thisisit

First, what came out of these bailouts?

Each example industry continues to require some sort of government intervention to remain solvent at one point or the other. Auto/banks/saving and loans getting bailouts in 2008/2009. Airlines in 2020/2021 due to COVID etc. These industries employ a lot of people and now have become a political hot zone for voters so there is no way to remove these backstops now.

And whether these industries remain competitive globally is another question. Because it is always funny to hear countries accuse each other of propping up one industry or other through government intervention.

Second, these were industry wide bailouts. This action is not.

The genesis of CHIPS Act is a 2020 deal to onshore TSMC. The idea was to further persuade Samsung and Intel to produce chips in US through tax benefits, loan guarantees and grants. But now with US taking a stake in Intel, the strategy for onshoring TSMC and Samsung becomes unclear. Maybe the idea is to use tariffs to make TSMC and Samsung uncompetitive if they don't onshore but that is a bad idea. Because if Intel finds it easier to just coast on "national security" and continue producing last gen chips, they are going to do that and lower innovation even more. This is a win-win for Intel though.

The government has made a lot of noise about injunctions and courts interfering with executive power and SCOTUS is agreeing with them. So, expect that legal action will be taken and then these things might happen.

Government will argue that executive power can decide if the contracts are "suggestions" or not.

If that doesn't work, try to reduce the scope of the injunction such that it applies to specific set of contracts. And then stonewall those contracts.

If the case is still lost, government will quickly appeal and file for temporary relief. If temporary relief is not coming in the short term, chose to ignore the court because executive power is above everything else.

Repeat this till it gets to SCOTUS and get a specific carve out and go to step 1 - stonewall these contracts.

I'd say given the on again, off again tariffs, courts acting like this and government retroactive actions like against Intel (CHIPS grant money was withheld to take 10% stake) it can be safely said it is no longer place for many long-term investment.

For years Tesla had been over promising and under delivering. It had to catch up sooner or later. I believe the flashpoint might have been the Tesla Cybertruck launch. These insiders should have knowledge about the issues and sales figures for the Cybertruck.

It's like you intentionally chose the ignore other government actions and focus on taxes just to fit your narrative. Read it again:

> It should enact preferential policies like grants, tax cuts, subsidies etc. for industries they want to promote.

And read the announcement again. Intel has not been given extra money. CHIPS Act money has been converted to stake. That means Intel wasn't going away, if that is your concern.

Government routinely provides grants or preferential treatments to certain sectors or industries. Like Tesla and the EV grant. That works fine. It doesn't mean government needs to acquire stake in Tesla and put their thumb on the market scale.

In case you miss it, let me repeat - industries needs to be supported. It is called CHIPS Act not Intel Act for a reason. Given the current POTUS propensity to hold aid/grant without a quid pro quo, we can guess what happened here. Intel doesn't gets the grant money unless they kiss the ring and polish POTUS' image.

Here I thought the point of a grant/subsidy is that it allows companies to take risk - by setting up factories, funding research without worrying about the monetary cost etc.

Government benefits through one, generating employment - direct and indirect employment, raising taxes through personal taxes (indirectly impacting tax collection) or second the country being at the forefront of the innovation etc. That is how average tax payer was supposed to benefit.

But I guess trying to nationalize companies and "benefiting" from company profits was something people were missing. How did no one see that? Ah yes, third world countries try this routinely for "national security" and it always leads to moral hazard pointed out by the person above you.

Government shouldn't bail out anyone. Period. It should enact preferential policies like grants, tax cuts, subsidies etc. for industries they want to promote. It is done all the time. That is what happened with the CHIPS Act.

The moment 10% stake was announced this became political. While the stated reason might be national security etc, in reality something else might be at play.

One, this government and its supporters have been talking about government "wasteful" spending. So, a stake shows that they got something in return for that public money. The money is now "well spent".

Second, it helps boost the political "dealmaker" image of POTUS and we all know how much he cares about his image.

Government now has a vested interest in seeing Intel succeed. And as much as RW debate in bad faith about cutting public funding being good and private entities should pick up the slack etc. there is no bigger catalyst than government policy. Intel can now get preferential policies like bigger tax breaks/holidays, preferential treatment in government contracts, cheaper access to Federal land etc.

In the long term though, at least in hands of the government like the current admin, they will ensure Intel slows down innovation. They will push for every company in US to use Intel chips in one way or the other - national security and what not. Without competition companies often get complacent - not many can match the might of a government and US govt at that. So, yay for national security and nay for Intel becoming innovation powerhouse.

“National security” is often used by third world countries to nationalise companies and industries. Often with a bad outcome.

Once the money is in, government becomes invested in the success of the company. This leads to preferential policies and government demands for the invested company. I think it is safe to say that US is going full on third world strong man government at this point.

With time military companies need to pay their allegiance money so that they can break sanctions and oh national security. Some will approve because of the same reasons as Nvidia deal, who leaves that money on the table?

Most of the answers are going to be national security. That is the reason used by third world countries to nationalise companies.

Lot of companies want to do drive down costs. This often falls on departments which are not "bringing in revenue". That means in this era of AI lot of back office operations are the first on the chopping block. Executives often don't care for consequences of cutting back office operations.

Customer support has been the biggest target for a long time. Companies care only about revenue and people signing up. After that unless you are giving them more business they stop caring. They figure - best case they frustrate you enough that you leave them alone or bad case - they refund you and worst case - they give you a gift coupon.

With that mind, AI chatbots are the best solution. Intentionally make it difficult to solve the issue and then even if you reach human support - they have the old scripts. That means now companies ability to frustrate-out a customer is now supercharged.

I found that if you have people with accents and they emphasize certain words then it becomes very difficult to read. One example, I find is "th" is often D because how people pronounce it. Apart from that it is a hit or miss.

You seem to be unaware of world history or local politics.

India US relationship has historically been bad. It turned around only during the Bush administration with the civil nuclear treaty. So, this good relationship has been there for last 25 years or so. In comparison India has a longer history with Russia.

India was one of the first countries to start working on a deal with US. India subsidizes agriculture as much as US. Indian farmers are a big voting block. Hence the trade deal has been at stuck:

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...

That means it is a political suicide for the current Indian government to sign any sort of deal with Trump unless the agriculture part is removed.

And as much you want to tout IT services, overall GDP contribution is 11.47% and pharma is 1.72%. Someone has told me that the remittances from India to US is 3%. All that combines to less than 19% contributed by agriculture.

Add the fact that previous US administration was okay with India buying Russian oil to help stabilize global oil prices: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/us-wanted-india-to-buy-russi...

That just pours more fuel on fire. Pun intended.

Additionally, I don't get why people keep thinking that getting deals is some sort of a master plan. Countries routinely break their deals. Its not only US - who you think has "lot of power" which gets to do that. Countries go to WTO to try and resolve it but US has chosen to side step that as well. Case in point US Canada diary dispute: https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/cases_e/ds103_e...

If you think US has "lots of power" and countries, in the long term, are not going to intentionally make things difficult, I have a bridge to sell you.

This sounds like what social media mangers are telling their clients - If you are acting stupid/dumb/shameless and attracting people through rage bait, you are being authentic. Lots of prank channels who harass people shamelessly are certainly going for “authentic” reactions.

There is a reason why sales and marketing is first. It has to do with hallucination.

People have figured out that even if you mess up sales/support/marketing, worse case you apologize and give a gift coupon. And then there is also the verbose nature of LLMs which makes it better suited to write marketing copies etc.

On business process outsourcing like customer support lot of companies are using LLMs, so that part is unclear to me.

Other BPO processes are accounting & finance, IT, human resources etc. And while companies can take that hallucination risk for customers, they see it as a serious risk. If for example, the accounting and finance operations get messed up due to AI hallucination companies will be in real hot water. Same goes for other back office functions like HR, compliance etc. So, most likely this statement is just hogwash.

More and more companies are focusing on costs and timelines over anything else. That means if they are convinced that AI can move things faster and be cost efficient they are going to use more AI and revise cost and time downwards.

AI can write plausible code without stopping. So, not only you get sheer volume of PRs going up at the same time you might be asked to do things "faster" because you can always use AI. I am sure some CTOs might even say - why not use AI to review AI code to make it faster?

Not to mention previously the random people submitting malicious PRs needed to have some experience. But now every script kiddie can get LLMs to out the malicious PRs without knowledge and scale. How is that not a "security nightmare"?

If you ask a layperson the answer is - "Yes, and?". If its free, very few people care. Sure you can run a local instance and yes, it might be as simple as downloading Ollama but not many will do it or even have a powerful enough computer to run it.

Worst yet you might individually make a choice to do that but others might not care. They might share email/chats with you to a chatbot to parse it or "make it think like them" and then the chatbot has info about you. So, as much as I understand this sentiment this seems like a losing battle.

I know it is a cliche at this point but there are clear parallels to what happened in Nazi Germany.

Many people don't know is that the Nazi party was voted democratically into the government. They didn't win the majority but got most votes. They were majority in the Reichstag (Congress). One of the selling point was that Weimar Republic had lost World War I and the reparations paid to the Allied powers was a slap in the face and the country has fallen (aka country was no longer great, people were laughing at them etc ). Hilter wasn't even elected, he was appointed by the Nazi Party.

The Nazi Party then went on a spree - twisting arms, illegal detention etc to get what they want. Lot of people were complicit in their rise. As Martin Niemöller wrote:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

At this point there is no dearth of fools who think because they are above the "left" because their party is in power. If they continue to align or voraciously defend these intimidation tactics and tariffs etc they are going to be better off.

If there is a big learning to had here - History repeats itself. Mostly because people think they are better than people who came before them. People believe that the can get along with a person who cares nothing but for power. At this point, there is nothing which can be said or done to help them because they believe their enemies being better off is the win.

As bad as this is it will only lead to more brigading about how billionaires like Zuckerberg were talking about being repressed under the Dems/Biden. It just seems the party condemning others regarding first amendment rights isn't that first amendment. And for others yet this is going to be only a "rating" or a list. Nothing bad is going to happen just because the list or rating exists. Right?

To them I ask to explain how many points Tim ̶A̶p̶p̶l̶e̶ Cook and Apple got for his gold bar:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/07/tim-...

No need for pig butchering scams in terrible English when you have AI like this.

Just because something is happening for years doesn't mean there cannot be extra incentive to make it worse today. But you just handwaved tariffs away. and did the inflation go up by 0.9% in a month in those years?

5 years ago I was researching the iOS app ecosystem. As part of that exercise I was looking at the potential revenue figures for some free apps.

One developer had a free app to track some child health data. It was long time ago so I don't remember the exact data being collected. But when asked about the economics of his free app, the developer felt confident about a big pay day.

As per him the app's worth was in the data being collected. I don't know what happened to the app but it seemed that app developers know what they are doing when they invade privacy of their users - under the guise of "free" app. After that I became very conscious about disabling as many permissions as possible and especially not using apps to store any personal data, especially health data.

You are right. An entire category of merchants (made in USA) looked at others (importers) who now need to pay increase prices due an import tax and figured it was fine to raise prices. Those greedy businesses who figured that you can raise prices just below the import tariffs and make consumers pay. Oh wait, what were you saying about tariffs?

Its been ~8 months in office now. Can we please stop with this whataboutism? Pray do tell what is this guy's plan to reduce the national debt? The BBB seems to be increasing the national debt to unmanageable level.

There has been convergence of many events:

1. The tax deduction change where costs couldn't be classified as an expense.

2. The saturation in people joining coding. At one point in time everyone wanted to be part of a bootcamp to earn that sweet coding salary.

3. Rising interest rates means the era of borrowing at low costs is over.

etc.

AI is last on my list for the reasons that people are being laid off. And its not because AI isn't helping people, rather it isn't helping people enough to justify the current layoffs.

And lets be honest - AI and employment is the hot topic right now. You should expect executives to say that they are jumping on the AI bandwagon and looking at time savings.

Once upon a time everyone wanted to add ML to their product. This is just going with the flow. Otherwise their stock prices will take a massive hit. Others yet want to showcase that they are doing everything to extract better margins. These statements can be slightly deceiving.

What does 30% of the code mean exactly? How much of it is going into the products and making into the market?

For now, AI is a convenient scapegoat. Maybe it becomes a force to reckon with and truly leads to people being laid off. Not today.

You can watch the Big Short. Michael Burry started paying out premiums on CDS in 2005. The premiums were huge. He got into a fight with his biggest investors and then had to freeze withdrawals. So, that he could still pay the premiums on the CDS. Did he falsely predict the top?

> The global pandemic will tank the stock market - the market did crash and then Fed stepped in. Rates were cut and Fed

> War in Ukraine will tank the stock market - Market did go down by -30% between Jan-Oct 2022 and went nowhere for sometime after that.

> High interest rates will tank the stock market - Impact for this remains to be seen. Even during 2008 the high interest rates risk persisted for couple of years before the crash. So, I'd give it more time.

> Tariffs will tank the stock market - Did we not see a 20% drop before tariffs were put on hold for 90 days?

> IA will tank the stock market - I don't have much conviction on this one.

It is true that no one knows when a prolonged market crash like 2008 will happen. Maybe never. Government has figured out that Fed intervention can help the market stay afloat. So, maybe unless Fed doesn't step in for a long time these predictions will come true.

The flip side of this is that investment returns of a diversified portfolio (net of inflation) is slowly going down. The choices are to either concentrate or find alternative investing vehicles. That is one of reasons private equity is out looking for alternate income sources like buying up houses and hiking up the rents etc.

This is just a ball park number. Its like the AI dev will cost some what less than a human developer. Enough for AI providers to have huge margins and allow for CTOs to say - "I replaced all devs and saved so much money".

Is that so hard to believe? My work uses proprietary language. Something like ABAP for SAP [1]. AI has ingested lot of documentation available on the internet. But it cannot tell the difference between versions. So, AI code often has correct but deprecated functions.

And don't get me started on the "time savings" for boiler plate documentation. It messes up every time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABAP

From corrupt businessman to corrupting the government. Next up - trade with North Korea is okay, if you pay the government 50% of your profits.