1130
Intel is laying off over 15,000 employees and will stop ‘non-essential work’
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
1130 points (99.0% liked)
Technology
59549 readers
3369 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Intel has an enormous technical debt that they're finally struggling to pay back after they hit a brick wall with their 7nm Titanium chipset.
It isn't that this is wasteful spending so much as it is big upfront costs for future productive development.
That said, the fact that this work has to be government subsidized in order to be done raises the question of why this business is private at all.
I'm not sure I want the gov and huge amounts of my tax dollars going to operate federal gov chip fab plants. On the other hand I get your point that it is so heavily subsidized it is practically a de facto situation anyway.
That is ultimately what the subsidies amount to.
I think the question isn't "Do I want my tax dollars going to X?" (because they're going there whether you want it to or not - semiconductors are an essential industry in a modern post-industrial nation). The question is how you want the business to operate. As a for-profit venture focused on returning the maximum profit to shareholders over the smallest time frame? Or as a public utility, focused on generating a sufficient quota of useful products for a fixed unit cost?
Part of the problem with the Western/Americanized economic system is that the second kind of enterprise is increasingly difficult to find. And where it does exist (the USPS, the state university system, the federal reserve, the SEC/FAA/EPA) there's been so much privatization and regulatory capture that these institutions appear incapable of fulfilling their mandates.
But constantly diverting responsibility for fixing the problem by saying "I don't want my tax dollars involved in this failed thing" doesn't get us any closer to a solution. At some point, the public (and by extension the state bureaucracy) has to engage with our corrupt and failing economic cornerstones. Otherwise, we just become beholden to the nations we import from.
"Let Saudi-ARAMCO handle it" isn't a solution I find particularly appetizing, either.
Doesn't the US have semiconductor chip sanctions in place on China, specifically because it's a national security concern? If semiconductors are that big of a deal that we need to sanction China over them... maybe they should be nationalized.
Taiwanese Semiconductor is the global industry leader, and half of their output is sold to China. Korea and Japan are also major exporters. The Chinese manufacturers don't care about losing access to Intel chips, when they're a generation behind the curve anyway.
Wall Street would flip its lid if the US tried to nationalize Intel.