Yahoo! is carrying the Bloomberg story A Company Few Americans Know Is About to Dethrone Intel.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. was created in 1987 to churn out chips for companies that lacked the money to build their own facilities. The approach was famously dismissed at the time by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. founder Jerry Sanders. “Real men have fabs,” he quipped at a conference, using industry lingo for factories.
.
.
.
Sanders’ current successor at AMD, Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su, doesn’t have to worry about this because the company sold its factories and lets TSMC handle the complex production.

“That’s one of the best decisions we’ve made,” said Su. “It allows us to manage risk and focus on the things that make the product great.”

Having worked for Digital Equipment Corporation and then having moved on before Digital had to sell itself to Compaq which in turn sold itself to Intel, I do maintain a residual interest in all of this. I have been wondering how AMD has stayed competitive with Intel. I didn’t realize that AMD gave up its own manufacturing. Trying to keep up its own manufacturing is a large part of what did Digital in. I am glad I got out of Digital when the time was right.

As a former owner of some Intel stock, I am not ready to count Intel out, but this is the kind of story to know about if I ever consider buying back into Intel stock.

YouTube has the video Colorado Democrats Already Betraying Workers Who Elected Them.

Colorado Democrats saw some victories in the Midterms with the promise of more worker’s rights. They’re already changing their tune…

The video makes many valid and worthwhile points, but a dangerous point slipped in.

California may be the fifth largest economy in the world, but California does not create its own money the way the USA Federal government does. For a state like California, asking how you are going to pay for something at the state level is a valid question. It’s sad when people mistake the message of Modern Money Theory delivers about what a country like the USA can do, as if it applied to individual states.

Such misunderstandings will come back to bite the people who make them. If too many people learn the wrong thing about Modern Money Theory, the whole explanation will be discredited.

YouTube has the video Jeremy Corbyn Responds To Hillary’s Xenophobia.

Hillary Clinton recently made some immigration statements to the Guardian. Here’s how Jeremy Corbyn approaches the issue.

The Clinton approach has been tried over and over again, and has been shown to be a failure. Corbyn proposes an approach that would be much better for the world’s societies (and cheaper, too).

The Nation has the article Exclusive: The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed.

Here is what Bernie Sanders had to say about the situation.

The Defense Department remains the only federal agency in America that hasn’t been able to pass an independent audit – 28 years after Congress required it to do so. Why is this issue so important? According to a recent report from Michigan State University, between 1998 and 2015, the Pentagon has been unable to trace, document or explain, are you ready for this, $21 trillion in financial transactions. Yes, that’s trillion with a “T.”

Over and over again, our Republican friends tell us that we cannot possibly afford to join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee health care as a right to every man, woman and child through a Medicare for all program.

We have been told that we cannot afford to make public colleges and universities tuition-free, or make sure that everyone in America has access to affordable housing, childcare, or a good job that pays a living wage with good benefits.

But when it comes to spending $716 billion a year on the military – more than the next ten countries combined – all of a sudden there is a deafening silence from my Republican colleagues about the deficit.

That is unacceptable. The time is long overdue for us to take a hard look at the enormous amount of waste, at the cost overruns, at the fraud, and at the financial mismanagement that has plagued the Pentagon for decades.

I have been avoiding reading stories like this. The $21 Trillion seemed like such a ridiculous number. This has been going on so long, that it cannot be attributed to Republicans alone. Moreover, given the need for top secret programs in the Department of Defense, there is some justification for obfuscation in the books. (I onetime read a story where even reporting the amount of money used to buy peanut butter was classified. The premise was that reporting such a number would give clues to the enemy about staffing levels.)

I have no idea what the remedy is.

The Real News Network has the video The Doomsday Machine: The Big Lie of the Cold War – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI (1/12).

On Reality Asserts Itself, Daniel Ellsberg tells host Paul Jay that US intelligence agencies knew that Stalin was not planning to invade Western Europe or seek world domination, but based on the myth, the world came close to nuclear war – and it’s all happening again

The above video is only the first episode of a 12 part series. Below are the links to the first eleven episodes. I’ll put in the 12th as soon as it is published.

The Doomsday Machine: The Big Lie of the Cold War – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI (1/12)

Hitler Wouldn’t Risk Doomsday, But The United States Did – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI (2/12)

Truman Delayed End of WWII to Demonstrate Nuclear Weapons – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI (3/12)

The Largest Act of Terrorism in Human History – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI (4/12)

Russian “Doomsday Machine” an Answer to U.S. Decapitation Strategy – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI (5/12)

U.S. Planned Nuclear First Strike to Destroy Soviets and China – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI (6/12)

U.S. Refuses to Adopt a Nuclear Weapon No First Use Pledge – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI (7/12)

Once Fired, There’s No Calling a Nuke Back – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI (8/12)

The Discovery That Should Have Changed the Cold War – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI (9/12)

A Strategy of War Crimes, Killing Civilians to Win a War – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI (10/12)

The Doomsday Machine and Nuclear Winter – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI (11/12)

ACLU has the article Edward Snowden Explains Blockchain to His Lawyer — and the Rest of Us.

…the important concepts to understand are that blocks in the chain are meant to be verifiable, strictly ordered by chronology, and immutable. Each new block created, which in the case of Bitcoin happens every ten minutes, effectively testifies about the precise contents of all the ones that came before it, making older blocks harder and harder to change without breaking the chain completely.

I basically already understood the mechanics of blockshains, but I think this article helped me a little to understand how it might be applied to things other than money.

The Real News Network has the video How Fraud Corrodes Weak Market Regulations Governed by Market Fundamentalism.

Prof. Bill Black’s talk at the forum, “Destroying the Myths of Market Fundamentalism,” held in Washington DC, on October 19, 2018

Despite the wide publication of this information and the constant exposure to this on my blog, there are too many people who are religiously unable to admit this truth exists. Why are people so committed to disbelieving what is right in front of their eyes?

ABC Australia has the interview Bernie 2020?

Stephanie Kelton is such a great teacher. Her explanations are so easy to understand, any adult should have no trouble getting what she is explaining.

The only thing standing in the way of more people understanding this is the little recording in their heads that will be repeating, “No, this can’t be true” as she explains for 20 minutes. If you can temporarily shut that recording off, and listen to what she says, then you will have something to think about later when you let that recording play again.

The interviewers are your standins, because they pose all those questions of how could this possibly be true. Kelton has great answers to all of their questions.

I particularly like Stephanie Kelton’s response when the interviewers asked about the problem of interest payments on US bonds growing too large. She said, just stop paying interest. She did not mean that we should default on the interest we have promised to pay. She meant stop issuing bonds that pay interest. We don’t need to borrow our own money back. The money that the government created and put into the hands of the public doesn’t need to be borrowed back so that we can use it for other purposes. Just use it for those other purposes in the first place.

We have created a system where

1. the federal government creates money
2. the federal government gives out the money to the public
3. the federal government borrows the money back with the promise to pay interest
4. the federal government spends the money on things the country needs

We don’t need the second and third steps, It was our choice to create the four step process. We can change how we operate.

Maybe it would help to see the diagram that I explained in my previous post When Will the White House and OMB Ever Learn About Sector Financial Balances?

Naked Capitalism has the article The Global Financial Crime Wave Is No Accident by Nat Dyer.

Top of my list of neglected economic superstars is Professor Susan Strange of the London School of Economics, one of the founders of the field of international political economy. In a series of ground-breaking books – States and Markets, The Retreat of the State and Mad Money – Strange showed how epidemic levels of financial crime were a consequence of specific political decisions.

Dyer goes through four ways that Strange “showed how politics and the financial crime epidemic were intimately connected.” I’ll quote the first item in the list.

There was nothing inevitable about financial globalisation, Strange said. It was born out of a series of political decisions. It means that global money can skip freely across borders beyond the reach of national laws and supervision. For smart operators tax, regulations, and compliance become a choice, not an obligation. Strange argued that international organisations lack the power to control global money, only coordination between the world’s major economies can rein it in.

I have recognized for a long time that no single country can control the problem. It will require coordination among the major players around the world to get a grip on what is happening. There were efforts being made along these lines, but George W. Bush put a stop to the participation of the USA in the talks to rein in the tax havens. Now global “trade” talks are all about making it easier for the corruption to continue.

This was always Lake View to me. The Merry-go-round, or bobby horses, was always fun.