So...as part of the deal to bail intel out and give them government money, Trump just took 10% of intel's financial stake. In other words, Intel is now a partially US government owned entity. In other words, Trump just seized the means of production.
I mean, I'm left, but not even I'm THIS far left. What trump is doing to tantamount to a soft form of communism here, if we call socialism/communism government seizing control of the means of production. But that's what trump does, and that's what his "America first" and deals are. It's just "what's in it for me", raw self interest, and he just takes what he wants. Ya know, like a dictator does. He thinks this is winning, I think it's massive government overreach.
Still, I do wanna discuss the intel thing and why it's important. Intel is falling on hard times. They're one of the two major X86 competitors in the CPU industry, and given I'm a PC gamer im passionate about that industry and have strong opinions myself. I will say, it's BS that "X86" is copyrighted where they're the only two companies legally allowed to work on that format of computing given how crucial that industry is. Windows is an X86 operating system. PCs run on it. Sure, alternatives exist, like linux, android, which is why other companies are more active in other parts of the industry, but for X86, only intel and AMD are legally allowed to work on it.
If intel goes under, then guess what? AMD has a monopoly, and to repeat the mantra of every AMD fanboy ever, "competition is good." And it is. Neither intel nor AMD should be allowed to go under here.
I've seen a lot of AMD fanboy types cheering on intel's destruction in recent years. They love to defend AMD when they're down and paint intel as an evil monopoly who kept us at 4 cores or whatever, but now they seem fine with saying intel is down and they deserve it and AMD is t3h b357. (the best, for those who dont understand leet speak).
Me, honestly, I dont think intel really is doing that bad outside of finances. Basically, they invested tons of money in stuff they didnt work out as we reach the limits of moores law with computing, and their latest products didnt pass muster. I dont even think they're doing that bad in raw competitive terms. yes, they've had missteps. They couldnt get to 10nm products well. They tend to run their own foundaries, rather than just running everything through TSMC like everyone else does (they practically have a monopoly on the stuff used to make processors). That's expensive. They were gonna build more here in America to try to offset TSMC's dominance, which does give us a national stake in the process. I mean, we dont want all microchips made in taiwan do we? What happens if china invades? It's good to have our supply. Anyway, intel has been throwing all this money around investing in this and that, working with the US government, and their latest products have kinda crapped the bed. Raptor lake had the self degradation problem where they pushed the chips too hard to be competitive with AMD and then they started self destructing. And then arrow lake has a new architecture but introduced tons of latency. Meanwhile, after AMD's failures with bulldozer, they came up with a new CPU architecture from scratch, they improved it rapidly through multiple generations of improvements, and now they're beating intel. Outside of gaming, I still think intel is fairly competitive, I dont think they're doing as bad as they were during bulldozer where FX 8 cores struggled against fricking $100 dual core i3s, and X3D stuff isnt present on all CPUs yet on the AMD side, it's super premium and only available in the $350+ price range. So anything below that, intel still gets the job done mostly. They arent the best, and I think AMD is getting to the point they're better, but intel is still good enough where I saw fit to buy a discounted 12900k a couple years ago and run it in my main PC. If anything over the years I've had better experiences with intel than AMD overall, although I admit AMD really took off in the past 5 years in particular.
But yeah, that's the thing. Intel was ahead from like 2006 through 2020, then their dominance started being challenged with zen 3, rocket lake was a misstep. Alder lake was good, X3D and zen 4 were also good, raptor lake was just trying to push things too far and backfired, and now arrow lake is just....what it is. Kinda like a bulldozer moment for intel, but not as bad.
Still, its problems the past 2-3 years in particular are catching up, they're losing market share, and given their extremely high operating costs (their biggest problem), they're just imploding now.
But yeah, to bail them out, trump took stake in the company, an extremely socialistic move, strangely socialistic for a free market republican, and yeah.
I mean, I dont think the answer was to let intel go out of business. I know a lot of free marketeers on fox business and whatever think they should've just taken intel behind the barn like kristi noem and her dog, but uh...if we did that, AMD has a monopoly, and that's bad. Even worse, don't we WANT foundaries made in america? I mean, it fits the maga motif of doing things here, and let's think just beyond jobs. Do we want TSMC and taiwan to control the entire world's supply of microchips? Seems like a problem waiting to happen given we're in a de facto cold war with china with AI and computing technology being a major front for that. I mean, we want a strong intel with foundaries in america where if war ever broke out, we got our own reserve of microchips. Ya know?
So...yeah. Keep intel alive. Bail them out. Do the chips act stuff. I dont think that stuff really makes much sense to individuals outside of the beltway in a sense because they're focused on their own economic situations, but if we want to be competitive in a 21st century cold war with china, yeah, we want our own stuff made here, we dont wanna rely on this tiny island off of china's coast that they might invade some day. We want that stuff here.
So...yeah. Intel should be bailed out. I just dont like this straight up nationalization crap. Like, this is too communistic for me, and im to the left of both parties. of course, as vaush pointed out today, its not really communistic in the sense that he's nationalizing it for the people or whatever, nah, trump is more like a king who just takes what he wants. And he just wants part of intel. So he's taking it. It's dumb. Like, I hate this guy. We need to enforce checks and balances against his bad behavior. But until then, yeah, this is basically just....trump being the mad king taking what he wants because he can.
And yeah, that's how I see it.
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