Prior to a week ago every conservative was 100% against any form of government corporate ownership. They hated TARP, Solyndra and quantitative easing. They went so far as to want to privatize social security and the post office. Countless hours have been spent justifying all of this and it was baked into their identity that it was all bad in any flavor.

Then, suddenly, Trump is for it and they fall into line without a moment of cognitive dilemma. Cult mentality. They cared about communism before and suddenly they don't and they haven't given us a reason. They haven't admitted their change.

Competitor is already here. Apple and Ampere are making ARM systems that fit most users needs. There are ARM servers. But people don’t want to switch.

I don't disagree with anything else you said, they are a cult it's just not communist at all. Fascist yes

Literally illegal. Only AMD and Intel have the patent cross-licensing rights to make x86 chips. There used to be a third company (Cyrix and subsequently VIA), and (maybe?) still is, but it hasn't been relevant to the desktop CPU market in decades.

The real competition will come from ARM-based computers.

Not communist except for the government ownership of companies?

Plenty of capitalist companies are government owned. Canada has crown corporations, for example, that do generate profits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government-owned_companies

If the government owns every company, maybe you have communism, but most likely what you have is autocracy. If the government owns a 10% stake of one company, that's some nationalisation. There are good reasons for it in capitalism, such as for regulating natural monopolies. I'm not sure Intel falls into "good reasons,' since it appears to me to be some kind of corruption.

10% for now. Trump always changes his mind.
One company for now. Except the 15% tax that exists only on Nvidia. 15% for now. Trump always changes his mind.

Broken record: if Biden or Obama did this the same MAGA people making excuses would be decrying this government overreach. And what happens when Trump isn't in office anymore? When a Dem embraces and extends this governor power grab?

Are you in favor of this?

In favour of what

Defense contracting.

They do a a good amount of of military industrial contracting and work for 3 letter agencies on data processing/ high performance computing.

They also got awarded government funding in 2024 to build logic chips for the military in-country.

Not enough to sustain the company, but such "sensitive" programs may not be allowed to show up in revenue reports or have to be assigned to other areas or so.

Athlon64 x2s fucking dominated Pentiums back in the mid 2000s, but the market for people playing games was much smaller. Only with the i-series did Intel come back on top. Ryzen was great when it came out for budget gaming, but Intel still was supreme in perforce until the Ryzen 3D processors came out.

The government holding ownership stakes in companies. If so, have you been in favor for a long time or did it start this week?
Because I'm focusing on the people that just recently adopted this position after years of opposition to anything that even smelled like government interfering with business.

I agree with everything you said. But none of it is a rebuttal to what I said

Apple doesn't really exist as a competitor for a number of industries and use cases due to not officially supporting anything other than OSX so I'm not sure if they're a fair comparison here.

The only real edge they have is in non-gaming related consumer workloads.

Ars is making a mountain out of a molehill.

James McRitchie

Kristin Hull

These are literal activists investors known for taking such stances. It would be weird if they didn't.

a company that's not in crisis

Intel is literally circling the drain. It doesn't look like it on paper, but the fab/chip design business is so long term that if they don't get on track, they're basically toast. And they're also important to the military.

Intel stock is up, short term and YTD. CNBC was ooing and aahing over it today. Intel is not facing major investor backlash.

Of course there are blatant issues, like:

However, the US can vote "as it wishes," Intel reported, and experts suggested to Reuters that regulations may be needed to "limit government opportunities for abuses such as insider trading."

And we all know they're going to insider trade the heck out of it, openly, and no one is going to stop them. Not to speak of the awful precedent this sets.

But the sentiment (not the way the admin went about it) is not a bad idea. Government ties/history mixed with private enterprise are why TSMC and Samsung Foundry are where they are today, and their bowed-out competitors are not.

I never took a stance on it.

Examples of federal Crown corporations include:
the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Canada Post

These are fine, fairly high quality in terms of service. And I guess in general these two having revenue streams and self funding mean that I don't pay taxes to run a national broadcaster and our postal service.

I would rather not have junk mail or advertisements in our public broadcasts. I would have to look at numbers to say whether the taxes are a worthwhile trade-off.

I do not want news or mail to only have corporate owned options, because then capitalist interests would have a much heavier influence on communications is Canada. I wish we had a national crown ISP, for the same reason.

In Canada, state-owned corporations are referred to as Crown corporations, indicating that an organization is established by law, owned by the sovereign (either in right of Canada or a province), and overseen by parliament and cabinet.

Then you aren't my target audience.
Canadians are very different from USA Republicans who have a long and loud history on this topic and then flipped in one day to say it's okay to have a little communism as a treat.

We don’t need competition in the x86 space, we need competition in the mobile/desktop/server space. That could easily be performance competitive ARM or RISC-v or whatever. Better even with diversity of design.

Well yeah sure, it's just a little histrionic to call all government owned businesses communism. They aren't enforcing a monopoly on chip fab or anything.

Trump tries to ban AMD then sure, it's communism and would be super weird.