When the company is the only company that's building a product that's needed domestically and internationally and is essential in the modern age and their biggest competitor is in a country that you need to protect from another world superpower I'd say exceptions are in order
Or you force them to license their patents and I.P. to alternative suppliers on reasonable terms, invest money in all of the players in that market, and the best players grab more market. If building a fab, it should probably not be managed by Intel but could pay them for their tech. Intel should get much less of the money since their management is the problem.
I’ll note that the only reason there even is a good market for x86 is that Intel was forced to license patents to AMD. Centaur and Transmeta had their innovations, too. More competition, esp building on proven fabs and I.P., would be the best route for the x86 ecosystem.
Likewise, IBM has competing suppliers in POWER markets. Apple bought the power-efficient one. ARM’s model is pro-competition with the huge number of good products showing what my Intel proposal might accomplish.
>is predicated on a very low risk scenario where Taiwan is invaded?
Low risk scenario? Chad is insisting that it's inevitable, constantly escalating their military exercises, and it's seeming like they're increasingly on a near-term timeline, and it seems like military interaction with the United States is almost guaranteed, it seems like that is an extremely provocative danger.
I might go so far as to say that it's among the top five greatest risks facing the world over the next 10 years. It's about as risky as it gets.
What is likelier is China actually succeeding in matching TSMC's capabilities and duplicate the entire west tech ecosystem completely. Anyone who still looks at China as a producer of cheap crap is a decade behind. Their STEM workforce dwarfs the west, they have the means, the ability and will to utilize every trick in the book (like spying). Taiwan and China are not like South and North Korea. They can lure engineers from Taiwan to work for them.
China is aggressively modernizing their chip manufacturing capabilities, it's nevertheless extremely hard, and their ambitions to absorb Taiwan and TSMC's capabilities into their economic industrial and military ambitions would serve to compliment their efforts
Because they can't and I wasn't suggesting they could. It could simultaneously be the case that they can make some degree of forward progress that falls well short of replicating the capabilities of TSMC.
that very low risk is predicated on the US sticking its neck out for Taiwan. Also considering what's happening in the world at large I wouldn't be so sure there's that low of a risk after all
> that very low risk is predicated on the US sticking its neck out for Taiwan.
Half of the US military is obsessively focused on this scenario. The Ukraine war showed what an invasion of a neighboring country gains you and that one didn't involve US airforce, navy, and marines directly intervening.
The odds the Chinese will suddenly be happy being poor and isolated from the west like Russians in exchange for Taiwan is extremely unlikely.
> Half of the US military is obsessively focused on this scenario. The Ukraine war showed what an invasion of a neighboring country gains you and that one didn't involve US airforce, navy, and marines directly intervening.
Taiwan is a little island right next to its adversary, and far away from its major allies. It's not Ukraine, you can't drive a truck from NATO to it.
Also the western cupboard is looking pretty bare, after so much equipment and ammunition has been burned up in Ukraine. Western production capacity can't keep up.
IIRC, and the US blue team has lost every war game it's conducted on that scenario. Like it or not, China is modernizing its military quickly, so the US can no longer depend on having a huge technological advantage to compensate for its weaknesses in this scenario.
> The odds the Chinese will suddenly be happy being poor and isolated from the west like Russians in exchange for Taiwan is extremely unlikely.
It doesn't matter if the Chinese (people) are happy or not, they don't really have a say.
Americans, on the other hand, will feel just as poor if they become isolated from China (just think of all the Made in China products that won't be restocked), and they do have a say.
In WWII, the Allies won in large part because America was the workshop of the world. Decades ago it ceded that title to China, because muh profits free trade. That doesn't augur too well for the outcome of a future conflict.
Go ahead and play the war games, but stories I've heard indicate that the Chinese military is at least as corrupt as Russia's.
Ukraine invasion was a flat land invasion. Invasion of Taiwan involves crossing a body of water and then an invading a mountain fortress Isle.
Ukraine just grew wheat for the third world.
Taiwan produces the world's most advanced semiconductors and many of America's most profitable businesses are dependent upon it.
The Chinese do not have a deep water Navy. We can blockade their oil supply with a couple destroyers in the Malacca strait. No oil, no food. China starves in six months.
Consider this strategy. If China tries to invade Taiwan, The best strategy may be overwhelming conventional defeat of the Chinese forces so they get back in the global trade game rather than extended blockade and disruption of the geopolitically extended supply lines.
In the meantime, any US company depend upon Chinese production really should start partying with them to move production or at least distribute production to Mexico as well as China.
US businesses should be encouraging Chinese companies there depending upon to open satellite manufacturing branches in Mexico or South America. A lot of Chinese industrialists are concerned with the increasing authoritarianism in China and are probably desperate to diversify internationally.
> Go ahead and play the war games, but stories I've heard indicate that the Chinese military is at least as corrupt as Russia's.
Maybe so, but Russia is still winning in Ukraine.
> Taiwan produces the world's most advanced semiconductors and many of America's most profitable businesses are dependent upon it.
> The Chinese do not have a deep water Navy. We can blockade their oil supply with a couple destroyers in the Malacca strait. No oil, no food. China starves in six months.
China is building ships far faster than the US is, and they don't have to operate halfway around the world in this conflict scenario. Also, they're working on building a blue-water navy right now.
> Consider this strategy. If China tries to invade Taiwan, The best strategy may be overwhelming conventional defeat of the Chinese forces so they get back in the global trade game rather than extended blockade and disruption of the geopolitically extended supply lines.
The US/NATO has avoided a direct conflict with Russia for a very important reason everyone understood during the Cold War, and that reason also applies to China. I think the US is more likely to lean on Intel and let Taiwan go than engage in a full-on direct conflict with China (which the US would also likely lose).
Also, China's not stupid. They have high-priority projects, to reduce the vulnerabilities you cite, which they are making progress on, e.g.:
When the US tries stuff like that, business interests undermine it, then it gets flogged as a boondoggle and never repeated. China just does it. If it doesn't work the first time, they try again.
> US businesses should be encouraging Chinese companies there depending upon to open satellite manufacturing branches in Mexico or South America. A lot of Chinese industrialists are concerned with the increasing authoritarianism in China and are probably desperate to diversify internationally.
US business interests have the US government by the balls, so they were allowed to sell out the US industrial base and have been able to freely throw wrenches into attempts to address that problem. Chinese business interests don't have that kind of pull, and I don't think the Chinese government will allow them to pull the same kind of shit. I wouldn't be surprised if those industrialists would get thrown in prison if their business actions threatened Chinese state interests, and they most likely know it.
> It's pushing toward a stalement, far short of its initial invasion goals and at vastly heavier cost than intended.
The momentum is in Russia's direction, and it feels like Ukraine is teetering in the brink due to manpower and resource issues, and that's even without Trump.
If Russia pays the price, it won. Winning is winning, even if it's Pyrrhic.
Which is why Russia's economy is collapsing with devalued rubles, high inflation, high interest rates, closed banks, they are calling up NK soldiers, lost territory in Russia, are losing 1500-2000 soldiers a day?
They are losing like 100,000 soldier per 10 miles of ground they gain. Talk about unsustainable.
And now Russian staging, logistics, weapons depots, artillery, airfields can be targeted with ATACMS.
Absolutely nobody has any momentum in this. If anything, Russian meat wave tactics lend themselves to spectacular collapse if morale and logistics break. So they grind soldiers for months to gain 30 kilometers, and suddenly get overrun by a swift counterattack if the line falters.
It's hard to get info on the actual kill ratios, but I would guess meat wave tactics are resulting in 5:1 kill ratios by Ukraine, if not better. We'll see what winter does to Russian troops, they aren't typically well supported or supplied even in summer.
Afaik Russia isn't losing its own army, all those soldiers lost are foreign mercenaries which only costs them money. Kill ratios might be because they're sending in untrained Indians and not professional soldiers. As I understand it Putin is doing this to not turn his own country against him
"Teetering [on] the brink" is overdrawn. I'm not aware of any analysis that suggests that the Ukrainian side is on the verge of collapse.
My own sense is tha the conflict is long past the point where it can be meaningfully won by either side. The best either can hope for is an outcome that can be presented internally as "not losing". Any attempt to portray the outcome as substantially stronger than that will be a matter of spin and rhetoric.
> Except it doesn't, as we have seen with another nuclear power in the course of its psychotic attempt to invade Ukraine.
Because the West has been very careful not to push too hard, and has afforded Russia a grinding and expensive advancement on its goals. If NATO forces joined directly, or Ukraine was marching to Moscow with Western aid, I think you'd have a different story (e.g. at least the use of tactical nuclear weapons, which I think would quickly spiral out of control).
Honestly, I think this could be fixed in probably a year, if the US made a rule that 10% of anything sold, whether it be the assembled or parts, has to be manufactured in US, Canada or Mexico.
I got to be happy with South America or Africa or obviously Europe
The biggest difference from 2023 Q3 is a massive loss in "Cash flows provided by (used for) operating activities". Too many pizza parties I guess. This feels more like creative accounting to justify the layoffs and other cut backs.
Taxpayer money can’t be spent on profitable companies, and can’t be spent on unprofitable companies. Would you rather taxpayer money be spent on inefficient government agencies instead of a free market solution?
