"...we actually live in a capitalist society that allows big businesses (and otherwise zombie corporations) to fail..."
We do, though. Lehman Brothers was sacrificed in 2008, IIRC. Enron was taken down a few years before that. Occasionally the owners throw one of their sacrificial lambs to the wolves.
"So not only will we be propping up Intel but also a slew of other companies when it suits the administration?"
Remember that Mussolini defined Fascism as the partnership of corporations and government, what we call today public/private partnerships. What the USG taking a 10% stake in Intel is can be properly defined as Fascism. That's what this is. Fascism.
Also, don't forget the IME, the Intel Management Engine that is a separate computer on your computer that has it's own power source, so you can't turn it off, and turning off your system doesn't turn it off, has access to all your devices, all your keystrokes, all your data before you encrypt it, and so forth. This factory installed backdoor into your devices (all commercially available chipsets AMD, and etc, have similar mechanisms) will now be government property. "...vital to national security..." indeed!
"It's a dark comedy but it's still pretty funny."
It hurts to laugh.
Thanks!
So you believe that a single nation-state: the USA... already has unfettered access to every machine globally? And every other nation-state has been too stupid to figure this out and block the backdoor? To me that sounds highly unlikely, and if other nation-states were doing the same it wouldn't even be legal to buy electronics from China. Perhaps you can elaborate on this more.
Huawei.
The geopolitical realities involving such surveillance and access to modern computers are beyond my competence to cogently comment on, but the IME and branded alternatives are real, and have access to all hardware at all times, and to all keystrokes and data before it's encrypted. Obviously before AI there was limited human capacity to access all data. AI has changed that. We're seeing the net locked down globally now, and I expect these to be the last months we can communicate at all - unless we can adopt Reticulum ubiquitously AND have some means of linking local mesh networks.
I see no practical way for that to happen at present, so I am preparing to lose access to the internet.
IME Does not have a separate power source.
Obviously backdoors like this are bullshit but you have a tendency to exaggerate the situation to the fringe.
The only cure to such fuckery is an open-source decentralized modular solution to hardware, but unfortunately that is a wildly complex and tall order. Maybe one day.
OSH is the solution to the KYC internet that is coming, too. Without OSH we will only be allowed such information and ability to communicate as them we depend on for our devices and network infrastructure want us to have. Also, it's not only Intel, but all commercially available chipsets. Moving to AMD won't end the hardware backdoor.
Potato Potahto. You can't turn it off, and turning off the machine doesn't turn off the IME.