Massive consolidation is happening in every industry, IT distribution to cabinet parts to industrial equipent. I think it is from cheap debt allowing private equity to buy up a bunch of companies, smash them together, cut the duplication and lower margin parts of the business, hiking margins as they eliminated competition, and then spinning them off. Debt has been so cheap, they don't even need to have up front capital, just borrow and profit off the deal.
However, it is eliminating useful and valuable products & tools, disrupting lives, and making it very difficult to run a business that relies on those parts.
This is one of the many ways endless years of emergency low interest rates are destroying the economy and the livelihood of many people.
This is the conclusion that I am coming to as well. You need to pick the correct tool for the job.
What's the correct tool? The simplest tool that can get the job done, the Principle of Least Power[0]. We often hear "Favor Composition over Inheritence", but never "These are the instances where Composition does not work, and Inheritence needs to be used instead."[1] Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy" shows many more examples, but this principle is very wide reaching. Prefer expressions over code blocks. Prefer for over while. Prefer map over for. Prefer data over functions. Prefer functions over macros. Prefer monoliths over micro-services. Prefer companies over governments. Prefer bikes over cars. Prefer smaller teams over bigger teams.
It's that last one that is intriguing me. You need to ensure that all of the skills that you need to be in the company are there, you can leave a bit of a buffer like Kelly-sizing, and then you want to optimize for that and cut as much as you can. Vertical integration is just another instance of tight coupling. The less people in the company, the less you need to communicate, the more it can get done. You want the skills Venn diagram of the team to look like the Olympic rings.
Social media runs into this same trap where communities grow far to large. The economies of scale within the space grows and even with the worsening of communication the entity gets stronger with each member according to a network effect. Both need some sort of dampening effect or forced splitting, but I don't know yet what that is.
Another huge reason is government overregulation. It takes many years and millions of dollars of capital to start a bank or a medical business or many other types of companies.
And don't forget the gigantic scam that is intellectual property. Creating one small pebble of an idea that could only be created because of the titanic mountain of human knowledge underneath it, and then block competition and progress for decades is horrifying.
I think those are potentially the two worst examples to pick to argue for deregulation given the huge impacts on people's lives and potential of killing people (healthcare). Banks too though the risks are more from lessons learned from giant banks which you can't become overnight. But consumer protection is a big one, even if deposits are protected, predatory behavior is a big problem and profit center of small banks.
I can definitely buy into less regulation for most other businesses or small businesses though.
You mean the country of the Zaibatsu? Where the economy is stagnant for the past several years? That has several global conglomerates like Sony and Toyota?
> Their business empire grew N-fold, they just didn't grow in Japan, but the rest of Asia.
I feel like that’s strengthening the point you’re arguing against. Consider the quotes sentence alongside the realities of American firms outsourcing their manufacturing. Yes the firms are still juiced by American investors, but there are additional concerns beyond the investment capital. It affects individuals jobs, industries, and economies here in America (or in Japan) for large components of the economy to happen elsewhere.
> The term originally referred to the years from 1991 to 2001, but the decade from 2001 to 2011 (Lost 20 Years) and the decade from 2011 to 2021 (Lost 30 Years) have been included by commentators.
I am actually very glad that those investment wizards almost completely nuked whole sectors of the semiconductor market.
It cleared a lot of long standing nasty monopolies, which self destructed since their LBO schemes collapsed, or... successfully went through, and they were sold to unwitting asset manager/banker types for $$$$$, just to be chopped up after they found what a load of lemons they bought.
certainly agree that there should be some kind of garbage collection process that pushes established companies to reinvent themselves at least a little to keep up.
but i really dont want to give any credit to those guys - they certainly aren't discriminating - they'll eat, digest, extract any salable capital and just shit out whatever is left.
i suppose you can argue that they exert an evolutionary pressure to develop an immune system (?)
I used to describe this situation as “late stage capitalism” and lay the blame at capitalism’s feet. I’ve recently done a 180 on that.
The tangling of Copyright, Trademark, and Patent law into the mega-legal structure of “intellectual property” law has had devastating effects IMO.
The government creates and protects monopolies, and then allows those monopolies to be bought and sold like playing cards. It’s not surprising that pools of money result in the concentration of these government created monopolies.
This is most evident to me in healthcare. The pattern in the late 2000s and 2010s was to purchase up drug companies for their IP, gut the R&D, and jack up drug prices since the government would enforce their monopoly - and consumers had no choice since they needed the drugs. Yes this is GREED, but this isn’t capitalism. Capitalism would _solve_ this - but government actively stands in the way of letting market pressures fix that market.
Governments create markets by creating and enforcing laws. Without government, without law, there would be no market.
Capitalism allocates resources according to the decision making of holders of capital (assets, whether land, machinery, cash etc) - motivated by the desire to generate returns on that capital. This works pretty well, however it has a tendency to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few and away from the many.
By enforcing patents etc, another asset class is constructed, ready for exploitation for revenue generation. Capitalism is thus extended - imagine if the government regulated fresh air, and allowed it to be bought and sold.
Government is not the problem, and (more) capitalism is not the solution - it is bad government enabling the worst aspects of capitalism that is the problem, and it is good government harnessing capitalism for the benefit for everyone which is the solution.
It is rent-seeking behavior, which is the natural result of capitalism.
The problem with idealistically pure capitalism is that then it concentrates wealth, then people apply that wealth to control government and establish rents for themselves. Then it is no longer idealistically pure.
The ideal of capitalism where this would not happen and it would stay idealistically pure is a myth like a drug-free society.
> Capitalism would _solve_ this - but government actively stands in the way of letting market pressures fix that market.
No it wouldn't, Capitalism caused the issue. Its called Regulatory Capture.
I don't understand how people can look at Capitalism and all of its failings and say more Capitalism is the solution. Maybe in theory, more Capitalism would solve it, but in theory Communism _should_ be a much fairer form of government and we all know how the USSR worked out.
To say that Capitalism didn't cause this in the first place is laughable. Its gotten to the point that corporations or special interest groups are just writing some of the laws and having lawmakers champion them as if its their own bill. its called Model Legislation.
Make no mistake this is full blown Late Stage Capitalism.
That’s just the natural way of capitalism if you allow companies to get bigger and bigger. They can buy up any upcoming competition for good money so most startups are being built to be bought and not as standalone businesses. You see that and also in medical devices where I work. Seems most industries will evolve into a state where you have 2-4 competitors that suppress all competition by building up regulatory hurdles and by their ability to buy small companies.
I would be in favor of massively progressive taxation of large companies. I just don’t see the value of them beyond a certain size but I see a lot of danger accumulating so much power in their hands.
> Seems most industries will evolve into a state where you have 2-4 competitors that suppress all competition by building up regulatory hurdles and by their ability to buy small companies.
This isn't a natural law, it's the point at which antitrust stops letting them buy each other. If it wasn't for that they would merge to monopoly. And that few competitors is enough for them to implicitly or explicitly collude instead of actually competing.
But it only works if barriers to entry are high. Otherwise investors would see profit in going into competition with the cartel. Which is why they lobby for regulatory barriers to prevent that from happening.
> I would be in favor of massively progressive taxation of large companies. I just don’t see the value of them beyond a certain size but I see a lot of danger accumulating so much power in their hands.
What causes this is really the opposite, and what you're suggesting would make it worse.
Corporate expansion is a tax deduction to corporations because corporate income tax is a tax on profit and building new factories etc. to expand vertical integration is a cost. So they'd have more incentive to reinvest all their revenues instead of paying the tax. That's how you get Amazon.
The real problem there is that we double tax corporations. So Ian invests in Apple and his share of Apple's profits are $1000. If Apple pays the money to Ian so he can go invest it in a company that makes electric cars, he has to pay tax on it right away, and then he has less to invest. If he leaves the money inside of Apple and Apple expands into making electric cars, he doesn't have to pay the tax until he sells his shares and gets to earn returns on the money in the meantime.
So then investors have a preference for share price appreciation over dividends, which is equivalent to preferring conglomeration over returning profits to the investor to invest in independent companies. Then we get more and ever-expanding huge conglomerates and less independent companies that do one thing and do it well.
The solution is to make dividends a tax deduction to the corporation. Then corporations with money they don't know what to do with will do that for the tax deduction.
I'm fine with returning to the system of high corporate income taxes, disbursing surplus to investors via dividends, high corporate R&D budgets, pensions, living wages, typical executive to janitor compensation ratio somewhere around 40:1, sustained productivity booms, and whatever other beneficial outcomes we got from the the last keynesian regime.
I'm ambivalent about capital gains taxes on individual investors. The rate should probably adapt dynamically, like pick a target number for the gini coefficient (or whatever) and ratchet the tax rate as necessary.
I'm completely untroubled by so-called double taxation. Squint and it looks like a VAT. It makes perfect sense to me that most every transaction should be taxed. That's kinda the point.
> The rate should probably adapt dynamically, like pick a target number for the gini coefficient (or whatever) and ratchet the tax rate as necessary.
High tax rates on the super rich are kind of this political pablum, where everybody buys into the idea of it because the thinking is Zuckerberg is going to pay all the taxes and then you won't have to, but it doesn't really solve anything.
Zuckerberg is never going to spend that much money on consumption. Not even 10% of it. Not even 1% of it. How could you even do that? You only need so much food, so many houses and jets.
The problem is that his wealth gives him control over "Meta" and therefore everyone. But that's the same problem even if he's only the CEO. It has little to do with what percentage of the company he owns; somebody's got to be the CEO. The actual problem is that the company's too big. You can't fix that with individual income tax rates.
And if you try, the amount of resources that will get poured into tax avoidance will just eat you alive. I mean it already does. Billionaires already shield most of their wealth from taxation whatsoever, so what does it matter the rate?
Fix the thing that causes billionaires to exist, namely market concentration that causes the founder of the winning company to be a billionaire instead of there being a thousand competing companies whose founders are all millionaires.
> I'm completely untroubled by so-called double taxation. Squint and it looks like a VAT.
This is completely the opposite of VAT. The whole point of VAT is that it isn't double taxation -- if a business buys wholesale for $80 and sells retail for $100, they only have to collect VAT on the $20 difference and not the whole $100, because the wholesale seller already collected it on the $80.
To do otherwise creates a massive incentive for vertical integration because if the wholesaler buys the retailer outright they wouldn't have to pay it twice. And so it is with corporate dividends.
I have no opinion on the capital gains tax rate (for individuals).
Just that it's dynamically adjusted as needed to meet a defined policy goal. Like reducing inequity.
The never ending tug of war drives me nuts. I get that rhetoric about taxes is more about campaigns than policy. And I don't know that capital gains rax rate is even the most important parameter.
So while I'm totally fine with repeated radical cachectomies, I'm also fine with simply rolling back GWB & Trump tax breaks, or Warren's 2% wealth tax. Whatever works.
I can't recall previously disagreeing with anything you've written. So I'm pretty sure I misunderstood your point about double taxation.
> As of December 2020, China had the largest stock of highway legal plug-in passenger cars with over 4.5 million units, 42% of the global plug-in car fleet in use.[10][20] China also dominates the plug-in light commercial vehicle and electric bus deployment, with its stock reaching over 500,000 buses in 2019, 98% of the global stock, and 247,500 electric light commercial vehicles, 65% of the global fleet.[21]
The difference isn't on taxation but investment; China invests way more in infrastructure and development.
> Tesla Motors Inc., SolarCity Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support, according to data compiled by The Times. The figure underscores a common theme running through his emerging empire: a public-private financing model underpinning long-shot start-ups.
Taxation in China (at least by law) is quite comparable to Germany's (40+% when you reach ~$144k) but without all the social benefits. Unlike Germany, there are gray areas in the Chinese system where people find ways to pay less tax. But there are also other cost-inducing things than tax.
In lights of the evergrande crisis, I'm not sure how efficient China's hugely state-directed investment system is. And much won't be achieved had there not been Deng's economic reforms and the tax indulgence that followed.
More than anything, high taxation stifles innovations in China. What you see in China is not real innovation (in the sense of inventing new things), but social-mobility [1] as a consequence of authoritarianism which can result in mass adoption of technologies, etc.
Also, considering the recent Tang Ping (躺平) movement, I don't think China's social-economy is currently in a healthy state.
> recent Tang Ping (躺平) movement, I don't think China's social-economy is currently in a healthy state.
Well, it is not like an antiwork movement has been forming on the US and is gaining mainstream traction. ( https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/ )
> In lights of the evergrande crisis, I'm not sure how efficient China's hugely state-directed investment system is.
How is a private developer that overleveraged itself the fault of a state that is investing in _public infrastructure_ like high speed rail, nuclear reactors, and tech in general? Since anything vital is public property they can do what self-called capitalists in the US cannot: let evergrande fail. (No private company in China is "too big to fail")
> No private company in China is "too big to fail"
The biggest companies in China are state owned enterprises with large ownership positions by communist party insiders.
Not only are they not allowed to fail, their share price often isn't allowed to fall. They borrow money at interest rates below the rate of inflation and often never need to pay it back. This creates a zombie banking system that is periodically recapitalized by the government, and is also capitalized by households who receive interest rates below the rate of inflation on their deposits.
This then creates a shadow banking system where households, not wanting to leave their money in official banks, search for yield, for example investing in real estate or really anything that will at least keep up with inflation and at best offer a positive return. You have pig farmers stockpiling copper. This was why the bitcoin craze took off so much in China. Households are looking for anything, anything to preserve their wealth.
This explains the phenomena of Evergrande holdings -- it is not just a private developer that "overleveraged itself", it's the direct consequence of Chinese subsidies to State Owned Enterprises.
These SOE's then burn money on everything from building exact replicas of small Swiss villages to creating electric buses and absolutely everything in between. When you are paid to lose money and are politically connected, a whole host of investment opportunities becomes available. These SOEs will not be wound down. Evergrande, however, will be wound down, but only to be replaced by the next big construction conglomerate because Chinese households aren't going to leave their money in the bank.
However households, by lending to firms, cannot rid themselves of excess deposits - that requires a financial sector that faces market discipline on the liability side of its balance sheet, which Chinese banks do not. They do not face discipline on either the asset nor the liability side, as credit analysis is determined as much by political connections as any kind of business fundamental. You are going to have a hard time even getting proper books for these businesses, which is why we find out which ones fail only when they can't make a bond payment.
Therefore as long as these financing, ownership, and regulatory arrangements are in place, you are going to have the current crazy investment market where the state firms never go bankrupt but the private firms or those firms not well connected with party insiders are regularly going bankrupt.
This does not mean that capital is being allocated wisely, even if it does mean that your favorite infrastructure projects are more likely to get funded in China. But that's only because everyone's favorite infrastructure projects are more likely to get funded in China, from completely empty shopping malls, to empty apartment buildings, to empty airports, to bizarre tourist attractions, enormous 400 foot tall gold-covered statues of the buddha, it will all get funded in China, at taxpayer expense, and none of it will ever be marked to market. But from the bird's eye view, you see a nation where the private consumption share of GDP is now below 38%, the remaining 62% spent on enormous Buddhas, electric buses, vast shopping malls, and yes, empty apartment buildings constructed by Evergrande.
Not sure if this adds, but one observation I sometimes come across is this: Both Capitalism and Socialism as we know them are dependent upon resources (energy, concrete, steel, technology, etc) which cannot be taken for granted in either "finite planet" or "peak everything" terms.
> I'm not sure how efficient China's hugely state-directed investment system is
Every system misallocates resources, but some misallocation is more "beneficial" than others, i.e. arguably it's better to be overcapacity on infra than under. There's something to be said about the tangible byproduct of PRC misallocation. Versus something like US tendency to misallocate resources into intangibles like the stock market, currently with capitalization to GDP nearing 200% that makes PRC misallocation that generates stuff that can be useful seem preferable in comparison. It’s like how hosting the Olympics is notoriously corrupt but simultaneously the only way for some systems to build useful things that are long term beneficial. Ditto with inefficient “industrial policy” that the PRC adopted from the US and US is learning to re-adopt. Misallocating 100s of billions to get semiconductors and turbojets for PRC or reshoring semi for US is ultimately better than not realizing those goals at all. Fast, cheap, good - sometimes optimizing for only one thing is still better than nothing. It's not efficient, but IMO PRC state-directed investment is still largely useful. Question is of course sustainabilty.
Taxations is definitely different. Please check what Chinese tax rates are, and costs of doing business in China. In short, for those who don't want to lookup it themselves, it's way, way more, probably higher than even most highly taxed EU countries.
I just 5 something years, Chinese manufacturing economy became completely unrecognisable. It's a hot money game now in a way US stock market will look rather decent, and logical.
Tesla didn’t need a trillion dollar valuation to have an impact on the car market. When Apple, Google or Microsoft made their biggest contributions to innovation they also were much smaller. Now they are just milking their market position for profit without generating much innovation.
I wonder why is this still not treated as a loophole in capitalism and it is not illegal.
Perhaps because they have so much money they can stop any politicians raising the idea or shutting down any media for running the topic...
Non Technical (IT & Infrastructure) people making technical decisions is what may destroy the pentagon if you ask me.
Fraud and waste is always a concern in Government operations, but if you take a real look at who is leading decision making, people in those positions (including in private companies) are often completely unaware of the impacts of their decisions, while their advisory staff is often a team of people from a private (shareholder owned) company focused on billing their clients advantageously at every opportunity they get, and providing advice that maintains a "constant stream of revenue".
It's not technology we need to fix first, it's the lack of integrity and the focus on opportunistic profit applied to the vary basis of the organization. The method in which contracts are managed, administered, and regulated needs a major overhaul to address the changing landscape of business.
Many mission-critical manufacturing and information service operations that the military runs simply should not ever rely (in any way) on privately owned and profit/shareholder-driven companies because it breaks integrity and accountability.
The Asianometry newsletter wrote a really insightful newsletter about the US Government's Semiconductor Chip Buying Problem[1] (He also has Youtube video[2] you can watch on the same newsletter)
In the newsletter and video he talks about the US's Trusted Foundry Program and the different pitfalls and challenges that came with the program.
I think the USG could definitely do at least the design side of a M1 like series of chips that cover 80-90% of their needs but yeah idk how we could make the US industry competitive again when Intel has dropped the ball so hard.
I don't think that works when the companies aren't in the U.S.
>the Pentagon relied on one production line for key chips, and that production line, owned by Abu Dhabi-controlled Global Foundries, just sold it off to a firm that will shut it down.
Yes, I don't think it works for foreign owned entities although I guess they could basically use the DPA as more of a carrot for an Intel or someone to have a guaranteed purchase order for X# years at a certain price for these chips at a level that would be profitable for them
It is very doubtful that the factory itself is foreign-owned. It's more likely directly owned by a US corporate entity, and Global Foundries held ownership in that entity.
In any event, the Defense Production Act does not have an exception if the business is foreign-owned. The President's powers are very broad. The scenario described in TFA is exactly why the Defense Production Act exists, and I am also curious to know why it wouldn't be invoked in this case.
If the company is not in the US, they can use coercion through diplomatic channels. This appears to be a lack of willingness or incompetence to react to this event.
Considering that the factory itself is in the US, it seems pretty absurd that it wasn’t taken over. Like do we ground all our B2s if we run out of spare parts and nobody is around to make them? Insane.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? You've unfortunately been doing this a lot, and it's not what this site is for. We're trying for something other than internet default here.
A state monopoly's problems are complacency and applying government policy ( e.g. in a racist segregated country, they will apply that).
A private monopoly will absolutely bleed their customers dry out of any money they can take off them, they'll usually stagnate and become complacent ( just like a state monopoly).
Many things are natural monopolies ( infrastructure, education, healthcare) and are best left to state monopolies, even with the downsides.
> Many things are natural monopolies ( infrastructure, education, healthcare) and are best left to state monopolies, even with the downsides.
You have to be really careful with this. Most of the natural monopolies are very narrow.
You can't just say "infrastructure" or even "telecommunications." The natural monopoly is limited to the physical plant in the last mile. Transit is a competitive market. You don't want to extend the monopoly an inch more than it needs to be.
Almost nothing in "healthcare" is a natural monopoly. Maybe emergency services, and even then it's not a "real" natural monopoly (which is characterized by high fixed costs and low variable costs) but rather a market failure as a result of being unable to make a rational choice between providers while you're unconscious. It certainly doesn't apply to, for example, cancer treatment, where there are many providers and people are willing to spend as much time as necessary and travel long distances in order to receive the most competitive care.
And there is no sense in which any education is a natural monopoly whatsoever. It is the exact opposite -- a competitive market whose costs are predominantly variable (per-student) rather than fixed.
There is a case to be made for the local government to do the thing which is actually a natural monopoly, but that doesn't mean you can just reclassify a bunch of random stuff you want the government to do as a natural monopoly when it isn't.
* access to it is important for the whole population, so should be everywhere and not discriminate, and should be accessible
* choice between providers isn't viable ( there isn't enough need for multiple providers) or practical ( e.g. some people might travel an extra hour to the "cheaper" or "better" airport or train station, but it's better for everyone if they don't clog up transit capacity over that and use the fastest to reach one)
All infrastructure falls here. You can't really have competition between railroads or regular railroads, and it'd be a colossal waste of space and money. Telecommunications infrastructure costs a lot, and without heavy help/regulation can easily become monopolised ( at least regionally). For instance here in France, if an ISP puts down fiber in a neighborhood, they have exclusivity with it for a few years(iirc 3), afterwards they have to share it with the competition. That ensures a healthier market.
As for education, it's mostly a natural monopoly due to the fact that it should be accessible and present everywhere. Switching providers is complicated ( you might have to move, the kid might not enjoy the stress, transportation can become harder and longer, etc. etc.)
Healthcare should be close to you - do you imagine a cancer patient having to travel hours for treatment? Or having be far away from friends and family for that treatment? Or you get an operation 3h away, and nobody can come see you or help you get home.
> And there is no sense in which any education is a natural monopoly whatsoever. It is the exact opposite -- a competitive market whose costs are predominantly variable (per-student) rather than fixed.
The thing that worries me about this kind of thinking is that, while it's technically correct, privatizing education, or treating it as a competitive market, gives you bad outcomes. The rich can afford to send their kids to the best schools, which keeps the rich families rich. The poor can only afford to send their kids to the worst schools, or the chronically-underfunded public schools, and this keeps the poor families poor.
We already see this in some (many?) US school districts with our hybrid public/private system, largely because public education is underfunded and private schools are generally out of financial reach for most folks.
> The thing that worries me about this kind of thinking is that, while it's technically correct, privatizing education, or treating it as a competitive market, gives you bad outcomes. The rich can afford to send their kids to the best schools, which keeps the rich families rich. The poor can only afford to send their kids to the worst schools, or the chronically-underfunded public schools, and this keeps the poor families poor.
Who runs the schools is a separate question than who pays for the schools. You can have the government provide school vouchers to everyone without having the government operate any/all of the schools.
The existing system is what gives you the thing you oppose. The rich can afford to pay for private schools no matter what, but the middle class can't both pay property taxes to fund public schools and also pay for private schools. The poor can't even afford to live in the neighborhood that allows them to attend the middle class public schools.
Give everyone a voucher and the poor kids can go to the better schools because getting accepted into a particular school has nothing to do with the price of your house.
Of course, the really market-based solution is to give parents cash rather than vouchers. Because maybe you want to home school and spend the money on books or field trips rather than a prepackaged education bureaucracy, or pay one of the parents for their time in teaching the child themselves, and why should only the rich kids have access to that?
The really rich can do homeschooling and that avoids all problems. What is the problem that you are trying to address, the rich having access to better education than others or the others not having the same education as the rich? There is no solution to that than forcing everyone to go to the same school, but one can also avoid my moving to a different state or country.
Moving requires being able to afford the buy-in and, for families who don't earn enough to afford the education of the rich (those seem to be the careers that are less amenable to remote work), finding a new job. The upfront costs are prohibitive.
For police, army and things like water supply, they are good.
Many (including me) argue that far more services work better when state owned, eg health, education, power, infrastructure (eg roading) and public transport.
Absolutely, people matter. And in case of USA government taking over the ON Semi through DPA, you will have essentially the same creed of people being appointed to run it.
This comes from an obvious fact that the prime majority of public companies in USA have boards stuffed with bankers, and asset managers, because a big portion of there are owned by bankers, and asset managers.
Most people in government service administering companies also come from exactly the same banker/asset manager background for simple lack of any others.
Slightly off-topic, but I think you mistranslated the word for corporation. I suspect you translated “Konzern” from german to english’s “concern”. But I’m honestly unsure. In context the word concern could almost work.
Curious indeed! Merriam-Webster tells me that one definition of "concern," as a noun, is
`an organization or establishment for business or manufacture.`
But perhaps this is not in common use amongst native English speakers!
If you check english wikipedia, it lists “Concern” as a type of business structure that predominantly exists in Germany[0]. The word has be pulled into english, but it’s definitely not a commonly used english word, and it is likely pedantically inaccurate in reference to an American corporation.
It is quite accurate for an American company, the word "concern" used in that way is just more common in formal writing and in older writing. This is yet another victim of the shrinking common English vocabulary inflicted in large part by the Internet, but also other social forces.
For usages like this, it's usually better to use books.google.com. There, you can find many instances of the phrase "American concern" used to mean "American company" by everyone from official US government sources to journalists to writers.
The usage dates back quite some time, if it was borrowed from the German and not a native English word descended from Old English, it was more than a hundred years ago. It certainly predates the modern German legal definition of a concern.
It's somewhat common, but probably not the most popular usage. I think most people who read business news regularly would see it used in sentences like, "Due to Company Foo's dire financial situation, they will cease to be a going concern".
Same thing that happened to the requirement to code DoD software only in Ada: the requirement was scrapped when it became obvious the marketplace had shifted so much that the DoD would have to choose between second-sourcing obsolete gear or staying current with technology the market was postured to deliver.
There is absolutely no legal reason that the DoD can't take Intel/AMD/Whomever's designs to alternative manufacturers. Unfortunately in the name of making the richest among us richer, our leadership hardly exercises the DoD's blanket license of all things patented. Along the same lines, we no longer break up companies that dominate their industry, giving us fewer choices for alternative manufacturers.
Maybe no legal reason but there is a technical reason: a chip designed for a specific manufacturing process (e.g. IBM Cu-32) can only be made on that process and there may only be one fab that can run the process. The chip would have to be somewhat redesigned to be manufactured elsewhere.
In the name of national security, I would hope so. Why wouldn't it? US Companies don't mean much if there's no US behind it.
The issue is there is no overt war to drive the nationalism support necessary to push people into freely transferring knowledge. It seems to magically appear, when there's a feeling of imminent danger but ppl question it in times of peace.
This is very interesting in the context of increasing US-China tensions over Taiwan. https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/military/red-l...
I wonder just how much more important Taiwan will be getting to the West if we lose even more of our SC capabilities.
Nobody cares what the CEO of Intel thinks. They can’t come in and start spewing nationalist ideology after they were a primary factor in the outsourcing of a chip manufacturing to begin with.
Out of 10 of their fabs, only 4 are in the US. [1]
1. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
I believe Intel owns (did not outsource) its overseas fabs. Like everyone else, they probably outsource some parts of the manufacturing process (e.g. packaging).
So Huawei was a national threat but Abu Dhabi owned company supplied chips on GPSs are business as usual. Its think it's probable (may not be the case) the whole 'security risk' think was a ploy to get them ousted at the behest of thier competition..
However, it is eliminating useful and valuable products & tools, disrupting lives, and making it very difficult to run a business that relies on those parts.
This is one of the many ways endless years of emergency low interest rates are destroying the economy and the livelihood of many people.