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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr Intel desperately needs an activist investor.

Only if that activist investor acts with decisiveness, vision, long-term goal orientation, and demonstrates consistently high-integrity behavior.

What has much more commonly produced good outcomes in such situations is robust public-private partnerships like the ones that produced the semiconductor industry in the first place. Run the list of innovations in strategically key technology and what will you find at one remove in every instance? The DoD, NASA, the Labs and ATT more broadly, the university system.

It's always a public/private partnership during periods of explosive value creation when the stakes are high, and it's always a private sector capture orgy during periods of extractive stagnation like the present.

Bad news. We’re exploding NSF, NASA and many parts of DoD. Universities are uncertain as those acts are digested.

That era of American history has passed. Innovation gives way to consolidation and cronyism. Think Mussolini’s Italy.

If you have any evidence for the claim that "many parts of DoD" are being exploded/defunded, it would be really interesting to see that. As far as I can see, just the opposite is true; the military industrial complex looks like it's increasing in size and scope.

The recent budget cut about 5% from the DoD research budget.

A lot of cash is going to be redeployed towards tilting at the windmill of domestic ballistic missile defense… while we’re watching a war in Ukraine where cheap drones are demonstrating that most major weapons platforms are functionally obsolete.

Remember what finally happened to Mussolini?

We've had crime season gilded ages before. We've had trusts and corruption before. I agree that on present course and heading we are not going to make it out of this one in anything like the position we're accustomed to, but it's not impossible and frankly it wouldn't even take that much.

Forums like HN full of senior technologists and future founders are disproportionately high impact. If the tone around here shifted a little to stop excusing what YC has become and start embracing how it all started?

Shit like that adds up. geohotz had that post a few weeks ago about this late capitalism internet shit, he was pretty deep in with the Effective Altruists and he got it together. I said at the time and I'll say again, you get a few more people like that to sober up? pmarca and lex and people? Maybe even pg?

Real change happens that way.

berkshire hathaway

Intel needs a full-time board that gives a shit about whether the company succeeds. You could populate that board with nearly any combination of capable founder types and you'd get far better results.

The current board is a pack of cargo-culting epitaph writers.

They're a particularly egregious example of what corporate governance has become, but they're cut from largely the same cloth as the rest of our leadership class. Maybe a little dumber than average, a little more short-sighted, but devoid of any notion of obligation?

I forget the name of the speaker guy who has this turn of phrase, but whatever the merits of his overall platform this hits perfectly: "People doing well today are using every means at their disposal to decrease their accountability while increasing their compensation. If you don't compensate people based on the responsibility they are willing to undertake, you will get a world run by people like this and it will look like the world you live in right now".

Imho activist investors are usually about cutting investment in the future, maximizing the current accessible profits, collecting a wad of cash, then letting the company die while moving off to be active on another board.

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