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Comment by tyleo | Hacker News Reader

The real question is whether the fabs will ever come, or if they will be “too little too late”. As a former resident of Columbus, I’m skeptical of the Ohio government and Intel’s ability to get a value-positive operation running here.

So much of the Ohio population is hostile to the very acts like CHIPS which are funding this project and Ohio infrastructure generally. I have that on account of a couple civil engineers in Ohio who are friends and family.

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I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Intel announced the delay to the next presidential term.. The current administration is also hostile to the CHIPS act.. they’ve fired many of the administrators (the act is new enough that there were many probationary employers supporting it) and have told already-approved recipients that they are going to renegotiate the agreements. I’ve never seen such a self destructive administration..

> I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Intel announced the delay to the next presidential election year..

The next presidential election is in 2028, not 2030

Election in 2028, next president takes office in 2029, realistically 2030 is the earliest the CHIPS act and staff could be rebuilt.

The people overseeing the CHIPS act have mostly been fired or flagged for firing. Many of them were in their “probationary” period because they were recent hires.

The CHIPS act can’t be instantly restarted when the next president takes office. It has to be rebuilt. It has basically been sabotaged.

That's one of the most frustrating things about the wrecking ball far right administrations going through America and parts of Europe right now. They're causing damage that will take 5-10 years to fix, so even if we get more sane administrations, the public will complain "why aren't we seeing any improvements" because all they can accomplish at first is cleaning out the rubble.

Worst of all, it could become cycle. Trump / DOGE is basically doing a wholesale cleanse of left-leaning public sector employees at all levels, replacing them with yes men and cronies. A new administration will have to revert that, meaning firing and hiring and training people yet again. And an administration after that might try do undo that. What a quagmire.

In general it's a classic that left-leaning governments fix various policy and economic problems, which often carries big cost, which gets them voted out, and then the fruits of that labor are claimed by / wrongfully attributed to rightist administrations.

If you look at recent American history you will see this pattern has roughly already played out.

If a main part of your platform is that government sucks, you have no incentive to un-suckify it. Starve the beast.

Meh, starve the beast is just another cliché of minds that want simple answers to complex issues. Life tariffs and Trump. He has no imagination. Anyway, government is the only thing that can stand up to the broligarchs and that's why Trump is doing is his best to destroy it. If you want a simple explanation for what's going on there it is.

Yes, this is a very predictable failure mode of presidentialist governments.

Yeah typo on my part there, ty

That's not what a "typo" is. A typo is a typing mistake, not a lack of knowledge or error in thinking.

Appreciate your concern and pedantry - the typo was saying presidential election instead of administration. Believe it or not, I do know when the next election is.

If a person misattributes one thing, it is generally called as thinko.

And it’s only the end of Feb. it’s a massive shit show right now

I wonder how bad the recession has to be for these jokers to grow up or if they’re going to just double down on the face of it.

If you control the (social) media you can make a recession anybody's fault

I think there are probably limits to that though.. when you control all branches of government and are making big splashy displays of firing tens of thousands of people and erecting big trade barriers - there really isn’t anyone else to (convincingly) blame.

Unfortunately this makes the assumption that logic and critical thinking skills are used when assigning blame.

Instead, it’s a crude game of corralling people with emotions.

You blame the Deep State

Exactly. You tried your best but powerful shadow powers worked against you so you need even more power to fight them. And you know it may sound bad but things have to get worse before they get better. The population has to bear with you for just a bit more and you assure them you won't abuse any powers given to you, and if you do, it's because you were forced to.

It's election day, you get re-elected, rinse and repeat until the next generation has no memory of it ever being different.

Deep State is real though. Has been real for decades. Wikileaks proved it. Current events also. Here's a taste of what I mean

https://youtu.be/WV9J6sxCs5k

Current administration already picked racial minority to blame.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/confinement-unbearable-migrants-de...

That's going to be difficult after such a public media campaign giving people the idea that they're trying to crash the economy. Even if this will also take a lot of industry-level incompetence to achieve.

The spin seems the be that the recession is intentional in order to devalue the dollar and make American labor competitive with manufacturing hubs, bringing back domestic manufacturing capabilities.

And people actually buy that? Hey we're gonna make things worse for you so you can get worse paying manufactuer jobs compared to 2023. BTW we're cancelling all the new manufacturing initiatives.

Almost no one wins from this. Rich people suffer the least as usual by having a diverse banking account, especially in multiple currencies. All working class is devalued so the only boon is jobless people who manage to find a job.

There are a lot of people who romanticize America's time as an industrial nation, where most Americans were factory workers, miners, laborers, etc. They're being promised a return to those times, couched of course in the lie that those jobs will pay well, and the false assumption that workers will receive good treatment.

Bad enough that some GOP senators wake up and actually impeach trump. Which may not be possible because being rich to begin with shields you from the effects of a recession. It may have to be a depression to force their hands.

That or massive GOP voter pressure come 2026.

They won't really be affected by it, and they feel they'll come out of shiny and silky because they will have grifted all that money and still be in control and the 99% will have learnt their place.

What’s still totally unclear to me is how much money Intel has actually received. If they got all of the 7.9 B, then I would assume it doesn’t matter to them if the act is cancelled? But it’s not clear to me how much has actually been paid out so far.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/25/intel-close-to-8-billion-chi...

There's absolutely no way they already have all the $7.9b. That's not how government contracts and accounting works. DOGE/Trump can just slice whatever remains of the rest of the contract and then they'll bicker at each other in court for a decade until nobody cares anymore.

So from reading this[1] my understanding is the award for all four locations is $7.9B and for the Ohio project location specifically it's $1.5B

However I couldn't find the awards (and thus outlays) on usaspending.gov. I think this[2] is the CHIPS act account and you can see some general outlays per year there but Intel isn't in any of the specific obligations listed.

And even searching the award id or Intel in general as a recipient on the site didn't find obligations that matched.

However, page 112 of this[3] 10-K filing has the direct funding agreement (with award id!) and a lot of info about how payments work but no payment amounts. Page 30 seems to say they received $1.1 billion of the $7.9 billion in 2024 and another $1.1 billion for 2025 but I'm not sure if I'm reading it correctly.

[1] https://www.nist.gov/chips/intel-corporation-ohio-new-albany

[2] https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/013-0520

[3] https://www.intc.com/filings-reports/all-sec-filings/content...

Based on last few weeks I'll be genuinely surprised if there will be fair elections in 2028.

It’s a definite concern but fortunately elections are largely administered by the states so there’s at least a buffer between centralized authoritarians and the voting process.. That being said, I’m sure this DOJ is going to get up to all sorts of shenanigans with whoever is nominated.

We certainly have our share of dumdums here in Ohio but I think the actual leadership is fairly reasonable, and they do really like $$ and wouldn't do anything to jeopardize investment.

Now, I am not sure how long we'll have "the old guard" type guys like dewine, so this comment might not age well!

> We certainly have our share of dumdums here in Ohio but I think the actual leadership is fairly reasonable, and they do really like $$ and wouldn't do anything to jeopardize investment.

Mike DeWine is governor.

On the Federal level, Ohio has Representative Jim Jordan and the current VP of the US, J.D. Vance.

How do you measure that “the actual leadership [of Ohio] is fairly reasonable”?

DeWine, to his credit, has been notably independent on a number of fronts, from COVID restrictions to anti-trans legislation.

Yeah it's a sad state of affairs in general I agree with you there. Overall I'd say our clowns in Ohio are probably about average if you judge against the national landscape.

The republicans in Ohio will do what the republican in Washington are doing right now. Mark my words, whatever the King says goes, unless there is a national disaster or he has a complete dementia break down in public. Luckily, it's all built around his cult of personality and falls apart when he's no longer viable.

Why are they hostile to the plans?

“Not invented here” syndrome.

The “Liberals” did it.

Kill Obamacare but don’t you dare touch my Affordable Care Act healthcare coverage. Etc etc etc.

Mostly because “China bad” and “Biden bad”.. same thing happening in Michigan. There were organized protests to stop Chinese and Taiwanese companies from building billion dollar battery facilities in poor rural areas. Just the dumbest timeline.

https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2023/04/hundreds-rally...

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