to perceive SteamOS as being superior to Windows in this device category.

I think it would be correct to say that present-day desktops are mature and stable and aren't rapidly changing because they fill a mature niche. Mobile does seem to have decimated the casual computing and much of the non-work-related computing niche, at least for non-technical people.

I wonder if there's an argument to be made that desktops should become more technical and power user oriented since that is now their niche.

Which makes the B2C ad stuff they shove into Windows all the more infuriating: it's a drop in the bucket relative to their other product verticals.

…

I always think of this when I think about fusion and the irritating "fusion is 20 years away and always will be" meme. In reality fusion has been edging closer, and closer, and closer for decades. Like EUV lithography it's just incredibly hard and requires a ton of capital and time and some of the smartest people on Earth to make it a reality.

Never is a very long time, so I’m not going to say never. But it’s not at all certain that when all those smartest people declare victory we’ll have something that doesn’t make economic sense because the upfront capital costs are too high even if the theoretical (at that point) full lifecycle kWh cost is low.

The US ecosystem badly needs a serious Intel competitor -- because they just ain't it.

No freaking way. How do you think that’s feasible, considering how fast depreciation goes in semiconductors?

By "SpaceX moment", I mean a startup entering an impossible market, where the barrier to entry is billions of dollars of research and manufacturing, a market dominated by industry giants from the 60s, and yet still coming out on top somehow.

The thing is, the SpaceX moment occurred because of a rare opportunity where the industry incumbents were insulated from any competition or need for innovation for ~30 years. Some domestic industries still operate in an environment somewhat like this (e.g. the steel industry), but still face modernized global competition (albeit whose effects are kept at bay via import tariffs reaching as high as 266%).

The semiconductor industry... while there are magnificent barriers to entry and not "enough" competition, they have absolutely not been wholly insulated from innovation or competition. And innovation in fabrication is driven at a very rapid pace! So there aren't huge outsized profits to be found like there was for SpaceX. And even SpaceX needed to invent what was almost an entirely new industry (Starlink) to become truly profitable.

And even trying to pull a "SpaceX" on domestic steel manufacturing would fall flat because you wouldn't capture the global market, and would still be dependent on some (potentially much lower) tariffs to compete against the very modernized factories in China, which are innovative/competitive/efficient, unlike our domestic industry.

SpaceX took advantage of a very rare situation where there truly was no competition or innovation anywhere on the planet for a very long period. I'm not aware of any other industries which are quite as far "behind" today as space launch systems were in 2010. But if anyone else is, please mention those industries here!

> I'm not aware of any other industries which are quite as far "behind" today as space launch systems were in 2010. But if anyone else is, please mention those industries here!

Digital payments may be in a similar situation. Visa's 2% fee may seem low but from a scale and competitive standpoint it is fairly absurd - they are making 80% gross margins on $30b of revenue to do what boils down to a few API calls and some fraud repayment. I doubt that they need to do much innovation to keep that moat either (in contrast to say Apple and their 30% cut of App Store revenues - they need to constantly stay ahead of Android and Windows).

Curious to hear your take on what other industries at least come close to the space dynamics in 2010.

Problem is, the world consuming these things mostly seems to want those parts, and can't ignore those other parts. Which seems to explain relatively low uptake.

Payments are pulled instead of pushed; the underlying credit card numbers lack even a semblance of security; there is all kinds of mis-design due to the way that restaurant tips work; it all started when credit card imprints/readers were all assumed to be offline; etc.

One of my earliest memories is my mum paying for groceries using her credit card in the 90/00s, where the machine used was completely mechanical/manual. It copied the card number (that was embossed on the plastic) by literally taking a carbon paper rubbing of the card. The system was designed to be offline, because back then there was no "online".

A "built for online first" payment paradigm would look different, but it would have an enormous chicken-egg or installed-base problem, unless you had something with government-level muscle enforcing it.

I also recall the occasional business writing down credit card details, in person, with a pen, on a form they had for the purpose.

If the electronic retail payment industry hadn't already been captured by VISA and MasterCard, I could very well see something like this, a much cheaper and simpler system, being what everybody uses. There's countries (India?) where debit/credit card adoption was slow and now these simpler solutions have significant market share.

You could pay with cash or debit if you wanted to, but then you can't chargeback the business.

We just need a non-profit integrator to do it worldwide... Use credit card as a fallback if everything else fails.

The banks issuing Visa cards do fraud repayment. Visa gets paid for their network, and specifically their network of higher income spenders who want to play the rewards game. Also, note that Visa does not earn 2% of transaction totals. A signification portion of total card processing fees goes to the card issuing banks to pay for rewards and fraud repayment.

LOL @ anyone who believes that global financial processing is primarily a technical problem vs. the regulatory / bureacratic dystopia it actually is.

Here’s one of them: https://multibeamcorp.com/

I remember touring a little research fab, maybe around 2000, that could achieve feature sizes comparable to what TSMC can do today. But they were very, very, very slow.

(Fast-moving electrons are easy to make, easy to aim, and have teeny tiny wavelengths that entirely sidestep most the issues that people have with photons having obnoxiously large wavelengths. But electrons have all manner of downsides that explain why fabs spend many billions of dollars on optical lithography, one of which is that they repel each other, which makes shining a lot of them at a wafer at once quite problematic.)

I think semiconductors is a difficult space for a SpaceX. SpaceX was relatively cheap - the company itself only raised 2 billion dollars, and according to Musk, the cost to develop Falcoln Heavy was "only" $500M. I think the "thesis" behind SpaceX is moreso that the technology to develop rockets had come down massively, but the market had gotten fat and lazy on government contracts. The market only seemed impossible because everyone just assumed so.

On the other hand ASML's EUV machine costs $300M and that's only a small part of what you need build your own Fab and barring some massive research breakthrough that isn't coming down any time soon.

UMC was a Taiwan foundry that started even before TSMC and it eventually folded.

Estimates are it would take $200 - $300 billion just to catch up with them and little to no profitability for a decade while burning $10s of billions every year.

I think the federal govt is the only entity that has that kind of money.

It is prudent, possibly even critical, to have foundries on US shores, and the US will have to pay for it.

SpaceX and Tesla benefited from being helmed by a crazy person (in their nascent stages), who pushed to break norms in the conventional thinking, either "rockets can't be reused/we must spend $10B on a test campaign[2] before any part leaves the ground" and "EVs aren't cool". I don't think if Musk could design a rocket engine from scratch is relevant, but the strategic design patterns of 1) reduce requirements, 2) remove unused things, 3) simplify/optimize, 4) accelerate cycle times, 5) automate. Those points aren't revolutionary, just a more expanded "go fast and break things."

The computers that came out of Silicon Valley in the late 70s-into the 80s were a disruption to the old stalwarts like IBM. Though for silicon maybe I'm just trapped in that pre-SpaceX thinking.

[1]: https://phys.org/news/2020-05-exceptional-euv-hot-tin-plasma...

[2]: https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-sls-and-orion

That machine btw is called "free electron laser", and utilizes relativistic electrons to match their velocity to free-space photons instead of the slowed-down-by-metal-helix traveling-wave-tube-amplifiers that power most TV satellites. Those work at about 10 GHz or 30mm wavelength, much larger than the 13nm band used for EUV lithography.

FELs can have efficiencies in the double digit % if built with energy recovery, btw.

another good example of this is how VLSI in particular disrupted the mini-computer/mainframe market and made CPU's cheap enough to put them into smaller and far cheaper machines. This really shook up the old guys who where used to being total system vendors. (IBM, DEC etc). Suddenly, you could get a computer for much cheaper compared to the decade prior, and by the early to mid nineties you had guys like sun eating their lunch completely.

IBM pivoted to being a services company and DEC just imploded.

This already happened and the startup was TSMC. Unfortunately for the U.S., it's in Taiwan.

It could be simple as the free world not wanting manufacturing capability at home. It could be wanting only grain farms and money printers.

Also, manufacturing has a massive impact on the environment, this includes semiconductor manufacturing. It has politically been impopular for a while now.

But surely it wouldn't be impossible, with enough capital and initiative, to start a US-side TSMC clone on US soil? Just like the Valley successes of the 70s and 80s prompted savvy Taiwanese investors to found TSMC. We might need to start copying back some of their playbook to chart our own course to success, as they did with ours, then exceeded it with their out strategy and ingenuity, currently.

Bill Gates was a raging asshole. Steve Jobs was a raging asshole. Larry Ellison was a raging asshole. It's not ideal, but it also doesn't preclude success.

I'm perturbed by Elon's politics and hypocrisy, but this is absolutely not true in anywhere near the same timeframe.

So the real question is. Is there someone else with a similar or better drive then Musk, that is as smart as Musk, that has as much discipline, has the right personality and at the right time. The answer is much more likely to be no then yes in my opinion. Because if the answer is yes we would have another Musk or close to it.

We'll never know, though, because no bank or investor just hands out start-up capital to nobodies.

(I also happen to believe, and HN is going to hate this, that the high percentage of businesses that fail is a testament to how thoroughly misallocated capital is. So much capital goes to people who end up demonstrating they are incapable of deploying it. The trick that hasn't been solved yet is consistently finding who those many capable people are beforehand.)

Thiel is right about the indeterminate optimism and determinate optimism outlined in Zero to One. Many people just expect things will naturally get better, no need to actually do it yourself, that it will happen anyway. So it's funny that the things that need doing only get done by people that believe they need to do it. (practically all of the tech and company builders believe the Zero to One thesis)

Without Musk, what space industry would there have been? Blue Origin was a me-too a decade later. Virgin was a me-too failure. Boeing can't get their astronauts back right now. If you remove Musk, everything that's bad right now is delayed another decade.

To the extent that CISC means anything it means “backwards compatible”. Modern ARM cores have multi-step decode and issue: to the extent that RISC means anything it means “we developed this with twenty year’s hindsight so we don’t have to do a lot in microcode yet.” In die area, in TDP, in wafer consumption, it’s just not a big cost.

To the extent that Intel missed AI so did everyone: right now there’s one target and that’s NVIDIA, no amount of HBM/TC ratio tuning is going to change that. Like 3 of 17 Ray/Anyscale tutorials target Habana. The Gaudi stuff works fine if you’re willing to pay the “last year’s model” tax all non-CUDA does.

And bigger picture, on semiconductors it’s the geopolitics people who are watching the bright line: semiconductors are a major power arena, the markets will get adjusted along those lines.

“I’m going to do Windows and then I’m going to do Windows Mobile and I’m going to do Windows embedded.” (all on intel x86)

As someone who worked on Windows Mobile and Windows Embedded, it's funny because that's what management was hoping, but it was so different. I don't think any of the phones had an x86 chip in them, although that was our debugging setup so we could use vastly more powerful desktop machines as devkits (although we still had devices to). Having to port parts of Windows to ARM and even MIPS was a giant PITA.

Windows Embedded is closer since it was based on XP, but also a completely different branch from what I remember from Win Mobile.

A lot of people think it's easy to port things, and hard to write things. With really, really complicated software, it's still really hard just to port things.

On paper AMD is better, but in the scientific community, it seems that Intel has much better performance for things like NumPy and SciPy. The reason seems to be "Intel® MKL" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_Kernel_Library).

I'm using a lot of weasel words like "seems to" because I haven't rigorously proved it. But anecdotally, my company's AI pipelines which are NumPy/SciPy heavy run an order of magnitude faster (2 seconds vs. 20 seconds) on my laptop's Intel i7 than the do on my Ryzen 7, despite the Ryzen 7 being a newer gen than the i7.

I very very seriously doubt this is a like-for-like comparison. I suspect one case is multithreaded and the other not, or that one is using generic non-SIMD fallbacks or something like that.

Altera 10-series FPGAs were massively delayed due to Intel's 10 nm fab problems. But I speculate that there was also a big difference in toolchains, does anyone know for sure? I mean Altera was using TSMC previously, and I presume were using industry standard tools: Cadance / Synopsis. But I would guess Intel was running their fab on home-grown tools... what is the status these days? For example I know for sure that IBM's synthesis was "Booledozer".

It's interesting because maybe Intel will spin out the fab business. But are they immediately ready to become a commercial fab business instead an Intel-only business? What's the toolchain like for Intel fab?

Also just to check your facts on the 10nm fab problems. Intel's first FPGA for Altera was always planned to be 14nm. It was totally trash for reasons entirely within Altera's control (don't rock the boat, just wait for the acquisition to close). And the synergistic products were a dead end. I'm sure the 10nm catastrophe didn't help but really that time would've been well spent unpicking the disaster of Stratix 10.

I think they're supporting a more standard toolchain starting with 18A.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21504/intel-18a-status-update...

"For Intel, getting an external PDK out for a leading-edge process node is no small feat, as the company has spent decades operating its fabs for the benefit of its internal product design teams. A useful PDK for external customers – and really, a useful fab environment altogether – not only needs process nodes that stick to their specifications rather than making bespoke adjustments, but it means that Intel needs to document and define all of this in a useful, industry standard fashion. One of the major failings of Intel’s previous efforts to get into the contract foundry business, besides being half-hearted efforts overall, is that they didn’t author PDKs that external companies could easily use. "

But some bad news today:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-manufacturing-busin...

Surely all the fabless semis can't be blithely running off a cliff with TSMC as their only parts source? That would be a catastrophic risk to take down the track if there's only a single vendor for advanced chips and they've decided to hike prices and collect all of the benefits alone from their advanced processes and share none of them with their customers.

Selling what TSMC sells might not be easily reproducible.

I don't really see that happening yet, but at some point if TSMC maintains its lead and the alternative options don't get the sales to continue investing, TSMC could well become completely unassailable at the leading edge.

It reduces the deterrence factor of the TSMC facilities on Taiwan: if they get damaged or sabotaged during an invasion, the entire industry doesn't get blown back to 2010. But now I'm imagining they'd have a board of directors having to meet overseas and claim their legitimacy to trading partners, almost like the "governments in exile" during wars.

Maintaining a US native foundry might actually be a way to prevent war because one of the key triggers might be the moment where all major chip players totally depend on TSMC, which gives Chinese/Taiwanese massive leverage. Economically, might be a loss leader. But strategically, important, probably.

If the US truly views having a domestic foundry as critical to national security, the US federal government has no choice but to pay up big time to support Intel's foundry business until -- hopefully, eventually -- that business is able to compete profitably against TSMC to manufacture chips for Apple, Nvidia, AMD, etc.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen!

Surely at some point you can make the argument that it's worth the investment for possible returns in the future, even if it costs a crazy amount of money right now. Trying to replicate what Intel has as another player would be even more exorbitant, presumably.

I just don't see what benefit at this point the US government would see investing in intel when they aren't really a whole lot better at the game at this point vs pretty much anyone else.

The theory goes that any CEO who does the necessary thing will be fired, so either they won’t do it, or the board will replace them with someone who won’t do it.

That kind of market failure can destroy arbitrary value.

I had a 12900K that was one of my favorite chips in ages but nothing since then has looked appealing.

The question remains, will Intel survive in its current form or could an activist investor stir up a hostile takeover and change the calculus?

The biggest reason is geopolitics: If escalated confrontation happens with China, Intel becomes one of the most valuable companies on the planet, period. TSMC will finish western fabs eventually, but the delta-t on when they become competitive (tech, capacity & cost, remember) with even Intel's western fabs is... decades, plural? Maybe never? The CHIPS act helped, but TSMC is dragging their feet for very, very (existentially) good reason. Also, remember that TSMC is built entirely on the back of ASML; conflict with China doesn't just block the west's access to the east's fab capacity, it blocks the east's access to the west's tooling to build more and better fabs. TSMC craters in this scenario. Samsung also exists. That's the list of near-SotA fab capacity, globally.

Capacity is another good reason: TSMC is not a bottomless bucket, and every year for the past at least two years Apple has purchased 100% of their SotA fab capacity. No one is competing with Apple's margins (except Nvidia, but that's a bubble market; numbered days). His argument is that there's no market reason for Intel's fabs to exist; we don't have the data to say for certain, but I'd guess that if Intel went to TSMC and said "you're already making lunar lake, make our xeon chips too" TSMC would say "we can't" (especially on SotA nodes, but maybe even near-SotA). They're tapped out, they grow, they're instantly tapped out again, everyone wants what they're selling. Intel fabs Lunar Lake and Arc with TSMC; both very-low volume.

Also worth keeping in mind: Intel was at one time the global leader in chip fabrication; but they lost that crown. People view TSMC as this unassailable beast, but they're just as fallible; and when I hear people say "Well, Intel 18A is probably three years out and by that time we'll have TSMC N2P with backside power delivery so who will even care about Intel 18A" are just extrapolating history. That's a dangerous game when all these rankings and valuations are based on asymptotically approaching the limits of the laws of physics. And while it is unlikely that Intel will take the lead again, TSMC showing any sign of faltering will raise the relative value of the #2 companies.

Intel is not in a good spot, but they're still an interesting business, they're still designing some of the best chips on the planet, and with the right decisions could grow to be even better than interesting. IMO, this article is missing a lot of the hard analysis and data that Stratechery is usually known for; I don't feel you can have a researched discussion on Intel without talking about fabrication volume or their concerning levels of debt, but he didn't mention either of those things. Heck, more than one passing mention of China feels kinda important to the topic.

EUV itself was developed by US government labs; ASML is a sole supplier of it because we licensed it to them and refused to give it to Nikon/Canon for no good reason.

If escalated confrontation happens with China, and that is massive IF that is dependent on insanely belligerent action from the West like giving nukes to Taiwan, then new semiconductor manufacturing will be the least of our worries. A Chinese blockade on Chinese and East Asian exports to US would result in total economic collapse in USA over a relatively short period. $100,000,000,000s in real demand for goods no longer being met over the span of weeks.

The possibility of direct conflict with China is the domain of armchair strategists that consume too many Reddit headlines, Peter Zeihan, Economist, etc., and individuals directly downstream of the defense budget, where Threat Inflation is good business. It's really not something that serious, intelligent people are anticipating on the horizon (again, outside of the wildcard of an insane new administration in Washington). Even the insane combo of Matt Pottinger, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton didn't get close to manifesting it (allegedly, some of their attempts were undermined by backchannel diplomacy from Gen. Milley and the JSOC). So what's the real risk?

One moderately realistic one: Taiwan experiences something similar to what happened in Hong Kong, during a time when US leadership is not motivated to aid in its defense. This isn't a situation where China and the US are at war; we're still trading with China; and broadly speaking the economies of both countries are fine. But, Taiwan isn't, and whether it surfaces as key TSMC talent/tech leaving the country, military action, or just PRC subtly shifting TSMC's allocation priorities toward the homeland: western chip manufacturers could benefit. This isn't seemingly likely to happen in the next four years given the stated priorities of both sides of the political isle; but the right is shifting more-and-more isolationist every year, and no one arguing in good faith would speak with such certainty as you have on what happens 2028 and onward.

What are the strategically important things imported from China that US couldn't live without, and that couldn't switch to importing from eslewhere or manufacturing at home, in times of war ?

My understanding is that US would is importing a lot of non critical things, whereas China is much more dependent on importing critical commodities (food, oil).

Just the one single company, located in a politically unstable area?

And putting aside the politics, if they become a monopoly what do you think will happen next?

because if you yield the whole thing to tsmc. you won't be able to recover the expertise, which is catastrophic for both intel / USA.

Capacity building here has to be a long term play.

The x86 licence still has value to some others in the space, but it seems like Intel could potentially be sold off for parts if it can't sell correct.

How hard would it be for say AMD to make a performant dual-ISA CPU?

I was thinking somewhat like how virtual 8086 mode[1] worked on 32bit CPUs, ie OS could be ARM-based, but it could run x86 processes.

I assume it would be hard to not sacrifice performance for one of the ISAs, but if it's for legacy applications you wouldn't need top speed necessarily.

Are ARM and x86 just too different to make it work? Are there other obstacles?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_8086_mode

It's not really true. The uops are highly related to the input instructions. There's enough room in a big desktop CPU to fit a big complex decoder yes, but it's a waste of space you could be using for other things, namely even more caches.

But the main reason not to do it is that you can do emulation or recompilation in software instead.

My personal rabbit-hole conspiracy is that AI is driving a fire under the national security apparatus, and we're going to see a restriction on AI-chip technology being exported or manufactured overseas. Intel will be in prime position to onshore that manufacturing.

Their current foundries can't just make other chips, and they certainly can't make GPUs for AI (TSMC make Intel GPUs). They are making a new foundry in Ohio, but in Intel's current state and comments they've made to the market it's not guaranteed the foundry will be built.

Intel might make it out of the hole, but it's going to get worse before it gets better. At their current trajectory their is not valid reason for the company to have 100,000 employees. I expect the recent layoffs are the first of a few.

I know nothing about finance, but I have trouble figuring out how they got themselves into this situation given this https://www.intc.com/stock-info/dividends-and-buybacks :

    As of June 29th, 2024, we were authorized to repurchase up to $110.0 billion, of which $7.24 billion remain available. We have repurchased 5.77 billion shares at a cost of $152.05 billion since the program began in 1990.

Remember, for the decade before this point INTC was throwing off 20B+ profits every year. They've had a couple of bad results recently, and everyone is ready to throw them off a cliff.

People are, in general, very sensitive to the most recent news when it comes to stocks. They will extrapolate what happened over the last year out into the next decade and say X is dead or X is going to rule the world (Intel, Nvidia respectively).

The pessimism is because Intel is behind by tens of billions of dollars, and more importantly, years. Many years. Effecting management change and developing the right workforce with the right expertise is not a given, even if they were previously earning $20B net income per year.

One could easily say this is the business with the highest barriers to entry in the world (hence the highest profit margins and profits in the world).

That's easy. This is the thinking process:

By buying shared at that time, we increase the stock price and please Wall Street. I get a bonus. Not investing into R&D might cause some problems in the future, but we are Intel. We are #1. When there is a competition, we will just redirect money to R&D and zoom right past it. Plus I will likely be gone by that time anyway.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.....

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.

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.

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

Florida has amazing beaches.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.