Right, the fab... It's meant to be one of four across the world that will provide all of the most advanced chips. It's being built after the one Taiwanese fab as a strategic asset, with huge amounts of government funding and incentives

Like TSMC, it should be able to produce all kinds of advanced chips, not just Intel designs. And it's really not going well... We've been trying to stand it up for like a decade, and for the longest time the money just kept going "poof". It's only recently, when some kind of deal was made for TSMC to help the process for fabs in China, the US, and the EU that real progress started being made

That's not Intel's success, that's a big multinational deal that is being handed to Intel

That sounds like infrastructure to me.

What's more, chips aren't designed by 100k people, individual humans innovate and collaborate in teams. Corporations are terrible at it, the more people you have working towards something the more resistant it becomes to current.

We already have very small teams that come up with really cool and interesting chip designs, but they have little access to fabs because a few big companies monopolize the fab time in part to deny it to their competition. It's an impossible barrier to entry, there's so much horizontal integration and incestuous investment that we're blocking real innovation

Having infrastructure that allows for small players to win limited runs on the fab would drive the entire space forward

And speaking of jumbo jets, airlines just can't seem to keep themselves in business. It's a heavily subsidized industry kept afloat because air travel is a necessary piece of our economy... That's undeniably infrastructure

$5 million is indeed not much for a business, but a business that benefits more from influencing politicians than actually making/doing things is the problem. They should be too busy reinvesting in their business to start buying barriers to entry, it's a sign they have too much control over their space already.

They lack competition, and by going for regulatory capture means they need to be broken up to make that competition. I'm not saying every company who has $50 million in a bank account needs to be broken up, but once they turn their eyes to regulatory capture it means they have too much influence

And there are certain companies that need to be huge to function... Like Boeing. You do need hundreds of thousands of people to produce a line of jumbo jets and healthy competition isn't practical - but that makes them a strategic resource.

I'm not saying in all cases they have to be nationalized, but they can't be left to their own devices either... Look at Boeing. They've managed to lobby the FAA to allow their own employees to serve as federal inspectors. It's why they keep having these crazy problems with their aircraft.

But public private partnerships don't seem to produce good results, so maybe they should just be completely nationalized? For all that Reagan convinced us that the government sucks at doing things, NASA did incredible work before the funding was cut

Maybe they should be set up like the post office, something set up by Congress but primarily self funded and autonomous with more protections against micromanagement. Maybe we nationalize companies as a criminal consequence, and let public options compete against each other with restrictions around that competition

There's probably better models, but what I do know is that late stage capitalism is not working out well for us. Computing has stagnated, airplanes seemingly crash all the time now, and we're still actively destroying the Holocene era with no solutions in sight.

We need to realign incentives and create hard boundaries around the excesses of capitalism, and I think "having enough power to subvert democracy" needs to be a boundary no corporation can survive crossing